Seeing Like a Local
People in a remote part of the Amazon are using solar-powered canoes to travel around their territory on the rivers, and it has powerfully changed the notion of development there.
The solar boats allow people to travel around their territory without having to pay for diesel fuel for gas-powered boats—fuel that costs them five times more than anywhere else in the country because it has to be flown in on Cessna planes. It allows them to develop non-extractive income projects like tourism and forestry products businesses that work sustainably in the rainforest. And they don’t need to cut down chunks of the forest to build roads, or raise cattle to earn money to buy fuel.
Creating a sustainable transportation network is a way for the Achuar, an Indigenous people living in the Amazon along the Peru-Ecuador border, to take control of their own future, blending ancient traditions with modern solutions. “We believe that the best way to preserve the rainforest is to empower its Indigenous custodians,” the community says. “By building community-controlled solar infrastructure and technical capacity in vulnerable territories, we are strengthening traditional cultures and activating economic alternatives to extractive development across the Amazon.”
“We don’t want roads here,” said Kara Solar President Nantu Canelos. “Highways destroy communities.” Research shows that support for roads in Achuar communities dropped from 41% to 2% after the introduction of solar-powered river transport options.
Since the first solar canoe was launched in 2017, Kara Solar has delivered 12 of the vessels to communities in five countries (six in Ecuador, two in Peru, two in Brazil, one in Suriname, and one in the Solomon Islands), built solar recharge stations that double as community energy centres, and trained members of Indigenous communities to operate and manage the systems in their own villages. And the Achuar are accompanying the indigenous communities in those other four countries as they replicate the model in their territories.
The solar technology developed for the project also provides sustainable solutions for communication systems such as high frequency radio in some of the most remote areas of the Amazon, where cell phone communication is not available, said Cheryl Martens, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Inequalities at the San Francisco University of Quito.
View our latest digests
The solar boats have revolutionized movement in the region, allowing people to travel faster and farther.
About 7,000 Achuar people live in dozens of scattered communities in the province of Pastaza, which is the size of Belgium. Most are reachable only by boat or expensive chartered flights; only a third of the province has roads.
The Achuar used traditional dugout canoes for generations before the arrival in the 1990s of the diesel-powered peque peque, which caused many fish to disappear from the rivers. “There used to be plenty of cachamas, bocachicos, and tanglas here,” one elder told the New York Times. “But when the peque peque arrived, the fish disappeared.”
Oliver Utne first went to the Amazon in 2007 and was astounded by the biodiversity he saw all around. After graduating from college in Minneapolis in 2009, he had the chance to live in Yutzuintza, an Achuar village in a remote part of Ecuador, where people wanted to bring in the Internet. As he realized that the outside world and its roads, oil companies, and technology were inevitably affecting the territory, he changed his mind about the idea of keeping the Amazon pristine.
“Before (visiting Ecuador) I’d only viewed technology as a threat to Indigenous cultures. I think that was a very paternalistic point of view based on an overly romanticized idea of Indigenous people,” he told CNN.
After training as a solar installer in the U.S., Utne returned to Ecuador and began working with the Achuar on how solar technologies could best work in the Amazon. While it may have been a bit of a joke when they first bounced around ideas, MIT, having studied the question, said it was very feasible.
The traditional Indigenous canoe turned out to be the most efficient design to be powered by a small electric motor powered by solar panels on the roof. Two years of collaborative design work led to building the first canoe in the northern community that is the region’s oil and boat-building capital. That first electric boat was named “Tapiatpia”, after a mystical electric eel in Achuar mythology that transports beings who live beneath the river’s surface.
Then they faced a dilemma—how to get the canoe to Achuar territory. So on March 28, 2017, nine men made an 1,118-mile, 25-day river journey from Coca, Ecuador, to Iquitos, Peru, before returning back to the Achuar territory. The many challenges along the way convinced Utne that local people needed to know the systems inside out.
So the Kara Solar Foundation, formally launched in 2018, is staffed on the ground by members of the Achuar community.
“Kara Solar ensures that technical knowledge is cultivated within the communities themselves,” said Nantu, a member of the Achuar community of Sharamentsa and Kara Solar’s executive director. “It trains local technicians to maintain and control [the] technology, ensuring that power and the future remain in their hands.”
The boats vary in size, the biggest with capacity for up to 20 passengers. They travel quietly at up to 19 kilometres (12 miles) per hour with a range of up to 97 kilometres (60 mile). Their electric batteries can be charged via nine onshore charging stations that function as community solar grids along the river. providing power for schools, Internet access, computer labs, and eco-lodges. And with Motores Amazonas building solar motors specifically designed for the Amazon, electric motors and solar recharge points are now commercially available.
Kara means “a vision that becomes real” in Achuar. “Our vision is to create solar technologies that equip Amazon communities with new tools to build clean energy autonomy, strengthen cultural resilience, and contribute to the defence of rainforest ecosystems that sustain us all.”
Given that the Amazon is one of the few regions in the world without existing wide-scale infrastructure for transportation and electricity, the question of how that is built may well define the fate of the planet as much as it does the future of Indigenous territories.
“We’re building a future on our own terms,” said Nantu. And that is changing the paradigm of development—about how and who, Utne added.
Rosemary Cairns
Energy Mix Guest Writer
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I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.
