The initiative integrates locally-managed nurseries with agritourism, local resource trade and skills development, educational outreach, innovative crops, and expanded plantings of natural building materials.

Currently Nicaragua loses three percent of its forest each year. Centuries of deforestation and reckless cattle grazing have dried Ometepe's ten-month rainy season to merely six. Peasant farmers have scraped through a catastrophic economic climate by clearing vast tracts of biodiverse forest and planting subsistence rice, beans, and corn, with small plantain and coffee export crops for export. Wildlife, such as iguanas, armadillos and birds, have been hunted nearly to extinction. Except on the highest volcanic slopes, the great hardwoods have largely vanished and the ecosystem faces collapse.

In March 2004 the Carlos Diaz Cooperative (Finca Magdalena), along with our international team of permaculture designers, started the first in a series of locally-managed organic permaculture-style nurseries in Central America. Here, locals are trained in propagation of and care for fruit and nut trees, bamboos, palms, shrubs, as well as timber and reforestation stock.

Strategies are as follows:

• To create local tree nurseries to provide for reforestation efforts on the island and surrounding mainland. The remaining cloud forest offers a site where rare local hardwood seeds may be collected in abundance. A nursery creates value-added tree stock for other local reforestation efforts. Once the nursery is established, we can target these groups as clients, offering services in project consultation, delivery, and planting of the trees.

• A seed bank of the best native plant genetics on the island will be established and maintained.

• The development of woodlots throughout the island, on large as well as small holdings, to counteract forest tree poaching.

• Alternative construction materials will be encouraged and introduced. We will provide training in cultivation, management and construction techniques, using Native and noninvasive bamboos for multiple construction uses, Musaceae (Banana Family broadleafs) and palms for thatch, fiber plants, and many others.

• Appropriate companion planting species will be identified, studied and propagated so as to accelerate natural succession and ensure forest diversity. Proven techniques from permaculture "guild" strategies will be used to provide optimum growing conditions for establishment of key forest species.

• Fruit tree orchards and diverse understory crops will be developed as additional cash crops and nutrition sources.

• The Project already relies on a broad network of international and local organizations working in the area. The pilot nursery project with the 27-family organic coffee-producing Carlos Diaz Cooperative has generated great enthusiasm, and has proven instrumental to a one-year Reforestation and Economic Vitalization endeavor by the Nicaraguan Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARENA) and the Spanish NGO Amigos de la Tierra. We receive consulting and forestry management field support from Swiss development agency Interteam. Our training and community outreach programs are coordinated through Project Bona Fide, a locally-respected community development permaculture initiative.

• Education and Training components of the above, through community workshops and certificated bilingual Permaculture Design Courses, taught by our team of internationally renowned experts.