Following the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Rechelbacher was the first to sign onto the Valdez Principles, now the Ceres principles, joining corporate environmental responsibility with corporate bottom line. In 1992, along with his partner Kiran, he attended the Earth Summit, where three key agreements occurred: the Climate Change Convention, a precursor to the Kyoto Protocol, the Convention on Biological Diversity and an Intellectual Property Rights accord for indigenous peoples that included preventing actions that could be deemed culturally inappropriate and/or cause environmental destruction. Through this convention, Rechelbacher forged a relationship with the Brazilian Yawanawa tribe began a project cultivating uruku and replanting seedlings in deforested areas.