Ecotrust
Ecotrust is a conservation organization based in Portland, Oregon that works to foster prosperous communities along the West Coast of North America.
Ecotrust was founded in 1991 by Spencer Beebe, who brought his conservation experience in the tropical rain forests of Central and South America home to North America’s temperate rain forests. Prior to Ecotrust, Beebe was president of The Nature Conservancy International Program and founding president of Conservation International.
With the core belief that "the economy of nature and the ecology of man are inseparable," Ecotrust has sought to integrate economic and community development strategies into traditional conservation – and to establish working models of what the organization has variously called: ecosystem economics, conservation-based development, or a conservation economy.
Ecotrust’s advisors have included urbanist Jane Jacobs, ecological economist and steady-state theorist Herman Daly, forestry scientist Jerry Franklin, and counterculture icon Stewart Brand. In 2003, ecologist Peter Warshall summarized the organization’s activities with the statement, "Ecotrust is about designing a future."
Ecotrust began by surveying temperate rain forests as a distinct ecoregion, an analysis that led the organization to identify British Columbia’s Kitlope River as the largest intact temperate rain forest watershed in the world. Beebe and others from Ecotrust visited the region and engaged the Haisla First Nation, whose traditional territory included the Kitlope. The organization supported the Haisla in launching a Rediscovery Program for cultural education and, four years later, in securing provincial government recognition for over 750,000 acres (3,000 km2) of temperate rain forest as Huchsduwachsdu Nuyem Jees (the Kitlope Heritage Conservancy Protected Area).
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