�պ����ֲ�

When the Zoom window finally blinked on in the Barry Mills Hall classroom (after a few technical hiccups on this side of the world), students were suddenly connected in a three-way call to an office in Quito and to an open-air structure shaded by large chapi leaves in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

One of the guests, Nantu Canelos, greeted the students from his solar-charged laptop in Sharamentsa, a community of 195 people in southeast Ecuador. He then played a short song on his bamboo flute.

Canelos is the executive director of , an Ecuador-based organization that is developing sun-powered river boats and solar installations for indigenous people in the Amazon. Canelos was joined on the call by his coworker Leif Maynard ’23, whose role at that moment was to serve as a Spanish-to-English interpreter for the meeting from his desk in Quito.

Through Maynard, Canelos explained that the song he piped is a festive one, played at parties and social events. Other flute songs can be more solemn, used for instance as invocations at meetings.

“Every morning in Achuar territory, in his community, they have a ceremony where they drink wayusa tea, which is a special tea local to that area of the Amazon,” Maynard said. Attendees discuss their dreams, which helps direct their plans for the day ahead. “Nantu will often also play his flute.”

Maynard started his job as Kara Solar’s communications and development manager in the fall, leaving a job at the US Department of Energy (DOE) to join the innovative startup. This February, he helped set up the virtual meeting with the �պ����ֲ� class Talking to Farmers and Fishermen: Social Science Field Methods for Environmental Policy Research. The course, created by Assistant Professor of Government and Environmental Studies Shana Starobin, had been one of his favorites.

Students in Talking to Farmers and Fishermen regularly head into the field to visit farms and working waterfronts to research and interview people engaged in rural livelihoods across Maine. “The goal is to step outside campus into the community to listen and connect with people, as local ecological knowledge and key information are not always written down. It's inside people, learned from their lived experiences,” Starobin said.

She said she gladly accepted Maynard’s invitation as it presented an opportunity to involve her students in a multilingual conversation across cultures, one in which “we're not trying to extract information for our own use but are seeking to make sense of a complex interaction and to build a relationship.”

Asher Savel ’26, a student in the class, said the conversation reminded him that the energy transition is a global one, manifesting in unique ways depending on the context. “We think a lot about the green transition being a first world project, and it was interesting to see people who are not represented by a huge government and not part of a hugely funded green effort being involved in this.”

Dreaming of Light: Kara Solar

After finishing his flute song, Canelos first spoke about the origins of Kara Solar, which began as a series of conversations, fueled by wayusa tea, in 2012. At the time, an English teaching volunteer from the US, Oliver Utne, was working and staying in the area. Utne is now Kara Solar’s director of alliances, part of an intercultural team that helps foster “collaborations between the indigenous world and non-indigenous world,” as he said in a .

In these early gatherings, people discussed how they could care for their environment, particularly how they might reduce their dependence on polluting and expensive gasoline, Canelos said.

The Achuar territory is made up of 700,000 hectares of some of the most biodiverse forests on the planet. The people who live there rely on its capillary-like river system to see neighbors, travel to soccer tournaments, bring the ill to health care centers or to shamans, deliver students to school, catch loggers, and access markets.

But fuel costs five times what it does elsewhere in Ecuador, as it needs to be flown to difficult-to-access locations. Plus, burning oil dirties rivers and spews out air pollution, and the “people are very conscious of the fact they are relying on a resource that is damaging other parts of Ecuador and the Amazon in intense ways,” Maynard said.

The conversations that began in 2012 grew, drawing in women and men from nearby communities. “Out of this assembly came this idea to build a solar boat to replace gasoline boats,” Maynard translated for Canelos. “It was important that this project was autonomous and came from and was controlled by the communities.”

Building reliable, cheap transportation also helps to deter another existential threat to the Amazon: the construction of roads. Provincial governments justify new roads as a way to spur development and bring prosperity to people. But what inevitably happens, Maynard explained, is the roads pave the way for a toxic mix of industries—mining, farming, cattle ranching, and illegal logging—that lead to mass timber cutting.

Ninety-five percent of deforestation in the Amazon has occurred within 3.4 miles of a road, according to a . Not only does an intact forest maintain people's traditional way of life, it also maintains it as a vast carbon sink, absorbing one-fourth of the carbon dioxide absorbed by all the land on Earth. 

The Kara Solar team has observed that the introduction of solar-powered boats dampens people's enthusiasm for new roads, Maynard said. “If people feel that they have the ability to be connected to the outside world via reliable transportation that is cheaper and traditional, they’re much less likely to be interested in a road.”

