Seeing the Forest, Not Just the Trees

WLC-20 THE AMERICAS Wendy Call was a donor-supported “Healthy Societies” ICWA Fellow in southern Mexico from May 2000 to May 2002. Seeing the Forest, Not Just the Trees LETTERS By Wendy Call JUNE 12, 2003 Since 1925 the Institute of Benedín García climbed easily up the west pyramid, the highest in the “Com- Current World Affairs (the Crane- plex-A” ruins. Not fully excavated, the front of each ancient Maya building emerges Rogers Foundation) has provided in fuzzy brown, round-edged rock from the vegetation that once hid it completely. long-term fellowships to enable Its back melts into a hillside of humus and fern. Fifteen hundred years ago, outstanding young professionals the people of Uaxactún1 had buried to live outside the United States their king in the temple under and write about international Benedín’s feet. Beside their deceased areas and issues. An exempt leader, they had laid jade necklaces operating foundation endowed by and earlobe plugs, jaguar teeth, copal the late Charles R. Crane, the incense, pearls, pottery, seashells, and Institute is also supported by a single sting ray spine, painted red.2 contributions from like-minded individuals and foundations. Benedín waved to me, far below him on the forest floor. He yelled that A museum in Uaxactún displays an he could see all the way to his village, impressive collection of Maya pottery TRUSTEES even past it, to the community for- excavated from the local ruins. Bryn Barnard estry site. Benedín stood on the west Joseph Battat temple of Complex-A, one of seven ruins in the village of 138 families in Petén, Steven Butler Guatemala. The northern half of Petén has been protected since 1990 by the Maya Sharon Griffin Doorasamy Biosphere Reserve, the largest swath of lowland rainforest north of the Amazon William F. Foote basin. The reserve was intended to con- Peter Geithner trol deforestation by logging companies, Kitty Hempstone farmers and ranchers. From where Katherine Roth Kono Benedín stood, balancing casually on the Cheng Li stone temple’s apex, he could see Com- Peter Bird Martin plex-B to the north. To the east, the air- Ann Mische strip built half a century ago, when Dasa Obereigner Wrigley’s planes flew in regularly to buy Chandler Rosenberger chicle-tree resin. Planes no longer land Edmund Sutton there; villagers graze horses on the long, Dirk J. Vandewalle bare rectangle. It has become the village center, surrounded by small stone, bam- HONORARY TRUSTEES boo and cement buildings. David Elliot David Hapgood I sat on a stray stone next to the west Pat M. Holt temple, chin on my cane. A few weeks Edwin S. Munger before my April 2002 trip to the famous Richard H. Nolte Maya forest, I had twisted my ankle and Albert Ravenholt ended up in a cast. I convinced a doctor to Phillips Talbot replace it with a brace four days before I ar- rived in Guatemala. In Uaxactún, I could walk One building of Uaxactún’s “Complex- to the pyramids from where the rocky road Institute of Current World Affairs A” ruins ended, but only to gaze up at them from The Crane-Rogers Foundation Four West Wheelock Street Hanover, New Hampshire 03755 U.S.A. 1 Uaxacatún is pronounced “wah-shock-TUNE.” 2 The list of the tomb’s contents is taken from The Ancient World of the Maya, John S. Henderson, 2nd ed, Cornell University Press, 1997, p. 123. dor and Benedín came by plane from Guate- mala City to Flores, Petén’s regional capital. From Flores, they flew to Uaxactún, 28 miles north, for 5 quetzales. Had they looked out the window half-way through that flight, they would have seen the region’s most famous ruins, Tikal, just beginning to be excavated.

