Established in 1983, the land known as Las Casas de la Selva is the home of Tropic Ventures Sustainable Forestry & Rainforest Enrichment Project, in Patillas, Puerto Rico. Silvicultural techniques developed and applied at Las Casas de la Selva over the last three decades, demonstrate, that on a small scale in Puerto Rico, secondary forests can be ecologically and economically suitable for sustainable timber production. This eco-technology was implemented to encourage similar practice in the Caribbean and globally, as a contribution to economic development that encourages local protection and sustainable management of secondary tropical forests. For thirty years Las Casas de la Selva has seen people from all over the planet live and work in her forest in all areas of science, art, and management. Learning by doing; gathering valuable experiences about life and human interaction in this forest biome, striving to continue and keep the process of creating ecological and sustainable communities, going, going, and never gone.
The fact that ecological sustainability is a property of a web of relationships means that in order to understand it properly, in order to become ecologically literate, we need to learn how to think in terms of relationships, in terms of interconnections, patterns, context. In science, this type of thinking is known as systemic thinking or "systems thinking." It is crucial for understanding ecology, because ecology – derived from the Greek word oikos ("household") – is the science of relationships among the various members of the Earth Household. Fritjof Capra