Time, Continuity, and the Economic Value of Intact Ecosystems

ECHOES OF THE AMAZON PINK DOLPHIN

01/01/2026

Time, Continuity, and the Economic Value of Intact Ecosystems

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Nature, Law, and the Economic Blind Spot

For most of its history, economic thought has been concerned with what people make, exchange, and consume. It has been far less concerned with the physical world that makes those activities possible. This imbalance was not deliberate, nor was it immediately visible. Climate stability could be assumed, ecosystems appeared abundant, and the consequences of ecological degradation unfolded slowly, often far from the places where economic decisions were taken. Under such conditions, economics could proceed as if nature were background rather than structure.

That assumption is no longer available.

In living systems, production is structured not by preference, ideology, or policy, but by physical and biological laws. Rain arrives according to atmospheric dynamics, not market demand. Soil forms over long stretches of time. Forests regulate water, temperature, and carbon through processes that cannot be accelerated without loss of function. These processes follow their own rhythms and thresholds. When those limits are crossed, economic activity does not merely become more expensive; it becomes unstable, and in some cases impossible.

More than half a century ago, Rachel Carson identified this tension with remarkable clarity. Reflecting on the accelerating transformation of natural systems, she observed that “the rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.” Her concern was not nostalgia, nor opposition to progress, but duration. Systems shaped by long biological processes cannot be forced to conform to human timetables without losing the very qualities upon which their productivity depends. In Silent Spring, she described this as an obligation to endure.

That obligation has rarely been taken seriously within economic reasoning.

What Carson was pointing to can be stated more formally: living systems are governed by biophysical laws that impose non-negotiable constraints of time, regeneration, and threshold behaviour; while these laws are universal, their expression is ecosystem-specific, binding differently in different ecological contexts.

The difficulty now confronting economics is therefore not simply environmental damage or resource scarcity. It is more fundamental. Nature has been placed in the wrong category. It has been treated as an externality, a constraint, or a stock of resources whose degradation can be postponed, discounted, or substituted later. In reality, nature functions as a system of primary production whose continuity determines whether production can occur at all. What appears in economic models as context is, in fact, a governing condition.

For a long time, this misclassification carried few immediate penalties. Industrial production expanded while ecological costs accumulated quietly elsewhere. Growth appeared to confirm theory. But as climatic instability accelerates and ecological critical limits are approached or crossed, the limits of this abstraction have become increasingly visible. Floods, droughts, soil collapse, and climate volatility now register not only as environmental events, but as economic ones. What was once treated as background has moved, gradually and insistently, to the foreground.

This article begins from that shift. It does not approach nature as an ethical concern, nor does it propose a new method for assigning prices to environmental goods. Instead, it asks a prior and more demanding economic question: what must be recognised as a real and present cost if production is to remain possible in a biophysically determined world? It is written for those working at the intersection of ecological practice, economic theory, and institutional decision-making, where the conditions of production can no longer be assumed to be biophysically neutral.

The Theory of Intact Ecosystems (TIES) is developed as a response to this question. It starts from a simple observation: ecosystems are not ancillary to economic activity, nor are the services they provide incidental benefits. They are production systems governed by biological time, regeneration, and thresholds. The services they generate—such as water regulation, climate moderation, soil stability, and carbon sequestration—are continuous outputs, not one-off gains. Their continuity requires protection, governance, monitoring, and long ecological duration. These requirements entail real economic costs that cannot be deferred without consequence.

Within TIES, these costs are treated not as future liabilities or external damages, but as present conditions of production. When they are excluded from price formation, prices do not merely omit environmental considerations; they misrepresent the circumstances under which economic activity can continue. In this sense, TIES does not add nature to economics. It restores nature to the place it has always occupied, but rarely acknowledged: as a system whose laws set the terms under which value can be created at all.

To make this logic concrete, the article follows a single tropical hardwood tree through time. Its establishment costs appear early and are easily identified. Its value, by contrast, accumulates slowly through the continuous provision of environmental services as biological maturation deepens. Unlike extractive or depreciating assets, its productive capacity strengthens rather than erodes. This example is not illustrative by chance. It reveals, in concentrated form, the economic behaviour of intact ecosystems more broadly.

What follows is therefore not a moral appeal, but an effort at economic clarity. By placing nature and the laws that govern it at the centre of analysis, the Theory of Intact Ecosystems offers a framework for understanding value, cost, and price in a world where biological limits can no longer be assumed away.

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How Economics Learned to Look Away from Nature

Long before economics became abstract, it already sensed that nature shapes economic outcomes. Classical political economy emerged in a world still governed by land, seasons, and harvests, and it could not entirely ignore the material conditions of production. David Ricardo, in particular, recognised that land differed fundamentally from labour and capital. Its quantity was fixed, its fertility uneven, and these differences produced economic consequences. From this insight came the theory of differential rent: the recognition that economic returns arise not only from human effort, but from differences in nature itself.

This was a decisive step. For the first time, economics acknowledged that the qualities of land mattered — that nature was not neutral. Yet within Ricardo’s framework, land remained essentially static. It appeared as surface rather than system, as space rather than process. Land shaped distribution, but it did not yet govern the conditions under which production could continue.

The living dynamics of regeneration, exhaustion, and ecological change lay outside the analysis.

In this sense, Ricardo opens the door to nature — but only partway. What remains outside is biophysical law: the fact that living systems operate according to time-bound processes, thresholds, and irreversibilities that determine not merely how output is distributed, but whether production itself remains possible.

Marxian political economy moved further into material reality. Production was no longer treated primarily as exchange, but as a physical process involving labour, machines, raw materials, and energy. Value was grounded in socially necessary labour time, and economics regained contact with factories, extraction, and exploitation. The economy, once again, stood firmly on the ground.

Yet here, too, nature remained curiously silent. Marx referred to it as a “free gift” to capital — not because it was unimportant, but because it was not priced. Value arose through labour, and nature entered economic reasoning only insofar as it was transformed by human work. Forests, soils, rivers, and climate enabled production quietly, without wages or accounts, so long as they did not interrupt accumulation.

This treatment had a lasting consequence. By locating value exclusively in labour time, Marxian analysis recognised material production but not ecological productivity. Nature was essential, but economically mute. Its limits appeared only after damage occurred, when depletion or collapse disrupted production. Constraint entered the economy late, as crisis rather than as an ongoing condition.

It is one of the quieter curiosities of the present moment that environmental concern is so often described as Marxism in disguise. The charge is delivered with confidence, as though forests carried manifestos beneath their bark, or rivers flowed according to dialectical plans. The confusion is understandable. Marx spoke of material conditions, and so do environmentalists. But the resemblance ends there. Where Marx located value in labour, environmental thought begins precisely where Marx fell silent: with nature’s own productivity, its time, its limits, and its refusal to be hurried. If attention to rainfall, soil, and climate is ideology, then photosynthesis is subversive and the seasons are political actors—quietly unsettling economies that prefer acceleration to endurance.

