Ancient Earth Futures
Honest about the conditions.” with “Transformation warts and all
06.40 am: The field team is already on the second cup of tea by the time the jeep is loaded. The air is still damp with monsoon mist, and the Malabar squirrel is already active in the canopy above. Today’s itinerary: a three-hour drive over laterite-dusted roads that test the jeep’s suspension, a village council meeting that may or may not happen on schedule, and a late-night whiteboard session back at the field station once the light goes.
This is the "productive tension" of AEF: we move between jungle clearings and boardrooms, holding space for both rigorous research and place-based intuition. The day is a mix of high-stakes negotiation and the quiet tedium of waiting for a flat tire to be changed or a meeting to begin. It is not a highlight reel; it is an unsanitised account of what it takes to do this work honestly.
Work in rural areas never goes according to plan. Over time we've developed a few ways of thinking that help us stay useful when things fall apart — which they regularly do.
When people's livelihoods are at stake, the nuance of our work gets lost in translation more often than not. Stories spread quickly about what the "outsiders" are really here for — either wildly overestimating the benefits ("they'll probably buy all our coffee at double the price") or assuming the familiar harm. We err heavily on the side of being over-explicit about what we intend, what we can offer, and what we can't. Clarity is not a bureaucratic formality. It is the foundation of genuine collaboration..
Communities see through a professional mask within minutes. There is no "researcher persona" that holds up over time in a village. If you birdwatch, bring your binoculars and trade sightings. If you cook, offer to help in the kitchen. If you play sport, join the game. These are not distractions from the work — they are the connective tissue that makes the work possible. We all have more in common with people anywhere than the role we've been hired to play would suggest.
Coming from far away does not grant priority over local schedules. This is one of the harder things to hold, because schedules in the field break constantly and usually for reasons entirely outside anyone's control. What it requires is continuous negotiation — checking whether people are comfortable staying a little longer, reorganising planned activities around whoever actually showed up, and doing all of this without resentment. We treat the landscape's rhythms with the same respect we owe to the people within it.
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. Getting stuck in frustration about a missed meeting or a broken promise shrinks your field of vision exactly when you need it widest. The field has its own agenda. A group of kids shows up — what can you do with them? A wild animal passes through the clearing. A politician arrives uninvited. A wedding starts next door. Every disruption is an invitation to look at the core of the work with new eyes, and to treat what the landscape is actually offering as more interesting than what you planned to extract from it.
If you join AEF, you will move between environments that most organisations keep carefully separate. You will sit in a boardroom in the morning and sleep in a field station that night. You will be expected to hold rigorous research methodology and genuine ecological attentiveness at the same time, without sacrificing either.
It is not always comfortable. The flat tyre, the meeting that ran four hours over, the community that decides mid-session to take the work somewhere you hadn't anticipated — these are not edge cases. They are the texture of the job.
What we can offer is a team that takes this work seriously without taking itself too seriously, a set of active projects with real stakes and real relationships, and enough structure to give the wildness somewhere to land.
If that sounds like somewhere you could grow, we'd like to hear from you. Below: open roles, internship and volunteer opportunities, and our advisory group.
Photography for this section is still pending.
Specific, not generic. Roles below are illustrative pending confirmed openings.
Not a Board
We work with a small, informally convened group of advisors to ask for guidance, introductions to funders, and outside perspective — not a governance board, more a council of elders. Most outreach happens one-on-one, but if you think you might be a fit, we'd love to hear from you !
Current advisors: Shristee Bajpai, Ishan Agarwal, Akshat Sinhal
Express InterestThe organisations and initiatives we're part of. See Connected Sites for full context on each relationship.
Sister initiative on regenerative trade routes. Currently under revision.
Longstanding affiliation; relationship page needs updating.
Active partner with a dedicated professional team.