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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CERRO ROKE, Paraguay – The red school bus rattled its way down the red dirt road, cutting a path through the grey mist. The driver assured me we had not gone too far; my destination was the last stop on the line. Finally he lurched to a halt.

The bamboo gate was the only clue that I’d arrived at Takuara Renda, Paraguay’s permaculture center. Guillermo Gayo, the bio-architect at the heart of it all, was there to greet me, a welcoming South American double-kiss at the ready.

I learned about Takuara Renda at the Social Forum of the Americas in Asuncion, where Guillermo had transformed a corner of the intensely busy forum into a peaceful retreat with one of his bamboo houses.

It was there that I learned of his unique take on permaculture, built on a foundation of bamboo and his lifelong work as an architect devoted to the field of bioconstruction, a form of construction that emphasizes natural materials and sustainable technologies.

Takuara Rendá, his permaculture reference center, takes its name from the Paraguay’s native language, Guaraní, and means “home of the bamboo.” As an architect and a designer seeking to dignify peoples’ lives while lightening environmental impact, he had gravitated toward bamboo as a rapidly renewable and highly versatile construction material.

He invited me to come out to his permaculture center, about two hours outside of the city of Paraguarí, to see it for myself, and so I did.

What I found there in the lush green woods was something between a zen retreat, a woodsy inventor’s workshop and a hands-on learning center. Here a crew of Paraguayan, Argentine and Brazilian students were busy assembling bamboo creations, from doors to chairs to light fixtures.

What wasn’t as visible was the infinitely slower work of creating an agroforestry reserve from a depleted wasteland.

The restoration, the agroforestry, the garden and the bamboo workshop all work together to create an integrated way of life for Guillermo, who has earned his living teaching bioconstruction with bamboo all over the continent. Guillermo was teaching tools for planetary survival long before he discovered David Holmgren’s guide to permaculture, translated to Spanish, at the home of a Brazilian friend. But reading the book brought many aspects of his thought and practice into a sharper focus, and that focus eventually led him to get his training in permaculture design and to establish Takuara Rendá.

“If you had seen this place 10 years ago, you wouldn’t have believed it,” he was telling the guests from Asuncion who had arrived for a tour of the place. Overworked, overgrazed and burned over and over again, as was the agricultural practice in these parts, the land had reached a point where natural regeneration would be next to impossible. “It was like scar tissue,” he said. “We had to rebuild the soil, and that takes time.”

Looking around now at the lush and incredibly diverse growth – coconut palm and acacia, guayaba and papaya mixed with cactus and pineapple, interspersed with patches of moss and fern – it was hard to imagine.

The land here seems as if it could grow anything. But that was the result of years of clearing away thorny brush, building soil with compost, and nurturing the baby palms and guayabas and papayas with water and nutrients.
“We humans have a great capacity for destruction, but we also have a great capacity for recuperation,” he said.

Later Guillermo took me to harsher, more stubborn places on the land where he is gently coaxing native grasses from the earth, and another place where he is nurturing baby macadamia nut and mango trees amid vegetable plants. The idea is to plant for tomorrow while planting for ten years from now, he explained. The vegetables will feed them until the trees grow large enough to provide fruit and nuts.

But Guillermo the grower switches quickly into Guillermo the inventor as he explains to his students the law of aerodynamics and how it applies to a windmill they are building to pump water, or as they pore over plans for a pendulum-powered woodsaw.

And Guillermo the inventor can just as easily switch into Guillermo the architect, explaining the reason for the curving lines of the roof and walls that frame this building.

“We have to break with rectagonality – the way our structures are created in the city, they are designed to increase productivity. But nature is organized outside of linearity. What we’ve tried to do is create a habitat that is compatible with biology.”

As is typically the case with permaculturists, Guillermo’s own story is at least as interesting as that of his learning center. He was born in Argentina and came of age in the 1960s and ’70s. Like many of his generation, his involvement in social movements drew the attention of the repressive government and he was forced to run for his life or avoid meeting the fate of friends who had been tortured and killed.

He chose to head north into Paraguay. He lived for years in Asuncion, where he shifted to a more spiritual form of resistance – one in which he could continue to work for a more sustainable world, but without risking his life under a different dictatorship. He was teaching the Mayan calendar at a center for alternative thought when he and his friends began to reflect on the indigenous history of these lands, where the Guaraní still lived in harmony with the earth – marginalized and in extremely remote pockets of forest, but surviving in the way of their ancestors.

