Caquetá Department, in the Colombian Amazon, has a historical context of deforestation, education of poor quality, land tenure conflicts, and social violence. Thus, there is an urgent need to restore not only the ecosystem, but also the social fabric and the society-nature relationship. This article describes the process, impacts, obstacles, and lessons learned from a program of ecological restoration-based education for local communities. During 2017, a group of 15 local people were selected and trained in ecological restoration to become, as we called them, "local scientists" (LS). After this educative process, these LS, together with researchers from social sciences and biology, developed an ecological restoration education program aimed to local peasants. The bioregional current of environmental education and significant learning theory were the educative theoretical frameworks used. The pedagogical contents were grouped into five main themes: (1) soils, (2) farm planning, (3) river basins, (4) monitoring, and (5) social organization. During 2018, between 8 and 70 peasants per community participated in the program. The last phase, carried out in 2019, consisted of the propagation of native forest species and outplantings by the program participants, to restore the landscape connectivity in a region considered to be high priority. Peasants built 71 nursery gardens on their farms with their own labor. They produced 400,000 seedlings of 21 native forest species, which were further planted on 277 farms over 550 ha. The implications of the pedagogical process of the program, the advances in restoration of degraded forests, and changes in society-nature relationships are discussed.

Looking ahead to the United Nations' 2021-2030 Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, we would like to ponder and discuss two fundamental goals to improve, mainstream, and scale up ecological restoration. The first is to cultivate alternative visions of the human dimension in relation to ecological restoration and other restorative activities. The second is to develop shared protocols for planning, revamping, and monitoring the progress of social goals related to ecological restoration within the social construction theoretical framework, based on three interrelated dimensions: stakeholder-based problem definition, social representations, and legitimation. We draw on ongoing work in Caquetá (Colombian Amazonia) to consider how these dimensions may be incorporated into tangible restoration practices. Caquetá is facing the highest deforestation rates in the Amazonian region due to a highly volatile sociopolitical context and recent armed conflicts that have claimed thousands of victims to date. We conclude that the work in Caquetá demonstrates a process of social construction that effectively couples new human values with ecological restoration. Our work also provides evidence that the human dimension of restoration is a central issue in the restoration of human, social, and ecosystem health and must be integrated into the framework of the coming Decade of Ecosystem Restoration.

El objetivo de este estudio fue evaluar in situ la reacción de 50 materiales genéticos de tres especies de Theobroma(T. cacao, T. grandiflorum y T. bicolor) a la inoculación controlada de tres aislados autóctonos de Moniliophthora roreri (agente causal de la moniliasis del cacao) en el Departamento de Caquetá (Amazonia colombiana). Las variables incidencia de la enfermedad (IMr), severidad externa (SE) y severidad interna (SI), se evaluaron nueve semanas después de la inoculación de mazorcas de 2 a 3 meses de edad con una suspensión de esporas de 1,2 x 105 esporas/mL. La enfermedad se evidenció en las tres especies de Theobroma, sin embargo, ésta no se presentó en 13 de los 50 materiales genéticos evaluados, representados así: seis T. grandiflorum, cinco T. bicolor y dos T. cacao. Los materiales genéticos de T. bicolor y T. grandiflorum fueron los menos afectados comparados con los de T. cacao. Se encontraron diferencias significativas para IMr, SE y SI entre las tres especies de Theobroma y entre los 50 materiales genéticos. Diferencias significativas entre los aislados solo ocurrieron para SE. La incidencia y la severidad de la enfermedad entre materiales genéticos, fueron influenciadas por el patógeno aislado. Los materiales genéticos con menor reacción a M. roreri pueden ser utilizados en programas de mejoramiento por resistencia a la moniliasis.