“Fierce winds ripped huge branches off the thousand-year-old redwood, sending them crashing to the ground two hundred feet below. The upper platform, where I lived, rested in branches about 180 feet in the air … As the tree branches whipped around, they shredded the tarp that served as my shelter. Sleet and hail sliced through the tattered pieces of what used to be my roof and walls. Every new gust flipped the platform up into the air, threatening to hurl me over the edge.”
— Julia “Butterfly” Hill, The Legacy of Luna

It’s hard to say what was the most dramatic moment in that 738 days that Julia “Butterfly” Hill spent atop that platform in a redwood tree named Luna. Perhaps it was the day of that bitter storm and many others that ensued. Perhaps it was the day that a massive helicopter buzzed her tree and nearly blew her to her death with the 300 mph winds created by its updrafts. Perhaps it was the day that a fellow tree sitter had the rope he was standing on cut out from under him by “Climber Dan,” a logger hired by the timber companies to antagonize and remove intransigent activists from the trees they were trying to save from the loggers’ blades.

The full text of this article is currently only available in Spanish. I am currently seeking a publisher for the English version; please contact me at tracy@tracybarnettonline.com if you are interested.

To read the rest of the article click here:

JuliaButterflyHill-in-Magis(oct-nov2011

CHALMITA, Mexico State, Mexico – Long before the sun appears over the towering white cliffs all around us, this temporary village comes to life. The guardians of the ceremonial fire are stoking the flames for the temezcal; the kitchen crew is chopping and peeling and stirring; smoke is rising from the women’s tipi. Suddenly the resonant call of the conch rings out over the valley, calling us to the salutation of the sun, and the cry of an eagle pierces the air like a blessing.

We are gathered in this enchanted valley for the Call of the Eagle, the tenth intercontinental gathering of a group of dreamers and doers who are quietly changing the world from the inside out: the Consejo de Visiones – Guardianes de la Tierra (Vision Council – Guardians of the Earth).

Some 500 visitors from as far as Australia and as near as neighboring Chalmita – filmmakers and farmers, psychologists and shamans, artists and teachers, spiky-haired punks and lyrical poets – are learning to live together under the blue skies and bright stars of an itinerant ecovillage conceived more than a decade ago under the banner of the Rainbow Caravan for Peace and the Mexican Bioregional Movement. By the end of the week, this event will have touched the lives of more than 1,000.

This tenth gathering is a very special event for many reasons, chief among them that it is seen as the fulfillment of an Inca prophecy. When the Eagle and the Condor fly together, according to the prophecy, this will signal the dawn of a new era – the Eagle representing the North, and the Condor representing the South. Here in this sacred valley, lying in the shadow of an ancient pyramid amid the fertile Bosque de Agua, a high-energy group of visionaries, artists, and activists from North and South has come full circle.

Fourteen years ago, a now legendary group of them, led by among others Alberto Ruz Buenfil, otherwise known as the Subcoyote – cousin of Fidel Castro and son of the archaeologist who discovered Palenque’s fantastic hidden treasures – set off from this region for an epic journey that was to create the foundation for an intercontinental environmental, spiritual and social movement. After holding the first intercontinental congress of the Vision Council, they headed off in a bus painted like an ear of corn through the Zapatista territory of Chiapas, through the volcanic highlands of Central America and the tropical lowlands of Amazonia all the way to the tip of the continent in Patagonia. Using theater and the arts to plant seeds of hope, peace and sustainability in conflict zones, indigenous villages and crime-ridden barrios, they connected and nurtured social movements throughout the continent.

Their second international event, the Call of the Condor in 2002, brought some 1,300 activists and artists to the Sacred Valley of Machu Picchu in Peru to begin the work of consolidating a vision for a transition to a new age. The third, Call of the Hummingbird, was held in Brazil in 2005 and drew more than 1,500.

Now, after 13 years, that caravan has finally come back to its roots, and the seeds they planted here in Mexico and across the continent have come full bloom in an astounding event that is awakening even the most cynical and reserved among us. Tears flow freely in the circles of dance, in the darkness of the temezcal, in the embraces of long-lost friends who have only just met.

But this is far from a feel-good encounter group. In fact, it’s far from anything I’ve experienced. These folks are facing the future with their eyes wide open, painfully aware of the resource and climate crises that loom on the horizon. It’s also not a hand-wringing session. No one here is waiting for government to resolve these pending crises, although government leaders are here to participate in the forums, workshops and demonstrations in areas encompassing ecology, health, spirituality, appropriate technology, and education among many others. Local schoolchildren, too, are brought in to participate in panels teaching self-reliance; local youth participate in forums organizing political and social action preparing for turbulent times in a post-petroleum world. Gaia University is here, sharing a revolutionary model for participatory education, granting diplomas, bachelor’s and master’s degrees while its students are engaged in planetary transformation.

One team is building an oven from mud and bricks, while another is building a solar clock; another group is learning about native herbal healing techniques, while still another is raising the ceremonial tipi that will be the headquarters of a powerful women’s healing circle, and another is discussing strategies for protecting this valley, a strategic but highly vulnerable center for water conservation. Another initiative is gathering momentum to support the Huicholes in a struggle to save their most sacred site, Cerro Quemado in Real de Catorce or Wirikuta, from a transnational mining operation.

Sacred rituals from the world’s great traditions mingle with dance and creations of art and song to raise the energy throughout the week to a level I never thought possible. Activities run from sunup to 3 a.m., but sleep seems superfluous.

The culmination of the event comes after an all-night vigil to greet the dawn; a spectacularly feathered and painted group of Aztec dancers await us around a blazing fire, and a mandala of dance and rhythm and song erupts.

As I sit down to try and put this phenomenon to words, I recall those of Coyote Alberto as we stood together on the last day.

“It’s all so perfect,” I told him. “My only regret is that it’s just impossible to put into words.”

He laughed knowingly – the author of several books about the caravan and its Rainbow Warriors, and now involved in a project to bring the lessons of the caravan home in Mexico City, he has struggled with this problem daily.

“Nobody believes you when you try to explain it,” he said. “They say, ‘You’re just writing what you want it to be.’ There’s no way to explain – you just have to live it.”

Never has a human being lived his words more authentically, more powerfully, more beautifully than the man at the heart of this vision turned reality. I can do no better than to end with some of those words, which Alberto shared with us during the closing ceremony.

“Two hundred years ago these lands were the scene of bloody battles; much blood was shed among our grandfathers and grandmothers to make a step forward in the process of evolution, of growth, toward our liberty as individuals, as a people, and as a nation…. A hundred years ago, again in these lands, much blood was spilled once again among our people, with the same goal, to be able to walk with a bit more liberty, a bit more strength.

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VALLE DE CAUCA, Colombia – When Alicia Calle, an environmental scientist with Yale’s Environmental Leadership and Training Initiative, first told me of El Hatico Nature Reserve, her face lit up for the first time since I’d met her an hour ago. We’d been talking about the state of the environment in Colombia, a subject with much to lament, given the spread of mining operations, cattle ranching, vast monocultures of sugarcane and African palm and coca, deforestation, water contamination, the same story throughout the Americas.

What is it that gives you hope, I asked her, as I do in every interview. It was then that she pulled out a booklet and started showing me photos of El Hatico.

“Let me be clear: I don’t like cattle farming; I think it’s created terrible environmental problems and social inequalities throughout its development in Latin America. But this is a place I’d really like you to see, a place that’s turned a major problem into a part of the solution.”