“The Guaraní didn’t leave huge monuments, but what they left behind was something better… an integrated environment.

“We’ve destroyed a total habitat, and it’s going to be very costly to fix it. But they left nothing out of place.”
After much discussion, Guillermo recalls, “We came to the conclusion we had to ask pardon – of the Earth, of the ancestors, of the indigenous people. To ask pardon you have to offer something – not just to say I’m sorry and that’s it.”

Guillermo’s offering was his practice as a teacher of bioconstruction, working with low-income and indigenous people to help them create comfortable, dignified living spaces; he worked with the Guaraní of Paraguay and with the Maya Kiché of Guatemala to create water reservoirs that would free the women and children from hours of backbreaking water-carrying from faraway water sources.

In 1999 he bought the Takuara Rendá, a demonstration center of sustainable living, where graceful bamboo structures scented of sweetgrass are scattered among the trees.

“We try to make the interior living space as small as possible, and it extends outward into the outdoors,” he explained. “We believe that with less you can live much better.”

My short time at Takuara Rendá seemed to confirm the truth of this statement. I slept in one of these bamboo houses on a bamboo-frame bed padded with a grass eco-mattress; washed dishes in a bamboo-sheltered outdoor sink, with water carefully portioned through a series of recycled plastic bottles in an ingenious conservation system; sat in a bamboo chair at a bamboo table, and drank mate from a bamboo matero with a bamboo straw. I used the clever spiral-shaped bamboo composting toilet, with no ill effects. Manoel, the Brazilian student, helped me fashion my own drinking cup from a section of bamboo.

I breathed in the fresh air; my eyes soaked in the green freshness; and I felt better than I’d felt in weeks.
I reflected on a question Guillermo had asked: “What is health – is it just physical, or is it spiritual? And by spiritual, I’m not talking about a religious system that keeps putting patches on a structure where everything is going wrong.”

My time with Guillermo, with his assistant Milciades and with the Argentine and Brazilian students was all too short. I wandered among the misty woods and strange rock formations, listening to the back-and-forth birdcalls. I ate delicious organic food prepared by the young men on a simple wood stove under a hand-painted sign with the words of Hippocrates that modern medicine seems to have forgotten: “Make your food your medicine, and your medicine your food.”

Back in the city now, I look out at a landscape of squares and straight lines, and I sigh. One day, I’d like to have my own Takuara Rendá. Until then, I have my bamboo drinking cup.

Takuara Rendá accepts volunteers for a minimum period of two weeks and a maximum of three months. During that time, you can learn by doing: principles and practice of bioconstruction, agroforestry, alternative technology and permaculture. For more information, click here.

Here’s a little photo tour of my misty September stay at Takuara Rendá.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

By Tracy L. Barnett

SAN ISIDRO MAZATEPEC, Jalisco, Mexico – It was harvest season when I visited Teopantli Kalpulli, and the colorful native corn was spread out on the ground, drying in the sun. Children played in the grassy schoolyard as Levi Rios stopped from his rounds for a moment to watch them.

Not so many years ago, this young ecovillage leader was learning to read in this same schoolhouse; now a college graduate with several years’ experience in the city as a professional architect, he’s returned to his pastoral roots to help lead his community into a second generation.

Past, present and future meet at Teopantli Kalpulli, an intentional community/ecovillage about an hour south of Guadalajara. These families live close to the earth but still enjoy modern comforts. Conceived in the late 1970s by a small group that included Levi’s parents, Carlos Rios and Beatriz Cardenas, the community has grown to become Mexico’s largest intentional community of its kind.

Teopantli Kalpulli, a Nahuatl phrase which, loosely translated, means “sacred bioregional village,” was an outgrowth of the founders’ search for an earth-centered lifestyle that incorporated the sacred traditions of their ancestors. They were part of a network called the Universal Grand Brotherhood, practitioners of yoga, meditation and vegetarianism.

“They realized that the Americas had their own traditions that are as sacred as those of the East, so they decided to build their community on those traditions,” Levi explained.

The prehispanic kalpullis, he explained, were villages that shared a series of disciplines and cultural practices such as the traditional sowing of corn, the practice of sacred dance and the temezcal – the indigenous Mexican version of the sweat lodge ceremony. Teopantli, Levi said, was one of the first spaces in Mexico that opened its doors to the indigenous leaders to share their teachings, and those teachings were incorporated into the ecovillage structure.

Community members try to grow as much of their own organic food as possible, and they revere the corn and the Mother Earth as their ancestors did.

