A ROOM WITH A POINT OF VIEW
WHAT CAN ONE MAN ACHIEVE?
Dax Dasilva in Amazonia with Jane Goodall holding Mr H.
By SHAGORIKA EASWAR
Walk the talk. Put your money where your mouth is. Dax Dasilva brings new meaning to those trite phrases.
Many organizations claim a “global footprint”. Dax Dasilva is a man with one.
The tech entrepreneur founded Age of Union, a global environmental alliance, and is investing millions of dollars in vast conservation projects around the world. And he is not one of those sign-a-cheque-and-your-name-on-a-building philanthropists – he’s a boots on the ground kind of guy. Quite literally so.
Echoes From Eden is an account of his visits to the Congo Basin, Brazil, Peru and Indonesia to Madagascar, Haiti, and closer home, projects in French Creek Estuary and Saint Lawrence River in Canada to see his donation dollars at work and to learn how he can help more. His funding has helped protect hundreds of thousands of acres of endangered land and with it, endangered species of plants and animals. Helping “communities define their ancestral territories” by mapping and registering them. And undoing some of the damage caused by the conservation efforts of the colonists “who believed conservation meant removing people from the forest”.
He describes a goosebumps raising case of chiefs and elders in The Congo gathering to draw maps on the floor with coloured chalk. Arguments are settled and a consensus emerges.
“If you hand them a map, they’ll reject it. But if they draw it together, they’ll defend it. They’ll own it.”
From the first trip on, he immerses himself in his surroundings – uncomfortable and filled with bugs or crocodiles or snakes as they might be. “I wasn’t just watching the jungle anymore – I was in it. And it was in me.”
Filled with such deeply-felt emotions and the most gorgeous images on thick, glossy paper that one expects in coffee table books, Echoes From Eden is also a rare, passionate and insightful exploration of the natural world.
Eating grilled piranhas; travelling with a young boa constrictor in a bag in his jeep – they were transporting it to a safe place; dodging armed gangs in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; mimicking the calls of Madagascar’s largest lemur, indri, and having them respond; and navigating a creek of the Pit River in British Columbia choked with thousands of dead salmon, he’s done all of this and more. The last would result in his partnering with the BC Parks Foundation , with the Age of Union granting $6 million to protect the Pitt River Watershed.
Meeting Captain Paul Watson in Vermont – the man and his team had placed themselves between whales and fishing trawlers with harpoons, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence movement – and funding a fleet that would be a threat to illegal fishing operations off the coasts of Europe and Africa. Other journeys result in securing 3000 hectares of protected land in Borneo.
In other parts of the world, Dasilva makes the connection between gang kidnappings, political unrest, and environmental conservation.
“A stripped, resourceless environment breeds desperation, and desperation breeds violence.”
Dasilva funds the production of twenty-five thousand fruits and forest seedlings each year in Haiti.
He has spoken on a panel at the World Biodiversity Summit, hung out with the chief conservation officer at Rewild, a global conservation organization funded by scientists and Leonardo DiCaprio, and travelled with the late Dr Jane Goodall – at her invitation.
“Here’s a quirky detail not everyone knows: Jane travels with a small entourage of plush toys, including a monkey named Mr H.”
His journey began as a teenager during a protest against logging. “But the stakes were far higher than just trees,” he writes. “It was about the billions of heartbeats that existed in these woods, from the towering giants to the smallest of creatures that couldn’t fend for themselves.”
He would go on to found Light-speed Commerce, a company that innovates in the retail and hospitality point of sale and payment space. And raise over $300 million in venture capital funding. Today, it generales over a billion dollars in annual revenue. Dasilva transitioned to the role of executive chair of the board in 2022 to devote more of his time and resources to causes he believes in.
To fund initiatives such as Jungle-keepers in the Amazon, because, as he writes, “We aren’t just burning trees – we’re incinerating medicines not yet discovered, species not yet named, wisdom not yet learned... the urgency isn’t just environmental, it’s existential.”
And because “most conservation non-profits are startups in spirit. Scrappy, visionary, always one grant or setback away from collapse – but somehow pushing forward, driven by purpose.”
Madagascar is at its tipping point, he learns. “One of the only places on earth where we could lose entire evolutionary lineages in the space of a decade.”
He writes about Jasmine, an Indonesian transgender woman who looked out for him in his lonely teens after he came out. Dasilva travels to Jakarta as an adult, to honour her memory and to help save the gibbons.
Echoes From Eden is Dax Dasilva’s love letter to the forests, the seas, the deserts, and all their inhabitants, he writes in the epilogue.
He’s doing his part to keep them thriving.