Having said this, it is worth pausing before moving on. Economic abstraction did not arise from indifference to the world, but from a desire to make sense of it. Faced with growing complexity, economists sought clarity, order, and rules that could travel across places and sectors. What followed was not an attempt to deny nature, but an effort to simplify a world that was becoming increasingly difficult to hold in view.

With neoclassical economics, abstraction completed its work. Production was reduced to functions, preferences, and prices. Inputs became interchangeable, scarcity relative, and time a parameter rather than a process. The central achievement of this framework was coordination: markets could allocate resources efficiently under conditions of assumed stability. But this achievement came at a cost. Nature no longer appeared even as a silent partner. It dissolved into background assumptions, its endurance presumed, its limits smoothed away by substitution.

This abstraction proved extraordinarily powerful. It allowed economies to scale, integrate, and grow with impressive precision. But it did so by quietly removing biological time from consideration. Regeneration, thresholds, and irreversibility had no formal place in models designed for equilibrium. Nature did not resist within these models because it was no longer present to do so.

Keynes reintroduced time, but only of a particular kind. His concern lay with instability inside markets themselves: collapsing demand, volatile expectations, financial panic. Economic time narrowed to years, sometimes months. Policy was tasked with restoring balance quickly, before unemployment hardened into social rupture. Keynes gave economics urgency — but the time of living systems remained outside the frame.

In Keynes’s world, the material foundations of production were assumed to hold. Resources flowed, ecosystems endured, and nature remained reliable in the background. Biological time continued, but it was not something policy could wait for, measure, or manage.

As the twentieth century progressed, detachment deepened further within monetary economics. Value became increasingly mediated through money, credit, and expectations. Central banks learned to stabilise inflation, liquidity, and growth through interest rates and balance sheets. Economic stability came to be understood primarily as a nominal condition. What mattered was confidence, velocity, and control of signals. The economy appeared increasingly autonomous, operating in quarters and cycles unbound from soil formation, hydrological renewal, or climatic feedback.

As these monetary doctrines moved from theory into policy, they were institutionalised through international financial organisations. This institutional turn did not signal a renewed respect for nature, but a different and more consequential move: an attempt to override nature’s own temporal and biological constraints. Ecological limits were no longer ignored; they were treated as technical obstacles to be corrected. Productivity was no longer expected to emerge from soil formation, regeneration, or ecological balance unfolding over time, but from chemical substitution and engineered acceleration.

This logic was examined with particular clarity by Ernst Feder, who documented how World Bank–supported Green Revolution programmes reorganised agriculture around synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, and genetically standardised crop varieties. Under this model, nature was not displaced but disciplined. Biological processes were instructed to conform to economic timetables, while soils, water systems, and human bodies absorbed the residues of intensified production. Ecological duration was replaced by input responsiveness; regeneration by repetition; resilience by yield targets.

Long before this logic was institutionalised, Rachel Carson warned that the promise of chemical “control” over living systems carried a darker arithmetic: once these substances accumulate and spread, the damage does not simply retreat when policy changes or markets adjust. It persists, crosses thresholds, and settles into the world as an endurance of harm—an elixir whose final efficacy is measured not in yield, but in the quiet widening of what can no longer be undone.

The World Bank called it the Green Revolution, a name that arrived already absolved. Green suggested leaves, balance, renewal—perhaps even birdsong. In practice, it was a programme in which soils were instructed by fertilisers, insects negotiated with pesticides, and crops were selected less for resilience than for obedience. Nature was not expelled from the field; it was issued a timetable. And when rivers, bodies, and soils began to register the cost of this haste, the accounting preferred to record the murmurs as “externalities”—useful data, certainly, but rarely grounds for delay.

It was only when ecological damage became impossible to ignore that nature returned explicitly to economic thought. Environmental economics emerged to address pollution, depletion, and loss. Its contribution was important: it recognised that environmental harm carried economic cost. But it framed this harm as an externality — a deviation from otherwise efficient markets. The response was corrective: taxes, prices, and compensation designed to address damage after it occurred.

This pattern of misrecognition was identified with particular clarity by Archie Mafeje, who argued that many agrarian and indigenous systems were misread as inefficient precisely because they were organised around continuity rather than acceleration. These systems did not maximise short-term output, nor were they structured to respond to price signals in isolation. Instead, they embedded production within the long temporal rhythms of land regeneration, seasonal variability, and social reproduction. What external economic frameworks classified as backwardness or stagnation often reflected a refusal to violate ecological limits. In this sense, Mafeje revealed not an absence of economic rationality, but the presence of one in which nature was neither an external input nor a damaged residual, but a constitutive condition of production itself.

Across these traditions — classical, Marxian, Keynesian and environmental — a common pattern emerges. Each contributes an essential insight, and each has advanced economic understanding within its historical moment. Yet none succeeds in recognising nature as a biophysically governed production system whose continuity establishes binding conditions for economic viability itself.

Nature appears variously as factor, backdrop, assumption, or damage to be corrected, but never as a primary system whose laws precede and constrain price, preference, and policy. When nature is excluded from economic thought as a governing system with its own temporal and biophysical laws, development comes to depend on the steady conversion of living continuity into expendable material—an arrangement that presents depletion not as failure, but as progress.

From this same understanding of nature, developed within the Ecuadorian context, Alberto Acosta has articulated with particular clarity the argument that exposing the structural limits of extractivism is necessary but insufficient unless accompanied by the construction of viable economic and institutional alternatives—an unresolved challenge that SELVA has sought to address through sustained practice in the Amazon, giving rise to a coherent way of thinking about nature, value, and continuity.

When Value Becomes Visible — and Time Refuses to Disappear

A decisive shift in how nature can be understood economically occurs with the work of Giles Jackson, together with Jason Doedderlein and Martin Mulyadi. In a peer-reviewed article published in 2025 in the Journal of Applied Business & Economics, the authors establish a rigorous monetary valuation of environmental services generated by tropical forests in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Their study marks a turning point: ecological processes long treated as background conditions are rendered economically visible through systematic valuation.

The analysis is anchored in some of the most intact and biologically complex rainforest landscapes remaining on the planet, including SELVA’s Amazon Reserves for Peace and the adjacent Cuyabeno National Park. These forest tracts are widely recognised for their exceptional ecological integrity: continuous primary forest cover, extraordinary biodiversity, intact hydrological systems, and minimal historical fragmentation. Their significance lies not only in species richness, but in the uninterrupted functioning of ecological processes across large spatial and temporal scales.

Within this setting, Jackson et al. apply established ecosystem-service valuation databases and conservative benefit-transfer methods to compare three economic pathways over extended time horizons: extractive land use, carbon-only valuation, and the valuation of the full suite of environmental services. The choice of location is not incidental. Forests of this quality allow environmental services—carbon storage, water regulation, climate moderation, soil stability, biodiversity support, and cultural functions—to be observed in their most complete and undisturbed form.