Teopantli is a paradise for the children, who have the run of the place. Twenty-one families make their homes on these 92 acres, concentrated on 17 acres of homes and common space. The rest of the land is used for cultivation of their traditional maize, for organic gardens and fruit trees, and forest.

The community is designed to hold 55 families, so the community is still accepting new members. Ownership of the land is collective, Levi explained, with members being granted permits to construct their housing.
“What we are doing here is assuring that the earth belongs to the community,” he explained. Another key goal of the community is to ensure that a healthy, cooperative, earth-based lifestyle can be accessible to people regardless of their income level.

The tour began at the center of the community, where a giant ceiba tree, sacred to the Maya and other prehispanic peoples, spreads its leafy branches over a ceremonial circle.

The community itself is laid out along the four cardinal directions, with sacred spaces in each of the four points: In the north, a small pyramid constructed in the way of their prehispanic ancestors; in the east, a sanctuary for yoga and meditation; in the south, a calihuey, the sacred temple of the Huichol ancestors, and in the west, a temezcal. In each of these four spaces, they hold different celebrations throughout the year.

“We learned from the Huichol people to link the planting of the corn with a calendar of activities throughout the year,” Levi said. The planning of activities in different parts of the community is important, he explained, as it “keeps the energy moving” throughout the community.

One of the top priorities as to community enters its next phase, he explained, is to expand the school to create different classrooms for the different age groups. Currently the 14 children who belong to the community all study in a common classroom, but the group is continuing to grow, with an additional two families joining in the past year.

One change the village has seen over time is an increase in the educational level, Levi explained. His parents were fortunate to attend college, he said, but most of the founders did not, and it was always a struggle to earn enough money to support the community.

Part of that herculean effort involved rebuilding the soil, depleted from years of slash-and-burn agriculture and overgrazing, and reforesting what had become deforested pasture.

“If I showed you the photographs from this place when the community first bought the land, you wouldn’t believe it – there wasn’t a tree or a bush to be seen,” he said. “If you’ll notice, the land all around the community is pasture.”

It’s true, I realized – we had entered a lush oasis of hardwood forest and abundant garden spaces.

Nowadays, as the community enters its second generation, Levi was explaining, more members of the community have gone to college and have brought to the community a variety of skills. Nowadays, 90 percent of the residents are able to earn their living from businesses based in the community; 10 percent of them commute to town to do other jobs.

Next was a tour of the prolific permaculture garden. Nine hectares (20 acres) are plowed with the antique tractor and planted as a traditional milpa – corn, beans and squash – in the traditional way of the ancestors.
Levi exchanges vegetables from his garden with other families who produce whole-grain baked goods, honey, soymilk, tofu and a variety of other items.

“Barter is something that’s come about naturally,” he said. “The people have workshops in their homes, and we just exchange.”

On the edges of the common areas are the homes, built by each of the owners themselves. All are built with materials available in the local area; some with adobe, others of brick. We pass one that has been abandoned and the owner has put it up for sale.

“It’s just that life is not easy here,” Levi explained. “You have to be able to make the economy work for you; you have to be able to live isolated from the economic system. If you can develop a professional activity isolated from the city, you can make it work – but it’s not for everybody.”

Few communities like this one have survived for this long, he said. “There are about five like this one in Mexico, but none of them with as many people as we have now in Kalpulli.”

The tour commenced to a comfortably spacious community dining area, where Beatriz and her two children, Yuma and Maya, were enjoying the sun on the patio. Beatriz is Swiss and her husband is Mexican; they are one of the new families in the community.

Maya and Yuma are hard at work coloring, and Levi stops to admire their handiwork – and also that of Beatriz, who, Levi informs me, designed and knitted the beautiful sweater she is wearing, which is made of organic linen.
Beatriz has made a business of selling these sweaters. This one, she says, took about 80 hours to make, and will sell for 700 pesos – a little over $50.

We continue on our way, meeting Celia Rubalcava, who has a soymilk business in her home, and Isaac, who is using a hand-powered mill to shuck the dried corn. His children are playing at his feet, making what looks like elaborate meals from mud.

“Aurima, what are you doing? Making little balls?” Levi queries. Aurima proudly displays her creations.
At the next house, I meet Jose Luis and Angelita Gutierez, who operate a small whole-grain bakery and tofu factory in their home. They showed me around and shared with me a little pinole de maiz – a powder made of cinnamon, brown sugar and toasted ground corn, eaten as a snack or mixed with hot water for a delicious drink.
Next we went on to the temezcal area, where small, domed structures awaited the next sweat lodge ceremony. Some of these ceremonies are open to the public, and others are just for the community.