I looked at the photograph and thought I was seeing my grandfather’s farm in the Missouri Ozarks: clusters of russet-colored cattle peacefully grazing among shady forests of mature trees. Nothing like the razed expanses that stretched to the horizons, cattle farms I’d seen throughout the Guatemalan Peten, the Argentine Chaco, in rural Mexico and Paraguay.

Cattle farmers have cleared millions of acres of rainforest and tropical dry forest to create fields for cattle, releasing untold tons of carbon into a steadily heating atmosphere, causing a wave of droughts and erosion, eliminating wildlife habitat and degrading the rivers that flow through. An estimated 27 percent of Colombian land is now used for cattle production, and deforestation continues at the aggressive rate of 300,000 hectares a year, according to an article coauthored by Calle and others published this month in the prestigious professional journal Forest Ecology and Management.

El Hatico, a nine-generation family farm that has become an oasis of biodiversity among the sugarcane deserts of the Cauca Valley in Southwest Colombia, chose a different path, and finally, industry and government leaders are beginning to take notice. Now, according to Calle, the El Hatico model is being replicated around the country through a new government program, and other countries are watching to see the results.

That’s how I found myself riding shotgun with Alicia’s sister, Zoraida, making our way through miles of sugarcane fields as she told me a bit of El Hatico’s history.

“We’re at a very exciting moment in the development of this system,” Zoraida was telling me. As a specialist in ecological restoration with CIPAV (Center for the Investigation of Sustainable Agropecuarial Systems), she sees El Hatico and its Intensive Silvopastoral Systems approach to cattle farming as a key component in the rehabilitation of degraded tropical lands. CIPAV has dedicated 19 years to this project, and she has never seen the receptivity that has opened up in the past year.

“Every year we’re receiving visits from two or three Mexican producers and technicians; we’re seeing farmers from Nicaragua, Panama, Brazil, Cuba and Argentina. They want to see how it’s possible to do what they are doing.”

Conventional cattle farming requires the application of 100 to 800 kilograms of urea fertilizer per hectare per year, costly imported fossil fuel-based fertilizers that create runoff into regional streams, degrading water quality and suppressing the fish populations. The tropical forests that once stretched the length and breadth of the Cauca Valley were felled more than a century ago for lumber and many hectares were converted to cattle farms; since then, the more lucrative business of sugar has supplanted most of the cattle, with even greater environmental impacts because of widespread herbicide and pesticide use.

Finally we are leaving the monochromatic landscape of cane and entering a promenade of graceful saman trees. An enormous bird swoops across the road in front of us, as if to welcome us to its world – a garrapatero, or yellow-headed caracara, Zoraida tells me.

A flock of black ibises with their curving red beaks flutters by and lands on the lush grass in the forest at our left. A cluster of white cattle egrets alights amid the roan-colored cattle to our right.

“Oh, look, it’s a cocli,” exclaims Zoraida as a huge and magnificent pair of birds lands in a field along the way. These birds are also nearly extinct in the region. “These birds are almost extinct in the Cauca Valley – but here they have a home.”

We have arrived in El Hatico.

We pull up to an elegant iron gate and Carlos Molina is there to greet us, the eldest brother in a family of six brothers and sisters who tend the heritage of their grandfathers and serve as agroforestry educators, agronomists and entrepreneurs. A tall, handsome man with an easy smile under his broad-brimmed straw hat, he’s delighted to learn of my grandfather, the agroforestry pioneer, and my mother, the organic farmer, and we connect immediately.

My grandfather passed away in April, and since then I have felt his presence with me strongly – especially on this day, as I invited him along for the ride. I think he was pleased with what he saw.

Carlos showed us around the house first, a graceful relic from the late 1700s whose terra cotta tile roof had survived its 230 years with little damage, but some of the beams were beginning to bow, and workmen were carefully disassembling it, replacing the bowed segments and marveling at the integrity of the original structure.
“Look at this giant reed,” Carlos said, shaking his head in wonder at the strength of the caña brava, a local species used to build the roof. “Just as strong as it was 200 years ago.”

The same could be said for this family and its farm, which has held together through two centuries of revolution and armed conflict, drug wars and economic crises and climate crises, an oasis amid the storms.

Soon we were joined by another of the Molina brothers, the equally charismatic Enrique, along with an agronomist and an environmental educator from Costa Rica who had come to tour the farm as well.
“The problem of the defense of the forests is of anguishing seriousness and the most terrible threat to the future of the region,” wrote Enrique and Carlos’ great uncle, Ciro Molina Garcés, in 1937.

By 1942, vast expanses throughout the region had been cleared by logging and cattle operations, as we see in the aerial photos that begin our presentation. By 1986, the landscape had been converted to a patchwork cane farms. Only the dark patch of Hatico remained as forest.

Today El Hatico is a mixed-use farming operation; 32 percent is organic sugar cane; only 5.5 percent is pure hardwood forest, but another nearly 9 percent is native bamboo forest, while 12.7 percent is under what is called SSPI, Intensive Silvopastoral System by its Spanish acronym, and this is the part that is being closely watched by industry leaders.

“When we talk to agricultural producers, they look around and say, oh, this isn’t good. Our fathers and grandfathers taught us you have to cut the trees down,” Carlos said. “But I tell them, look around; see for yourselves. We have 80 percent canopy cover here, and look at the quality and quantity of this grass. And this is with zero chemical inputs. Conservation and production do not compete; they work together.”

In terms of cost, the El Hatico balance sheet comes out shining. Due in part to improved production and in part to a greatly decreased cost in inputs – zero agrochemicals, zero soy supplements for the animals because of the higher nutritional value of their grazing plants, and greatly reduced irrigation costs and the associated electricity bill – El Hatico shows that conservation is good business.

In addition, the Molinas point out, they are providing priceless environmental services: carbon fixation, oxygen production, hydrogen cycle regulation, productive capacity of the soil and conservation of biodiversity.

But what really captured the attention of industry leaders was the production at El Hatico during the drought of 2009-2010, brought on by El Niño, which devastated producers throughout Latin America. In 2009, El Hatico actually had higher production than the year before – a result that was virtually unheard of throughout the industry. “And this was without irrigation,” emphasized Carlos.

Now it was time for the tour. Carlos and Enrique led us out the cast-iron gate and down the shady lane, where a pair of magnificent coclis were grazing in the tall grasses nearby. Enrique spoke of the challenge of transferring the family’s values to each new generation in an era when most young people leave the farm for other opportunities in the cities.

Here at El Hatico, each child on his or her third birthday is placed on a horse for their first horseback ride. The horse continues to be a tool to connect the children with the farm, and on their first communion they are presented with a small mare.

“It creates a sort of an addiction,” Enrique explained, “but a healthy addiction – it sensitizes them to the family heritage. These three elements – equine, human and natural environment – are a supremely beautiful way to provide environmental education for the children.”

Indeed, the tour of the entire farm is a supremely beautiful educational approach for all of us. The next stop is the under the enormous spreading branches of the grandfather saman tree that Carlos and Enrique’s father planted 70 years ago and has become a symbol of the farm.

Much of the resistance to agroforestry for grazing comes from the idea that broadleaf plants are a weed and must be eliminated, Carlos explains. In fact, shade eliminates the most problematic broadleaf plants, and the native plants provide good, high-protein forage – “so the ‘maleza’ becomes a ‘bueneza,’” he jokes, using a play on the Spanish word for weed (maleza = weed, mal = bad, Buen = good).

