Awakening the Badass

Amazon Restore is the product of many years of blood, sweat, and bananas.

We knew that we wanted to live in nature, far removed from the vices of Babylon, and to create a food forest that would nourish us with clean healthy food and help to reduce or eliminate our reliance on others.

We considered settling in several different locations in the tropics where the conditions seemed hospitable for growing some of the most delicious and nutritious fruits. After evaluating the options, we chose to come to Ecuador where it seemed that there were already people in the process of creating more or less what we envisioned. After a series of hardships and multiple disappointing experiences with other fruit forest projects. we discovered a part of Ecuador where the climate was excellent and the land was still affordable.

However, one of the biggest challenges that we encountered here, as elsewhere, was the people around us. The land that we found is in a beautiful valley with jungle surrounding it, but a significant portion of this valley has been destroyed, mostly for cattle ranching but also for mono-crop farming and a few other industrial uses.

Our planting began, and the trees started growing. Every farm has its challenges, but the unusually dry weather posed a bigger hurdle to getting the food forest started. We made many trips watering new trees with buckets of water from the creek and replacing a lot of them that dried out and died.

The physical work is bearable, but the most trying thing is what we see around us. We watched the neighbours cut down almost every remaining wild forest tree on their land. We hear chainsaws killing more trees in the distance, hear machines cutting grass that wouldn’t be there if the jungle still existed, and see people slashing and burning land large areas of land, burning trash on their land, and more.

Around us there are constantly cows, horses, and donkeys tied to trees and treated as slaves, animals enclosed in cages like prisoners, people physically abusing animals, chickens squawking through the night (and destroying our young plants), people creating ponds to grow fish just to kill, scraggly dogs invading our land to steal our food, domesticated cats killing small birds and other native animals, people shooting animals with guns, and an overall lack of respect for any of the innocent beings who live here. It’s one thing to see documentaries and hear stories, but it’s very different to experience these things all around us.

We came here to create our own little paradise, but the surrounding environment and especially the people doing the damage have prompted us to pursue a bigger mission.

The first thought that we had was to invite people who were interested in reforestation to buy land from any neighbours who were selling and to collaborate in reviving as much of the surrounding area as possible.
That was how the idea of Badass Fruiterrarist Land was born.

We were also very aware of the larger-scale devastation that the entire Amazon Rainforest and many forests around the world are facing, and so we decided to use this endeavour as an example for others to replicate - a project called Amazon Restore.

We built this website to share information about the danger that the Amazon is in as well as what people can do about it.

We invite everyone to read the site, learn as much as reasonably possible about these topics, and join us if your conscience tells you that helping to save forests and all of the beings who call them home is a worthy cause.

“If we don’t do something now, it may be too late if we ever do…”