The conclusions are explicit. As the authors state, “the true economic value of tropical forest ecosystems emerges only when the full suite of environmental services is taken into account.” When this occurs, familiar economic hierarchies are overturned. Over long time horizons, “the monetised value of environmental services substantially exceeds that of extractive land use.” Value appears not as a one-time gain realised through removal, but as a continuous economic output generated through persistence.

This contrast is central to the article’s significance. Extractive economics produces value through depletion: timber is harvested, minerals removed, productive capacity diminished. Environmental services behave differently. Their value arises through continuity. Carbon is stored year after year, water cycles are regulated season after season, soils remain stable, and biodiversity persists. In the valuation presented by Jackson and his colleagues, forests generate economic returns not because they are consumed, but because they are allowed to remain standing.

The authority of this finding rests not on advocacy, but on academic scrutiny. The article underwent independent peer review prior to publication, situating its methods and conclusions firmly within recognised economic science. As a result, the valuation of environmental services presented here rests on a scientific foundation rather than normative preference, providing an empirical basis from which further economic reasoning can proceed. Environmental services are therefore presented not as ethical aspirations or institutional preferences, but as measurable economic outputs expressed in monetary terms and directly comparable with extractive alternatives.

This valuation is not produced at a distance from the ecosystems it measures. Jackson’s engagement with the Amazon is not confined to modelling. He has worked in the Ecuadorian Amazon with SELVA since 2020, combining sustained field engagement within the Amazon Reserves for Peace with academic research on the valuation of environmental services. This long-term presence in primary forest conditions grounds the valuation exercise in lived ecological reality rather than abstract modelling.

Giles Jackson holds the Baxa Chair at Shenandoah University, an endowed academic position supporting scholarship in economic frameworks that move beyond narrow extractive logics toward longer-term conceptions of value. He also serves as Professor-in-Residence with SELVA, a role reflecting sustained academic engagement with the organisation’s Amazon Reserves for Peace rather than project-based collaboration.

The valuation framework has also entered interdisciplinary academic dialogue. Through exchanges connected to Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, where long-term forest and climate dynamics are studied at the Tree-Ring Laboratory under the direction of Professor Brendan Buckley, the economic valuation of environmental services has been discussed alongside biological records that unfold across decades and centuries. In this context, monetary valuation and ecological time are treated not as competing perspectives, but as complementary ways of understanding continuity.

The significance of this valuation is therefore not only empirical but theoretical. By demonstrating that environmental services behave as continuous economic output rather than value realised through extraction, Jackson and his colleagues render visible a form of productivity that earlier economic traditions could not fully conceptualise.

Classical, Marxian, Keynesian, and environmental frameworks each approached aspects of nature’s role in production, but none possessed the analytical means to treat biological continuity itself as an economically productive condition. Once value is shown to arise through persistence rather than extraction, ecosystems can no longer be understood merely as inputs, constraints, or repositories of damage. They appear instead as production systems whose economic behaviour is governed by biological time, regeneration, and systemic coherence. It is at this point—not before—that a new theoretical formulation becomes necessary.

The Theory of Intact Ecosystems

The Theory of Intact Ecosystems (TIES) is an economic framework developed to classify a form of economic activity that becomes visible only once continuity itself is recognised as economically productive. It treats intact living ecosystems as primary production systems whose outputs take the form of continuous environmental services generated through the persistence of biological processes over time.

Within this framework, value does not arise from conversion, removal, or accelerated turnover, but from the maintenance of systemic coherence—regeneration, succession, and functional integrity—through durations that exceed conventional economic horizons. In doing so, TIES establishes continuity as an economic category in its own right, rather than as a residual, an external correction, or a future concern. This represents a substantive departure from existing economic frameworks, because it identifies the maintenance of intact ecological systems not as an environmental objective, but as a necessary condition for the continuity of economic production itself. For nature, this marks a shift from being valued for what can be extracted, substituted, or compensated, to being recognised for what can only be produced when ecological systems are allowed to remain whole through time.

Earlier economic traditions approached nature without possessing the analytical means to treat biological continuity itself as a productive condition. Land appeared as limit, labour as source of value, markets as coordinating mechanisms, and environmental damage as a correctable deviation. What remained unclassified was a form of economic organisation whose output emerges only through uninterrupted ecological duration. This absence was not accidental. Until the continuous economic contribution of environmental services could be demonstrated rigorously, continuity remained economically implicit rather than analytically explicit. The valuation work of Jackson, Doedderlein & Mulyadi marks the point at which this condition changes: once persistence itself becomes economically visible, a theoretical framework capable of holding it becomes necessary.

TIES resolves this limitation by inverting the conventional temporal structure of economic reasoning. In extractive systems, value is realised early through depletion, while costs accumulate later as instability, scarcity, and repair. In intact ecosystems, costs are borne early and continuously—through protection, governance, monitoring, and the acceptance of biological duration—so that value can emerge gradually and persist. Continuity, in this sense, is not an ethical preference or a future benefit. It is a present operating condition without which productive capacity collapses. Economic value, therefore, is not maximised by speed, but secured through coherence maintained across time.

Within this framework, the distinction between price, cost, and value acquires a specific meaning for living systems. Price exists only in the present. It refers to the immediate expenditures required to hold ecological continuity in place—protection, governance, monitoring, care, and restraint borne now, without which continuity does not occur. Cost operates across time. It appears first as the ongoing commitment required to maintain intact systems, and later, when continuity is disrupted, as loss, instability, and the erosion of productive capacity. Value does not coincide with either moment. It emerges only through the sustained operation of intact ecological processes over time. Confusing these categories leads economies to underprice continuity in the present, defer disruption costs into the future, and misrecognise the conditions under which nature remains productive at all.

The Green Diamond: Designing Intact Ecosystems

Across much of the Amazon, extractive activities have not only removed forest cover but disrupted the layered structure, regenerative cycles, and ecological coherence that define intact rainforest systems. What remains after such interventions is often a simplified landscape unable to reproduce the functions of primary forest through time.

The Green Diamond was developed as a practical response to this condition: a reforestation framework designed not merely to replace trees, but to reconstruct the structural and temporal conditions under which intact rainforest ecosystems can re-emerge.

The Green Diamond proceeds from the premise that intact ecosystems cannot be restored by accumulation alone. Planting trees, even in large numbers, does not recreate a rainforest if the spatial relationships, vertical stratification, and successional dynamics that govern ecological continuity are absent. Instead, the framework begins with form. It establishes a deliberate geometry that organises species placement, spacing, and interaction so that ecological processes—rather than external inputs—drive regeneration over time.

At its core, the Green Diamond reconstructs the layered logic of primary rainforest. Species are selected and positioned to re-establish canopy differentiation, understorey development, and root system complementarity from the outset. Hardwood species are introduced according to their functional roles within different layers of primary rainforest, so that structure, food availability, and shelter co-evolve in ways that support not only forest regeneration but the gradual return of fauna dependent on intact habitat conditions. 