Back on the lane to the highway, a flock of fulvous whistling ducks takes flight and the visitors grab for their cameras. I realize I’ve seen more birds here at El Hatico than I’ve seen on several birdwatching expeditions during my journey.

I learn many things on this tour; one is that organic sugarcane can be just as profitable as its chemical-assisted counterparts, and can be companion-planted with other crops. Part of the Molinas’ sugarcane work crew was hard at work when we arrived: a flock of hair sheep, grazing on the weeds that grow up between the rows, eliminating the need for herbicides. When they first began experimenting with the sheep as a means to control weeds, they were very careful to use moveable fences to protect the fledgling cane plants from the animals. One day, however, the fence got knocked down, and the pastor observed, to his surprise, that the sheep didn’t touch the cane – only the broadleaf plants around and between the rows.

In the beginning, the neighbors worried that the sheep would escape and create havoc in their fields. Now, Enrique says, they’re getting a different type of phone call from the neighbors, who want to borrow the sheep for weed removal in their own parcels: “’Send in the contractors!’ they say.”

Perhaps more importantly is the Molina’s alternative to the slash-and-burn approach to waste management that predominates throughout the industry. At the end of each growing season, most cane producers burn their fields, leading to air pollution, vast amounts of carbon pouring into the atmosphere, and destruction of healthy soil ecology, requiring more chemical inputs for the next crop.

Instead of burning, the Molinas use their cane waste to produce a ground-protecting mulch that is returned to the soil with each new season. This biomass is laid between rows and protects the soil moisture, drastically cutting down on the need for irrigation, Carlos explains. He picks up a handful of the brown grassy mass in the irrigation ditch and wrings a stream of water from it to demonstrate its capacity to hold water.

“This was the system we used until the 1960s, when they started burning – because that’s what they used in California and Hawaii,” he explained.

Under normal conditions, it costs a cane grower $300,000 per hectare per year to irrigate, Carlos said. The Molinas were able to irrigate their fields for much less.

Nowadays, Carlos says, visitors to the farm leave enthusiastic about making a transition on their own farms. “People no longer see us as romantics,” he says. “They see us as pragmatics.”

The sun sets quickly here in the tropics, and the insects and treefrogs sing a farewell chorus as we reached the old homestead. Carlos and Enrique shared a farewell song with us as well, one that was written for El Hatico by a friend who is a songwriter.

The Molinas shared with us a sumptuous buffet of typical Colombian cuisine, including fresh orange juice and crispy fried plantains from their own farm, and saw us off with hugs and an invitation to come back soon. As we walked to our car, I looked up and saw a cloud passing the moon. Somewhere out there, I thought, Grandpa was smiling.

El Hatico is open for agroecology tours. It’s less than an hour from Cali and is well worth the trip. Contact CIPAV at rnhatico@cipav.org.co for more information. Meanwhile, here’s the virtual tour.

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By Lee McLoughlin

Editor’s note: I visited the Maya Mountains, San Miguel and San Pedro Colombia in March of this year and the natural beauty of the area took my breath away. I was distressed to hear of plans to build a hydroelectric dam here and had hoped the community organizing efforts had put a stop to it. Unfortunately, Lee McLoughlin of the Ya’axché Conservation Trust contacted me recently to let me know that the project is a destructive reality, and one that the community and the conservation trust have teamed up to fight. What follows is a guest article by Lee and three excellent videos sponsored by the Ya’axché Conservation Trust. – Tracy L. Barnett

MAYA MOUNTAINS, Belize – The Toledo District of southern Belize is blessed with rich natural and cultural resources. Along its spine runs the rugged Maya Mountains, a largely uninhabited refuge for a wide variety of threatened and endangered species including jaguar, Baird’s tapir, howler monkey and the iconic scarlet macaw. The Maya Mountains are part of the last remaining relatively intact block of forest within the region – The Selva Maya – stretching from Belize to Guatemala and Mexico.

Central River in Bladen Nature Reserve (Photo courtesy of Ya’axché Conservation Trust)

In addition to the Maya Mountains’ value as a conservation area for threatened, endangered and endemic species it also provides services such as clean air and of course fresh, limestone filtered water to rural communities. To help protect these freshwater resources a large portion of the Maya Mountains are under some form of protection. The most strictly protected area in this block is the Bladen Nature Reserve which is co-managed by Ya’axché Conservation Trust and Belize Forest Department. Bladen protects the headwaters of the Monkey River and the Central River (Rio Grande tributary) where the river drops through sinkholes and emerges out of springs as it makes its way through the underground limestone cave systems on its way through indigenous Mayan communities and then coastal Creole communities before reaching Belize’s World Heritage Barrier Reef. The communities of San Pedro Columbia and San Miguel, in the upper Rio Grande watershed, are particularly dependent on these rivers as a source of drinking water, for washing and for irrigation for subsistence agriculture.

In November of last year Ya’axché Conservation Trust discovered that Belize Hydroelectric Development (BHD) had conducted an illegal ‘feasibility study’ for a proposed hydroelectric dam within the pristine, strictly protected Bladen Nature Reserve. This development was taking place without any prior consultation with the communities that would be affected by the dam and in addition Ya’axché, as co-managers of Bladen, were not informed. The communities of San Pedro Columbia and San Miguel mobilized to form a commitee and numerous meetings were held to allow people to voice their opinions. People were overwhelmingly against the development, especially since the same company had previously established a dam on the San Miguel river on community land without any tangible community benefit. Ya’axché decided to take the community opposition a step further and is now involved in litigation against BHD and the Forest Department who granted them the permit.

Community meeting in San Pedro Columbia (Photo by Chris Hamley)

What this illegal development showed was a complete disregard for the human rights of the indigenous communities living downstream and the rich ecology of the Maya Mountains. Ya’axché realized that it was necessary to give a voice to those communities who would be most affected by developments such as this. To ensure this voice is heard Ya’axche requested permission from Ajax films to publicize ‘Saving Paradise’ and later collaborated with Ajax films to create ‘River to Reef’.

Saving Paradise from Ajax Films uploaded by Ya'axché Conservation Trust on Vimeo.

The first film, ‘Saving Paradise’, is the story of the opposition of Toledo communities to the proposed hydro dam and the five-day expedition to the site of the ‘development’ in the remote upper reaches of the Maya Mountains. It enabled the community members and Ya’axché to show those who could not make the long trek, the damage that had been caused by the developers. This included the bulldozing of a road, clearing forested slopes, blocking waterways and creeks and clearing helicopter landing pads. ‘Saving Paradise’ also shows the series of community meetings which followed the ‘feasibility study’ and particularly the passion and organization of the communities in opposition to this dam.

The second film, ‘River to Reef’, is all about the relationship of modern Belizeans to their water resources, it highlights the impacts that we have on our watersheds on individual, community and commercial levels. Importantly it not only demonstrates the negative impacts but also shows those committed individuals who are making small changes in their community to achieve healthy watersheds and coastal reefs for future generations. The film is currently being shown on Belizean Television, on the internet and, most importantly, in schools and communities.

River to Reef from Ajax Films uploaded by Ya'axché Conservation Trust on Vimeo.

