A non-profit built around all aspects of regeneration.

We believe the world is not broken — it is asking for a better design.

Every degraded hectare is an invitation. Every monoculture is a question waiting for a different answer. Every community surviving at the edge of a forest is evidence that the current model of land use has failed — not people and not nature, but the logic that separated them.

ALUME was born in a specific place: a farm in Aritaguá, Ilhéus, Bahia, where rubber trees were planted in rows across land that once held one of the most complex ecosystems on Earth. We did not begin with a theory. We began with the land in front of us and the question of what it was asking to become.

That question is still the center of everything we do.

We believe land is not a commodity.

Fazenda ALUME — the territory where this experiment lives — will not be sold or subdivided. That commitment belongs to those who steward it. The intention is to move against the grain of land fragmentation: holding the territory together, expanding green corridors where possible, integrating surrounding communities into a living and growing ecosystem rather than shrinking it into a private reserve.

Land access — the right to grow food, to belong to a place, to live with dignity on it — is a human right that our era has systematically narrowed. We orient ourselves in the opposite direction.

The Institute's role is not to own land. It is to build the institutional structure, partnerships, and methodologies that make regeneration of land like this viable, replicable, and financially sustainable — so that what works in Aderno can be adopted by any community, producer, or landowner in Bahia who wants to do the same.

We believe science and traditional knowledge are incomplete without each other.

The mateiros who know which plant signals water underground, the farmers who read soil by its smell, the communities who have lived inside these forests for generations — their knowledge is not folklore. It is data that no satellite can collect. ALUME is built on the commitment to take both ways of knowing seriously and let them strengthen each other.

All methodologies, monitoring tools, and regenerative models developed through our work will be made open source. Knowledge that helps forests grow should not be locked behind intellectual property. It belongs to everyone who needs it.

We believe people belong inside living systems, not outside them.

Preservation models that fence people away from nature in the name of protecting it have failed — ecologically, socially, and morally. ALUME is not a nature reserve. It is a working territory where humans are part of the system: planting, harvesting, learning, building, resting, and contributing to ecological function rather than extracting from it.

We are building, at small scale, a model of what a future ecological community can look like — one that has food sovereignty, local culture, education, healthcare, meaningful work, and wildness, all at the same address. Not a utopia. A prototype.

We believe business has a role to play — but only when it plays honestly.

We work with companies. We design products for them, issue them certificates, give them access to our science and our land. We do this because corporate capital, directed well, can accelerate restoration at a pace that no grant program or volunteer effort can match alone.

But we do not offer greenwashing. We do not sell the appearance of impact. Every tree we count is planted. Every carbon estimate is conservative and documented. Every partner who puts their name on our work is accountable to what it actually produces.

We refuse to participate in movements — corporate or otherwise — that are separative, extractive, or manipulative. We do not take money from entities whose core activity contradicts what we are building. We would rather be smaller and honest than larger and compromised.

We are guided by four values.

• Freedom — to experiment, question inherited models, build differently. The forest evolves. So must we.
• Evolution — to always improve. We are an institution entering a very old forest, and we intend to remain students of both.
• Order — because conviction without structure produces noise, not results. We build governance, methodology, and measurement systems precisely because our intentions are too important to be disorganised.
• Love — the force that gives meaning to everything else. It is what moves us to care, to observe attentively, to act with responsibility, and to protect what is fragile, alive, and interconnected. We believe love becomes real through action — through the way we relate to people, ecosystems, and the future we are helping shape.