Audubon 2023

For more than a century, Audubon has built a successful legacy of conservation and has mobilized the strength of its network members, local chapters, Audubon centers, state offices, and specialized professional staff to connect people with nature and with the power to protect it.

Science, education, and policy expertise combine to generate efforts ranging from protecting and restoring local habitats to implementing policies that protect birds, other living things, and the resources that sustain us all. both in the United States and on the American continent.

Carlos Andrés Collante Carreño and Igino Mercuri Posada

We are part of the El Taller Fundación team, a civil society organization that accompanies processes of systematization of experiences and social appropriation of knowledge for the recovery and management of collective knowledge. We promote the construction of cultural heritage, alternative heritages and alternatives to heritage, and we scaffold projects and initiatives for the construction of commons. Carlos is a political scientist by profession and a bird watcher by accident, Igino is an educator and together with the El Taller Fundación team they have participated in the development of the biospace ecosystem in Colombia and community conservation tourism circuits with the help of organizations such as Audubon de las Americas and territorial environmental authorities.

Based on the relationship and accompaniment of experiences of young people, social leaders and communities that inhabit territories where tourism motivated by bird watching has been present, and under the principle that experience is not having lived, but rather having reflected on what has been experienced, it is It is pertinent to share some findings that should help us as a country to define our own routes for the development of community tourism, in order to build paths of well-being for human communities and the territories they inhabit.

The community commitment in Laguna de Sonso, Valle del Cauca, to build a conservation tourism model where the center is the conservation of the territory and tourism only a complement that supports the sustainability of the community project, among many other experiences, has led to understand that conservation is a social agreement to guarantee the conditions that make life possible in the territory, that community initiatives must be articulated with territorial life plans and the danger of the only ways of being in a diverse and plural country.