For more information on the fight against the dam please check out the blog, Let Our River Flow. For more information about the activities and protected areas of Ya’axche Conservation Trust, including the 100,000-acre Bladen Nature Reserve and the 15,000-acre Golden Stream Corridor Preserve please visit the Ya’axche Conservation Trust website at www.yaaxche.org or write to cmichaelangelo@yahoo.com or nicrequena@gmail.com. And to lend your voice to the cause, write to Belize Prime Minister Dean Barrow at cabinet@btl.net, or call him at (501) 822-0399; and write a letter to the newspapers, Amandala (editor_amandala@yahoo.com) and the Belize Times, 3 Queen Street, PO box 506, Belize City, Belize.

And to close the subject with a smile, check out this short video by a group of Toledo High School students, Damn the Dam! It’s priceless.

Damn the Dam! from Ajax Films uploaded by Ya'axché Conservation Trust on Vimeo.

Jorge, Murunahua man, who was shot in the eye by loggers on first contact in 1996, Breu, River Yurua, Peru. © Survival International

By David Hill

Editor’s note: David Hill is a former researcher at Survival International, an organization that has taken the lead in defending the rights of the increasingly embattled indigenous people of the planet, especially those who have taken a stand in defense of their native land. For more information, to sign up for alerts and to lend your name to the cause, see www.survivalinternational.org.

PERUVIAN AMAZON – The tragic Gulf of Mexico oil spill, which led to the death of 11 people, has generated enormous concern about the environmental impacts of oil exploration and exploitation. But what about the social impacts? What about oil operations that can decimate whole groups of people? As reserves dwindle and prices rise, oil companies are moving into increasingly remote parts of the planet – some so remote, like the Peruvian Amazon, that they are inhabited by indigenous people who have no contact with the outside world.

These ‘uncontacted’ tribes, numbering an estimated 100 worldwide, are extremely vulnerable to any kind of contact with oil crews. The reason for this is simple: they have lived so isolated from other people for so long that they have not developed immunological defences against outsiders’ infections or viruses, including the common cold and flu. It doesn’t take much to start an epidemic: a brief encounter between an oil crew member and an ‘uncontacted’ man or woman, a hand on a shoulder, the exchange of a t-shirt. The fact is, colds kill.

These spears were left by the uncontacted Indians as a message to bar outsiders from entering.
© Marek Wolodzko/AIDESEP

This is no exaggeration. Time and time again first contact has wiped out 50% or more of entire Amazonian tribes. The Nahua, in south-east Peru, are one example. After first regular contact in 1984 following exploration by Shell on their land and the subsequent influx of loggers using the tracks and paths cut by Shell’s oil crews, more than half of the Nahua died in the next few years.

‘Many, many people died,’ remembers one of the survivors. ‘People dying everywhere. People left to rot along stream banks, in the woods, in their houses.’

Oil companies often acknowledge the danger their work poses to ‘uncontacted’ tribes, but continue to operate anyway. Shell did just that: ‘a cold could easily turn into pneumonia and be fatal,’ said one Shell plan. So too Mobil in the 1990s when they explored in Peru: ‘these populations are very susceptible to respiratory and Western diseases. . . for which they have no natural resistance.’ More recently, Barrett Resources admitted contact was ‘probable’ and could be ‘disastrous’, but that did not stop French company Perenco from taking over their operations, in northern Peru, in 2008.

Worse, some companies actually encourage their crews to establish contact with the tribes and even provide specific phrases to use. Some of these would be comic if the consequences weren’t so potentially tragic. Barrett recommended saying things like: ‘We are people just like you’ and ‘Is something disturbing you?’ Repsol-YPF, currently working in the same region, has suggested this: ‘Use a megaphone to inform the natives in the local languages why we are there and that it is not the company’s intention to interfere with their activities.’

Abandoned hut, believed to be Mashco-Piro, taken during FENAMAD trip to Tayacomme, Manu National Park, Peru. © FENAMAD

Other companies take a different tack and act as if the tribes didn’t exist. That is what Perenco has done. In a report to Peru’s Energy Ministry outlining the potential impacts of a pipeline it currently intends to build in northern Peru to help transport an estimated 300 million barrels of heavy crude oil from the Amazon to Peru’s Pacific Coast, there is plenty of detail about the ‘contacted’ indigenous people in the affected region, including village locations, potted histories, and even demographic statistics. And the two ‘uncontacted’ tribes who live there? No mention, absolutely no mention, of them at all.

Another tactic is to argue openly that the tribes really don’t exist, or that there is no evidence for them. ‘This is similar to the Loch Ness monster. Much talk but never any evidence,’ said a Perenco spokesperson when confronted by a British journalist last year. ‘We have to conclude that the existence of uncontacted tribes is extremely improbable,’ a spokesperson from Repsol-YPF, operating in the same region as Perenco, told Survival. ‘According to information provided to us by Repsol, there is no evidence of un-contacted people,’ said ConocoPhillips, Repsol’s partner in northern Peru.

The tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico led to renewed calls for offshore drilling to be banned altogether, so why not the deepest Amazon too? Ignore what the companies say. There is actually a huge amount of evidence for the existence of ‘uncontacted’ tribes in these regions, and by operating there the companies are, in addition to violating international law and the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, exposing the tribes to unknown diseases which could decimate them. No rig explosions required. Big Oil doesn’t need to spill to kill.

Click here to join Survival International’s campaign to stop oil exploration on uncontacted tribes’ land in Peru.

Temporary shelters built by an ‘uncontacted’ tribe in southeast Peru. © ACCA/Survival

SAN RAFAEL RESERVE, Alto Vera Department, Paraguay – “You are about to enter the most beautiful place in the world,” Daniel advised me as we bumped along on the rutted red road, which was growing more rutted and narrower by the minute as the dark forest closed in around us. Waist-high ferns and vine-draped trees rose in the darkness.

It had been two and a half hours since we’d left Encarnacion, Paraguay’s southern hub on the banks of the Parana, and it had been nearly an hour since we’d seen any kind of human habitation. Instead, miles and miles of wheat fields stretched to the horizon – the winter crop here, which will be harvested soon to make way for Roundup-Ready soy.

“The changes here in Alto Vera have been really dramatic in the past few years,” Daniel tells me. He’s watched as the vast Atlantic forests of his native land and the small farms that once dotted them have fallen, mile after mile, to make way for these fields.

“What’s happening is very sad,” he said. “The campesinos who have lived and farmed here all their lives are in a very precarious situation – if they have one bad season, they will be hungry all year. When a big producer comes to them and offers them money for their land, many of them can’t refuse. At $6,000 a hectare, it’s an inconceivable amount of money – they think they’ll be able to live on it for years, and they move to the city. Within a year or two, it’s all gone.”

My time in Paraguay has been colored in so many ways by the sadness of its history. I’ve come to San Rafael, however, to leave that behind for two precious days and nights in a place where a fragment of Paraguay’s former paradise remains, and a dedicated team of conservationists is working to preserve and restore it.

Among many other roles, Daniel Espinola is supervisor of operations at San Rafael and a member of the team at Guyra Paraguay, one of the country’s leading conservation groups. Its name is derived from the Guaraní word for “bird,” given that the organization’s founding mission was the preservation of bird habitat, but the group has grown far beyond its origins.

It was 10:30 by the time we arrived, and night had closed in on the forest long ago, so I would have to wait to judge the accuracy of Daniel’s description. “One always thinks their own land is the most beautiful,” he acknowledged, “so you will have to decide for yourself.”