This layered arrangement allows light, moisture, nutrients, and microbial activity to circulate in ways that stabilise soil, moderate temperature, and retain water, creating conditions in which biological processes can proceed without continual intervention. The aim is not acceleration, but coherence: allowing growth, succession, and interdependence to unfold according to ecological time rather than project cycles.

Crucially, the Green Diamond treats intactness as an emergent property of interaction, not as a fixed target to be reached. The framework does not prescribe a final state. Instead, it establishes conditions under which complexity can increase, resilience can develop, and ecological functions can recover through their own dynamics. In this sense, the design does not impose a forest; it creates the space in which a forest can form itself.

This approach reflects the logic articulated in the Theory of Intact Ecosystems. Continuity is not assumed as a background condition but constructed deliberately through form, restraint, and patience. By designing for interaction rather than extraction, and for duration rather than yield, the Green Diamond translates the theoretical insight that intact ecosystems are productive systems into a concrete ecological practice. It is here, at the level of design, that theory first becomes legible on the ground.

Aurelio and the Forest’s Own Laws

Long before continuity was named as an economic condition, it was recognised as a law of the forest. Aurelio, a Cofán shaman and governor whose entire life was embedded in the Amazon, did not describe ecosystems in terms of services, outputs, or productivity. He spoke instead of timing, restraint, and relationship—of knowing when not to act, when to wait, and when the forest itself was ready to respond.

For Aurelio, the rainforest was not an assemblage of species but a living order governed by its own internal rhythms. Trees were not interchangeable units, nor were they planted in isolation. What mattered was how growth unfolded in layers, how shade preceded emergence, how roots prepared the ground long before trunks appeared above it. Forests, he insisted, do not respond to force or haste. They respond to patience, listening, and coherence.

This understanding extended beyond plants to the life they support. Animals returned not because they were invited, but because the conditions they required—cover, food, shelter, and continuity—had been restored. When structure was rebuilt, movement followed. When layers re-formed, pathways reopened. The forest, Aurelio would say, remembers how to hold life when it is allowed to remain whole.

Such knowledge was not transmitted as doctrine but learned through long presence. Aurelio observed throughout his life how disturbed areas healed themselves when left undisturbed, and how others failed when intervention interrupted succession too aggressively. From these observations came a simple but exacting rule: do less, but do it in the right order. Act in ways that allow the forest to resume its own work.

Aurelio was not only a teacher of these principles but a mentor whose guidance shaped how they were translated into practice. Without his insistence on structure, timing, and restraint, the Green Diamond could not have been conceived in its present form. What the Green Diamond expresses through design and ecological form, Aurelio articulated through lived knowledge and governance. Both recognise that intact ecosystems cannot be commanded into existence. They must be given the conditions—and the time—under which they can re-form themselves.

Hardwood Nurseries: Infrastructure for Time 

Design and territory alone are insufficient if the biological capacity to sustain regeneration through time is absent. Intact ecosystems do not reconstitute themselves on demand; they require species availability, genetic continuity, and institutional patience measured in decades rather than planting seasons. Hardwood nurseries provide this capacity. They are foundational to any effort that seeks to restore primary rainforest structure rather than short-lived cover.

Within SELVA’s Amazon Reserves for Peace, hardwood nurseries function as infrastructure for ecological time. They hold species whose growth cycles, ecological roles, and successional timing extend far beyond conventional project horizons, allowing reforestation practice to align with the slow rhythms through which primary forests assemble themselves. Within Ecuador, SELVA’s hardwood nurseries are unique in being purpose-built for the reconstruction of primary rainforest systems, integrating species selection, layered structure, and long-term care within a single reforestation framework. Across the wider Amazon basin, only a small number of initiatives operate comparable nurseries oriented toward intact ecosystem reconstruction rather than short-cycle planting or commercial forestry. This rarity gives them particular ecological and institutional significance.

The role of these nurseries is not limited to seedling supply. They serve as living repositories of ecological succession, enabling species to be introduced at moments appropriate to their function within a layered system. In doing so, they prevent the compression of ecological time that occurs when fast-growing species are forced to stand in for structural diversity. The nurseries thus protect not only individual trees, but the sequence through which complexity and resilience emerge.

By holding species, timing, and knowledge together, hardwood nurseries translate ecological restraint into operational capacity. They allow reforestation to proceed without substituting acceleration for structure or quantity for function, ensuring that continuity can be maintained even when external pressures favour immediacy.

Seen through the lens of the Theory of Intact Ecosystems, hardwood nurseries make visible an often-overlooked requirement of intactness: that productive capacity must be held before it can be realised. They establish the conditions under which ecological value can emerge later, without being forced prematurely into the logic of yield or extraction. It is only because such capacity exists that continuity can be sustained across generations rather than planting cycles.

Holding Continuity: Governance, Care, and Restraint

Continuity does not hold itself. Ecological systems persist only where human action is governed by restraint, skill, and long-term responsibility. Beyond design, territory, and infrastructure, reforestation requires forms of care that are continuous, attentive, and often invisible. These practices constitute the real cost of holding living systems together through time.

One such practice begins deep within the primary forests that remain intact inside SELVA’s Amazon Reserves for Peace. Hardwood seed collection is not a mechanical task but a specialised form of ecological labour carried out within living forest. Trees do not flower or fruit simultaneously. Many follow irregular cycles, sometimes separated by years, that can only be anticipated through long familiarity with place, season, and terrain. Knowing when to enter, where to move, and when to retreat without disturbance is knowledge acquired slowly, through repetition and caution.

Movement through these forests is never neutral. The ground shifts underfoot. Venomous snakes lie motionless among roots and leaf litter: Bothrops asper, whose bite causes rapid tissue destruction, and coral snakes (Micrurus spp.), whose venom acts silently and for which treatment may not be available in time. Spiders span unseen distances between branches; insects cloud exposed skin; mosquitoes carry malaria and other fevers that linger long after the walk back is over. None of this is exceptional. It is the ordinary condition of entry.

At times, the forest signals more directly. Jaguars are rarely seen, but their presence is unmistakable when it is meant to be known—a low growl carried through vegetation, not an attack but a boundary. Peccaries, moving suddenly in tight groups, can be equally dangerous when startled. These encounters do not interrupt the work; they define its limits. They are reminders that passage is conditional, and that the forest retains its own authority.

These conditions define not atmosphere but cost: the real and present expenditures of labour, risk, restraint, and time required to hold ecological continuity in place.

The seeds gathered through this work carry more than genetic material. They are often drawn from highly endangered or locally disappearing hardwood species whose regeneration has been disrupted by decades of selective logging and forest fragmentation. By collecting and propagating such species directly from remaining primary forest within protected reserves, the nurseries do not merely reproduce trees; they safeguard biological lineages that would otherwise continue toward extinction. Continuity is extended backward as well as forward in time, anchoring future forest structure in species assemblages that once defined intact rainforest systems.

Such care does not end with collection. Governance, monitoring, protection, and post-planting attention remain necessary long after the visible act of planting has passed. Reforestation aligned with long-term ecological logic requires ongoing presence: guarding against encroachment, responding to disturbance, and accepting delay when conditions are not yet right. These practices do not produce immediate outputs, but without them continuity fails.

