Third Millennium Alliance is a nonprofit organization working to conserve one of the last remnants of tropical forest in coastal Ecuador and spearhead a regional movement toward sustainable land-use. We offer two internship programs. The Tropical Permaculture and Research program is based in the Bamboo House Research Station in the middle of the Jama- Coaque Ecological Reserve. The Community Education program is based in the small agricultural community of Camarones, which is 3 km down the road from the Jama-Coaque Reserve.
Both programs are for two months. We are only accepting applications for August 1 through September 30. At the bottom of this posting, we have included a brief synopsis of each program. If you would like to learn more, please visit our Internship page on our website, where you can download a detailed program description, at: http://www.3malliance.org/index.php?id=320 If you would like to apply, send an email to the address listed in the program description and please write the subject heading as “Internship – August 1.” We hope to get a chance to work with you! Sincerely, Jerry Toth Director, Jama-Coaque Reserve Third Millennium Alliance Jama, Ecuador www.3malliance.org Tropical Permaculture & Research: A few years ago, a few of us – ecology, economics, and business graduates – founded a nonprofit organization called Third Millennium Alliance. We raised some money and bought a lot of land in a critically-endangered rainforest and established an ecological reserve. There was a small patch of previously-degraded land right in the middle, where we have built an innovative and surprisingly comfortable research station out of bamboo, by hand. Immediately surrounding the house we are designing/growing/building a living laboratory of sustainable resource management (i.e. permaculture). Our goal is 100% food self- sufficiency within 10 years. So far, we’re maybe 15% of the way there. Likewise this is a testing ground for appropriate technology, such as off- the-grid renewable energy, water treatment and management, organic pesticide production, etc. We are also in need of various biological research projects and inventories, such as botanical research, cloud forest precipitation research, GIS mapping, setting up sample plots for a bio-mass inventory, and building a native hardwood tree nursery and seed collection and germination system. Community Education Internship: You will be living and working in U.S. Peace Corp-type conditions in a small rural community. The quality of education in this community is low and the curriculum is poorly suited to the very special ecological conditions in which the community lives in – namely, they live on the edge of the most threatened tropical forest in the world. The adults in the community earn most of their money through forest-clearing activities, for lack of alternatives, and the effects of deforestation are not well understood by the community. Our hope is to significantly improve not only access to education in the community, but also the quality of the education, with emphasis on the issues that are most relevant to its particular conditions – namely, forest and water ecology and agriculture. Most importantly, we are trying to foster a culture of conservation in this community and throughout the region, for which the wonders and power and beauty and importance of ecology needs to become household knowledge. You will be on the frontlines of this effort, which attempts nothing less than a regional consciousness shift and a generational change in natural resource management.