The research station includes housing for up to 12 visitors; birdwatchers, scientists and ecotourists make their way here from all around the world to see some of the more than 400 different species of birds that make San Rafael their home.

Tomorrow, Daniel told me, I’m going to get to play forest ranger for a day. As I pulled up the comforter in the chilly night and blew out the candle, an absolute silence enveloped me and sleep descended like a warm blanket.

The light was just beginning to stream into my window when an excited commotion arose outside my cabin. It seemed that every bird in creation had gathered in our valley to put on a songbird symphony that very morning. The variety was tremendous; trills and chirps and melodious riffs interlaced in a tapestry of sound that seemed to envelop me in my half-asleep state.

I drowsed and listened for awhile, then threw open the shutters to see a gold-red peeping over the horizon. Joy was in the air; it was infectious. I understood what Daniel had meant.

Before breakfast, I saw a fork-tailed flycatcher, a southern lapwing and a – and was personally saluted by what looked like a versicolored emerald hummingbird who darted into my cabin door, hovered near me for a moment and darted back out. Afterwards I tried to settle in to do a bit of writing before our morning outing but the excitement going on outside my window was too much for me; I grabbed my binoculars and in no time had spotted a plush-crested jay and a ferruginous pygmy owl.

My day was filled with activities; I accompanied Ramon and Ariel on their rounds as they checked a series of sand “traps” set up to record the prints of the park’s feline species. I hoped to see a jaguar print and was disappointed, but we did see fox and armadillo prints. I put the binoculars Daniel loaned me to good use, In the afternoon we took a drive through the grasslands and watched as a trio of bright yellow-breasted carpintero campestres (campo flickers, a type of woodpecker) circled a giant termite hill in search of their six-legged prey and conspired to get some decent shots We spotted an amazing streamer-tailed tyrant, similar to a scissortail but with an even more dramatic double-plumed tail and beautiful cinnamon-colored face-markings, which I was also able to photograph.

Spring is bursting on the preserve, with wildflowers dotting the tallgrass prairie and the niño azote, a delicate pink mimosa-type bloom, sprinkling the forest. The male birds are wearing their most impressive plumage and singing their hearts out in hopes of attracting a mate, and migratory species linger in the vicinity, like the tyrannus savanna, the winsome black-and-white fork-tailed flycatcher I had seen in the morning.

Ariel accompanied me on a hike to the river; I watched a spectacular sunset over the mix of grasslands and forest that surround the station, and took in the riot of birdlife around its edges come back to life.

The time passed all too quickly, and soon I was on my way back to the city with Daniel, but not before visiting with a couple of the campesinos whom Guyra is working with to promote sustainable farming practices.

For more information about Guyra Paraguay, visit their website. The group manages four reserves and a wide range of programs and events in Asuncion and throughout Paraguay.

Meanwhile, a little photo tour of San Rafael:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

ASUNCION, Paraguay – It was an historic moment for Latin America, and perhaps for the world: A former guerilla, a former priest and a former coca grower, now presidents of their respective countries, stood together and addressed the continent’s largest assembly of social organizations.

Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, a former Catholic bishop whose election on April 20, 2008, signaled the end of a six-decade dictatorship, welcomed the Social Forum of the Americas to his country as a much-needed show of international support for his country’s fragile democracy. In addition to battling his own right-wing legislature, judiciary and mass media, the country’s first progressive president just last week began chemotherapy treatments for a newly diagnosed case of lymphoma. In perhaps the most emotional discourse of the entire forum, Lugo spoke from his heart.

“This privileged social forum is one of the lights we can raise like a torch to light the road to change in Latin America,” he said. “For the Paraguayan people, this is a sincere show of brotherhood …your presence is the force that will sustain us for the irreversible road to change in Paraguay.”

Bolivian President Evo Morales, risen from the ranks of indigenous organizers and coca growers, called the moment a sign of the times. “Never in the ’80s or the ’90s would you have seen a president at any of these events – and now we are here to receive your solutions, to convert them into programs and projects to liberate our people.”

The relationship between the forum and the progressive governments of the South has been a reciprocal one, with presidents from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have used it to burnish their images with social movements. The World Social Forum was launched in 2001 in the neighboring country of Brazil as a counterpoint to the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and as a meeting place and incubator for social movements across the globe under the theme, “Another World is Possible.”

Over the years the annual event has drawn upwards of 100,000 participants and has become so unwieldy that some have dismissed it as little more than a feel-good talk session or a left-wing carnival. But to many here, the social forum has become a force to be reckoned with, and indeed, a current that has nurtured and informed the continent’s leftward shift over the past decade.

“Critics have said all along that the forum is just a gabfest,” said Marc Becker, longtime forum observer and Latin American historian. “But there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s fundamentally shifted the discourse from neoliberalism and the Washington consensus to an environment that has permitted the rise of the leftist governments we have today.”

Since its inception, the WSF has spun off numerous regional and thematic versions. This week’s gathering, launched Aug. 11 and running through Sunday (Aug. 15), was the fourth hemispheric gathering, and it drew more than 10,000 from all over the Americas and beyond. Its slogan, “Nuestra America está en camino” (Our America is on its way), reflected the optimistic view that significant progress has been made toward achieving that other possible world.

This year’s themes were many and diverse, ranging from climate change and food sovereignty to the impacts of an increasingly industrialized agriculture and the growing number and strength of U.S. military bases throughout the continent.

Whether the forum will manage to shift the debate at the global level remains to be seen, but there’s little doubt that it has had significant impact at the regional and certainly at the local level, and within the movements themselves.

Peruvian anti-mining activist Lourdes Huanca actually credits the connections she made at the forum with saving her life and that of other activists during a violent confrontation with the Peruvian government.

“We sent out an e-mail to the contacts we had made saying, ‘Help, they are killing us!’” she said. Via Campesina, a global peasant organization, sent a representative and others responded by putting pressure on the government, and the situation was resolved, she said.

Groups as diverse as the Via Campesina and the Latin American Network of Women Transforming the Economy (REMTE, by its Spanish acronym), some of whose feminist leaders hold multiple academic degrees, come together across borders to strategize on their own issues, and reach out to learn about the struggles of other groups, as well.

Sonia Alvarez of the University of Massachusetts attributes the forum with giving women a much more prominent voice within social movements in the South; Gina Vargas, a fellow member of the Network, agreed.

“When Via Campesina first began having a presence here, the men would say, ‘Here we’ll have our meetings, and there the women will do their cooking,’” said Vargas. “We said, ‘Wait a minute!’”

As the Via Campesina women began to interact with strong women leaders, the power balance began to shift. This year, one of the most dynamic speakers from the central stage was Magui Balbuena, a campesina leader from Paraguay.

Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchu, who was received with perhaps even more excitement than any of the presidents, joined a panel defining the concept of “buen vivir,” or living well – a counterpoint promoted by the new Latin American left as a counterpoint to the individualist striving for the better life promoted by industrialist societies, a striving that speakers said impoverishes the planet through mindless consumerism.

‎”Our elders taught us that what we can take with our hands is ours; what doesn’t fit is for someone else. It’s selfishness that caused us to take the rest and put it in a bag for ourselves – and that selfishness is destroying the world,” she said.