In a sense, I went to Guatemala to find what I had spent nearly two years searching for in Mexico. When I began my “healthy societies fellowship,” two questions drove me: What are the alternatives to our society’s excessive consumption? In our mobile society, how does one become native to a place? These questions are two sides of the same coin, at least in the currency of Part of the Tikal ruins in Petén, Guatemala “bioregional” thought. Based on the limits flat ground. I spent a lot of time sitting, watching and marked by local climate, biota and watersheds, listening during the eight days I spent in Petén. “bioregions” are the physical boundaries of ecosys- tems. Bioregionalists, taking these local regions to In the forest around the ruins, hundreds of insect be the contours of home, believe that cultures and wings rasped together into a single tone. The leaves of economies should be scaled to the home region, with the mahogany trees rustled like parchment pages. I suddenly understood why forests are often compared to cathedrals: thousands of beings live there, bearing witness. In the Maya forest, the rare ocellated turkey cocks its head from side to side, as if preening. It isn’t looking at its own green, purple and bronze plum- age, but at its surroundings. Its iridescent feathers re- flect any movement. The howler monkeys, so un- fairly named, sing their safety as a baritone hymn. They howl during the day only when they aren’t hunted, falling silent when threatened. Vines thick as church-bell ropes hang down from far overhead, undulating in the breeze.

Like most Uaxactún residents, Benedín is nei- ther Maya nor Petén-born. He comes from a town called “Holy Spirit,” in the southern Guatemalan department called “Progress.” He ar- rived in Uaxactún 42 years ago with his brother Salva- dor, when both were teen- agers. There were no roads to Petén at that time. Salva- 2 WLC-20 people relying primarily on local resources.3 Above all, people should deeply know and re- late to the place where they live. When I began This portion of a my ICWA fellowship, a few expressed surprise 1995 satellite that I went looking for a healthy society in south- map shows the ern Mexico. For them, the fact that I pushed on difference in to Guatemala during my fellowship’s final weeks forest cover might seem almost bizarre. between Petén, Guatemala and Others have come to Uaxactún looking for Mexico. The something similar. Salvador and Benedín left northwestern their parents behind to live with an aunt in part of Uaxctún. “If we had ended up somewhere else, Guatemala is the maybe we would be farming. South of here, because “backwards-L” of the ranching and farming, the forests are really shape in the threatened,” Salvador says. “You’ll see pasturelands, lower right hand areas made into wasteland by cornfields. But here in corner of the Uaxactún, it’s different. We’ve taken care of the forest image. because we depend on it…. I’ve learned how to survive from the forest. I’m really thankful to the Photo credit: first people who learned how to survive this way. Detail from They have taught us how to live.” “Vegetation of the Maya The Maya forest that surrounds Salvador’s Forest,” home spans three nations: Belize, Guatemala and Conservation Mexico. The political boundary, an abstraction, International should be invisible. On satellite images, though, much of the line between Petén and Chiapas, Tabasco and Campeche is a stark slash between Guate- black-stemmed pepper plants, thin as reeds; and ma- malan forest and Mexican bare earth. hogany trees, trunks splaying out into buttresses.5

When I looked at the forest around the Complex-A Nearly all the villagers draw their livelihoods from ruins, I saw Uaxactún’s entire economy: deep green xate4 the forest, but only a few from the trees. They collect deep palms with pendulous, green-and-white fruit; red-barked green xate palm leaves for floral arrangements in wealthy chicozapote trees criss-crossed with machete wounds; tall, countries. They harvest the pepper plant’s seed pods: allspice. They drain chicle sap from the chicozapote tree. They cut down just a few of the mahogany trees, using both trunk and branches, leaving the twigs and leaves to fertilize the forest floor. They cut the vines that hang down from the trees and weave them into wicker furniture sold in Guatemala’s tourist meccas.

Each harvest demands careful balance. Cut the xate frond in the wrong place, the plant dies. Bend the pepper plant too far, the stem breaks. Slide a machete blade too deeply into the chicozapote bark, insects invade and destroy. Fell too many large trees, too much heat and light flood in. Much of the forest floor’s life withers without the essential, dim dampness provided by the canopy.

