By Alejandra Vida Ramirez
This year, I am excited to join the Sustainable Futures Lab at the University of Illinois as a Fulbright Scholar from EAFIT University in Colombia. During my time here, I have been engaging in conversations central to the lab’s work: How do we move beyond sustainability toward regeneration? and how do different worldviews shape the ways people live and work? My research brings us to Colombia’s Arenal River Basin, a region rich in biodiversity. It represents a departure from Western-centric models, and my preliminary findings show how local entrepreneurs often prioritize wellbeing and their connection with the river’s ecosystem over profit.
Through qualitative ethnographic fieldwork with 25 venture leaders, I explore the human and non-human relations that sustain the basin and study how diverse worldviews shape the work of local leaders. To better understand these connections, I incorporate creative methods alongside interviews, including body mapping, an arts-based process in which participants use color and imagery to express their physical and emotional relationships with the environment. The example featured here reveals entrepreneurship as something deeply relational. Entrepreneurial identity is embedded in the environment itself, and many participants describe their work as a search for alternatives that prioritize harmony between nature and human livelihood. In practice, tourism has begun to shift from a purely extractive industry toward a source of funding for conservation. Several leaders have established private natural reserves, opening them to the public to foster a shared appreciation for the basin’s ecological significance.
Being part of the Sustainable Futures Lab has encouraged me to reflect on a broader question: how can we rethink entrepreneurial education to foster a deep ecological consciousness? The insights emerging from the Arenal River Basin suggest that alternative futures are already being practiced. They are not without challenges or tensions, but they are rooted in care, reciprocity, and a recognition that humans are part of living ecosystems, not separate from them.
For me, this research is a reminder that innovation does not always begin with new technologies or prioritizing profit, but with different ways of seeing. Listening to these stories invites us to reconsider how we define success, wellbeing, and learning in a rapidly changing world.