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Seeing Like a Local
People in a remote part of the Amazon are using solar-powered canoes to travel around their territory on the rivers, and it has powerfully changed the notion of development there.
The solar boats allow people to travel around their territory without having to pay for diesel fuel for gas-powered boats—fuel that costs them five times more than anywhere else in the country because it has to be flown in on Cessna planes. It allows them to develop non-extractive income projects like tourism and forestry products businesses that work sustainably in the rainforest. And they don’t need to cut down chunks of the forest to build roads, or raise cattle to earn money to buy fuel.
Creating a sustainable transportation network is a way for the Achuar, an Indigenous people living in the Amazon along the Peru-Ecuador border, to take control of their own future, blending ancient traditions with modern solutions. “We believe that the best way to preserve the rainforest is to empower its Indigenous custodians,” the community says. “By building community-controlled solar infrastructure and technical capacity in vulnerable territories, we are strengthening traditional cultures and activating economic alternatives to extractive development across the Amazon.”
“We don’t want roads here,” said Kara Solar President Nantu Canelos. “Highways destroy communities.” Research shows that support for roads in Achuar communities dropped from 41% to 2% after the introduction of solar-powered river transport options.
Since the first solar canoe was launched in 2017, Kara Solar has delivered 12 of the vessels to communities in five countries (six in Ecuador, two in Peru, two in Brazil, one in Suriname, and one in the Solomon Islands), built solar recharge stations that double as community energy centres, and trained members of Indigenous communities to operate and manage the systems in their own villages. And the Achuar are accompanying the indigenous communities in those other four countries as they replicate the model in their territories.
The solar technology developed for the project also provides sustainable solutions for communication systems such as high frequency radio in some of the most remote areas of the Amazon, where cell phone communication is not available, said Cheryl Martens, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Inequalities at the San Francisco University of Quito.
View our latest digests
The solar boats have revolutionized movement in the region, allowing people to travel faster and farther.
About 7,000 Achuar people live in dozens of scattered communities in the province of Pastaza, which is the size of Belgium. Most are reachable only by boat or expensive chartered flights; only a third of the province has roads.
The Achuar used traditional dugout canoes for generations before the arrival in the 1990s of the diesel-powered peque peque, which caused many fish to disappear from the rivers. “There used to be plenty of cachamas, bocachicos, and tanglas here,” one elder told the New York Times. “But when the peque peque arrived, the fish disappeared.”
Oliver Utne first went to the Amazon in 2007 and was astounded by the biodiversity he saw all around. After graduating from college in Minneapolis in 2009, he had the chance to live in Yutzuintza, an Achuar village in a remote part of Ecuador, where people wanted to bring in the Internet. As he realized that the outside world and its roads, oil companies, and technology were inevitably affecting the territory, he changed his mind about the idea of keeping the Amazon pristine.
“Before (visiting Ecuador) I’d only viewed technology as a threat to Indigenous cultures. I think that was a very paternalistic point of view based on an overly romanticized idea of Indigenous people,” he told CNN.
After training as a solar installer in the U.S., Utne returned to Ecuador and began working with the Achuar on how solar technologies could best work in the Amazon. While it may have been a bit of a joke when they first bounced around ideas, MIT, having studied the question, said it was very feasible.
The traditional Indigenous canoe turned out to be the most efficient design to be powered by a small electric motor powered by solar panels on the roof. Two years of collaborative design work led to building the first canoe in the northern community that is the region’s oil and boat-building capital. That first electric boat was named “Tapiatpia”, after a mystical electric eel in Achuar mythology that transports beings who live beneath the river’s surface.
Then they faced a dilemma—how to get the canoe to Achuar territory. So on March 28, 2017, nine men made an 1,118-mile, 25-day river journey from Coca, Ecuador, to Iquitos, Peru, before returning back to the Achuar territory. The many challenges along the way convinced Utne that local people needed to know the systems inside out.
So the Kara Solar Foundation, formally launched in 2018, is staffed on the ground by members of the Achuar community.
“Kara Solar ensures that technical knowledge is cultivated within the communities themselves,” said Nantu, a member of the Achuar community of Sharamentsa and Kara Solar’s executive director. “It trains local technicians to maintain and control [the] technology, ensuring that power and the future remain in their hands.”
The boats vary in size, the biggest with capacity for up to 20 passengers. They travel quietly at up to 19 kilometres (12 miles) per hour with a range of up to 97 kilometres (60 mile). Their electric batteries can be charged via nine onshore charging stations that function as community solar grids along the river. providing power for schools, Internet access, computer labs, and eco-lodges. And with Motores Amazonas building solar motors specifically designed for the Amazon, electric motors and solar recharge points are now commercially available.
Kara means “a vision that becomes real” in Achuar. “Our vision is to create solar technologies that equip Amazon communities with new tools to build clean energy autonomy, strengthen cultural resilience, and contribute to the defence of rainforest ecosystems that sustain us all.”
Given that the Amazon is one of the few regions in the world without existing wide-scale infrastructure for transportation and electricity, the question of how that is built may well define the fate of the planet as much as it does the future of Indigenous territories.
“We’re building a future on our own terms,” said Nantu. And that is changing the paradigm of development—about how and who, Utne added.
Rosemary Cairns
Energy Mix Guest Writer
Your email address will not be published.
I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.
…
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