Nature surpassing nation: the Amazon Sacred Headwaters shows how a bioregion can transcend borders

In a moment when national borders are causing us endless pain, it’s perhaps useful to attend to initiatives so powerful and important that nations are subsumed within them, willingly. Such is the case with the Cuencasa Gradas or Amazon Sacred Headwaters bioregional plan, whose domain covers land across the border or Peru and Ecuador.

See the video above for their 2041 vision, and this extract from the website below:

The Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative is building a shared vision among indigenous peoples, NGOs, the philanthropic community, social entrepreneurs and governments towards establishing a bi-national protected region – off-limits to industrial scale resource extraction, and governed in accordance with traditional indigenous principles of cooperation and harmony that foster a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship.

The Initiative is led by Amazonian indigenous federations CONFENIAE (Ecuador),  AIDESEP (Peru), ORPIO, and COICA, in partnership with Pachamama Alliance, and Fundación Pachamama.

During this early stage of the Initiative, priorities include:

• Resisting expansion of extractive industries including oil and mining and related infrastructure in the region

• Strong regional alliance of key stakeholders—indigenous peoples, governments, civil society—aligned around a shared vision for the protection of the Sacred Headwaters region

• Completing a regional ecological economic plan for the Sacred Headwaters that is grounded in the principles of ecological stewardship and community well-being

• Developing conservation funding solutions that advance protections for the living forests and halt expansion of large-scale extractive industries

This Initiative offers an exceptional opportunity to create and demonstrate a new ecologic-economic model to usher in the post-carbon era – one that both safeguards the vital heart of our Earth’s biosphere and enhances human wellbeing.

More here. Their paper on the details of the plan contains some passages which explain what some would call the “onto-shift”, or the different framing of reality, that comes from the “sacred” context of this ecological marking out of territory. See below:

The Sacred Headwaters initiative proposes a viable alternative to a modernizing logic, one that, in its stead, seeks to “ecologize” our economies, our political structures, and our modes of ethical behavior.

It considers it essential to learn from the dynamics and qualities intrinsic to headwaters, as maximally expressed in one of the most majestic but also the most fragile watersheds in the world –the headwaters that sustains the vast web of life in the Upper Amazon.

The headwaters of a watershed delimits an area, a domain, but not in the usual political sense which imposes an order from above (as it happens with decrees and wars that create the borders of a country), but rather in an ecological sense. In other words, we see the headwaters of river basins as the emerging network of life that sustains and nourishes other fluvial networks that makes life itself possible.

As such, it is a model for another way of relating, that we earthly inhabitants must learn to adopt, if we want to survive the ecological crisis that is affecting us all, regardless of nationality, ethnicity or even species.

Headwaters of river basins are fractal. Each and every one of us is like a unique headwaters’ basin. Our veins are rivers. Our capillaries are the streams that feed them. A tree, with its trunk, branches and leaves that extend into the clouds, emanating from its roots and mycorrhizae that reach into the Earth can also be a watershed.

Each of us is nourished by a broader upstream watershed. Headwaters exist within other headwaters that give rise to yet others. They nurture and sustain those sources of water that preceded them and, along with many other sources, continue to give rise to others that we do not yet know of.

The river basins of the Upper Amazon are home to and are nourished by worlds of living forests (“selvas vivientes”). As described by the Amazonian communities, these living forests are made up entirely of communicative beings or “persons”. These communicative beings, whether they are trees, insects, animals, or even their emergent associations, manifest and express the spirit quality that is inherent to all life as it emerges anew out of that which came before.

This spirit quality is what makes such spaces of life, and the headwaters that sustain them, sacred. Recognizing this sacred nature of life helps us deepen our understanding of the close relationship between Human Rights and the Rights of Nature that this Initiative seeks to uphold in Ecuador and Peru.

More here. And for an interesting global perspective on bioregions - “what if nature drew the world’s maps?” - see One Earth’s bioregional mappings of the earth, from 2020.