Mariana Gómez Soto

Anthropologist, Environmentalist and Activist. Leader and Coordinator for the North Amazon Alliance.

Bogota

, Cundinamarca

. Colombia

Contributor Since January 2026

I am an Anthropologist with minors in Biology and Geography, a master degree in Social Anthropology in Colombia and an MSc in Holistic Sciences at Schumacher College, UK. I have experience working with indigenous peoples and local communities regarding territorial and environmental issues, from the public and civil society sector. I’ve lived in the Amazon and admire indigenous people´s knowledge systems, as these address the integrity of the world and have a sense of co-responsibility with the living system they participate in. My activist spirit awoke when my homeland was threatened by a potential open pit gold mine in 2013 and since then I have supported grass-root movements in defense of territory through her volunteer participation in the global solidarity network Yes to Life No to Mining as global south coordinator.

I have been working with Fundación Gaia Amazonas since 2015 leading the consolidation of a regional strategy that has called upon the creation of the North Amazon Alliance to guarantee the protection of the integrity of the Amazon through safeguarding ecosystem and sociocultural connectivity in the region north of the Amazon River, one of the largest and best-preserved rainforests in the world. I coordinated the Green Livelihoods Alliance program for Gaia Amazonas until 2025, implemented in eleven tropical forest countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America which aimed to strengthen the capacities of indigenous peoples and local communities for the sustainable and inclusive management of tropical forests.

I am currently part of the coordination team of the North Amazon Alliance, which brings together nine civil society organizations in five Amazonian countries. For the alliance I lead the joint regional advocacy strategies based on indigenous peoples´ governance, management and knowledge systems. I facilitate convenings and encounters where joint priorities and perspectives are collectively identified in order to inform national, regional and global policy frameworks and discussions.

I am the lead author of the chapter focused on socio-bioeconomies and connectivity in the Amazon for the recently released Assessment Report of the Science Panel for the Amazon, and have also spearheaded the formation of the Amazonía Conectada coalition, which brings together the North Amazon Alliance, the Science Panel for the Amazon, RAISG and Alianza Aguas Amazónicas, all impactful regional networks with complementary expertise and a shared vision for safeguarding multidimensional connectivity in the Amazon.

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August 5, 2026

Mangrove Commons: Biocultural Heritage in the Afro-Colombian Pacific

For Afro-Pacific communities, biodiversity and cultural heritage are not separate concerns—protecting one means protecting the other. Their interrelation makes a compelling case for biocultural heritage as a framework for research, governance, and conservation.

Rowan Glass

Contributors

January 29, 2026

Self-Organization and the Promise of a Circular Amazonian Socio-Bioeconomy

Is self-organization the answer to the foundational question of why life exhibits such complexity? And can it also serve as a guiding framework for how best to save complex webs of biodiversity amid the onslaughts of the modern world? Self-organization exists throughout nature and socioeconomic structures. It refers to the spontaneous emergence of collective, complex order within a disordered system, due to localized interactions that follow simple rules, and occurring without external controls. While conceptually abstract, given that uncertainty lies at its core, the applications of self-organization are everywhere. Advancing our understanding of the non-linear processes within complex systems that drive self-organization is also becoming increasingly important for developing evidence-based policies in a world defined by interdependence and escalating stressors. Indigenous cultures, such as those that live within complex socio-ecological systems in the Amazon ecoregion, have long embraced these principles of uncertainty, interconnectedness, and non-linear dynamics. How will their wisdom, experience, and models of socio-ecological systems integrate with evidence-based policies for protecting the Amazon ecoregion? Safeguarding the Amazon is one of our world’s most pressing, complex, and vital global challenges. Among the strategies gaining traction, supported by increasing financial investment, is the intriguing proposition to transform a portion of the region’s immense biodiversity into a sustainable “bioeconomy.” However, these proposals, and the policy makers responsible for negotiating their implementation across boundaries and cultures, often lack an understanding of how both economies and ecologies self-organize and scale. Data-driven models of self-organization and critical collective phenomena in the natural world and within traditional Indigenous sociocultural structures, along with adaptive context-based frameworks, can help guide the transboundary development of a decentralized and circular socio-bioeconomy for the Amazon. Self-Organized Criticality and the Edge of Chaos Pioneering research on self-organized criticality (SOC) began in the 1980s and was made accessible to a wider audience by...