One area in which the forum has the potential for a greater global impact is in the area of climate change. Groups preparing for the upcoming climate talks in Cancun, a follow-up to Copenhagen, have been working behind the scenes since April’s WSF-styled People’s Climate Summit in Cochabamba to further the development of an International Court for Climate Justice. Their sessions laid the groundwork for a multifaceted approach in Cancun.

Back in Paraguay, it’s hard to measure the impact on local social movements, but farmer Braulio Anibal Avalos provided a little insight when he stopped me on the stairs after a workshop to tell me how excited he was.
“This forum has completely changed my way of looking at the world,” said Avalos, whose family has been involved since before his birth in a fight to reclaim their cooperative’s land after it was seized by the Paraguayan government for supposed subversive activity.

Paraguay’s difficult past – first, a war with neighboring countries in which it lost more than half its territory, followed by the dictatorship – has made Paraguayans insular and isolated, he said.

“I’ve always been extremely nationalist because of our history,” he said. “But today, as I look around and discover the thousands of people from other countries who are struggling for a better world, I realize the fight is not just ours. I realize we are not alone.”

Here are a few images from the Fourth Social Forum of the Americas:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

POPTUN, Guatemala – It’s been a long day, and Rosa Maria Chan is still not finished. She’s traveled for hours on twisty, rocky country roads, held community meetings in three villages, toured a cacao farm, met with the liaison for funding from the World Bank and a tilapia farmer, answered questions all day long from a visiting journalist, checked in with the Guatemalan Vice-Minister of the Environment and a score of others via cell phone, and ate a hasty dinner while checking her e-mail.

It’s 9 p.m., and by most people’s standards, it would be a good time to turn in. She has a two-day workshop on watershed protection beginning tomorrow, and she needs to prepare.

But now the mayor of Poptun is here, visiting with a Guatemalan legislator who is head of the committee on environment, and she has some networking to do.

There’s no such thing as down time for Rosa Maria Chan, director of ProPeten, archaeologist turned administrator of one of the country’s most respected environmental organizations. The tireless drive she once applied in six-day jungle expeditions, like the one where she discovered an ancient Mayan village she named Zapote Corozal, she now channels into marathon searches for funding.

This time, however, she’s motivated not by the call of an ancient people but the spirit of their descendents, migrants who have been pushed off their land by poverty and war. These are the people she sees as key to a stable, sustainable future for a seriously troubled region.

The Peten, home of Tikal and a host of other magnificent Mayan cities, takes up a third of Guatemala; it is the largest of the country’s states, or departments. Until relatively recently, it was an untamed jungle wilderness. In the 1960s, that began to change, with the construction of a new highway, followed by wealthy landowners coming in and clearing the jungle to make way for enormous cattle ranches. These landowners, called latifundistas, were seeking a calmer place to live, away from the conflicts in the highlands resulting from an attempt at agrarian reform, and Kek’chi and Mopan Mayas moved there to work the plantations.

The ‘70s and ‘80s brought a different sort of migrant, those fleeing violence in their homelands in the highlands. In three decades, the population of the area increased 10 percent each year; in 1990, the former wilderness was home to 300,000. But the bulk of the newcomers didn’t find the good farmland they were hoping for, as most of that had already been snatched up by the latifundistas. Instead they settled on parcels on the hillsides and planted their milpas as they had for centuries. The forest was decimated.

In 1990 the government responded to international pressure to preserve what was left of the forest – mainly a huge swath of jungle and wetlands in the north, where the Maya Biosphere Reserve was created, forming the largest natural preserve in Central America. In 1995 it followed suit with four smaller preserves in the south of Peten.

In theory, it sounded good. The problem was that the people living there had nowhere to go. A long-range plan to resettle them was not carried out, and continued population growth led more and more people to invade the preserves, causing escalating conflicts, especially in the region of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, where ProPeten – at that time a project of Conservation International – had a field station to do research and work with local communities to protect the preserve.

Unfortunately, people in the local communities saw the environmental community as a threat to their survival. The tensions culminated in the burning of the field station and a highly publicized incident in which members of the ProPeten staff were held hostage.

This was all before Rosa Maria’s time, but she relates the history as if it were her own – as it was soon to be, as Carlos Sosa, her longtime friend and mentor and the founder and director of ProPeten, asked her to become the head of its board of directors. “I know you, and I know you will never sell out ProPeten,” he told her.

The hostage crisis, Rosa Maria says, just brought to a head the differences in philosophy between the staff of Conservation International and the local staff of ProPeten. As she sees it, Conservation International, like most of the mainline conservation organizations at the time, took a strictly conservation-oriented approach, whereas the local staff recognized the need to integrate social policies into the organization, a need that CI failed to respond to.

“That’s why I refer to myself – and to ProPeten – as an environmentalist, not a conservationist,” Rosa Maria told me on the day we met. “I see people as part of the environment, and if you don’t include them in your plan, it will fail.”

Sosa gave up trying to convince the Conservation International leadership to change their strategy and decided it was time to separate. What ensued was a painful power struggle that Rosa Maria euphemistically calls “a divorce.” As chair of the board of directors, she was drawn into the struggle. It was a nightmarish time that she doesn’t like to recall, especially the most painful part. During that year, Sosa was diagnosed with late-stage cancer, and soon after, he died.

The board of directors called an emergency meeting and immediately asked Rosa Maria to take over as director. It was a difficult decision, as she was currently involved in a high-profile archaeological project at Piedras Negras, listed as one of the world’s most endangered historical sites by UNESCO. The organization was left nearly bankrupt and without even an office or supplies after the rift with CI. Most people would have run in the opposite direction.

But Rosa Maria felt called to the task. She finished her two-month commitment at Piedras Negras and set to work rebuilding the organization. Seven years later, by all accounts, her work has paid off; ProPeten is seen locally, nationally and internationally as one of Guatemala’s most successful environmental organizations.

One key to Rosa Maria’s success has been her longtime experience working with government and nonprofit agencies. She started by working her way through college in a job with the Guatemalan Secretary of Planning. Here she learned how to do budgets and negotiate the system, and she began to build allies at the national level. She later held jobs with several other nonprofits, including the German nonprofit GTZ, and learned how to write fundraising proposals.

On a normal day, she juggles telephones and e-mail accounts and meetings with the agility of an acrobat. But today, she’s left all that behind to enjoy the fresh air of the countryside and meet with some of the communities she’ll be raising funds for. I’ve been invited to ride along, because this is really the only time she has to meet with me. So she and two ProPeten staffers, Elder Hernandez and Hector Choc, explain to me some of the many programs ProPeten is sponsoring in the countryside as we bump along a country road past scorched hillsides and grazing cattle.

On this particular day, she’s meeting with some of the five communities that have expressed an interest in starting cacao farms. Rosa Maria is approaching international foundations to find the funding for this project, and she wants to be sure the communities are prepared to invest the time necessary for a successful project.
“Cacao is a good thing to promote here because it’s native to the area, and it’s part of their indigenous tradition,” she explained. “It requires shade, so it’s a form of agroforestry, which protects the soils and the watersheds.”

Ultimately, however, perhaps the most important result is to give these families a way to earn a living on their own land without slashing, burning and using it up, as so many families have done. It will also give them the incentive to resist the land speculators coming through to buy up tracts for the oil palm companies, which ProPeten and other environmental groups see as an increasing threat to the region.

Other programs that ProPeten is sponsoring now throughout the countryside include tilapia ponds, ecotourism projects, a educational program with a soap opera and xate cultivation – xate is a native plant used by the floral industry which has been severely depleted in Guatemalan forests by foraging campesinos who sell it to make a living.