In this sense, restraint itself becomes a form of labour. Decisions not to act, not to accelerate, and not to extract prematurely are as consequential as active intervention. Holding continuity therefore involves accepting present obligations so that ecological value can emerge later. The cost is borne upfront, through time, risk, and care, rather than deferred into loss and repair.

Within the framework of the Theory of Intact Ecosystems, these practices make clear that intactness is not a passive state but an active condition maintained through governance and responsibility. Continuity persists only where institutions and people are willing to absorb uncertainty, delay, and effort on behalf of systems whose productivity unfolds slowly. It is from this foundation of care that valuation can later be approached without collapsing living systems into short-term price

From Continuity to Valuation: Price, Cost, and Value Through Time 

What becomes visible through this work is that the economic life of a tree begins long before it is planted. By the time a seed is carried out of primary forest, its future already rests on years of observation, risk, restraint, and care. The moment of planting is only the most visible point in a much longer sequence. Valuation, if it is to reflect reality, must begin where that sequence begins.

In this context, price is not an abstract signal or a promise of future benefit. It names the present commitment required to keep continuity in place. It appears in the labour of seed collection, in years of nursery care, in protection, monitoring, governance, and restraint. Price belongs to the present tense. It is what must be borne so that continuity does not break. Where such commitment is absent, no future value can unfold, regardless of intention.

Cost reveals itself more slowly. It accumulates as an ongoing obligation rather than a single expense. Holding living systems intact requires attention that cannot be compressed or postponed without consequence. When continuity is sustained, cost appears as care carried forward. When it fails, cost returns later in another form: degradation, instability, and the heavy burden of repair. In this sense, cost is not avoided by neglect; it is displaced into the future, where it grows larger.

Value does not reside in either of these moments. It emerges only through duration. As forests mature, as interactions deepen, as species return and environmental services begin to flow reliably, value takes form. It is not contained in a tree at planting, nor captured by the price paid at any single moment. Value accumulates as continuity proves itself over years and decades. Where continuity is interrupted, value collapses, regardless of how many trees were once placed in the ground.

Seen this way, initiatives that may appear similar at the moment of planting are economically incomparable. Programmes that externalise nursery time, ecological risk, and post-planting care can offer lower prices because much of the work that makes continuity possible is excluded. What is sold is an event. What is missing is duration. SELVA’s pricing reflects something different: the holding of continuity itself, before, during, and after planting.

Within the framework of the Theory of Intact Ecosystems, valuation therefore does not begin with output, yield, or visibility. It begins with the conditions that allow living systems to remain productive. Price names the present commitment to hold those conditions in place. Cost traces the burden of sustaining—or failing to sustain—that commitment. Value arises only where continuity endures long enough for ecological processes to become economically legible. Only under these conditions can the contribution of intact ecosystems be meaningfully recognised rather than symbolically priced.

Professor Giles Jackson lecturing on the Amazon at Colombia University

Environmental Services Over Time: Re-entering Jackson, Doedderlein & Mulyadi.

The framework now in place makes it possible to return to valuation without abstraction. Once continuity, care, restraint, and duration have been established as economic conditions rather than ethical preferences, the question of environmental services can be approached with clarity. It is here that the work of Giles Jackson and his colleagues enters not as an external justification, but as empirical confirmation of what intact ecosystems already demonstrate in practice.

Jackson’s contribution lies in making visible the economic productivity of living systems that remain intact. Through valuation of environmental services—carbon regulation, water cycling, climate moderation, biodiversity support—his work demonstrates that forests generate continuous economic output over time without requiring extraction. These services do not appear suddenly, nor are they realised through conversion. They unfold gradually, accumulating reliability and scale as ecological structure matures and stabilises.

What becomes clear when this valuation is read alongside the practices described earlier is that environmental services are not independent phenomena. They depend directly on the conditions that allow continuity to persist: intact forest structure, species diversity, temporal depth, and protection from interruption. Where these conditions are weakened, service flows diminish. Where they are sustained, value increases not episodically, but cumulatively.

This alignment resolves a long-standing problem in environmental economics. Earlier frameworks were able to assign value to nature only once damage occurred or extraction took place. Jackson’s work shows instead that value can be measured while ecosystems remain whole. Environmental services behave not as residual benefits, but as primary economic outputs whose reliability increases with time rather than declining through use.

Seen through the lens of the Theory of Intact Ecosystems, this valuation acquires a deeper significance. Environmental services are not merely benefits produced by nature; they are the measurable expression of continuity successfully held. Their value emerges precisely because forests are allowed to remain intact long enough for biological processes to stabilise and interact. In this sense, valuation does not drive conservation. Conservation makes valuation possible.

Jackson’s figures therefore do not stand apart from practice. They rest upon it. The economic value of environmental services becomes legible only where time has been respected, risk absorbed, and care sustained. Where continuity is interrupted, services falter. Where it is maintained, value compounds.

This understanding closes the circle between ecology and economics. It shows that intact ecosystems are not passive assets awaiting monetisation, but active systems whose economic contribution depends on restraint rather than exploitation. Valuation, in this context, is not a tool for conversion, but a means of recognising what already

exists when continuity is allowed to endure.

A Hardwood Tree as a Long-Term Asset

Once continuity is held, a hardwood tree can be understood not as an intervention, but as an asset whose economic behaviour unfolds over its lifetime. Its significance does not lie in the moment it is planted, but in the sequence of functions it performs as it survives, matures, and becomes structurally embedded within a living system.

In its early years, the asset is fragile. Survival is uncertain, and its contribution is modest. What matters economically at this stage is not output, but persistence. Each year the tree remains alive increases the probability that future contributions will occur at all. Early care therefore does not accelerate value; it protects the conditions under which value may later emerge.

As the tree grows, its role changes. Root systems stabilise soil and regulate water movement. Canopy formation moderates temperature and humidity. Biomass accumulation begins to store carbon at increasing rates. These contributions are not episodic events but continuous processes that intensify as the tree’s structure develops. The asset does not depreciate through use; it becomes more productive as it remains intact.

Over longer horizons, a hardwood tree participates in interactions that extend beyond its own biomass. It supports habitat formation, nutrient cycling, and species interdependence. Its economic relevance is no longer attributable to the individual alone, but to its integration within a functioning system. At this stage, value is no longer additive. It is relational.

This behaviour distinguishes a hardwood tree fundamentally from short-cycle plantings or symbolic offsets. Its economic contribution cannot be realised quickly, nor can it be extracted without loss. The asset matures slowly, generates returns continuously, and retains value only if the system that sustains it remains intact.

For those purchasing a tree through SELVA’s reforestation programme, what is acquired is therefore not a unit of planting, but participation in a long-term asset whose value grows through survival, integration, and duration. The tree’s future contribution depends not on scale or speed, but on the conditions that allow it to remain alive and embedded within an intact forest.

