This is PART 1 of a four-part series of stories based on reporting done in the Peruvian Amazon in 2018. Funding was provided by the Princeton Environmental Institute and a AAAS Mass Media Fellowship.

*Schnnk*

Oversized machete still raised, Gloria Jilahuanco Huamansulca watches a thorny length of climbing bamboo sag toward the steep, muddy path beneath her feet. She swings the implement back across her body and catches the tendril in midair, casting it off the trail. Despite being no more than five feet tall, she has little trouble clearing headspace for me, her six-and-a-half-foot hiking companion.

It’s August 2018 and Jilahuanco Huamansulca is sprucing up a former logging trail that serves as the only conduit between the outside world and a 25,000-acre stretch of rainforest called Concesión Gallito de las Rocas (The Cock of the Rock Concession). Gallito, as she affectionately calls it, sits in the Kcosñipata Valley of Peru, where the Amazon splashes up the eastern flank of the Andes. By sheer number of species, it may be the most biodiverse place on Earth.

Jilahuanco Huamansulca’s father, Teodocio Jilahuanco, fought for more than a decade to have the concession rezoned from logging to sustainable ecotourism, a first for Peru. Amid stories of fires and other gnawing degradations of the Amazonian frontier, her family continues a multi-generational push to paint another path forward.

We crest the hill and Jilahuanco Huamansulca steps over a leaf-cutter ant superhighway and again raises her machete.

*Schnnk*

Another length of bamboo floats off into the brush.

I wonder if trailblazing is genetic.

Conservation by concession

Several miles and one painful encounter with a swarm of army ants[Link to Part II] later, we veer off the logging trail, heading toward the roar of the river that forms the border of Gallito.

We step out of the forest. The ground reverberates with hydrologic fury, but it is the view that takes my breath away. The river is bracketed by bands of enormous granite boulders, the only objects the raging water has found temporarily immovable. Knife-line ridges sheathed in mossy forest slice up into the fog tufting the lower reaches of the Andes. The neighboring Peruvian state may be the one called Madre de Dios, but the cathedral-like verticality and divine fecundity in front of us feels every bit the inspiration for a story of creation.

As I wonder how those without wings could traverse the rapids, Teodocio Jilahuanco pops out of the trees on the far shore like a sun-weathered wood sprite, barefoot in a pair of rolled-up camouflage pants. He’s carrying a stone tied to a long rope as he steps from boulder to boulder, moving down to a section of bank where the whitewater briefly toggles down from ‘homicidal’ to ‘ornery’. He flashes a grin and launches the projectile toward us, beginning a risky, difficult process of ferrying us into the future.

For decades, most efforts to protect the planet’s shrinking numbers of plants and animals focused on cordoning off large tracts of wildlands. More recently though, the limits of this strategy have been laid bare as political interests of extractive industries increasingly undermine efforts to create new national parks, wildernesses, and other protected areas.

Meanwhile, conservation biologists have pointed out that walling off habitat is not sufficient to save species. Animals and plants become isolated when parks are surrounded by hostile human-dominated landscapes, running the risk of inbreeding or becoming trapped in an unsuitable climate in the face of rising global temperatures. No fortress can withstand an indefinite siege.

For some, hope now pivots on what happens in the farms, logged forests, and other lands that form seas around insular parks. “[Gallito de las Rocas] is an ecological bridge,” Jilahuanco Huamansulca later tells me. “It is 99% primary forest and situated between Manu National Park and the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve,” she says, referring to the two huge blocks of protected forest to the north and south of us. “If we can protect this area, we can guarantee that these parks don’t become isolated.”

Biodiversity isn’t the only thing the concession protects, either. “We think it’s a really important zone because it’s a place where rivers are born that eventually become the Madre de Dios and the Amazon,” she says. Mining and logging are notorious for transforming the crystalline waters of places like Gallito into something resembling chocolate milk.

“Water is life,” Jilahaunco Huamansulca concludes.

Gloria Jilahuanco Huamansulca crosses the river that forms the border of Concesión Gallito de las Rocas. The improvised raft was made of lashed-together truck tire inner tubes.

But Gallito alone will not keep all of Peru’s rivers blue, and nor its forests green. In addition to seeing exactly what the Jilahuancos were able to do, I trekked out here to try to figure out how replicable their journey has been. Could the aggregate efforts of thousands of other families be the missing ingredient for protecting our planet’s cradle of biodiversity?