Salvador García looks up at the forest canopy. In 1964, the population of Petén was just

3 For a good summary of bioregionalism, see Kirkpatrick Sale’s Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision, New Society Publish- ers, 1991. 4 Xate is pronounced (SHAH-teh). 5 For a brief overview of the Uaxactún economy, see “Going, going, gum — Guatemala,” at http://www.tve.org/ho/ doc.cfm?aid=890. INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS 3 (Left) A Uaxactún artisan weaves wicker, harvested in Uaxactún, around a chair frame made from local wood. (Above) In an attempt to reduce pressure on wild xate populations, Uaxactún residents are experimenting with growing xate seedlings in nurseries. over 25,000 people. By 1996, it had ballooned to more impossible to completely eliminate illegal activity. Still, than half a million. In the mid-1990s, while the popula- the village seems to do a better job than the government tion of Guatemala grew at 2.9 percent annually, Petén’s — which devotes only 80 cents per acre annually to na- population grew 10 percent each year.6 This is due mostly ture-reserve protection.10 Just a few days before my visit, to migration, but also to Petén’s birthrate: around 7.0, one villagers had come across a poachers’ encampment and the Latin America’s highest.7 insisted they leave. Salvador planned to return to the site, to make sure they had left. According to a 1995 satellite Uaxactún’s 138 families are responsible for 206,390 map of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Uaxactún had lost acres of land, 98% of it forested. That’s nearly 1,500 acres no forest cover in the previous decade, while illegal log- per family, though the people of Uaxactún don’t see it that way. On January 12, 2000, the Guatemalan government’s National Council of Protected Areas (CONAP, for its Spanish initials) sold a 25-year-harvesting concession to the community of Uaxactún.8 “The government finally put in some controls, then gave concessions to the communities.” Salvador says simply. “They [logging companies] left and now each community does the harvesting.” The villagers must account for every tree felled, every kilogram of allspice harvested, every bundle of xate loaded onto a truck. Salvador’s casual explana- tion sums up many years of struggle by Uaxactún residents and international environmental organizations.

One element of their success: after much negotiation, CONAP agreed to charge them less than half what it Harvested xate piles up in a Uaxactún buying cooperative charges corporations to harvest Petén trees.9 It’s a bar- that was founded with support from the Wildlife gain for CONAP. In exchange for the reduced fee, the Conservation Society. community monitors poaching on its lands. It would be