Finally Levi takes me to his home, a cool brick-and-adobe house with simple, clean lines, a front porch with a hammock and a beautiful altar looking out onto the fields.

He shared with me a bit about his decision to return to the community after eight years in Guadalajara, four years at ITESO, a Jesuit university, and four more working with local architectural firms and construction companies.

“I believe all people have a mission in life – or if they don’t have one, they should! – but for me, growing up in a community has marked me with a special vision of community,” he said. “I wanted to go to the university precisely to broaden this concept of community.”

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.

Rony is now among the leaders of his town’s efforts to rebuild the local community of San Lucas Toliman and the surrounding villages. Any support that can be given either to his organization, or through his organization to the reconstruction effort, will help strengthen the Permaculture community and philosophy in this region, an approach that is firmly rooted in native tradition and ecological practice. For more information on how to help, contact Rony at nativasemilla@hotmail.com or Rebecca Cutter at rebecutter@gmail.com.

Dear friends of Guatemala,

We are sorry we have not informed you about the tragedy that probably by now you have probably heard about. First there was the volcano, Pacaya, and then Tropical Storm Agatha. We have been very busy trying to respond in a coordinated way.

The magnitude of the catastrophe has had more impact than Hurricane Stan in 2005, since it was early in the rainy season and we had 4,000 millimeters of water in 24 hours, which the rugged topography of our land could not handle. Making matters worse is that this is just the beginning of the hurricane season.

At the national level, the storm has left us with more than 400,000 people affected; at least 152 are dead from flooding or landslides, 98 are still missing and147 wounded; 87,000 are in public shelters and uncounted thousands more sheltered with family and friends; and 48,000 homes are damaged or in high-risk areas. The roads have been ruined and that has caused food prices to increase. That, along with the loss of all the crops that had just begun coming up, will soon be manifested in a severe food shortage.

In the Lake Atitlan area, most of the communities were affected. Throughout Guatemala, 19 areas of high risk have been identified, and 9 of them are located here in our department of Sololá. Forty-one emergency shelters in Sololá reported 7,500 homeless this week. In our village of San Lucas Toliman, where IMAP is located, fortunately only 10 people died, but thousands have been left homeless. Eight neighborhoods are still habitable but they are in such high-risk areas it’s not recommended that they return.

Our center at IMAP has been designated as a shelter for the community of Pachitulul, which is one of the 13 communities of the San Lucas Toliman municipality. Pachitulul is also a high-risk area, but this time they were not affected directly. We are now compelled to step forward and participate in the emergency relief effort of the entire San Lucas municipality and coordinating throughout the Lake area by working together with other community groups to fill in for the leadership void that is now presenting itself.

IMAP has been working since 2000 on risk management in this disaster-prone area by generating information and educational materials, and holding workshops that have educated hundreds of people throughout the region. We have promoted reforestation, land and water management and food security by promoting seeds and foods that are more resistant, not only to disease but to these dramatic weather changes we are experiencing.
Fortunately that strong sense of community of the Guatemalan people has come again to the rescue, and thanks to that, the situation is under control. However, their resources are limited and the danger is still very present.

Our effort right now is to encourage that solidarity and at the same time channel all the information and efforts of all the organizations with the idea to coordinate so that we can be more efficient and more resourceful.
Food is present at the shelters but it is scarce. Aid has been delivered but not always the appropriate aid. For example, many of the indigenous women won’t wear Western clothes no matter what, and most of the women’s clothing being donated won’t be used. Milk is being delivered, which is not healthy for most indigenous people, who have a high incidence of lactose intolerance.

Governmental presence is intermittent and not very substantial, limited mostly to moral support. One local NGO was quoted in the Prensa Libre estimating that about 80 percent of all assistance has come from private citizens, not the government.

If you’re interested in more information or in supporting the relief effort in any way, please contact us and we will direct you in the best way. Also, if you want to support IMAP directly so that it can continue doing its work, we would be more than grateful.

We thank you for your solidarity, which has always provided for us.

Sincerely,

Rony Lec
for the Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura (IMAP)

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.

Emergency food and supplies had arrived from the federal government and had been carried off by whomever happened to be around instead of being distributed in an organized and equitable way; nobody had any idea how many people were now homeless; people who were not in the shelters were not being taken into account; the list of immediate problems went on.

