Join western influencers as they deeply listen to Manari Ushigua, a political and ceremonial leader and healer from the Sapara people from the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest, during this Living Nature 2021 Listening Session.
During this Listening Session, journalist and cross-bench peer in the House Of Lords, Baroness Rosie Boycott; actor, playwright, and theatrical director, Simon McBurney OBE; and Assistant Director of Sustainability and Climate Change at Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Susannah Fitzherbert-Brockholes virrtually journey into the Ecuadorian Amazon and cosmologies of the Sapara people.
To collectively understand how all societies can live in harmony with the earth, we must start listening to 5% of our population who currently protect 80% of global biodiversity – Indigenous communities. Our Listening Sessions highlight this urgent need by pairing Indigenous representatives with influential Western leaders who donate the power of their voice. We invite you to join them in quietly, respectfully, and intentionally listening to these lived experiences.
Thank you to Manari:
- Manari Ushigua served as the Vice President of CONAIE (The National Indigenous Organization of Ecuador) from 2013-2016, and as the President of the Sapara Indigenous Federation from 1999 to 2012. He has also led the Sapara Bi-national Federation of Ecuador and Peru since its inception in 1996. As an entrepreneur Manari created the community association NAKU www.naku.com.ec. Naku is a sanctuary and provides ecotourism and healing retreats with traditional plant medicine and alternative medicine and other Amazonian healing traditions based on ancestral knowledge. As an advocate of indigenous rights, Manari led the Sapara people, to become recognized by UNESCO to be protected as an oral and cultural heritage of humanity.Manari has been a key player along with his sister Gloria Ushigua in stopping the expansion of the oil frontier in their territory. In December 2019 Manari launched his latest book on simbología, culture and dreams of the Sapara, a compilation covering the story of creation of the universal life of the contemporary Sapara people.
Thank you to our three listeners:
- Baroness Rosie Boycott has a long and distinguished career history as a journalist, publisher and author. She is a cross bench peer in the House of Lords. For ten years she was chair of ‘The London Food Board’, responsible to the Mayor of London for food policy in the City. As a food activist, she holds particular emphasis on food poverty, health, environment and agricultural sustainability. She is a trustee of the Food Foundation and Feeding Britain and chair of Veg Power. She was the founder of the feminist magazine Spare Rib and the editor in chief of three national newspapers: The Independent on Sunday, the Independent and the Daily Express.
- Susannah Fitzherbert-Brockholes is Assistant Director of Sustainability and Climate Change at Pricewaterhouse Coopers, a multinational professional services network that designs and delivers large scale initiative to support low-income countries in tackling the challenges posed by climate change. She is also the Programme Director for the Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) funded Climate Finance Accelerator programme, a £10 million technical assistance programme designed to support nine middle-income countries to develop a sustainable pipeline of bankable, low-carbon projects.
- Simon McBurney OBE is an English actor, playwright, and theatrical director. His high-profile acting career spans theatre, TV and film. He is the founder and artistic director of the Théâtre de Complicité, which performs throughout the world. In the last 20 years his work has continually returned to political, social and philosophical questions of the way we live, think and act as a society and he is unafraid of melding the most ancient of theatrical forms with the most recent aspects of modern technology
“We don’t need to invent a lot of technologies to get out of our current dilemma. We need to change our consciousness.”
–Manari Ushigua