Making concessions

One evening, Jilahuanco Huamansulca ran me through the basics of how her government administers the 60% of the country covered by rainforest.

“In Peru, there are lots of national parks and communal reserves,” she says, “and all of them are managed by SERNANP,” referring to the acronym for the Servicio Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas. But SERNANP only administers a modest percentage of Peru’s forestlands. The rest of the land linking those parks are administered by SERFOR (El Servicio Nacional Forestal y de Fauna Silvestre). For decades, SERFOR’s predecessor agency parceled off blocks of forest as ‘concessions’ to extractive industries. “Mining concessions, petroleum concessions, concessions for logging wood–forestry concessions,” she lists. To some, it felt like a death by a thousand bites.

Then, SERFOR turned a new leaf. “In 2000, they started giving out concessions that had a conservation end,” she says. In a nutshell, a new law allowed non-profit organizations with sufficient financial backing to take the reins of sensitive but unmanaged forested areas for 40-year stints. It was an idea recently hatched by Conservation International. Peru became the first country to implement it.

In addition, there was a provision for smaller ‘ecotourism concessions’ intended for sustainable management by businesses. For serial entrepreneur Teodocio Jilahuanco, it seemed like an irresistible opportunity that dovetailed with the small guesthouse he and his wife founded three years prior. The problem, his daughter tells me, was that “The laws were very basic. In reality, it wasn’t clear exactly how to interpret them.”

“The process starts with a solicitation where you indicate what area you want to conserve and why,” says Jilahuanco Huamansulca. Then comes a technical report, requiring reams of data on their proposed site. When laws were tweaked or there was a change in personnel at SERFOR, it set Jilahuanco back months or more. It took a dozen long years of crisscrossing the Andes to visit Cuzco and Lima before the elder Jilahuanco first secured the initial rights to Concesión Gallito de las Rocas. He believes his family was the first to achieve such success in the whole of the Kcosñipata Valley, certainly the first of such modest means.

The Jilahuancos’ Kafkaesque slog came as no surprise to biologist Carlos Castañeda of the Amazonian Conservation Association when I described it to him over Skype much later. His organization was the first successful applicant for this new breed of concessions. Since 2001, they’ve administered Concesiones para Conservación Los Amigos (CCLA), in the state of Madre de Dios.

But being an august and resourced non-profit smoothed their way. “According to the law, anyone can apply for a concession,” he said. But in reality, the requirement that concessionaires demonstrate a “technical and economic capacity” serves as a major barrier to entry. “Definitively, no concessionaire can be poor,” he stated.

Castañeda said he’d heard a couple of stories like that of the Jilahuancos, but none in the Jilahuanco’s corner of Peru. While further tweaks to the law reduced the need for trips to Lima by devolving some centralized authority to state capitals, it was a bigger boon for would-be concessionaires in Castañeda’s state of Madre de Dios. There, it is relatively easy to reach the capital of Puerto Maldonado because it is located amidst the forests that applicants might seek to manage. “For the majority of residents in Madre de Dios that live along the main highway,” he said, “it’s three or four hours to the capital, and documents could be dropped off on a day trip.” For Kcosñipata residents, applications still ran through Cuzco, way up in the Andean highlands.

For his part, Teodocio Jilahuanco believes the struggle was worth it.

During a break in the rain one afternoon, we find a small clearing outside camp to talk. The river thundering in the distance. Beads of water cling to the moss covering every trunk. Against a continuum of every possible green, Jilahuanco’s monochrome red shirt has all the subtlety of a Maraschino cherry. His daughter sits with us, helping me translate here and there when my Spanish proves oxidado.

Jilahuanco tells me that where once he “Stood on top of a nearby hill and heard chainsaws in three different directions,” he can now point to two other groups to establish conservation concessions in the Kcosñipata Valley, specifically because of the inspiration of Gallito.

“This is my passion,” he says. “Every time I am out here, I feel happy.”

Even before he finishes saying the words though, another thought flashes across his face, and he quickly adds “Gallito de las Rocas is not Teodocio. It’s also my wife, as well as Gloria and her sister.”

It’s a good thing too. He’s not exactly a spring gallito, and they’re signed on to manage the concession for another 34 years. Jilahuanco Huamansulca, sitting next to her father, holds a degree in tourism and formal training in biology and seems ready to take the torch.

