In Focus

The Munich publisher Mascha Kauka has joined the effort to save the world’s largest woodland eco-system with a unique project. Enlisting the aid of two indigenous tribes, she’s having an international academy built in the depths of Ecuador’s rain forest. It will be a place where students from German colleges and universities can do field research work, whilst Indios can receive training and learn how to earn money from science tourism. This concept makes the indigenous peoples the guardians of their own forests - a radical alternative to the pressure they often experience to sell them off to oil and logging operations.