Lissandro Botelho (ELP 2017) | Professor, Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Amazonas (IFAM), Brazil
My view from the office in Manaus: Dawn rising over the Río Negro. In my 23rd year of academic career, I looked back to how I learnt so effectively what constitutes environmental leadership at Berkeley Beahrs ELP program.
The Revelation
Sitting through a Berkeley lecture on innovation economics, I realized how Western economic paradigms dominated discourse, while indigenous systems that had successfully sustained Amazonian resources for thousands of years were relegated to footnotes. How can we align market practices with the fact that some of the most effective forest conservation communities operate under different economic systems? I asked. The silence that followed was telling.
As a Brazilian economist with ASD, I have a peculiar standing: insider both by training and by cognitive architecture. Berkeley crystallized my sense of intuition: that environmental leadership was failing not in spite of our expertise, but because of our homogeneity.
The Amazon's Unfolding Crisis
Back in the Amazon, I confronted overwhelming proof of this failure. Though deforestation briefly abated, economic insecurity in the forest villages escalated. Good intentions of policies often got dashed on the rocks of societies that greeted social engineering as an enemy.
My students at IFAM who come from traditional and indigenous cultures were irritated with green-driven initiatives that made them into subjects and not bearers of change. In the meantime, our ITASA sustainability assessments made us understand that technical fixes were inappropriate when not rooted in local knowledge.
The common thread? Environmental leadership was limited to the privileged few who worked within specific mental and cultural architecture.
The Berkeley Challenge: ESG+ DEI = Action Transformation
Berkeley knows what much of the world is only now figuring out: Diversity isn’t just a moral imperative; it’s an epistemological one, too. The objective is not merely to integrate ESG into DEI, but to fundamentally rethink the creation and application of environmental knowledge.
Inspired by this approach, we have initiated “Cognitive Justice in Conservation” programs, which illustrate that the solutions that people come up with when they have diverse teams — we mean diverse in terms of identity, diverse in terms of cognitive styles, diverse in terms of knowledge systems — creates more effective, more equitable solutions.
The Call to ELP Alumni
As leaders from an ELP standpoint, it is our turn to become the architects of environmental leadership from within. This is more than a matter of diversifying representation — it demands a challenging of what is recognized as expertise, and what information is credible, and it involves fundamentally changing how decisions are made.
My challenge to each ELP alumni:
When auditing your team's diversity, look deeper than demographic background
Reverse the flows of knowledge by reconfiguring projects with historically excluded populations as sources of expertise
Establish safe routes for neurodivergent and traditional knowledge individual
Quantify the effect on climate and environment
The enduring message of Berkeley is that it is not knowing the (right) answer that is important but asking the better question. The most insightful questions arise when we include diverse voices, particularly those previously overlooked in environmental discussions.
As we take on the worst environmental threats the world has ever faced, it's a shining beacon of hope: hard evidence of the extraordinary, endlessly adaptable power of human intellect, in all its rich variety.
Lissandro Botelho teaches economics at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Amazonas (IFAM) and specializes in regional development and sustainability and technological innovation in the Amazon. He participated in the UC Berkeley BEAHRS Environmental Leadership Program in 2017.