In fact, the illegal harvesting of xate has grown to the point that, as Guatemalan forests have been depleted, people have been crossing over the border to Belize to harvest their xate. The plant is now in danger of extinction and the government has passed a law requiring xate dealers to verify that their harvests come from legitimate sources. Guatemalan incursions into Belize for xate harvesting is on the decline in the past year, Rosa Maria’s Belizian contacts have told her, in part due to the new law and in part because of the xate cultivation promoted by ProPeten.

After two days in the communities come two days of meetings of an entirely different sort: local and regional leaders gather to map out a strategy for watershed protection. Then, on Saturday, a meeting with a local women’s cooperative.

While Rosa Maria’s work may be tiring, it is not without its rewards. Southern Peten has embraced her with open arms, and everyone from the mayor to the local agriculture administrator and the head of the regional planning department shows up to spend two days mapping out a watershed management plan under her direction.

“I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with Rosa Maria since the beginning of my administration and I’ve seen the success she’s had administering this organization and working with the local groups and the municipality,” said Poptun Mayor Angel Kilkán Ochoa. “She’s a woman of enormous vision, and I wish we had 10 or more people like her, and that all the municipalities would work with her and her team to lift up our communities together.”

Donald Perez, coordinator of the regional organization of community leaders, agreed. “I would say that today, ProPeten is the NGO with the weight and experience to represent the initiatives of conservation and human development in Peten – and given that Peten represents a third of Guatemala, we could say that we’re really good ambassadors for conservation at an international level for our country, thanks to the live experiences of ProPeten that are excellent examples.”

Here are some images from the four days I spent with Rosa Maria, Hector and Elder. The videotaped interview with Rosa Maria (above) is available only in Spanish at this time – sorry!). For more information about ProPeten, visit their website, www.ProPeten.org.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

We’re seated at his kitchen table now, in the home he designed and built, sharing a cup of the freshest coffee I’ve ever tasted. A soft-spoken Kakchiquel Maya with a loose ponytail and a gentle voice, Rony takes a sip of the fragrant brew and settles in to tell me his story.

The light filters in pleasantly from above through a skylight, an artfully placed series of bamboo tubes and the brown, green and white glass cylinders high above us that are set into the adobe walls. Later I learn, to my surprise, that these colorful cylinders are discarded bottles.

A tree trunk with its gracefully gnarled limbs emerges somewhere from the wrought-iron staircase; a lamp woven from bamboo hangs above us. The stone wall and arched door of the sauna in the background, the lush greenery of the garden out back and the savory aroma of home-grown and home-cooked food complete the picture of natural harmony.

I am at home with a permaculturist.

Permaculture, for the uninitiated, is a design system that incorporates everything from agriculture to architecture to community and organizational development into an elegant system that works in harmony with nature.

How permaculture came to this tiny village amid the volcanoes on the shores of Lake Atitlan is a story as winding as the canals Rony designed to slow down the torrential floodwaters here.

Rony was one of the hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans whose lives were blown apart by the 36-year civil war. He was just a boy when his father was killed by the army.

“My family was always involved in community development and organizing, and that was the reality in those days; anyone who was working with the community was perceived as a threat.”

His family, in fear for their lives, fled to the United States with the help of the Catholic diocese of New Ulm, Minn., which has a strong presence in this village.

Rony studied at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, earning a degree in cultural anthropology, but always with the idea of coming back home and applying it in a way that would make a difference for his people.
“I never wanted to gain knowledge just to put it in a book on a shelf,” he said. “For me, knowledge has to go beyond theory, it’s something you must put into practice.”

Returning home in 1994, when the conflict had calmed and negotiations were underway, he looked around for a project that could apply what he’d learned about his roots in the Mayan tradition, a tradition interwoven with the rhythms of nature.

“My idea was how to reconstruct and rescue the traditional, ancestral knowledge, and of course much of that had to do with agriculture, because that’s the base of our culture.”

On his own he read far and wide about alternative agricultural practices, and he began to dig into the ancient traditions of his own people. He found his first project on a piece of flood-prone land near the lake, owned by the Catholic Diocese. The land was compacted from many years of cattle grazing, and it flooded, along with the surrounding homes, every rainy season.

Rony asked for the land to try out the ancient system known in ancient Nahuatl as chinampas. The chinampa system is most famously illustrated by the design of ancient Mexico City, which was built by diverting the waters of a swampy lake into canals. Xochimilco, a historic neighborhood in the south of Mexico City, is the last vestige of the old chinampa system.

Here in the Guatemalan highlands, the Kakchiquel Maya had the same concept with a different name, but it fell out of use many years ago with the advent of modern agriculture.

Rony organized a group of subsistence farmers to help him analyze the situation and reclaim the land so that they could farm it, and they spent weeks digging the ditches that would slow down and channelize the rushing waters. But come rainy season, it didn’t work; the canals were clogged with sediment, and the project was swamped.

“Of course, in the anthropology books they tell you about the chinampas, but they don’t tell you how to build them,” he recalls with a laugh.

That’s when he was invited to a conference in the States on traditional agricultural practices, and he decided to make the trip with a dual purpose: to visit the Santa Fe-based center of Permacultura America Latina.

It was there at the “permaculture mansion” of one of the PAL board members that Rony began to realize the potential of permaculture to transform living systems. He explained his plan to PAL founder Ali Sharif, who took a look and quickly diagnosed the problem. The canals he had made were linear and angular – not like anything you’d find in nature. The trick to designing systems that work well is in mimicking nature, Sharif explained, working with nature instead of against it.

The trip was a breakthrough for him, and he ended up making another trip to Australia to study with the legendary Bill Mollison, one of the founders of the permaculture system.

Soon after his trip to Australia, he was joined by Rebecca Cutter, an artist, designer and educator from New York, who had heard about Rony’s group, then called Ija’tz, the Kakchiquel word for seeds. All she knew about the project was that it combined design and organic agriculture in some innovative ways. She came down to volunteer and ended up staying.

The new chinampa design was by all accounts a success. Rebecca took me on a tour and I was able to see the lush forest they had created on this urban tract of about 60 by 150 meters, where there once was only barren, compacted ground. It was raining, so I saw the canal system at work.

“What this does is slow the water down,” Rebecca explained. “Fast water is destructive.”

Runoff from surrounding hillsides carries tons of soil, silt, sand and other debris with it, which formerly ended up in the houses of the people who were flooded each year. Now the water as well as the soil it carries is retained on the land, and at the end of each rainy season when the canals dry up, the farmers empty them of that season’s load of rich soil, sand and silt, piling it up on the sides. In this way, mounds of rich, fertile soil a meter high or more has been built along the meandering canals.

A profusion of tropical plant life, much of it edible, sprouts from those hills. Rebecca shows me the house where they once lived on the site, and a “banana circle,” a permaculture technique involving a circle of banana palms used to treat greywater.

IxChel, Rebecca and Rony’s curly-haired, bright and energetic daughter, accompanies us on the tour, running off to gather wild strawberries and yellow flowers to share with us.

The growers collective who made up Ija’tz eventually decided to focus their energy around the production and commercialization of organic coffee. Rony and Rebecca supported their decision but wanted to continue promoting Permaculture with a focus on the protection of genetic diversity both locally and throughout Mesoamerica. So in 2000, Rony and Rebecca founded the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute, or IMAP, and the two associations continue to collaborate and support each other.