6 “El Estado de la Reserva de la Biósfera Maya en 1996,” by CONAP (Consejo Nacional de Areas Protegidas), USAID, and the Peregrine Fund, p 4 7 Interview with Amilcar Corzo, of Propetén/Conservation International, April 17, 2002 8 Information about the concession from CONAP and Benedín García, April 2002 9 Interview with Benedín García, April 11, 2002 10 Information from Carlos Albacete of Trópico Verde, Guatemala City 4 WLC-20 gers had damaged every ism — A Vital Force for Peace.”14 Though little happened national park that has road with the proposal, the same route showed up in Mexican access.11 Of course, that was government plans a decade later.15 In 1995, the World before the concession was Bank recommended that “a complete moratorium on road granted. improvement should be imposed [and] public road main- tenance should be limited” throughout Petén.16 Is the concession work- ing? A review from the Recently, the highway idea has surfaced again as part Guatemala office of the en- of the Inter-American Development Bank’s Plan Puebla vironmental organization Panama (PPP). The Guatemalan government urged that ParksWatch has concluded the Tikal-Calakmul route be included in the PPP. The In- it’s too early to answer that ter-American Development Bank said no, as its internal question.12 I asked Erik guidelines prohibit funding highways in nature reserves. Cuellar, director of conces- The Guatemalan government then refused to sign the sions for CONAP, whether agreement on PPP road construction. Current PPP plans the harvesting might be un- don’t include the highway, and the Guatemalan govern- sustainable. He replied that ment seems to be going along with it.17 The plan seems it “could be,” but “there is to persist under other auspices, however; early this year no alternative.”13 Uaxactún residents saw construction equipment pass through their village.18 Although no one knows whether the concessions My first afternoon in Uaxactún, I joined Salvador and truly represent sustainable Benedín at a meeting with the village president, Rocael forest use, CONAP has A chicle tree whose sap has Peña, and other com- granted them to 14 villages been harvested several times munity leaders. Forty and community associations throughout the biosphere minutes into our dis- reserve. None of the other concessions approach the size cussion, the subject of of Uaxactún’s. “At first they said we were crazy — why the highway arose. did we want so much land?” Benedín says. He knew the Benedín introduced it community needed it to maintain control. He and Salva- this way: “This is what dor have visited other communities in northern Guate- all of us fear.” I asked mala, and have seen how conservation efforts have been him why. “It will be the undermined by neighbors and outsiders who don’t share end of us,” was all he the communities’ values. Some of those places have been said. Salvador finished left as tiny islands of green in a wide swath of brown. his brother’s thought, as Erik Cueller calls people like the García brothers “extreme he sometimes does. conservationists.” “It’s going to leave our forest in pieces. Did we Threats loom over the Petén forest. In 1970, an oil save all this to have company built a road from Tikal to Uaxactún. Because others come with their the road was there, loggers came. Numerous highway big machinery?” plans for Petén have surfaced over the last couple of de- cades. The most common version slices through the for- “It would be a est north from Tikal, through Uaxactún, across the Gua- complete change from temala-Mexico border, to the Calakmul nature reserve. the life we have,” Calakmul is already connected by highway to Cancún. Rocael added. When The idea is to lure Cancún beachgoers to the Tikal ruins. the dirt road first con- Fifteen years ago, the World Conservation Union pro- nected Uaxactún to posed the Tikal-Calakmul route — along with several Benedín García in the forest at Flores, things got better other new highways — at a conference entitled “Tour- Uaxactún´s “Complex-A” ruins and worse for the vil-

11 “El Estado de la Reserva de la Biósfera Maya en 1996,”p 12 12 “ParksWatch Report: El Mirador-Río Azul National Park,” December 2001, www.parkswatch.org 13 Interview with Erik Cuellar, Coordinator of the Multiple Use Zones in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, CONAP, April 17, 2002 14 “Parks on the Borderline: Experience in Transfrontier Conservation,” edited by Jim Thorsell, 1990, p 52 15 “Campeche XXI,” Gobierno Contitutionial del Estado de Campeche 1997 to 2003, 6.3.6.9, “Infraestructura de comunicaciones y transportes” 16 “Guatemala: Land Tenure and Natural Resources Management,” The World Bank, Report No 14553 GU, June 5, 1995, p vi 17 “Red Internacional de Carreteras Mesoamericanas,” Inter-American Development Bank, April 2003, www.iadb.org/ppp 18 “Continúa preparación de proyectos del Plan Puebla Panamá,” Guatemala Hoy, February 10, 2003 INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS 5 lagers. They could come and “Nephites.”19 He is excavating Nakbe — the largest Maya go more easily, as could the ruin in Guatemala, in the heart of the biosphere reserve products they bought and north of Uaxactún. Hansen is also raising money for the sold. The road also brought “Mirador Basin” project, a large-scale tourist operation more people cutting down that would redraw national park boundaries in the re- trees, hunting wild animals, gion, leaving a chunk of forest with much less protec- leaving behind trash. tion. He plans to fly in well-heeled tourists by helicop- ter, piggybacking on Tikal’s popularity.20 Two months Those people are the before my visit to Uaxactún, Hansen had come to the problem, according to Salva- village to discuss his plans, but the village leaders weren’t dor. Though he, Benedín and interested in what he had to say. Rocael are all migrants to Uaxacatún, they have made For them, heli-tourists would be a new, gross extreme it their home. “Because he of what CONAP calls “furtive tourism.” The only tour- hasn’t struggled, because he ist I encountered during my visit to Uaxactún would has nothing, the migrant probably qualify as “furtive.” He came in a rented ve- Rocael Peña, president of comes only to disturb, to be hicle from Tikal, bringing a hired tour guide and a cam- Uaxactún a predator,” Salvador says. era, buying nothing. Uaxactún residents complain about “Not us. If we cut a tree, it’s these visitors: they stay only a few hours, bring their own because we need it. We’re not going to waste the forest.” water bottles and plastic-wrapped sandwiches. They Salvador, like most of his neighbors in Uaxactún, thinks leave behind nothing but garbage and tire tracks. Locals small-scale, low-impact — two crucial elements of prefer the young backpackers. They stay for several days, bioregionalism. The community leaders try to make de- rent cabins, eat in local restaurants. The less rich the tour- cisions considering both economic development and environmental sustainability.

