Orion Grassroots Network

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EcoLogic Development Fund: Collaboration for Community Conservation

Ecologic supporters lead an expedition to locate Central America’s most endangered bird, the Honduran Emerald Hummingbird.

by Deborah Fraize
photos by Robert Hyman

EcoLogic Development Fund has an image problem. Unlike international nonprofits that take a more conventional top-down approach to conservation in the biologically rich but lesser developed corners of the world, EcoLogic is dedicated to helping rural communities in Latin America become the custodians of this planet’s biological treasure chests. EcoLogic was founded on the belief that local authority over resources is not only the right thing to do from a social justice perspective, it also makes the most sense from a management perspective: Who better to steward these globally important resources than those whose survival is most immediately affected by their decline?

Unfortunately, though EcoLogic works in some of the more remote areas of Latin America and with some of the region’s most vibrant indigenous communities, the actual day-to-day work of EcoLogic doesn’t lend itself to a good marketing yarn. The work involves years of community meetings, months of negotiations with local mayors and village leaders, and lots of subtle miscues when gringo, Latino, and Mayan cultures converge. Time moves very slowly when you rely on consensus building in such settings. It would take an astute and extremely patient multilingual communicator to capture and convey the richness of it to a general audience. Between these challenges and its modest communications budget, some of the copy EcoLogic turns out doesn’t exactly sizzle—a predicament faced by many grassroots organizations.

Enter Robert Hyman and his wife Deb Atwood, both long time supporters of EcoLogic. Robert is an adventurer and member of the venerable Explorers Club headquartered in New York City. He freely admits that he doesn’t have the patience to do the kind of work that EcoLogic does, but he does understand its importance. Inspired by a 2006 trip with EcoLogic staff, this year Robert and Deb led an Explorers Club expedition to Pico Bonito National Park in Honduras to track down Central America’s most endangered bird species, the brilliantly colored Honduran Emerald Hummingbird (Amazilia luciae).
The Honduran Emerald’s population is estimated at between 200 and 1,000. It makes its home in isolated fragments of extremely dry tropical forests on the southern side of Pico Bonito National Park, where EcoLogic has been working since 1998. Their expedition team (which included H. Ross Hawkins, founder of the Hummingbird Society) traversed inhospitable, thorny terrain to successfully locate and document additional patches of suitable habitat and populations outside the Emerald’s previously known range. Because of its status as a critically endangered species and its unusual habitat, this tiny bird has become a flagship species for conservation efforts in Honduras. The additional populations discovered by the team strongly suggest that more populations remain to be discovered, thus greatly increasing the possibility of saving the species from extinction and encouraging further efforts to do so.

The attention that the expedition team has brought to the bird and the region helps EcoLogic and its local partner organization, the Pico Bonito National Park Foundation (Fundación Parque Nacional Pico Bonito), promote their conservation and sustainable livelihoods work with rural communities around the park and throughout the region. The German edition of GQ is writing a story on explorers like Robert and their pursuits. A photo of Robert, arms crossed, with a giant image of the hummingbird projected across his chest, is slated to accompany the article. Now that could sell a whole new group of people on EcoLogic’s work.

For more information on EcoLogic and its work with the communities around Pico Bonito National Park , please visit www.ecologic.org.  For more information on the expedition and its members, please visit www.explorers.org.

EcoLogic Development Fund
25 Mount Auburn St, Suite 203
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States
Phone: 617/ 441-6300

www.ecologic.org

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