Protect Earth's last wildernesses, $5 per acre

The past few months has seen a great deal of our energy placed into communicating how we do things, not simply what we do. Forever Wild was not established to simply be another replica of so many existing NGOs. It was established to demonstrate that there is another way to do business, another way to have a relationship with our planet.

Our projects are not the reason we exist. We exist to develop and demonstrate a powerful model to redefine how we share this Earth. That's why we call our landscapes Shared Earth Landscapes; we share these places with so many other species, and we expect them to allow society to use the natural world to feed our economic system. And yet society generally gives nothing back.

So Forever Wild set out to change that. Our model relies on circular economics, feeding financial resources back into nature and remote communities while drawing on donations and large pools of private capital.

The Tropical Wetlands Shared Earth Landscape remains our primary pilot project, where we have now clearly shown the value of ultra-low impact business as a way to finance effective protection of the natural systems. We use the proceeds to fund critical land management, such as cool burns. These early Dry Season fires prevent wildlife later in the year, which can destroy the habitat and kill the animals we work to protect. Cool fires move slowly, they don’t burn everything and they leave all the critical habitat components for the animals - such as the delightful but endangered Northern Quoll in the video below :-)  Importantly, cool fires prevent the release of massive quantities of carbon from wildfire.

We also use the funds to support engagement with the First Nations people who used to roam this land, and who are the holders of deep knowledge about it.

In turn, the conservation and community engagement work we do in the landscape actually increases the value of the food that is produced, because that food is supporting a climate, conservation and cultural initiative. As it is higher value, we need less of it to be viable and therefore it has much less impact.

By supporting Forever Wild, you are supporting far more than a 'project'. You are supporting a movement, a way of thinking and doing business, and climate and conservation action that must endure.

Links:

• Endangered Northern Quoll on our Tropical Wetlands property
• A black-necked stork, early morning

Yes, 1 million acres! By 2024 we are confident that we will have expanded our Western Deserts landscape to 1 MILLION ACRES. We have a number of strategies in play, including working towards acquiring another 560,000 acres and developing programs on adjacent land wilderness land.

We know that simply creating more protected areas is not good enough, and will also never be enough to manage our climate challenges. While they are definitely important the scale is limited and does not acknowledge that we all share one Earth.

Therefore, as a socio-environmental enterprise, a great deal of Forever Wild's focus is on creating positive feedback loops from wilderness to society as tools to protect those wilderness areas. Unless we scale up efforts in a way that explicitly identifies human society, local economies and the environment as components of a whole, we will not succeed. 

The granite rock above, photographed in the Western Deserts, is a superb example of the flow we need to create, even where the problem is hard to tackle! We all live here together, and we have no choice except to figure out how to create our own fully interconnected planet.

Thank you to all our donors We blend all donations with impact investment and so each $5 actually supports between 5 to 10 acres of wilderness!! Now THAT is making every dollar count.

Best wishes from the Forever Wild Team, Australia.