Rony was organizing a group to help with the immediate disaster response, gathering data that would allow IMAP to respond with a long-term plan to help with recovery and prevention. I had offered my services as a documentarian for a few days, to try and get the story out about what’s going on here.

After a quick meeting, we decided to divide into two groups: Rony and Felix would attend the meeting being called by local NGOs, and Emilio and Eliazar would accompany me to the affected areas and to the shelters to do interviews.

We headed downhill to the edge of town, where a series of landslides had occurred. It didn’t take long. Within five minutes we encountered a woman picking through the remains of her brother’s house.

Ismael Santiso Yoxon had lived with his family in this house for 16 years; it was built on land he had inherited from his grandfather. He had survived many storms, including Hurricane Stan, with no problems.

A huge chunk of hillside had fallen off and slid down, smashing into his home, flattening the back wall and filling it with dirt. The chicken house with its 50 chickens was buried, along with his other animals.

“He doesn’t have any idea what he’s going to do,” said his sister, Elvira. He and his wife and daughter are currently staying with his mother-in-law, but there’s not room to continue living there.

The case is a typical one; the land above his house, like much of the land on the hillside, was divided up and rented out with the blessing of the municipal government, despite the instability of the soil. The neighbors began cutting trees and put in a milpa on the slope just above Yuxon’s house, and this cornfield was what had collapsed.

We wished Elvira well and made our way up the hill, where we encountered an abandoned house with the front torn off. Inside, the bed was covered with dirt, and a cluster of green bananas had landed on top. The walls were askew, and dirt and rocks practically filled the structure.

Children’s schoolbooks and backpacks and clothing were scattered about in the mud, with what was left of a manual typewriter tossed in the middle of the pile.

No one was near, so we made our way back down the hill, past two other abandoned houses, where we encountered Ana Cu and Romelia Guarcha Sep, two women in traditional dress who said they knew the affected families and would take us to them. We accompanied them to the stricken neighborhood called Nuevo Amanecer, or New Dawn.

Regina Castro was standing on what was left of her back porch, looking out at the expanse of mud and the fallen trees that covered what was once her brother-in-law’s house.

“We were here on Saturday in the rain and we started hearing the sounds and we got scared, so we grabbed the children and ran,” she said. “We didn’t have time to get anything together – we just ran. Fifteen minutes later, the hillside fell down.”

Ana and Romelia’s homes had not been damaged, but they didn’t feel safe living there anymore, seeing what had happened to their neighbors.

Marcelino, Leandro and Luis Acibinac were the three brothers who lost their homes nearby. We found Liandro just up the hill, looking over the mud that buried his home. The only sign was a small pile of clothing on top. How they had gotten there, I didn’t know – perhaps they had been drying on the line.

“Here was the kitchen… here was my bed,” he said, pointing out where his house once was. “We didn’t have time to recover anything; we only have the clothes on our backs. Only God knows where we will go now.”

Esdras Mardoqueo Baran was picking over the remains of his sister’s house, nearby. His house had not been hit, but he didn’t feel it was safe to continue living there.

“We’re all at risk,” he said. “The river finds its path, and the rainy season has just begun. What will we do? Only God can say.”

Up the hill, Salamon Alvarez de Leon was checking out the remains of his friend’s home. The land above their homes had been converted to a coffee plantation, which doesn’t have the same ability to hold the soil as a native forest.

His friend, Rafael Ajcot, had had six children, ranging from 6 to 16. “This is part of the problem – all of the people,” said Alvarez. “The deforestation, the population growth – in 1970, we had 5,000 people living in San Lucas. Now we have 40,000. Where are they all supposed to go?”

Created with Admarket’s ]]> http://theesperanzaproject.org/2010/06/the-river-will-find-a-way-visiting-with-the-victims/feed/ 1 14.6348610 -91.1430969 http://theesperanzaproject.org/2010/05/eco-evangelical-mayans-work-for-a-greener-village/ http://theesperanzaproject.org/2010/05/eco-evangelical-mayans-work-for-a-greener-village/#comments Sat, 22 May 2010 02:26:57 +0000 Tracy Barnett http://theesperanzaproject.org/?p=1084 PAXTOCA, Totonicapán, Guatemala – Martin Pedro Toc Sic is an eco-entrepreneur on a mission. Standing amid the green, forested hills of his native village, this young Maya marketing major explained why he left a good-paying job in the city to try and make his mark in his hometown with projects designed to keep those hills green.