Jilahuanco turns to his daughter and thanks her for being the one who has brought researchers, volunteers, and others to the park. In particular, the ongoing survey of Gallito’s animal life will give them “Fortitude to continue advancing ahead.”

A model for citizen conservation?

After too few days amidst Gallito’s Edenic environs, I have to leave. Jilahuanco leads me on the long trip out. We head to her family’s home base of Pillcopata, the largest settlement in the Kcosñipata Valley.

We arrive at the Jilahuanco family hotel, which shares a name with the concession. At the moment, it’s bursting at the seams with fifty participants in a workshop on sustainable bamboo architecture, an event co-organized by Gloria’s sister Yesenia. The influx of guests has their mother, Francesca Huamansulca Mamane, working in overdrive.

After dinner, she managed to pull away to sit down with me and her two daughters. We find a quiet spot on a small streetside patio on the edge of the property. Only the rumbles of an occasional car punctuate the evening chorus of insects.

Huamansulca Mamane tells me about when her husband first started pursuing a concession.

“Teodocio always talked about conservation, but at first I didn’t understand,” she confesses. When the girls were young, they had even earned money through farming and timber.

What’s more, this new venture had a lot of upfront expenses. “It was really difficult. There wasn’t much money because of these trips to Lima.”

Her voice softens. She explains how they came from humble means. Huamansulca Mamane never knew her father and was only able to complete five years of formal education because of the costs. Her husband only made it through secondary school. Before her daughters were born, they used to go on excursions into the forest together to collect natural products to bring to market. Later, she says, they scrimped and saved in order to found a small bakery.

At some point, I notice Gloria is holding her mother’s hand.

One of the things Carlos Castañeda would later impress upon me was how competitive the ecotourism industry is in Peru. That the Jilahuancos found improbable success with both Gallitos de las Rocas–hotel and concession–is a testament to the partnership of, as Yesenia puts it, a “Dreamer and a pillar of support.” (El Gallito y La Roca, I quip.) Their combined willingness to invest blood, sweat, and hard-won Peruvian Soles into the cause resulted in achieving lofty conservation goals and enough financial stability to put both their daughters through college.

Of the two Gallitos, the lodge has historically been the more profitable venture. The annual fees for the concession, even though only $0.08 a hectare, have been hard to cover given the difficulty of transporting visitors out to the site. However, Yesenia points out that the two share more than just a name; part of what sets the lodge apart is that it has the concession as its spiritual core. “Indirectly, all of our work, all the activities are done with the concession in mind,” she says. Even though visitations are limited, many guests are heartened to know their hosts are going above and beyond band-aid measures like reducing waste and recycling.

More than any financial considerations though, Huamansulca Mamane’s daughters feel that their parents’ sacrifices were worthwhile because they address an emerging moral issue. “Simply put, nature gives us life,” Yesenia tells me.

“I’m proud of my parents,” she adds, “because in Kcosñipata they are pioneers in conservation.”

In the end, Huamansulca Mamane agrees the effort was worth it. “Vale la pena. Teodocio’s dream–it came true.”

The ecotourism concession program in Peru is still in its infancy. About 80 ecotourism and other small private conservation concessions had been allotted as of 2015, totaling just over 600,000 acres. Perhaps that does not amount to an ecological silver bullet, but it’s unquestionably a win for Peruvian biodiversity.

And there’s still potential for the impacts of the program to increase exponentially. If Peru’s ecotourism industry continues its COVID rebound, there will be more opportunities for ranchers, loggers, and illegal gold miners on the Amazonian frontier to find a more sustainable line of work. “If we want to keep our forests and improve the quality of life for local people,” Jilahuanco Huamansulca points out, “we need activities that are sustainable and sustaining.”

“That’s what we’re trying to implement in the concession,” she says. “We want to be an example. […] We want our neighbors to see the benefits of inclusive tourism and to see that we can have economic development in harmony with nature.”

No doubt, the precedent set by the Jilahuancos makes it easier for those who are inclined to follow them. Where there was once a wilderness of foggy laws and bureaucracy as tangled as a bamboo thicket, there’s now a marked trail. And in the meantime, those who’ve seen the concession and met its stewards rest easier knowing one exquisite corner of the natural world is in such capable hands.