Villagers have watched engineers pass through Uaxactún on their way north to Río Azul, part of the biosphere reserve’s central core. Salvador sees the forest as an integrated whole. The road makes no sense to him. Bits of the forest can’t be sliced off — much less removed from the middle — without damaging the larger organism. “After they have given us a concession for 25 years, they can’t give someone else a concession!” he insisted at the community leaders’ meeting.

“We only have the right to harvest from the forest. It’s not our private property,” Rocael replied. He explained to me that the community has held several meetings to discuss the highway. “Most are afraid of it, but some say it will bring new employ- ment.” The dirt road has fallen into such disrepair, heavy rains leave it impassable. “If the idea is to help us, why don’t they rebuild the dirt road?”Salvador wondered.

When I asked the Uaxactún leaders about other challenges facing the community, their first reply was: Richard Hansen. He is the latest Mormon archeologist to come to Mesoamerica in search of the “lost tribe” of Mormon predecessors, the

19 Yes, it’s true. Read a fascinating and entertaining article about it: “This is Not the Place,” Hampton Sides, DoubleTake, Spring 1999, vol 5, no 2, pp 46 to 55, online at http://www.ldshistory.net/bomnot.html. 20 “ParksWatch Report: El Mirador-Río Azul National Park” and www.miradorbasin.com 6 WLC-20 ist, the more Uaxactún benefits.

Was I a “furtive tourist”? I stayed for a few days, ate in all three restaurants and rented a bungalow room. But then I left, sending no new tourists their way, writing about my time there only long after the fact. Often during my fellowship, when I wrote about the communities I visited, I felt as if I were describ- ing something about to disappear. I could almost feel the wave of destruction behind the line of my pen, wiping out the reality as fast as I could record it. Writ- ing about Uaxacatún, I don’t feel that way. It seems more a hopeful act, a way of saying: Look at this. Let’s support other places like this. Still, the Sheraton hotels A typical Uaxactún house, with a solar panel and helipads might be closing in on them. what they produced for obsidian, chert, salt and other Tikal, perhaps the grandest of the excavated Maya necessities.24 Two thousand years ago they began building pyramids from great stone blocks. They aligned their buildings with celestial movements, marking where the sun rose at the summer and winter solstices. They painted images of their kings and deities in stucco on temple walls. A few centuries later, they began carving stelae, large stone monuments, to mark important events. They maintained relations with non-Maya communities, host- ing guests from as far away as Teotihuacán, in what is now Central Mexico.25 It was a bioregional community, as were all the communities of the Americas before the conquest.

