In the same way that biodiversity is being eroded, so is the world’s cultural diversity. Mother Jungle is a call to promote biocultural conservation approaches that sustain both biodiversity and indigenous cultures.

The Indonesian archipelago contains 120.35 million hectares of forest, which is the largest forest area in South-East Asia and the world’s third largest after the Amazon and Congo Basins. The forests have been categorized as production forests (58.25 million hectares), protected forests (33.52 million hectares), conservation forests (20.5 million hectares) and non-forestry development reserved forest/conversion forests (8.08 million hectares). Indigenous people have lived in the these vast forests for millennia, and their cultures and lives are inextricably related to their forests and to maintaining their profound and multi-dimensional relationship with them. “The forest is our mother, our breast milk”, say the indigenous people of Paser in East Kalimantan. Their existence is reflected in the forest through oral history, traditional knowledge and well-defined and detailed customary tenure regimes by which all indigenous people delineate their traditional territories.

People are not always fully aware what their impact is on our earth. Climate change is happening at high speed, due to consumerism. The only ones that can fight climate change is us, human beings, we have to feel responsible for this and act.

Mother Jungle delivers continuing and experiential professional development programs integrating traditional and contemporary knowledge focusing on sustainability, cultural immersion, entrepreneurial skills, and local community impact. Training is required to prepare the workforce for e a green economy. A number of studies estimate that by 2030, 100 million green jobs will be available worldwide (A Guidebook to the Green Economy by the Division for Sustainable Development, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2012) – about 2% of the global workforce. Of these, 50 million green jobs are anticipated in Asia.

So let’s get ready for this!

Indigenous storytelling is an asset for bio-cultural conservation as indigenous people have a broad knowledge of how to live sustainably. However, formal education systems and the digital era we live in, have disrupted the practical everyday life aspect of indigenous knowledge and storytelling, replacing them with abstract knowledge, digital distraction and academic ways of learning. Today, there is a grave risk that much indigenous knowledge is being lost and, along it, valuable knowledge about ways living sustainably.

“In an era of technological advancement, we’re bloated with information yet starved for wisdom. The Wisdom of Stories: keep the voices of the ancestors alive, take the wisdom of these elders to return the world to balance.”

Elizabeth Lindsey

The indigenous women are powerful agents of change. They are the guardians of the rainforest cultures and storehouses of great knowledge. Because of the way they are taking care of their tribes, the indigenous communities have successfully lived in rainforests for thousands of years. From them we can learn to live sustainably, within the limits required by the planet’s ecosystem. They have learnt to harvest the wealth of their forests without destroying them and taught their children how to do this. But fact is, their lands are being taken, their basic rights disregarded, and often even their very existence is being ignored. There are so many stories hidden in the jungle and it’s time to give the mothers a voice. Both women and Mother Earth are resilient, strong, and overall a necessity. Woman as creators of new life and the jungle functions as the lungs of earth.