Roger Irwin wrote Amaterra’s Credo in 1982, nearly a decade before the phrase “biodiversity” entered common discourse through the Rio conventions – Irwin’s philosophy and credo have been a core guiding force for Amaterra since. The Credo tries to bring two broken halves together to form a whole. Ecological brokenness and human brokenness are not two problems but one, and that neither can be repaired from the outside.

That idea has since become something like conventional wisdom among the parts of the conservation world paying attention. The last decade has seen a steady turn away from what practitioners now call “fortress conservation” — the model of protecting land by removing the people who live on it — and toward approaches built around the people who already know the ground: co-managed protected areas, community monitoring programs, land-back initiatives, local seed and water governance. All of it is downstream of the same conviction his Credo states plainly: that the destiny of a person’s life and the destiny of the land are “one and inseparable.”

For Amaterra, the Credo was never meant to sit on a wall. It shaped the way we operate: micro-grants sized to what a small group of people can actually use and a default posture of funding what local partners ask for rather than what a program officer in another country has decided they need. It’s a slower, smaller way to work than most conservation philanthropy. It has also meant Amaterra has been making rights-based, community-led grants since long before the term was widely used.

The credo continues to guide Amaterra’s work. Its final line is a commitment to “seek a future in which the broken shall be restored, the estranged shall be reconciled” — future tense, not past. Forty-some years in, the honest answer to what the Credo asks of us now is the same as what it asked in 1982: not a bigger vision, but a willingness to keep funding the next small, local, piece of restoration work, on the belief that this is what repair actually looks like, one watershed and one seed bank at a time.