Thunderbird School of Global Management

Thunderbird Alum
Andrew Wulf ’08

Thatched huts elevated on stilts rise from the morning mist in Panama’s Darien rainforest. Roosters take turns splitting the heavy air with their crows, and an untended campfire crackles outside one of the dwellings.

The rising sun glows like a dim fog lamp in the distance, casting Arimae in blue and gray shadows. About 1,000 members of the Emberá and Wounaan indigenous communities live in this village, surrounded on all sides by a canopy of jungle trees.

Chickens, ducks and dogs roam freely among the huts, called chozas, and children in blue and white uniforms gather in small groups before heading to school.

Nearby, a tethered horse chews on the wet grass along the Pan–American Highway, a paved route that runs past the community in an unbroken line from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, more than 5,000 miles away. Deeper in the rainforest, where jaguars, pumas and tapirs still roam, the Darien’s thick foliage and rough terrain force the only gap in the highway, which picks up again in Colombia.

Peace Corps veteran Andrew Wulf ’08, 29, dresses quickly and heads to breakfast. The 2008 graduate of Thunderbird School of Global Management steps carefully through patches of mud until he arrives at the home of Eulicia Salazar.

"Buenas!" he calls from the base of a narrow flight of stairs. "Con permiso."

A friendly voice from the platform above invites him inside, and Wulf removes his sandals and ascends barefoot into the open–air dwelling.

"Sientate," Salazar says with a smile, pointing to a chair.

Laundry hangs from clotheslines around the perimeter of the hut. Shirts and pants are left on the line after they dry, which eliminates the need for closets and dressers. The clothing also functions as curtains, adding privacy for the occupants inside.

Hammocks hang from the rafters at night but are tied out of the way to maximize the living space. A notched pole leans against one rafter, providing access to the domed cavern overhead, which is covered with palm fronds.

A television and DVD player rest on a cluttered cabinet against one wall, like anachronisms, providing a link to the outside world.

Salazar prepares fish and fried plantains from an electric skillet while her daughter, a young mother named Marisela, entertains her two small children. Both women wear colorful skirt wraps called parumas, the traditional apparel of Emberá women.

Wulf chats with the family in fluent Spanish that he polished during three years of Peace Corps service on the opposite side of the Panama Canal near Costa Rica. He returns to Panama now on a quest to save the rainforest and provide community aid through a business enterprise he helped launch in 2006 called Planting Empowerment.

Fire that grows trees

The company fights deforestation in Panama by creating financial incentives for rural landowners to participate in sustainable timber production.

"You can’t tell a farmer to conserve the rainforest when he’s got a family to feed back home," Wulf says.

Planting Empowerment recruits U.S. investors and others to lease rainforest land that already has been gutted for agriculture or cattle grazing. The company then reforests the plantations with a mix of teak and native trees that restore the habitat for the region’s diverse wildlife.

The company harvests and sells the timber over a 25–year investment cycle, and saplings are planted as mature trees are removed. A portion of the profits go back to participating communities, such as Arimae, through enhancements such as aqueducts and other income–generating projects.

Wulf says his friends in the Peace Corps developed the business plan while they worked together in Arimae and other rainforest communities.

"They thought there must be an economic incentive for poor landowners to break the cycle of slash–and–burn agriculture destroying the rainforest and rich biodiversity of the Darien," Wulf says. "They also saw how the communities did not share in the huge profits generated by the logging companies hauling old growth trees out daily."

Wulf’s friends invited him to join Planting Empowerment as a founder near the end of his Peace Corps service, and he helped refine the business plan as he took classes at Thunderbird.

Since then, all four friends have never met together in the same room at the same time. Instead, the founders use Skype and other networking tools to swap ideas and share updates on the project.

"We’re a new type of organization," says Chris Meyer, a Planting Empowerment founder who graduated in 2008 from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.. "Rather than work out of our offices, we Skype on Sunday evenings. Our board meetings are conference calls. Two or three of us might get together in the same room, but the rest will call in."

Meyer impressed the judges at Thunderbird when his Johns Hopkins team won $20,000 and earned the title "Global Champions of Sustainable Innovation" during Thunderbird’s Sustainable Innovation Summit in November 2007.

Planting Empowerment also gained accolades in May 2008 when the enterprise won second place in the Social Innovation Competition at the University of Texas. More than 1,200 students representing 97 colleges and universities competed to produce the "most compelling new idea to change the world."

Wulf acknowledges that Planting Empowerment has started small, with modest plantations near Arimae and others about 40 miles west at a community called Nuevo Paraíso near Tortí. But Wulf says the enterprise is scalable and can spread quickly through the region and to other rainforests in South America and Asia.

"We are very open with our ideas and actually encourage other forest companies to employ them in their operations," he says. "What we’re doing is starting a fire. We’re starting something that can catch on throughout other rainforests. It’s a fire that grows trees."

Wulf finishes his breakfast, returns his tin platter and coffee mug to Salazar and stands to leave.

His schedule for the day includes a tour of Planting Empowerment’s nearby plantations. Already he is too late to beat the glaring sun that has cut through the mist and transformed the blue–gray landscape to vibrant green.