Around 830 AD, more than 400 years after Uaxacatún had become subservient to Tikal, they stopped building Salvador García relaxes in a hammock at the the great temples. Within a few centuries, the stone city community’s logging encampment. of Uaxactún lay in rubble among forest detritus. The ruins, sits 14 miles south of Uaxacatún. Tikal’s Temple of people who lived there no longer could read the inscrip- the Giant Jaguar, which rises above the forest canopy to tions on the stelae. Uaxactún reverted from a city with a nearly 150 feet, is reproduced on everything from bill- few nobles, more artisans and many slaves, to a village boards to beer bottles. At its peak around 400 AD, Tikal was home to perhaps 50,000 people. After it was aban- doned in the ninth century, it lay nearly forgotten for 1,000 years.21 These days, more than 130,000 tourists — nearly one in every three entering the country — visit the site each year.22 Too much of the money they spend ends up in the hands of people far from Petén. While a xate gath- erer in Uaxactún earns an average of $5.15 a day — chicle and allspice harvesters earn even more — a waiter in a three-star hotel earns less than $2.50 a day and a maid, about $1.20.23

Around 3,000 years ago, a small village first appeared at Uaxactún. Like the residents in other small Maya villages at that time, the people at Uaxactún tended garden At the logging encampment, Salvador García plays pebbles- plots and made simple clay pots and bowls. They traded and-paint checkers with a forestry cooperative member.

21 Information on Tikal from The Ancient World of the Maya, John S. Henderson, and “Maya Lowland Centers: Tikal,” Athena Review, vol 2, no 2 22 “El Estado de la Reserva de la Biósfera Maya en 1996,” p 20 23 “Economic Perspectives in the Maya Biosphere Reserve,” Carlos Soza Manzanero, in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Tropical Rainforest: Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, James Nation, Ed, Conservation International, 1999, p 51-52 24 The Ancient World of the Maya, John S. Henderson, p. 79 25 The description of the ancient village of Uaxactún is taken from The Ancient World of the Maya by John S. Henderson. INSTITUTE OF CURRENT WORLD AFFAIRS 7 Author: Call, Wendy Title: ICWA Letters - The Americas ISSN: 1083-4303 Imprint: Institute of Current World Affairs, Hanover, NH A billboard Material Type: Serial uses the Temple Language: English of the Giant Frequency: Monthly Other Regions: East Asia; South Asia; Jaguar to sell Europe/Russia; Mideast/North beer in Flores, Africa;Sub-Saharan Africa Petén.

Institute Fellows are chosen on the basis of character, previous of subsistence farmers who grew their crops in isolation. Eventually, the community died out, or left. As with all the Maya communities, no one knows for experience and promise. They sure why or how this happened. Many believe that a burgeoning population are young professionals funded cleared too much forest, then faced a severe drought — with disastrous conse- to spend a minimum of two quences.26 years carrying out self-designed programs of study and writing My second day in Uaxactún, I sat at a picnic table talking with Elfio Aldana, outside the United States. The who rents several cabins in his yard to backpackers who come to see the ruins. Fellows are required to report He was anxious to tell me his thoughts about the highway. “This is supposedly a their findings and experiences conservation reserve and they want to build a highway through it. So, are they from the field once a month. really conservationists, or is it just us?” Elfio Aldana asked me, arms wide and They can write on any subject, eyes furious. “If they are going to destroy the forest, it would be better to just pay us for our houses and throw us out. We have spent so many years building as formally or informally as this, maintaining the forest — for what?” they wish. The result is a unique form of reporting, analysis and periodic assess- Many thanks to everyone quoted in this newsletter, as well as Roan Balas, ment of international events Rut Catalán, Luis Góngora, América Rodríguez, Angelo Pisano, and especially and issues. Ileana Valenzuela, for making my trip to Petén such an important and enjoyable experience. ❏ ICWA Letters (ISSN 1083-4303) are pub- lished by the Institute of Current World Affairs Inc., a 501(c)(3) exempt operating foundation incorporated in New York State with offices located at 4 West Wheelock Street, Hanover, NH 03755. The letters are provided free of charge to members of ICWA and are available to libraries and professional researchers by subscription.

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The information contained in this publi- Tikal’s Temple of the Giant Jaguar cation may not be reproduced without the writer’s permission. 26 “How Old is the Petén Tropical Rainforest?” Claudio Méndez, in Thirteen Ways of Look- ing at a Tropical Rainforest, p 33