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The tropics have long been imagined as an exuberant, untouchable, fertile, and infinite paradise. This externally constructed vision has fueled colonial, extractivist, and touristic narratives that reduce the complexity of tropical territories to landscapes of abundance at the service of others. But what happens when we look beyond paradise?

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This public program emerges as a space for encounter and resonance among science, art, territorial thought, and living community practices. Oaxaca, with its biocultural diversity, offers us a situated perspective from which to rethink our relationship with tropical biodiversity—not as a resource to be preserved from a distance, but as a web of interdependent connections that organizes, sustains, and celebrates life.

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Inspired by the call of the Beyond Paradise report (2017) by the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC), this program seeks to broaden our view of tropical ecosystems and recognize that there is no nature without culture, and no conservation without justice. Today, in the face of the climate crisis and ecological collapse, science must engage in dialogue with communities, ancestral knowledge, and territorial struggles that resist and regenerate. Tropical biodiversity cannot be separated from the people who care for it, inhabit it, and transform it every day.

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Looking beyond paradise means dismantling the romantic vision of the tropics as an isolated Eden and beginning to understand biodiversity as a complex web in which we actively participate. It is an invitation to build bridges between biology, art, public policy, and the daily practices of territorial care; to recognize those who already live in harmony with nature, caring for biodiversity; and to create spaces for listening to the voices and knowledge that emerge from other territories, beyond institutions and academia, from the communal.

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The program unfolds in two parts: a public program in the city and an outreach program within the convention center. Both aim to bring the themes of the conference closer to the people of Oaxaca and foster knowledge exchange through talks, film screenings, performances, listening, weaving and cooking labs, and encounters with forest communities, artists, biologists, land defenders, and inhabitants of these living tropics. All from a critical, sensitive, and situated perspective.

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In Oaxaca—where biodiversity is a way of life—we want to collectively ask: What does it mean to care for life in common, beyond paradise?

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