"Gracias," he says to Salazar, handing her a few dollars. He climbs down the steps of her choza and continues on his way.

MBA on a mission

The rainforest project is a part–time endeavor for Wulf, who started in July with Driscoll Strawberry Associates after a careful job search. Wulf now represents the family–owned company in Chile, moving back and forth between South America and corporate headquarters in Watsonville, Calif.

The six–month rotations create a pattern of endless summer.

Wulf says he had other career opportunities after he finished his MBA with an emphasis in international strategy and international development. But he took the job with Driscoll’s because he liked what CEO Miles Reiter had to say about corporate social responsibility and environmental protection.

"The CEO is progressive," Wulf says. "He is open to new ideas and wants to be progressive environmentally."

Wulf says many MBA graduates in his generation share this concern for business ethics and seek out companies that care about more than just the bottom line.

"Companies that don’t take into account the communities they affect or the environment they affect are very much at a disadvantage at recruiting new MBAs that are coming out," Wulf says, "whether it’s from Thunderbird or any other business school."

He says an increasing number of MBA graduates consider these issues during job interviews.

"They want to work for a company that they feel proud of," Wulf says. "There are many graduate students who are going into finance or the heart of business sectors who want to have an impact on the world and not just take their profits."

Deserts of Teak

Rows of uniform teak trees zip past Wulf’s window as he drives along the Pan–American Highway deeper into the Darien rainforest. He points to a hillside covered in nothing but teak.

"This is monoculture," Wulf explains. "People invest in large plantations of just one species."

The practice, which started in the Darien rainforest about 15 years ago with a tax incentive from the Panamanian government, allows landowners to maximize their short–term profits. Teak comes from Asia and grows fast and straight in Panama’s tropical climate, producing durable hardwood in 20 to 25 years.

But monoculture also chokes out the rich biodiversity found on the narrow neck of land between North and South America.

"You have all this biodiversity funneling down into this region called the Darien Gap," Wulf says. "We grew frustrated when we saw this intense biodiversity being destroyed."

More than 500 species of birds live in the Darien, including many types found nowhere else on the planet. The Darien also supports a wide range of amphibians, mammals, reptiles, insects and fish.

Wulf says monoculture creates a "desert of teak trees" that cannot sustain this diversity. He says the practice is also risky for landowners because a single disease can wipe out entire plantations.

Additional threats to the rainforest include slash–and–burn agriculture that has cleared vast chunks of virgin rainforest for cattle grazing and production of corn, rice and other staples.

Wulf recognizes the harm of slash–and–burn agriculture but does not blame the local landowners, who scrimp by on mountainous terrain without bank financing or modern farming machinery.

"They don’t have any other options," he says. "But we believe people have been very open to Planting Empowerment and our ideas."

Community Partners

Wulf parks his vehicle at the home of a friend in Nuevo Paraíso. He shoves a water bottle into his back pocket, lathers himself with sunscreen and proceeds on foot down a gravel road toward the home of Rosita and Juan Cruz, longtime residents who now lease some of their land to Planting Empowerment.

Rosita squeals with delight as Wulf approaches the white picket fence surrounding her yard. Peace Corps volunteers in the community know her as a second mother, and she abounds with hospitality. She offers Wulf a giant mango and then scurries inside her home to brew cinnamon tea, which she serves on the patio with stale cheese puffs.

She chats about her chickens, her makeshift oven in the back yard, her garden and her beloved friend, Andrew Parrucci, who worked in Nuevo Paraíso for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer before co–founding Planting Empowerment.

Before long, her husband returns on horseback from his morning errands.

Juan Cruz says he moved to Nuevo Paraíso more than 30 years ago and has watched the rainforest canopy disappear. He says he welcomed the opportunity to partner with Planting Empowerment.

"When I first came here, there were no people," he says in Spanish. "Virgin rainforest filled this valley. Parrots and monkeys were everywhere, and sometimes we saw larger animals such as pumas and jaguars."

Win–win–win

Wulf says goodbye to the Cruz family and starts the journey to the top of a nearby hill that rises from Planting Empowerment’s first plantation in the area.

Wulf ran steeplechase and middle distance events for the track and field team at the University of California, Los Angeles, and he stays in shape by running each morning. Despite the training, his shirt is soon drenched in sweat as he pushes uphill through the lush plantation.

"I should have brought a machete," he says.

Teak trees that were saplings one year earlier now tower 15 to 20 feet into the sky. Other varieties of trees and native plants grow thick on the land, and Wulf expresses satisfaction as he looks down from the hill guarded by howler monkeys.

"None of this was here one year ago," he says.

Planting Empowerment welcomes large investors, but everyone can participate. One investment product called the Forest Savings Bond allows individuals to invest at the levels of $50 or $100. Wulf says payout dates for the Forest Savings Bond come around eight, 12, 15 and 20 years – with maturation at 25 years.

"We launched it in time for Christmas," he says, "and people have been gifting these to family members."

Wulf says Planting Empowerment also is exploring new markets, including one that would allow investors to trade out earlier than the 25–year maturation of their investment, "making more liquid a very illiquid asset – a growing tree."

Planting Empowerment also has explored the option of becoming certified to sell carbon credits to organizations and individuals looking to minimize their carbon footprint.