Amazon Reserves for Peace as Long-Term Value Infrastructure 

A hardwood tree can function as a long-term asset only where the conditions that sustain its survival remain stable. Outside intact systems, its economic behaviour becomes volatile: mortality rises, service flows fragment, and future contributions become uncertain. The Amazon Reserves for Peace exist to resolve this problem. They operate as infrastructure that holds ecological value in place, allowing long-term assets to mature rather than fail prematurely.

Within the reserves established and managed by SELVA, land is not treated as a passive backdrop but as an active economic stabiliser. These reserves are not leased or nominally protected landscapes; they are owned and held by SELVA itself, representing long-term capital investment committed to maintaining ecological integrity rather than converting land into short-term yield. Protection from extraction, fragmentation, and conversion reduces volatility across biological processes. This stability does not generate immediate outputs, but it preserves the conditions under which accumulated value can continue to grow. In economic terms, the reserves reduce risk.

Unlike land held for speculative appreciation or short-term yield, intact reserves function by preventing loss rather than producing visible returns. Their value lies in what they stop from happening: degradation, interruption, and collapse of ecological processes already underway. This preventative function is difficult to capture through conventional accounting, yet it is precisely what allows long-term assets—such as hardwood trees—to retain and compound value rather than depreciate.

The reserves also operate across scales that individual interventions cannot reach. While a single tree contributes incrementally, intact territory sustains interactions that only emerge at system level: hydrological regulation, climate moderation, and biodiversity persistence. These processes stabilise service flows over time, transforming ecological variability into economic reliability. The reserve, in this sense, is not an asset alongside trees, but the structure that allows tree-level assets to function at all.

Importantly, the reserves do not require continuous expansion to maintain their economic role. Their value is not derived from growth, but from duration. As long as integrity is preserved, accumulated ecological functions continue to operate without depletion. This distinguishes intact reserves from extractive land uses whose apparent productivity depends on continual conversion of future capacity into present gain.

For those supporting SELVA’s reforestation programme, investment in trees is therefore inseparable from investment in the reserves that sustain them. The economic value of a tree is conditional upon the integrity of the system in which it stands. The reserves hold that integrity in place, allowing individual assets to mature, interact, and generate value that would otherwise dissipate.

Tree-Level Valuation: One Tree Through Time

What follows therefore begins at the smallest possible scale: a single tree, observed through time. Valuation does not start with aggregates, hectares, or programmes, but with the biological trajectory of one living unit whose contribution unfolds unevenly as it survives, matures, and integrates into its surroundings.

What matters economically at this scale is not visibility, but survival. Before a tree can contribute meaningfully to environmental services, it must first persist through its most vulnerable phases. Mortality, rather than productivity, defines the early economic condition. This asymmetry is decisive: costs are borne immediately and continuously, while value remains latent, dependent entirely on duration.

A tree does not produce environmental services at a constant rate. In its earliest years after planting, service output is necessarily limited. Biomass is small, canopy coverage incomplete, and ecological interactions are still forming. At this stage, survival is the dominant condition: the tree must withstand drought, flooding, pests, competition, and disturbance before any meaningful contribution can occur.

As the tree moves beyond its most vulnerable phase, its role begins to change. Root systems extend and stabilise soil more effectively. Canopy expansion moderates temperature and moisture. Carbon storage accelerates as biomass increases. Water regulation improves as evapotranspiration and interception become more pronounced. Environmental services begin to rise not incrementally, but cumulatively, as biological functions reinforce one another.

In later stages of maturity, the tree becomes a stable component of a functioning forest system. Its contribution is no longer episodic but continuous. Carbon is stored year after year. Hydrological regulation persists across seasons. Habitat value increases as structural complexity supports biodiversity. At this point, environmental services appear not as isolated effects, but as sustained flows.

Valuation, therefore, must follow time rather than moment. The relevant economic question is not what a tree is worth when it is planted, but how the value of its environmental services evolves as it survives and matures. This progression—from fragile establishment, to accelerating contribution, to long-term stability—forms the basis upon which environmental services can be meaningfully expressed in economic terms.

For this reason, valuation must follow biological development rather than calendar time, tracing how environmental services intensify as ecological structure stabilises.

In the early establishment phase (approximately years 1–3), environmental service output remains modest. Biomass accumulation is limited, canopy coverage incomplete, and ecological interactions are still forming. At this stage, annual environmental service value can be estimated conservatively at around €1 per tree per year, reflecting minimal but emerging carbon storage, soil interaction, and microclimatic effects. Survival remains the dominant condition, and value is necessarily low.

During the accelerating growth phase (approximately years 4–10), service output increases substantially. Canopy expansion, rapid biomass growth, and improved hydrological and soil regulation contribute to rising value. Over this period, cumulative environmental service value surpasses the initial continuity cost, reaching approximately €12–15 per tree by year five, and €35–40 per tree by year ten. At this point, the tree’s contribution is no longer marginal but clearly productive.

In the mature phase (beyond 10–20 years), the tree functions as a stable and enduring component of a living forest. Environmental services are no longer intermittent but continuous. Carbon storage stabilises at high levels, water regulation persists across seasons, and ecological support functions become sustained. Over this horizon, cumulative environmental service value reaches approximately €85–100 per tree, continuing to accrue thereafter as long as continuity is maintained.

These figures are not presented as precise prices, but as order-of-magnitude indicators. Their significance lies not in exact amounts, but in the trajectory they reveal: costs are incurred immediately, while value emerges gradually and increases as biological functions mature and persist through time. This asymmetry—early expenditure followed by delayed but sustained value—defines the economic character of environmental services produced by living systems.

As of 1 January 2026, this logic can be expressed at programme level. The 1,661 tropical hardwoods already established in the forest during 2024–2025 are currently generating an estimated €5,000–6,500 per year in environmental services, based on conservative valuation ranges for trees entering their third year of growth. In addition, approximately 3,000 tropical hardwoods currently growing in SELVA’s permanent nurseries have already undergone the same biological development and carry equivalent environmental service capacity once integrated into the forest. Expressed on an annualised basis, this represents a further €9,000–12,000 per year in environmental services ready to be released through planting. Taken together, SELVA’s reforestation programme is thus already sustaining — or holding in immediate preparation — an annual environmental service value in the order of €14,000–18,500 per year, a figure grounded not in extraction or offset markets, but in continuity patiently maintained through time.

Annual Environmental Services Generated by SELVA’s Amazon Reserves for Peace

The valuation logic developed by Jackson, Doedderlein, and Mulyadi makes it possible to express the productive functions of mature tropical forests as annual economic flows. Applied cautiously to SELVA’s Amazon Reserves for Peace, this peer-reviewed framework allows magnitude to be stated without abstraction or speculation.

In the Aguarico Amazon Reserve for Peace, forest systems have been allowed to persist long enough for ecological processes to operate continuously and at scale. Carbon storage, hydrological regulation, soil stability, climate moderation, and biological continuity function without interruption across most of the reserve. When Jackson’s per-hectare valuation ranges are applied and adjusted for forest maturity, Aguarico generates approximately USD 680,000 per year in continuous ecological functions.

