95 | "Co" Benefits Vs "Core Benefits:" Geoff Mwangi And His Theory Of Change Bionic Planet: Reversing Climate Change by Restoring Nature

Remembering the Surui Forest Carbon Project, which was the first indigenous-led REDD project, plus:
A conversation with Geoffry Mwangi Wambungu, Chief Research Scientist at the Kasigau REDD Project in Kenya.
He explains what social scientists mean by “theory of change,” and tells us why he believes the term “co-benefits” is a misnomer in natural climate solutions.
Further reading on the Surui Carbon Project here: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/story-surui-forest-carbon-project/
Full Transcript (non-scripted portions translated by AI)
 
CO-BENEFITS VS CORE BENEFITS, WITH GEOFFREY MWANGI
Bionic Planet, Season 9, Episode 95
OPENING HOOK
STEVE ZWICK
Almir Surui was ten years old when the first logging truck came to his tiny village deep in the Amazon Forest.
It came to chop a single stand of centuries-old mahoganies, and it came with the grudging approval of the chiefs.
After all, they reasoned, it was just one truck, one stand, one time, and for a good cause.
The chiefs weren’t the grizzled old men you probably imagine. Most were barely into their 30s, because more than 90 percent of everyone had died in the five years before Almir was born in 1974.
Ninety Percent.
Gone.
They lost their mothers, their brothers, their sisters, and their lovers.
They lost almost everyone who knew anything about governance.
The surviving chiefs, shamans, and elders lost faith in their own abilities to serve their people, because their time-tested traditions had failed.
Prior to 1969, Brazilian authorities categorized Almir’s people as an “UNCONTACTED” tribe of the Amazon, but in reality, they HAD contact — SOMETIMES peaceful but MOSTLY violent contact — with neighboring tribes, rubber tappers, and even Brazilian explorers going back decades.
One of those neighboring tribes called Almir’s people the “Surui,” but Almir’s people called themselves the Paiter.
In the regional Tupi dialect, Surui means “enemy,” while Paiter means “real people.”
Due to a miscommunication, the Paiter were entered into the lexicon of indigenous people as “Surui” in the leadup to First Contact, which took place on October 7 1969.
Today, their name is hyphenated: Paiter-Surui.
The Paiter-Surui had lived in harmony with the forest for centuries, but they didn’t live in harmony with those who invaded their territory.
And invasions increased dramatically in the years prior to First Contact, as Brazilian authorities encouraged westward migration into the forest.
It was a bloody period, and the Paiter-Surui held their own in combat, but they couldn’t hold their own against European diseases — such as smallpox, measles, and the flu.
That’s what got them in the end.
The elders died, and kids became chiefs. One of those kids was a 17-year-old named Itabira, who learned to navigate the OUTside world of Brazilian society as the world IN-which he’d grown up disintegrated
(Aside)
By the way, if you can’t find any of this online, it’s because it’s all original reporting, and my book hasn’t been published yet.
Anyway, Itabira realized early on that to save his people, he had to push the Paiter-Surui and their struggle into Brazilian awareness. To do that, he and other chiefs stopped fighting illegal loggers and started colluding with them to finance trips to Brasilia, the capital of Brazil.
Soon, they were chopping trees to feed their families and pay for medicine, and by the mid-1990s, they were known as the “logging Indians” — despised by environmentalists who saw them as traitors to the cause and riven internally by fights over how to manage their resources.
The Paiter-Surui broadly split into three factions:
one that embraced the destruction of the forest for commercial gain,
one that opposed that destruction,
and one — the largest of them all — that WANTED to save the forest but NEEDED to feed their families.
Almir was born in 1974 — five years after First Cont