Sachamama Center for BioCultural Regeneration (SCBR) is a non-profit organization in the Peruvian High Amazon with a field station in the town of Lamas, Department of San Martin, Peru and a directorate in Cambridge, Massachusetts, dedicated to the biocultural regeneration of the region in collaboration with the indigenous Kichwa-Lamistas, the descendants of pre-Columbian inhabitants, as well as with the local Education Board of the province of Lamas (Sp. acronym UGEL). SCBR was founded in 2009 by the anthropologist Frédérique Apffel-Marglin. SCBR shares a worldview in which the human, the non-human, as well as the community of spirits, are all kin to each other, treating nature as a Thou rather than an it. By ‘biocultural regeneration’ we mean to honor this integration of all life as well as the cyclicity of its rhythms. It is also meant to obviate the backward/advanced implications of more linear formulations.
SCBR is bringing together an expanding collective of scholars, activists, and students that cross the North-South divide. The Center’s mission is to integrate politics and spirituality, activism and scholarship, biocultural regeneration and fair economic practices, with the goal of nurturing intercultural dialogue. SCBR’s mission is to strengthen the ancestral legacies and other practices of the Kichwa-Lamistas in dialogue with them as well as to regenerate the pre-Colombian Amazonian Black Earth of millenial fertility, collaborating with the local Education Board of Lamas to teach this heritage of the pre-Colombian ancestors to the new generation in order to slow deforestation, improve the local agriculture and help solve the climate crisis.
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And view:
Amazonian Dark Earth in a Center in the Peruvian High Amazon
Published on Sep 13, 2015
In the past two decades or so archaeologists have discovered a type of soil throughout the Amazon Basin, known as Amazonian Dark Earth. This soil is 8,500 years old and still fertile today; it is considered to be the most sustainable soil in the world. It gave rise to a complex and populous Amazonian civilization, the first in the Americas. With the demographic collapse that happened with the coming of the Spaniards in the 16th century that saw 99% of Amerindians die, the knowledge of this soil has been lost.
Amazonian Dark Earth can at once address deforestation and food sovereignty as well as mitigate the climate crisis thanks to the biochar that it contains. It is full of ceramic shards which come from offerings to Earth Beings, providing us with an alternative to relating to the earth as an inert mechanism to be exploited for the sole benefits of humans.
A documentary about re-creating Amazonian Dark Earth in a Center in the Peruvian High Amazon founded by anthropologist Frédérique Apffel-Marglin.
as well as:
Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice
Transition Studies 