Nature and Culture International seeks to develop an environmental ethic throughout society by offering educational programs for children, teens and adults. We stress the local management of forests and rivers to assure that people can realize their desires to live in a healthy environment, one with clean air and good water.

In Colombia, we use community environmental workshops to stress the importance of healthy ecosystems, while in southern Ecuador, we sponsor a full page in the leading regional newspaper each week. We travel to rural communities to bring our message to the front lines of conservation.

Our environmental education programs teach children from the first through twelfth grades, and we organize annual Science and Technology fairs as well as “Encounters for Creativity,” which have reached over 200,000 students in southern Ecuador and northern Peru during the last ten years. Nature and Culture also trains conservation officers and youth rangers, and conducts a campaign to recycle batteries, in conjunction with the EcoClubs of Loja.

With the Podocarpus National Park and Zoological Gardens of Loja, we sponsor fire prevention and water conservation workshops. In 2009, Nature and Culture International helped CANATURA, a group of volunteer students and recent college graduates, to provide field education programs and festivals for groups of young people in northern Peru. That is an exciting, ongoing series in a region that had seen nothing like it.

Chapters have now been established in Iquitos, Moyobamba and Chiclayo, and five cities have hosted Festivals for Amazonian Biodiversity, together reaching over 12,000 people.

And in Piura, Nature and Culture implements the Children and Land Program, which seeks to involve children in the management of their natural environment, developing in the process an awareness of value and a commitment to the natural world.

Our vision is help communities and villages understand, love and protect the lands that surround their homes.