The importance of good tree-climbing skills (video)
Imagine for a moment that you live in a tropical rain forest and that calorie-rich palm tree fruits are an important part of your diet.
Cutting a palm down for its fruit would be pretty shortsighted, right? Still, you might do just that–if the fruit dangled 20 meters above the rain forest floor, you lacked climbing skills, and you were hungry.
But, if you had climbing skills–and gear when you needed it–and if everyone else was climbing to harvest fruits, that would be a different story. You could climb the palm, harvest only the fruit, and return someday. That’s the way it was for generations in South American rain forests.
Climbing to harvest fruit is a life-sustaining tradition now in steep decline throughout the greater Amazon Basin. At Caura Futures, we are helping to bring climbing back.
Text by Tarek Milleron