Canelos’s community built its first solar boat in 2016, affixing panels to the roof of a traditionally designed Achuar vessel. These large canoes, which have ported people around the Amazon Basin for thousands of years, are well adapted to the environment and very efficient, requiring relatively small motors with batteries that can be easily charged by an intense tropical sun.

(A side benefit of the solar boat is its quiet motor. People can chat with one another along their travels. Also, eco-tourism businesses can bring visitors closer to animals, including endangered pink dolphins.)

The first boat, which is still in use today, nine years later, is named Tapiatpia after an electric fish in an Achuar legend. Based on the success of Tapiatpia, Fundación Kara Solar was incorporated as a nonprofit in 2018, to “expand the model of community transportation and energy in Achuar territory and across the Amazon,” according to its website.

Harnessing the Sun and Community Support

Canelos explained that while the word kara in the organization’s name doesn’t have an exact translation in English, it roughly means a vision or dream. “The Achuar have a specific relationship with dreams,” Maynard translated. “In the wayusa tea ceremonies, the dreams help people decide what to work on, and the interpretation of dreams becomes reality through that work. So what kara means is a vision or dream that becomes real.”

Seven years after it was founded, Kara Solar has supported the construction of four shuttle boats in the Achuar territory. It has delivered eight additional solar-powered boats to other communities in Ecuador, as well as in Peru, Brazil, Suriname, and the Solomon Islands. In total, the boats support approximately 3,300 people.

The biggest of the boats carry up to twenty passengers and travel up to twelve miles an hour, with a range of sixty miles. If the boats’ electric batteries get depleted, they can be charged at one of the nine onshore charging stations. These power centers also provide electricity for homes, schools, the internet, and eco-lodges.

The foundation is currently working on a project to  Canelos and Maynard said, bringing solar boats and power to over 1,000 people in Achuar territory. In August, it opened a for-profit manufacturing center in Quito called Motores Amazonas. The shop designs and builds electric motors for smaller family boats “that are robust and serviceable and thus better suited for the Amazon’s unique conditions,” Maynard explained.

Current electric motor technology, much of which was developed in the northern hemisphere, “was not built for Amazon conditions,” Maynard explained, “which is very humid and has fast-flowing rivers with sticks. That has been a big technical challenge, as things break more often than they normally would.”

Tourism outfits, NGOS, and research centers have already expressed interest in the new Motores Amazonas boats, Maynard said. Fundación Kara Solar is also exploring how to apply solar systems to power small-scale farming, fishing, and other forms of production in the territory. Fifty-one percent of its profits are channeled to Kara Solar.

Canelos also spoke to the students about a critical aspect of the Kara Solar model, which is to cultivate technical knowledge among the people who use the boats. While the organization helps to pay for and supply the boats, it entrusts their maintenance and operation to the indigenous communities that receive them.

“The trainings are intercultural, and this is a key part of what we do and how the model works: we combine the knowledge of solar electric technology with indigenous knowledge,” Maynard translated for Canelos. Each of the communal boats is assigned a captain, a coordinator, and a technician.

Though this slows the process of outfitting communities with boats—since the trainings take time—“it is a much more sustainable process in the end,” Maynard said.

In this way, the organization is realizing its dream, fostered in those early morning discussions, “to use solar energy and solar technology to fortify territorial autonomy in Achuar territory and other indigenous territories, in the defense of ecosystems and cultures of the Amazon,” Canelos said. “Conserving the Amazon is important to the communities who live here, and solar is a new way to do that.”

Leif's Clean Energy Career

After graduating from �պ����ֲ� in 2023, Maynard started a fellowship program at the DOE on a contract that could have been renewed for up to four years. While working in DC, he applied for a Fulbright fellowship to do research with Kara Solar (which he first learned about as a �պ����ֲ� student). He studied abroad in Ecuador his junior year.

“I got to know the world of sustainability in Ecuador, and I fell in love with the mission of Kara Solar given my interest in community-led clean energy development,” he said.

Though Maynard did not receive the Fulbright, he did receive a job offer from Kara Solar's founder Oliver Utne. (They spoke a lot during the Fulbright application process.) “While I liked my job at the DOE, this felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and a good learning opportunity,” Maynard said, adding that he had made a vow to himself when he left �պ����ֲ� that he’d always continue to learn.

For his job, Maynard writes and submits grant applications and manages relationships with long-term funders. “We hope that the global north and development organizations and funders will see the value in indigenous-led initiatives that prevent deforestation by providing an alternative to building roads,” he said. 

“If the model of Kara Solar expands across the Amazon, it could be a transformative way to conserve the biodiversity and ecosystems of the forest, as well as indigenous sovereignty.”