Students’ effort to market necklaces from Ecuador helps give native artisans an alternative to felling the rain forest.
By: Gwen Runkle
WEST WINDSOR By helping indigenous people find a way to make a living without cutting down trees, Judy Logback, a Kansas native who has lived and worked in Ecuador for the past five years, is hoping to save the Amazon rain forest.
And the help of groups like one organized by teacher Victoria Braeme at the Thomas R. Grover Middle School is giving her a big boost toward achieving her goal.
This past week, several students in Ms. Braeme’s eighth-grade class sold about 450 necklaces made by a group of more than 700 native artisans who develop products from the rain forest for sale internationally as part of the Callari Cooperative.
Ms. Logback is the marketing director of that cooperative and spoke to eighth-graders at the middle school on Tuesday.
"In the Amazon, the government doesn’t provide any education after sixth grade for rural people, so it (higher education) is very expensive," she said. "People would give anything to send their children to high school and now they’re giving up their trees."
According to Ms. Logback, on average rural families in Ecuador make little more than $500 a year from their cash crops of corn, coffee and cocoa, and it costs between $250 and $300 a year to send one child to high school with expenses such as uniforms, textbooks and room and board.
Cutting down one tree would yield about $120, she said.
"But now, if they want to send a kid to high school they won’t have to cut down a tree," she said.
Instead, an artisan in the Callari Cooperative could make $10 to $20 a day making traditional jewelry, bags, bowls, baskets, hats and other products with materials found all around them, she said.
"And they don’t need to cut down the six soccer fields’ worth of jungle for fields, as is needed to grow crops like cocoa," she added. "They only need a little garden plot to harvest the materials needed."
Once made, the products are bought and marketed by the Jatun Sacha Foundation, a nonprofit Ecuadorian conservation organization that created the cooperative, to countries including England, France, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Canada and the United States.
Last year, for example, the Smithsonian Institution bought $4,000 worth of the hand-made crafts, Ms. Logback said.
But the help of smaller groups, like the one at Thomas R. Grover Middle School, is not to be overlooked, she said.
Ms. Braeme, who received a grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation in 1996 to assist a scientist with butterfly research in Ecuador, was very proud of her students’ selling success.
"We originally asked for just 100 necklaces," she said. "They’ve done a great job."
Since her time in Ecuador, Ms. Braeme has been a vocal advocate for the rain forest and recently gave a presentation to the school for Earth Day.
"My trip to Ecuador changed my life," she said. "At the current rate of destruction, the Amazon rain forest will be completely gone by 2020, but by getting the kids involved we can change that."
In 1999, Ms. Braeme also started a write-a-thon fund-raising campaign at the school where students are sponsored to write different companies, politicians or people in influential positions to address the rain forest issue.
This year, the entire eighth grade, nearly 400 students, participated, she said.
"Hopefully, we’re helping to make the next generation of scientists, business people, politicians and community members more environmentally conscious," she said.