I recently watched the documentary film Toroboro: The Name of Plants (Toroboro: el nombre de las plantas), one of two films in a diptych directed by Ecuadorian filmmaker Manolo Sarmiento, released in 2024. The original intention of the film was to reunite, twenty years later, ethnobotanist Dr. Carlos Cerón Martínez, who founded the Alfredo Paredes Herbarium at the Central University of Ecuador, and his colleague Dr. Consuelo Montalvo, with their Waorani “informants” who had shared the Waorani names and uses (nine on average) of 625 species of trees identified in one hectare of rainforest and along two one-kilometre long transects located close to the Quehueri-Ono (Keweri-Ono) community on the Shiripuno river.¹ Cerón and Montalvo had included 67 categories of uses in their studies.

Cerón and Montalvo are Latin American mestizo scientists who have inherited, through their academic education, the ontologies and methodologies of Western biological sciences, which stem back to the taxonometric impetus of Carolus Linnaeus. They collect plant species, archive dozens of samples, and preserve holotypes: “single specimens designated by the original describer of the form (a species or subspecies only) and available to those who want to verify the status of other specimens.”¹ Cerón and Montalvo preserve thousands of holotypes in their archives which contain the scientific name of the species, the family to which the plant belongs to, and a sample of it. They publish information on the species and its uses. Cerón collected more than 90 samples in the expedition documented in Toroboro. In one of the scenes of Sarmiento’s documentary he proudly shares one of his holotypes with the film crew: “this species, for example, has yet to be named. It lacks a scientific name. This is a new species to science.” “But it has a Waorani name,” retorts Sarmiento. “Yes, it has a Waorani name indeed.” Another striking scene in the documentary—among many—comes through the breakdown in the language by one of the Waorani translators. After listening to one of the elders explain information related to a plant, the translator, a middle-aged man, apologizes: “he is speaking scientific Waorani. I am sorry, I can’t understand most of what he said.”

The film beautifully portrays various processes of extraction that lie at the core of the environmental crisis we live in today. For example, one and only one species is removed from the “society of nature”¹ and information exclusively related to its properties and uses is recorded along the plant’s binomial nomenclature. In the renaming and categorizing of plants from a predominantly utilitarian and extractive perspective, the highly complex interrelations between the isolated specimen and its web of life—which the Waorani keep track of through songs, relational names, and other mnemonic devices—is lost. The isolated plant can then be manipulated and recast as a monoculture plantation, reproduced along the intersections in a grid of an impoverished, simplified society of sameness, now often genetically modified and adapted to diverse geographies. It can expand, colonize, and reduce more territories, substituting the complex and diverse society of nature. The extraction is double, physical and semantic: the plant is extricated from its web of relations, and it is extirpated from a knowledge system that considers it a sacred member of its social web and clearly understands, as well as cares for, those relations: a society that has been designing with them for thousands of years.

Western and Indigenous science intersect in the field. One has been extractive of the other. They meet in the primary process of identifying, naming, renaming, and cataloguing uses of specimens in the rainforest. As with the land and its colonial toponyms, in this process with Indigenous knowledge and scientific binomial naming, dispossession takes place. Western and Indigenous science radically diverge in their values and the relationships they establish with plants. Western science has traditionally been materialistic, it has objectified “nature” and treated its beings in an economic fashion, as mere “natural resources.” The first step in the commodification of nature takes place in the primary process of scientifically naming a plant and listing its uses. In Indigenous knowledge systems, the territory is a “living territory,” all its entities are “human,”² they share traits which are not considered exclusive to our species: plants are the keystone elders in the society of nature, powerful intellects, with agency, will, knowledge, and sacred energy: an old, living, and malleable library.³ The divergent axiologies driving the relationship established with the forest through different ontological and epistemological meshes also emerge to the surface in the film. “What is the use of this fruit?” asks Cerón. “Nocturnal animals—night monkeys—and birds during the day feed on the fruit and throw it away for the land animals to eat; they, in turn, feed themselves and go to spread the seeds throughout the territory,” responds one of the Waorani elders. “Use” is not anthropocentric in the rainforest. The fruit wills itself into life by spreading itself for the animals, animated by the generosity of living through the life of others, a law of the forest and its cycles.

A turn, though, has been taking shape since the time of Linnaeus and his contemporary Charles Marie de La Condamine, who first described the cinchona plant and rubber tree for a Western academic audience, after navigating the Amazon River (Spanish chroniclers in what is Mexico today were the first ones to describe rubber to a European audience). Contemporary science has been describing how knowledge is transmitted through generations, coded in its molecular texts (the genetic codes of trees are much more complex than those of any mammal, subverting the hierarchical notions of the great chain of being), how it mutates, how plants communicate, and how several entities—“human” and “non human”—come into being in the society of our nature, in our bodies. The thresholds that isolation and extraction have established are rapidly dissolving. A new consciousness of interdependency has been rising as climate change defies our barriers—geopolitical, economic, epistemological, ontological, axiological—and our survival requires reckoning with the bonds that hold us all together, and with our arrogant distortion of Indigenous knowledge.

Representations of “nature” have profoundly contributed to support the delusional idea of separation. The isolated plant needs to be restored to its rightful place in the social architecture of the rainforest and cannot continue to be reduced to a symbol of economic potential, a mere icon populating a cartography of the tropics: coffee, cacao, banana, soybean, avocado, açaí, guayusa…

At the Yale School of Architecture, in a series of seminars focused on the pre-Columbian cities of the Americas and Indigenous systems of design and planning, I have been exploring with our students how representation can work in favour of interweaving, of reconstituting the interdependencies and deep relationships among beings. Landscape architecture and its drawing protocols offer a rich canvas whereupon to re-embroider the rich agrobiodiversity of polycultures, with its complex and heterogeneous logic of interrelations, respectfully restoring Indigenous knowledge not with the intention of appropriating it or renaming it, but through the recognition that our worldview is in urgent need of a process of Indigenization (the reverse of colonization and assimilation).

In spring 2023, in the seminar “Agroecological Urban Constellations of pre-Columbian Amazonia” we studied and analyzed ten hierarchical and heterarchical civilizations that archaeologists have been describing for the region, with ever more detail thanks to Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) technologies. Each student or group of students created a series of drawings through informed speculation with the objective of bringing to life past, regional scale “territorial cities” (llaktakuna in Quechua) in which there is no separation between “nature” and “culture,” the “rural” and the “urban,” the “human” and the beyond human. As with the chakras (vegetation polycultures) and the cochas (aquatic polycultures), with the urban systems, we seek to restore the relations and interdependencies that constitute the make-up and design of these ancient cities—each an accretion of cultivated microecologies.

The drawings were exchanged with a group of Waorani artists whose collective is led by Manuela Omari Ima. In the Tepapare community, the women cultivate several colour kewenkore (chakra in Waorani) and chambira kewenkore (chambira is the palm tree from which they draw the fibers that are used to weave fishing nets, hammocks, and countless other items). The Waorani artists had the last word in the representation of the Amazonian cities we were studying and chose to weave their visions using a bark that can be unrolled from a tree (known in Kichwa as yanchama). The forest wills itself into new forms under this animistic approach to creation, and artists are mediums capable of manifesting the energy of the chambira, and the energy of each colour into the unique patterns that emerge as one thread grows a fishing net; or as the logic of inhabitation of Amazonians becomes embroidered to bring ancient cities to the cycle of life today.

Designing and creating with the Waorani has been a profoundly humbling experience. We act like a flute through which they can speak, and the forest speaks through their medium. Waorani women weave the energy and colours of their ancestors and other forest energies into the nets of life that hold worlds together.