In Sharamensa community, I met Domingo Peas, President of the Sacred Headwaters Alliance who has made it his mission to unite the tribes so that they can act together in preserving the Amazon for all of us.

We met and learned from the Achuar community who have given up hunting to preserve the forest.  From Domingo, his son Jose and grandson Nasir, we learned about the dream culture of the Achuar, their incredible knowledge of and relationship with the forest, and their mission to educate people so that they take this message out into the world.  

The Achuar people are traditionally hunters, who have stopped hunting to protect the forest and develop eco-tourism, but this has presented a problem in terms of protein deficiency, especially in children and pregnant women.  Amazon soil supports the forest but with predators and bugs it is not an easy environment for growing food.  NGO Pachamama, in recent years, has developed a fishpond project to teach the Achuar people to farm fish.  We took a hike through the jungle to see the new fishpond which was being run by Edwin.  In Achuar society the women are the farmers and hold the knowledge of growing and harvesting crops.  Edwin and his daughter showed us the ponds, one large with about 900 fish and one smaller for the baby fish.   

It was on this visit that I was struck by the idea of developing Aquaponics as a food and protein solution.  We took measurements and photos of the ponds and sent them to Charles and Kedar of Emerald Aquaponics, 2 experts in aquaponics back in Ireland, with a question, “Can we create an aquaponics system that would work in the pristine Amazon environment, made entirely from natural materials?”