Reforesting & Restoring the Barú Watershed

A Call to Protect the Waters of Barú

The Barú watershed is alive because people care for it.

In the mountains of Costa Rica’s South Pacific, the Barú River and its tributaries connect cloud forests, farms, communities, forests, and the Pacific Ocean. These waters sustain countless human and non-human communities—and their health is inseparable from the health of the land.

For the past several years, the Cuenca Barú Restoration Team has been working to strengthen a culture of watershed stewardship, ecological restoration, reforestation, and community collaboration.

We are now entering our second season of river monitoring.

This marks an important step forward: we are moving from awareness and community organizing toward consistent, long-term observation of the watershed so that we can better understand the health of our rivers, identify changes over time, and support informed restoration and protection.

Why Monitor the Rivers?

Healthy watersheds are not measured only by how a landscape looks.

River monitoring allows us to develop an ongoing picture of the waterways that connect our communities. By returning to monitoring sites over time, we can observe changes in water conditions, document ecological patterns, identify areas requiring attention, and build a growing body of local knowledge.

This work also creates an opportunity for community members, landowners, restoration workers, educators, and Earth Guardians to participate directly in caring for the watershed.

Our vision is to create a long-term community-based watershed monitoring and restoration initiative for the Barú region.

From Restoration to Regeneration

Over the past decades, people throughout the Barú region have been restoring forests, protecting waterways, rebuilding soils, establishing food forests, and creating communities committed to living in greater reciprocity with the land.

There is already a powerful foundation of restoration here.

Our next step is to connect these efforts more intentionally through the watershed itself.

The Cuenca Barú Restoration Team is working toward a model where:

- Rivers and tributaries are regularly monitored

- Restoration sites are documented and supported

- Native trees are propagated and planted

- River corridors and watershed forests are protected

- Local knowledge is shared between communities

- Stewards and elders cocreate seed festivals and community events

- Elders and long-time land stewards are included

- Young people have opportunities to learn through direct participation

- Data and observations help guide restoration decisions

- Community members can become active stewards of their local waters

Our Second River Monitoring Season

This season we are expanding our river monitoring work and developing the systems needed to make it sustainable year after year.

Funding will help us support:

- River monitoring equipment and supplies

- Transportation to monitoring locations

- Training and coordination of monitoring teams

- Documentation and data organization

- Community gatherings and educational events

- Native tree propagation and reforestation

- Restoration activities along waterways

- Outreach and communication

- Participation of local elders and community knowledge holders

- Coordination between restoration projects throughout the watershed

We are especially interested in connecting people who already care for different parts of the Barú watershed so that their work can become part of a larger picture.

We Are Looking for Funders & Long-Term Partners

We are now seeking individual donors, organizations, philanthropic partners, and impact-minded investors who want to contribute to the long-term regeneration of the Barú watershed.

Small donations help us keep the immediate work moving.

Larger contributions and investment can help us build the infrastructure required for the project to become financially and operationally sustainable, including monitoring equipment, restoration capacity, nursery development, community programming, transportation, and future watershed initiatives.

We are also open to conversations with people interested in strategic investment and long-term partnership as this project develops.

Our goal is to build a living, locally rooted model of watershed stewardship that can continue for generations.

The Barú watershed connects us all.

Every stream eventually joins another stream. Every forest protects water. Every tree planted changes the landscape around it. Every person who learns to listen to a river becomes part of its protection.

We invite you to become part of this next chapter.

Support the monitoring.

Support the restoration.

Support the people caring for the watershed.

Together, we can protect the waters of Barú and help create a future where forests, rivers, wildlife, and communities can all thrive.

Ways your Donations Support

Equipment and Travel Support — help fund this season's immediate monitoring and restoration work.

We collect data and observe whats happening along this complex river system so we can focus our support where it's needed the most.

Resources to Train Local Stewards to care for the Watershed — Education and mentoring to monitor a specific river or tributary over time.

Support reforestation — contribute toward native tree propagation, planting, and watershed monitoring and restoration.

Opportunities for Investors

Contribute your time or funds to our River Monitoring and Restoration Events and projects

Become a project partner — organizations and businesses can support specific initiatives or community programs.

Explore investment — for larger supporters interested in helping build the long-term infrastructure and economic sustainability of the project, we welcome a conversation.

Thank you for believing in the waters, forests, and communities of Barú.

Support the regeneration. Protect the waters. Restore the relationship.

The balance of life on our planet depends on our willingness to remember who we truly are: caretakers, not owners. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples have understood that every action we take — every tree we plant or cut, every river we honor or pollute — shapes the world for generations to come. Today, humanity stands at a turning point. The soils are thinning, forests disappearing, and climate patterns breaking apart. We are here in service to each other: to protect, restore, and nourish the web of life. It is an act of service, humility, and courage — a return to living in reciprocity rather than extraction.

On behalf of the Cuenca Barú Restoration Team, and along side other Earth Guardians, we are launching a regenerative initiative to restore, reforest, and protect the watershed systems that sustain all communities, human and non-human in the Barú region. This is more than conservation — it is a return to origin. A return to responsibility. A return to life.

Our "Cuenca" Barú

Nestled in the mountains of Costa Rica’s South Pacific lies the Barú River watershed, a vibrant lowland tropical rainforest fed by cloudforest headwaters, waterfalls, and lush valleys flowing to the ocean at Dominical. After centuries of Indigenous displacement, deforestation, and ecological harm, a new era began about 30 years ago when people arrived with a different vision—one of reciprocity, regeneration, and living in harmony with nature.

These pioneers listened deeply to the land, the waters, the animals, and the ancestral wisdom of the Indigenous communities who once thrived here. Together with the local Tico community, they began replanting forests, restoring soils, protecting river corridors, and rebuilding a culture rooted in respect for nature and spirit.

Today, the Barú watershed is rebounding with life—cleaner rivers, returning wildlife, flourishing food forests, sacred gatherings, and a multicultural community united in reverence for the land. The region has become a sanctuary of regeneration, a living example of what is possible when humans remember their relationship with nature and take action to heal it. But the work is far from finished.

We invite you to join us in protecting and expanding this regeneration, ensuring that the streams, rivers, forests, and communities of Barú continue to thrive for generations to come.

This movement, celebrated through the Expo, honors all beings—from microbes to mountains—and invites each of us to continue weaving this story, committed to harmony with the rivers and rainforests that sustain us.

For this round of funding of $3,000 we will be able to:

Thank you for your contributions.

Support the regeneration. Protect the waters.

Together, we can keep Barú alive and flourishing—

a sanctuary where all beings can breathe, belong, and thrive.