Sangay Foundation is an environmental, cultural, educative,
scientific, independent and non-profit institution. One of its main
goals is to preserve Sangay National Park, a huge UNESCO World Natural
Heritage Site in Central Ecuador, and the native cultures it sustains.
This is not, however, our only
concern. From a broader perspective, say, we agree that Latin America
encloses amongst the richest pristine environments on Earth. We at
Sangay Foundation are aware that the theoretical discussion about the
Biotropics and, more in general, the ecological theme in all its
aspects and implications, is currently developed mostly in Europe and
North America; consistently enough, the majority of the relevant data
and information on ecology (and, more in particular, on tropical
ecologies) circulates through English-written media; we are worried
that such sources are seldom easily reachable and affordable for the
Latin American environmental community; we are concerned that Latin
American ecologists and activists need to travel huge distances to
participate to the ecological debate; we believe that such a situation
hampers the discussion and the elaboration and proposal of
environmental solutions in this time of ecocide and global emergency;
we think that such a situation is inherently against environmental
sanity.
Thus, there might be discernible
reasons for believing that it made sense to select and collect
essential English-written bibliographic ecological resources in order
to popularise them in Ecuador and Latin America, after translation
into Spanish. We are confident that this could help to sharpen, deepen
and update the environmental debate currently ongoing in Ecuador, a
country of utter importance, in terms of biological and cultural
diversity, for the sub-continent and the whole planet.
Sangay Foundation is devising
``PanNature'' as such a document repository (presently in the guise of
an electronic web-site journal, but we hope there will be a printed
edition soon) for the benefit of the sub-continent ecologists,
activists and the public in general.
It is essentially a collection of
contributions from world-class activists and thinkers, like Joe Kane,
David Suzuki, Vandana Shiva, Fritjof Capra, Chellis Glendinning, Paul
Shepard, George Sessions, Thomas Berry, Jerry Mander, Wolfgang Sachs,
Warwick Fox, Joanna Macy, Gary Snyder, Arne Naess, and many others.
During the last year or so, PanNature
has received notable support and succeeded in obtaining licences and
permissions for translating and circulating such contributions in
Spanish and at a Latin America continental level. In addition, we
encourage the submission of original articles by all insightful
persons.
As a journal, PanNature does not
defend a priori any specific point of view, rather an effort is made
to reflect, through the selection of the published material, the
tension of different or opposite positions.
In fact, the scenario of the past and
present ecological discussion is not homogeneous or static at all,
continuously reflecting very different points of view and strategies,
and a dialectics that evolves rapidly and globally. Sometime, for
example, the comparison of ideas of ecologists and activists from the
``First," the ``Third'' or the ``Fourth" World attains polemic
tones.
Thus, one of the goals of PanNature
is to present contributions of ecofeminists, social ecologists,
spiritual ecologists and so forth, at the same time avoiding too
Eurocentric a perspective: in brief, to give a comprehensive
presentation of what could be called the past and present
pan-ecology.
Nevertheless, Sangay Foundation and
its journal PanNature are particularly committed to spread the message
of Deep Ecology, whose vision is ecocentric and
bioregionalist.
In this sense, we reject the
anthropocentrism of main stream environmental movements and
institutions (to be practical: ``The World should be preserved for the
benefit of future generations of human beings," is a typical, and very
popular, anthropocentric sentence), in favour of an assertion that
human and non-human life should flourish. Also, ``life," in
this framework and cosmovision, is understood in a very broad way, so
broad to include, for instance, rivers, lakes, landscapes, and
ecosystems - the latter being the real biological and even cultural
unit of the Earth: Humans are not the only valuable
constituents of nature, since all life has intrinsic value and is
inherently worth, and from this acceptance flows the innovative
perception of Deep Ecology.
This vision is not completely new,
anyway, dating back to the visions of Buddha, San Francesco di Assisi,
Hildegard von Bingen, Spinoza and Gandhi. It has been more recently
developed by extraordinary thinkers like, for example, George
Sessions, Paul Shepard, Thomas Berry, Theodore Roszak, Bill Devall,
Joanna Macy, John Seed and, above all, Gary Snyder and Arne Naess.
We are not only committed to
spreading the Deep Ecology message.
Our mentors, Joe Kane, activist and
writer, internationally known for his two books RUNNING THE AMAZON and
SAVAGES, is assessing us in making public the oil exploitation by
multinationals in the Ecuadorean Amazon; we have translated into
Spanish SAVAGES, which will be published soon in Ecuador; David
Suzuki, a world-class geneticist based in Vancouver, is assessing us
in making as broadly known as possible the side effects of transgenic
products on our foods and lives. Dr.David Suzuki has been
particularly active in personally mentoring our growth. In one of his
letters to PanNature, Dr. Suzuki definitely expressed his sympathy and
support for our initiative, allowing us to translate and use
everything he published so far.
We work to contribute to:
- Develop an ecocentric idea of society honoring the Earth
- Study the deepest causes of the present bio-cultural
decline of the sub-continent and the planet
- Publicize at any level and through all actionable
ways
genuinely sustainable solutions
- Encourage initiatives and participate to projects
that are model
for an ecologically viable future
C O N T R I B U T I O N S
TERRA ECUATORIALIS
ANIMA MUNDI
CARMINA ECOLOGICA
OMNI SCIENTIA
GLOBUS
TRANSGENICA
DEEP ECOLOGY
PORTRAITS & SELF-PORTRAITS
INTERVIEWS
EVENTS & MEETINGS