In the decade since its founding, the group has organized local growers to produce seeds and vegetables organically and has helped to create fair trade markets and seed exchanges with farmers and organizations working locally and throughout Guatemala; set up a center that has adapted the permaculture system to a subtropical and indigenous setting; where they’ve taught hundreds of students, both local and international; and responded to the disaster created by Hurricane Stan with low-tech water treatment systems, soil conservation practices, community gardens and other appropriate-technology approaches to disaster relief.

Perhaps their biggest success has been the establishment of a seed bank, housing seeds from thousands of native plants and disseminating them among local growers to keep them in circulation. The seed bank is a concept that has been growing in response to an increased homogenization of agriculture, with corporate growers pressuring local varieties out of existence.

Now, however, it’s time for us to go, and the rain is growing stronger. My tour of IMAP and the seed bank will have to wait for another day.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

SAN LUCAS TOLIMAN, Guatemala – School principal Aroldo Jerez Celada understands the importance of trees in the prevention of disasters like the one brought by Tropical Storm Agatha. He’s also seen, first-hand, the human disaster that keeps the obviously needed reforestation from happening.

“Of course we at the school worry about this, located as we are at the base of these volcanoes. We’ve done more than worry; we’ve actually tried to do something about it.”

A couple of years ago he organized a group of community volunteers and students from the school he directs to do a tree planting on the steep slopes surrounding this town, consulting with the experts to find out which type of tree was the best for these situations and raising the money to buy the seedlings.

The group was proud and exhilarated with their first planting of 500 trees. They had a plan for follow-up maintenance, taking turns to go up and check on the trees and water them through the dry season. But one day the team went up and discovered the area they had planted had been fenced off. The steep incline had been slated for development.

In many cases, local governments tend to be more a part of the problem than the solution. Here, one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods was a government housing complex built on one of these hillsides. The day of the storm, however, and even the day after, government officials were notably absent, Jerez and others told me.

“Our government, unfortunately, needs to be more organized,” said Jerez. “They didn’t have a plan, nobody knew what to do or where to go.”

I began my day with Rony Lec, from the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute (IMAP), and other members of a coalition of community groups meeting in the municipal hall, mapping out an emergency plan, assigning tasks, without any apparent input from the municipal government, which was largely absent. Rony was running the meeting. Like most of the others on this committee, he is working full-time without pay to help organize the response. I left the group at their gargantuan task and headed over to the shelter called Anexo to interview Jerez.

Saturday morning, after some 12 hours of intense and driving rain that was continuing unabated, Jerez ventured out into the downpour to rent a mototaxi and take a look around.

“I realized at 9 a.m. that we had a disaster,” he said. “Already there were many families in the area of the football field whose homes were underwater.”

A few hours later, the first landslides came, and then the people started pouring in. As of today, six days later, he is caring for 40 families, a total of 72 people.

Nobody showed up from the government until the next day. Aroldo had sick children in the shelter, including a small girl with pneumonia, and he took it upon himself to contact an organization and ask for donated medicine, and it arrived 24 hours later. He showed me with pride his ample stock. He had no idea if any of the other shelters had sick people.

Emergency supplies had finally been delivered by the federal government on Tuesday. But there was no one to coordinate the distribution, and the food and other supplies were grabbed by whomever was there.

Suddenly, a knock came at the door. The mayor was finally here.

Here was my chance to get an interview, I thought, and I went out with Jerez to find the mayor surrounded with the shelter’s inhabitants, each trying to tell their story, pleading for help. As the camera rolled, the mayor listened intently, tears in his eyes. He promised to do what he could and headed for the door.

I stopped him to ask for a few minutes of his time, and he told me to meet him in his office in half an hour. “He won’t be there,” one of the men in the shelter laughed.

He was right; the mayor wasn’t there. I waited for an hour. Finally I saw him approaching the central park, flanked by a crowd, talking to many, and then he prepared to leave. I approached, got his attention, his apology and his phone number, and agreed to call him in the afternoon. There was no answer, and his voicemail was not accepting messages, so unfortunately I can’t give his side of the story.

Felix Gomez, a representative of the Fundacion Guillermo Toriello, a community development organization, chairs the committee. He had been instructed in risk assessment and was working in the community to prepare people for disasters like this one when Agatha fell with all her fury, and he was trapped here.

“We heard from news reports on Thursday that the storm was on its way,” said Gomez. “Unfortunately we don’t have a culture of disaster preparedness.”

Gomez had already warned government officials that people should not be living in the high-risk areas at the foot of the mountains but his warning went unheeded.

Volunteers put together a form and went from shelter to shelter conducting a census on the first day and the second day, and I accompanied them. On the third day, we began to go out to the neighborhoods on the periphery and contact the leaders to get a sense of how many had been left homeless but had not come in to the shelters.

Yesterday in Pavarotti shelter, the Sicay family, Juan and Petrona, invited me to their home to see the damage. They lived near the family who had been buried in their home, and they agreed to show me the place.

The Sicays were one of the families who lived near the football field, and their home filled with water on Friday from a flash flood, long before the landslides began. They grabbed their two little ones and the two bigger boys and fled, running down the street in chest-high water. They had nowhere to go, and walked through the downpour until they arrived at the home of a family who took them in until the shelter opened.

They showed me the kitchen, which had only a single piece of furniture – a hutch, that had once held her dishes. Most had been washed away in the storm. I asked where the stove had been.

“I never had a stove – I made my tortillas right here,” said Petrona, kneeling in the mud next to a pair of cinderblocks, where she used to build her fire. “I’m not going to lie to you. This is how we live.”

A huge hole in the back of the kitchen floor showed where the river had found its way through their house.
Next they all filed into the small bedroom area, where mattresses were tightly packed into the cramped space, and a dresser overflowed with wet clothes. A clothesline stretched the length of the room, where ears of corn had been hanging to dry, and were now beginning to cover with mildew.

“We would take our clothes out and try to save them, but we have nowhere to take them,” Petrona explained.
The older son, Juan Antonio, was out back, trying to rescue what was left of the tiny corn patch, but there was little left to salvage. Most was covered in mud.

Finally I asked them to take me up to the place where the family had refused to leave their home and had been buried, the father and mother and three children, together with a neighbor who had been trying to rescue them.

The day ended with a ray of hope from a source higher than the government. The night before, I noticed a crowd gathering in the streets to marvel at a bright light that was shining from the hills above. It was so far up that there was no way someone could have climbed up there to place a light.

On the other side of the landslide gleamed something else – a white image of the Virgin Mary, gleaming from a patch of barren stone.

I went to the foot of the hill with Emilio and Eliazar, who had been canvassing the shelters and neighborhoods with me, to get a closer look. A campesino was in his backyard when we passed, and I asked him what he thought of it. “Well, the good book says there’ll be lots of signs in the last days,” he said with a hearty laugh. “I think we’re seeing them.”

Emilio and Eliazar had another take on the situation. “I was seeing it as more of a sign of encouragement, like it was saying things are going to be all right,” said Emilio, hopefully.

Today, as I made my way back from the destroyed homes, people were gathering in the streets to witness another marvel – a group of young people making their way up the mountain to pay their respects. My friends Emilio and Eliazar were among them.

Here are a few images from my second day in San Lucas.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.