The Man Who Planted His Own Jungle is the testimony and environmental manifesto of Nelson “Omar Tello” Benalcázar, an Ecuadorian conservationist who spent more than four decades rebuilding a degraded pasture on the outskirts of Puyo into a living Amazonian forest.
Drawing on memories that begin in childhood in the 1960s, Tello recounts the rapid transformation of the Ecuadorian Amazon through colonization, cattle ranching, logging, wildlife trafficking, orchid extraction, pollution, and the erosion of Indigenous knowledge. His account is deeply personal, but it also documents the social and ecological consequences of development policies that treated the rainforest as an inexhaustible resource.
At the center of the book is Tello’s practical methodology for ecosystem reconstruction. Beginning in 1980 with 6.75 hectares of impoverished pasture, he sought to recreate the conditions of the original forest by restoring soil, reintroducing native plants, rebuilding habitats, encouraging pollinators and seed dispersers, and allowing wildlife to return in freedom. His guiding hypothesis was simple: “Planting the lost flora will bring back the lost fauna.” Over decades of observation, photography, plant rescue, seed collection, and experimentation, the site evolved into the Jardín Botánico Las Orquídeas, a living conservation project and germplasm bank containing threatened Amazonian species.
The book moves from memoir to methodology and then to application, describing Tello’s work with flora, fauna, soils, wetlands, ecological indicators, local communities, and Indigenous knowledge. His reflections challenge conventional distinctions between conservation, captivity, restoration, and human dominion over nature.
The English edition includes a scholarly appendix, “Cartography of Amazonian Resistance and Defense,” by editor and translator Jon Dell Jaramillo, PhD. The appendix places Tello’s testimony in dialogue with biocentrism, rights of nature, political ecology, slow violence, epistemicide, Indigenous knowledge, restoration ecology, and Latin American testimonio.
Both urgent and hopeful, The Man Who Planted His Own Jungle presents environmental restoration not simply as a technical practice, but as an ethical, cultural, and political responsibility. It offers readers a rare longitudinal account of one individual’s attempt to return biodiversity, habitat, and dignity to a damaged corner of the Amazon.
