MOUNTAIN TAPIR FOREVER

We are building the first Community Conservation Center (CCC) for the mountain tapir—a space where local communitiesscienceand rural tourism come together.

We believe in the value of ancestral knowledge and integrate it into agricultureconstructionfood practicesand everyday life.

Our work is guided by permaculture principles. We started quite literally with our hands in the mudconstructing the first CCC using local materials and community labor. Our goal is to create the right conditions for scientific research to thrive heregenerating sustainable income for the families who live alongside the tapir and producing the knowledge needed for its proper management and conservation.

Our scientific approach is applied research. We study the regeneration and dynamics of the native forest where the tapir lives and bring those insights into productive systems in the species’ buffer zones. We see syntropic agroforestry as a pathway to replicate forest processes within community territories—one of our key medium-term goals.

The CCC concept is inspired by the Malocaan ancestral space for socialculturalspiritualand communal cohesion. In that spirita CCC is both a center for biodiversity conservation and a place where new knowledge is shared while ancestral wisdom is preserved and revitalized.

Our approach moves away from the industrial model that simplifies ecosystems and creates the very pests it later tries to control with harmful solutions. Insteadwe look to the forest: a system that no one fertilizes or fumigatesyet remains healthy thanks to the conditions it creates through its own diversity. With this visionwe hope the mountain tapir will not remain an endangered speciesbut become a species truly on a path toward long-term recovery.