The Aguas Negras Amazon Reserve for Peace operates under different hydrological conditions but with comparable ecological coherence. Extensive areas of flooded primary forest, combined with older terra firme forest and younger recovering sections, sustain stable productive functions across seasonal cycles. Using the same valuation logic and maturity adjustments, Aguas Negras generates approximately USD 560,000 per year in annual ecological output.

Taken together, SELVA’s Amazon Reserves for Peace are therefore producing approximately USD 1.24 million per year in measurable ecological functions. These values are expressed as annual flows rather than asset prices. They do not depend on extraction, offset markets, or speculative mechanisms. They arise because forest systems have been maintained in a state of coherence long enough for their productive functions to persist year after year.

Valuation in Context

We have suggested that when nature’s productive functions are treated as continuous economic output rather than external benefit, the foundations of economic reasoning begin to shift. By distinguishing clearly between price, value, and continuity, the Theory of Intact Ecosystems offers a framework in which environmental services can be recognised as economic production without reducing living systems to commodities. The implications for accounting, investment, and policy follow naturally.

Macroeconomic Consequences of Intact Ecosystems

At this point, the problem shifts again. It is no longer a question of whether intact ecosystems produce value, nor even whether that value can be measured. It becomes a question of how economic systems organise themselves around forms of production whose contribution lies in stability, risk reduction, and endurance. When continuity is recognised as a condition of production itself, macroeconomic consequences follow.

This shift marks the central analytical move of the Theory of Intact Ecosystems.

Continuity is no longer treated as an assumed background condition or an external correction applied after damage occurs. It is treated as a productive condition whose behaviour through time shapes economic outcomes in the present.

Modern macroeconomics has largely treated biophysical continuity as background. Output, investment, and growth are modelled as if the physical systems supporting them were inert or reliably self-renewing. For long periods, this assumption appeared reasonable. Water arrived. Soils regenerated. Climatic ranges remained broadly stable. Under these conditions, continuity did not need to be priced, because it had not yet become scarce.

That assumption is no longer tenable. When ecosystems degrade, the effects propagate across the economy. Agricultural output becomes volatile. Energy systems face irregular supply. Infrastructure is exposed to stresses it was not designed to absorb. Public expenditure shifts from long-term investment to emergency response. Risk premiums rise, not because of market psychology alone, but because the physical conditions of production have become unreliable. In this sense, intact ecosystems function as macroeconomic infrastructure: their failure produces cascading costs, while their maintenance preserves economic governability.

What becomes visible here is a pattern that standard macroeconomic categories tend to obscure: economies differ not only by what they produce or how they govern, but by whether productive capacity is treated as something to be drawn down or allowed to compound through time.

Several countries already illustrate how economies behave when continuity is treated as productive capacity rather than residual benefit. Costa Rica is the most widely cited example. Through sustained investment in forest protection, biodiversity governance, and the legal exclusion of extractive activities, it reorganised a significant share of its economy around ecological integrity. Nature-based tourism contributes approximately five to eight per cent of gross domestic product, while intact ecosystems underpin agriculture, hydropower, and long-term planning. The key point is not tourism itself, but the way continuity allows multiple sectors to coexist without eroding one another.

Norway offers a complementary lesson. While it is an extractive economy, it deliberately separates extraction from national wealth accumulation. Petroleum revenues are converted into long-duration public capital, while domestic ecosystems are protected as stabilising infrastructure. The result is not higher short-term growth, but exceptional macroeconomic resilience. The lesson is clear: value generation alone does not guarantee stability; how value is held matters just as much.

Chile offers a more diversified yet still extractive trajectory. While its economy includes manufacturing, services, and agriculture, copper extraction continues to shape macroeconomic behaviour. Export earnings, fiscal capacity, and investment cycles remain closely tied to global copper prices. Diversification has mitigated volatility but has not altered the underlying temporal logic: extractive value concentrates early and must be continually replaced to sustain output. The issue is not economic sophistication, but structure—productive capacity is still drawn down rather than compounded through continuity.

Ecuador’s position is distinct from all three. Few countries compress as much ecological diversity into a single national territory. Within a matter of hours, one passes from the Galápagos—where Darwin rendered evolution visible through the finches—to coastal ecosystems shaped by tidal exchange, upward into the Andean sierra where hydrology is generated, and eastward into the Amazon, where the same evolutionary logic has operated without interruption for far longer, and at far greater depth.

In the Amazon, continuity does not announce itself through isolated traits, but through organisms whose existence presupposes long, unbroken ecological time. The pink river dolphin is one such case. Descended from marine ancestors that entered the western Amazon basin more than fifteen million years ago, the species adapted as continental uplift and hydrological reorganisation transformed inland seas into river systems. Over millions of years, isolation within flooded forests produced anatomical flexibility, advanced echolocation, and behavioural intelligence suited to complex, shifting waterways. The dolphin’s present form is therefore not the result of discrete moments of adaptation, but of uninterrupted ecological continuity. In this sense, the Amazon did not wait for Darwin to explain evolution; it had already been practising it.

This compression of ecosystems produces a tightly coupled national system. Hydrology, biodiversity, climate regulation, and biological knowledge interact across short distances and rapid feedback loops. Territories such as Yasuní and Cuyabeno are not reserves of future extraction, but accumulations of biological memory—genetic variation, chemical complexity, and ecological relationships whose productivity emerges through persistence rather than removal. Once disrupted, these processes do not reset. They disappear.

Under a continuity-based framework, Ecuador’s endowment supports not a single dominant sector, but a portfolio of mutually reinforcing forms of production. High-value, low-impact tourism is one expression, particularly where intact ecosystems offer experiences that cannot be replicated elsewhere. Life-sciences and medical research constitute another, drawing on biological diversity as an irrecoverable stock of information whose value increases through time when systems remain intact. Hydrological regulation generated in the Andean highlands underpins energy reliability, agriculture, and urban water supply far downstream. Intact ecosystems also reduce exposure to floods, droughts, and health shocks, preserving productive capacity that would otherwise be absorbed by crisis management and repair.

When assessed cumulatively, this portfolio reaches macroeconomic scale. Oil and mining in Ecuador have historically contributed on the order of five to ten per cent of gross domestic product in favourable years, with revenues that are volatile and increasingly offset by remediation, health, and infrastructure costs. By contrast, a continuity-based economic base combining high-value tourism, life-sciences research, water and energy stability, and avoided loss can plausibly contribute in the range of nine to fifteen per cent of gross domestic product over time, with lower volatility and a tendency to deepen rather than erode productive capacity.

The comparison is not ideological. It is temporal. Extractive systems generate value by drawing down productive capacity and must continually replace what they exhaust. Continuity-based systems preserve and compound capacity by design. In economies endowed with exceptional ecological density, this difference determines not only how growth occurs, but whether it remains governable as time advances.

