In the footsteps of the ethnobotanical pioneers Richard Evans Schultes, Franklin Aranda, Al Gentry and their many grad students, co-founders Juan Ruiz and Michael Maki of The Richard Evans Schultes Center for Amazonian Ethnobotanical Research (RESCAER), aka The Schultes Center, seek to advance the protection and development of plant medicines in the Amazon Basin, a world center of biodiversity where the thread of traditional knowledge and practice is at once strong and fragile.

To protect the basis of this knowledge involves protecting the Amazonian ecosystem, including its people. They aim to do this through development of appropriate agroforestry production practices, integrating rural people with their environment in innovative and truly sustainable ways. Combining ethnobotany with modern scientific research tools can help both the people of this vast region and of the planet to live better lives, while protecting and enhancing the life of the supporting Amazonian biosphere.

The Schultes Center mission can be boiled down to two fundamental activities: Bioprospecting and Talent Scouting. Bioprospecting is the concerted search for novel and nutraceutically valuable compounds, taking research clues from traditional uses, but going beyond that by collaborating with regional research groups and international organizations.

Ethical bioprospecting is diametrically different from what has come to be termed biopiracy, which is the exploitation of traditional medical knowledge and biologically derived compounds without concern for recompense or indigenous intellectual property rights.

RESCAER's corollary focus is talent scouting - which is a purposeful effort to locate, inspire, and educate the next generation of young Amazonians who can both support the retention of traditional knowledge and advance it in the 21st century. RESCAER has a unique approach and an excellent network platform in place, one which can share benefits to the community through the individual initiatives of the talent it helps foster.

The efforts of the Schultes Center are being spearheaded by their CEO MIKE MAKI, an individual with deep ties to, and experience with, forest management, farming and renewable energy companies and systems, and the Center has an incredible board of advisors which include Dennis McKenna, Wade Davis (the biographer of the legendary ethnobotanist Richard Evan Schultes), Paul Stamets, Luis Eduardo Luna, and Michael Coe, amongst other stellar individuals.

Although several of their staff and advisors have long personal histories with the Amazon rainforest and its people, The Schultes Center is a young organization, begun in 2019 and somewhat set back by the global pandemic. They now seek to move quickly to advance their work and build their international support network. Many links in a remarkable global network await activation.

What happens in the Amazon does not stay in the Amazon; and the efforts of The Schultes Center can truly have planetary implications.