We heard the chainsaws first, like the buzz of a bee on amphetamines, interspersed with the crash of falling giants, then the toiling drone of bulldozers. We were approaching the edge of the Salvación-Boca Manu-Colorado road. Our Matsigenka guide, Feliciano, from Pankotsi Lodge in the nearby village of Shipetiari, led us expertly through the forest. Suddenly, we emerged onto the road clearing, precisely at the spot where a Caterpillar was digging up the roots of a recently felled tree.

The foreman at the road front was at first jovial and friendly, but when he noticed we were taking pictures, he began a speech about tourism and conservation not creating enough local jobs. He went on to say that the local district council had recently secured a large cacao project, which the road would support. I asked where he was from.

He replied he was from the Andean highlands of Puno, but that he had lived for 20 years in Madre de Dios and that he was a selvatico, a jungle man. We spoke for over an hour, and he showed us another Caterpillar that had broken down as a result of the grueling work. He was a nice guy. But in my mind the fact remained: He was helping to build a road, with illegal loggers hot on his tracks, already extracting precious woods from Manu National Park’s border, one of Peru’s last great wilderness areas.

So I decided to ask him directly: Did he not feel bad about all the forest they were felling?

His answer was also direct: "No. El bosque no me da trabajo." No. The forest doesn’t give me a job.

And that is the problem: Many people do not perceive the value of wilderness areas, even though we receive life-sustaining services from them every day. These services include natural cycles that we take for granted such as climate regulation, water purification and maintaining biodiversity.

Many people do not perceive the value of wilderness areas, even though we receive life-sustaining services from them every day.

These services are, in theory, worth trillions of dollars to the world economy (PDF). But you cannot eat theory, and so we are losing millions of hectares of forests, countless animal and plant species, and many unique ecosystems every year, especially in the emerging economies of the developing world. The need for new tools and systems to make this loss and its value tangible to people long has been acknowledged, but successful models of how to do this are still thin on the ground.

At Nature Services Peru, the first B Certified company in Peru, we are developing financial and non-financial incentives for the collective management of wilderness areas, with an initial focus on the Peruvian Amazon. Through Regenera we work to create shared value from nature’s regenerative services by providing carbon footprint-management services, and by equitably sharing our income with rural and indigenous partners.

Now, don’t misunderstand my use of the word "management." The best way to sustain a healthy nature is, sometimes, to leave it alone, to give it space and allow natural regeneration processes. But we confront a huge challenge. As in 10 billion consumers on one planet huge. In a resource-hungry world, the decision and ability to give nature the space it needs requires creative collective action, protecting nature on a massive scale, and getting our shovels out to restore nature in those areas where it already has been significantly degraded.

The global B Corp movement: The next economy

At Nature Services Peru, we know that regenerative services will form an important sector of the "next" economy. In order to do so sustainably, we need to work with allies and clients with shared values, and this is the reason I got so excited when Baltazar Caravedo, from the Centre for Leadership at Peru’s prestigious Universidad del Pacifico, spoke to me about his ideas of establishing the B Corp movement in Peru. Together with visionary environmental lawyer Jorge Caillaux and a group of founding members, Sistema B Peru was born in February 2016.

But we confront a huge challenge. As in 10 billion consumers on one planet huge.

Although Sistema B Peru is still in its early stages, Ian Sznak and his team have established a vibrant organization and grown the number of Peruvian B Corps to more than a dozen in less than two years. New B Corps such as Sustainable Fishery Trade, Hoseg and Sinba are working to create a more resource efficient, fair and exciting economy in Peru.

But we do not need a dozen or even 100 companies like our own. We need thousands of locally driven B Corps focusing on regenerative agriculture, wilderness restoration, sustainable urban design, nature-based education and myriad other opportunities. Only then will we rise to the challenge of rediscovering balance between society and nature in Peru, and elsewhere.