And yet, for all this, continuity remains the most difficult form of value to recognise. It does not arrive with contracts to be signed or cargo to be shipped. It leaves no crater to mark its contribution and no ceremony to celebrate its patience. It unfolds slowly, asking only that it not be interrupted. In a political culture accustomed to mistaking visible activity for progress and extraction for productivity, such value is easily overlooked. What cannot be extracted, sold, and replaced within the span of an electoral cycle appears invisible, even when it sustains everything else. The result is not the absence of wealth, but the persistence of an economy that continues to behave as if time itself were expendable.

Conclusion: Time, Continuity, and Economic Coherence

This article has argued that the difficulty environmental economics faces today is not primarily one of measurement, valuation, or technique. It is a problem of classification. Once environmental services are understood as continuous forms of production rather than incidental benefits, the categories through which economic reasoning operates begin to shift. What had been treated as background becomes condition. What had been deferred into the future presses into the present.

The Theory of Intact Ecosystems responds to this shift by restoring continuity to the centre of economic analysis where production depends upon it. It treats intact ecosystems as primary production systems whose outputs emerge through persistence rather than extraction, and whose maintenance requires present commitment rather than deferred correction. In doing so, it does not reject existing economic traditions, but clarifies what they were able to leave implicit under conditions that no longer hold.

The macroeconomic implications follow directly. Where continuity is degraded, costs do not remain confined to conservation budgets or environmental accounts. They propagate across sectors as volatility, emergency expenditure, and declining productive capacity. Where continuity is maintained, stabilising effects accumulate through time, extending planning horizons and reducing systemic risk. In economies endowed with high ecological density, these effects operate at macroeconomic scale.

What distinguishes TIES is not a normative claim about how economies ought to behave, but an analytical claim about how production behaves when biophysical continuity is either preserved or disrupted. Extractive systems concentrate value early and draw down productive capacity over time. Continuity-based systems incur costs early so that value can emerge gradually and endure. This temporal inversion is not a matter of preference. It is a structural property of living systems.

Seen in this light, the question facing economic reasoning is no longer whether intact ecosystems can be valued, but whether economies can remain coherent while excluding the conditions that make production possible. TIES insists that continuity cannot be assumed, substituted, or reconstructed after loss. Where it operates, it must be recognised as an economic condition in its own right. In such contexts, economic strength is measured not by the speed of conversion, but by the capacity to endure.

A Moment Reached

As 2026 begins, SELVA – Vida Sin Fronteras reaches a consequential threshold at which long-term practice, territorial ownership, organisational capacity, and theoretical articulation converge. More than three decades of continuous work in the Amazon have produced a combination of conditions that rarely coincide: sustained operational experience on the ground, durable presence within specific territories, and the accumulation of land and conservation assets held in ownership and maintained outside extractive cycles.

This prolonged engagement has resulted in the acquisition and management of rainforest territories and supporting infrastructure across extended time horizons, including tracts of primary forest and operational bases owned and managed by SELVA and recognised by UNESCO as Amazon Reserves for Peace. These territories establish institutional permanence: the capacity to remain present, to act consistently, and to support ecological processes whose significance unfolds slowly and irreversibly, while contributing to long-term stability for Indigenous Amazonian communities whose territories and livelihoods are inseparable from them.

The understanding of peace implicit in this territorial approach—peace as something constructed through continuity rather than secured after rupture—corresponds closely with the framework articulated within UNESCO at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Writing within the Culture of Peace programme, Gustavo López Ospina argued that peace cannot be reduced to the absence of conflict, but must be built through ethical responsibility, cultural continuity, and the long-term conditions that allow societies and their environments to endure (López Ospina, 2001; 2003).

That framework took concrete institutional form in 2004, when UNESCO formally recognised SELVA’s Amazon Reserves for Peace:

UNESCO Institutional Statement (2004)

“In 2004, UNESCO formally recognised the Amazon Reserves for Peace established through SELVA – Vida Sin Fronteras as a historic territorial initiative within the Organisation’s Culture of Peace programme. The project was developed in the Aguarico region of the Ecuadorian Amazon as a concrete response to the expansion of extractive activities, seeking to protect Indigenous territory and intact rainforest as necessary conditions for peace, cultural continuity, and long-term stability."

Issued under the authority of Dr Gustavo López Ospina, then Regional Director of UNESCO for Latin America and the Caribbean, this recognition affirmed that peace in the Amazon cannot be constructed solely through post-conflict or institutional measures, but depends on the preservation of living ecological systems and the continuity of the peoples whose lives are inseparable from them. The recognition forms part of UNESCO’s official institutional record held in the Organisation’s archives in Paris.”

What this recognition brings into view is a contradiction that development discourse has long avoided naming. Peace, when understood as continuity of territory, culture, and ecological function, cannot coexist easily with extractivism, whose economic logic depends on interruption, removal, and irreversible transformation.

Extractive activity does not merely generate environmental impact; it reorganises time and territory around short horizons and external demand, displacing the conditions upon which social and ecological stability depend. Peace and extractivism are therefore not competing values within the same system, but opposing temporal structures that cannot be reconciled without sacrificing one to the other. In the Amazon, this temporal conflict is lived most directly by ancestral Indigenous communities whose social organisation, knowledge systems, and livelihoods depend on the continuity of forest territory rather than its conversion.

Seen in this light, UNESCO’s recognition establishes more than historical validation. By situating the Amazon Reserves for Peace within an international framework that treats ecological continuity as a condition of peace rather than an outcome of development, it gives institutional form to an alternative development logic—one in which intact ecosystems are not obstacles to economic viability, but its foundation. On this basis, SELVA’s work moves from documenting the consequences of extractive development to demonstrating a development path that is both politically and economically viable for a country such as Ecuador.

In parallel, organisational capacity has matured. SELVA now operates with a level of professional integration that allows activities carried out in remote Amazonian territories to be monitored and coordinated in real time across the organisation. Through satellite-linked systems and shared digital platforms, reforestation, land management, financial flows, and programme costs are recorded and followed from the field to Quito and to SELVA-NL. Each tree planted is georeferenced and uploaded to a shared platform, allowing its precise location and subsequent development to be observed over time.

This infrastructure reflects rising professional standards across the organisation. It enables efficiency, transparency, and institutional coherence across geographically distributed operations and is sustained by an experienced and professional team working in the Amazon, Ecuador, and the Netherlands.

Entering 2026, SELVA operates as an institution capable of holding continuity, accountability, and theoretical clarity within a single operational form.

Seen through the framework developed in this article, the Amazon Reserves for Peace can be understood as long-duration economic assets. Their value does not lie in extractive yield or speculative appreciation, but in the continuous production of ecological functions whose reliability increases through time when integrity is preserved. Because these reserves are owned, governed, and held outside conversion cycles, their productive capacity is not drawn down but sustained, allowing measurable economic value to accumulate through continuity rather than depletion.

Institutions, like Amazon rainforests, do not announce their maturity. They simply remain, long enough for their presence to become undeniable

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