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 Editorials | Environmental | July 2005 
Conservation Efforts Building Steam Across the Nation Despite Challenges
 Jeremy Schwartz - Cox News Service
Environmentalists here celebrated a record-breaking land conservation deal in November that will protect more than 370,000 acres of tropical forest in Campeche on the Yucatan peninsula, home to the largest jaguar habitat outside the Amazon.
That triumph was followed up five months later with a purchase of 46,000 acres of grassland in the Chihuahua desert that environmentalists hope will rejuvenate an entire ecosystem.
Conservationists are hoping that their wave has yet to crest in Mexico, home to the world's fourth-largest collection of biological diversity. Government spending on protected areas, while still considered low, has nearly quadrupled since 2000 to about 55 million, and government officials are looking at an ambitious plan to double the amount of federally-owned protected land.
Despite those successes, Mexico's young but growing environmental movement faces a difficult struggle. Obstacles include the lack of government funding, lax vigilance on protected lands, out-of-date land-use laws, and organized gangs of enviro-bandits who plunder natural resources.
On paper, Mexico appears to be in good shape when it comes to land conservation. More than 44 million acres of land are in federal protection zones, nearly 10 percent of the country's surface. That includes some of the country's most important ecological sites, from cloud forests in Chiapas to coral reefs off the Yucatan Peninsula.
But that protected status does not guarantee that the land will stay unspoiled. It merely limits the amount of development, and some protected areas have been developed by politically connected landowners or threatened by tourism pressures.
Worse, environmental groups say, the government lacks the funding to adequately oversee those lands and keep illegal loggers from invading and plundering. Most notably, gangs of loggers at the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve east of Mexico City have been blamed for the thinning of butterfly colonies.
Complicating the picture is the land ownership system. While large swaths of federal and state lands encompass many of the United States' most important environmental sites, much of Mexico's environmentally sensitive land is in private hands or belongs to communal groups called ejidos , which resulted from land distribution following the Mexican Revolution.
Ernesto Enkerlin, president of the commission overseeing Mexico's protected areas, estimates that only about 15 percent of the nation's protected land is owned by the federal government. Officials hope to raise that share to one-third through creative land purchases and partnerships with private groups.
"We recognize that we need more land in government control," Enkerlin said.
But for now, the name of the conservation game in Mexico is community outreach. Environmental organizations spend years or even decades preaching to local landowners about the importance of conservation. Private groups have purchased conservation easements, rented land and worked with communities to develop sustainable development methods.
"We're experimenting with a whole array of tools to compensate owners of lands with biodiversity," said Juan Bezaury, director of environmental politics for the Mexican branch of the Nature Conservancy. "Buying the land is the extreme situation in Mexico." The government has begun a program to pay owners of forest land in watersheds up to 40 per hectare (2.5 acres) not to cut down trees, in hopes of saving underground water reserves. Enkerlin says communities are starting to join the battle against illegal loggers, slowing degradation in Monarch butterfly habitats.
In parts of Oaxaca, where community ejidos comprise 80 percent of the land, largely indigenous communities have organized to form protected areas on more than 100,000 acres of sensitive forest land. Residents have set aside areas for conservation and practice more sustainable land-use techniques, including reforestation. The areas have been lauded by environmental groups as a model for other developing countries.
"The only future for conservation is to continue working with the people," Enkerlin wrote in a pamphlet outlining his agency's activities.
But in other areas, environmentalists preaching land conservation bump head-on into Mexico's harsh realities.
In the Montes Azules Bioreserve, which encompasses 1,200 square miles of jungle in Chiapas, environmentalists have been at odds with Zapatista rebels and Indians fleeing the violence of Chiapas' civil conflict. Several communities of Indians settled on the bioreserve, leading to fears they will damage the rain forest as they make space for farming.
Earlier this year, some Zapatista groups moved out of the bioreserve amid claims that the government wants them gone so it can open the door to foreign pharmaceutical companies and water bottling outfits.
In addition to pushing for more funding and vigilance of protected areas, environmental groups are also asking for a constitutional change to Mexico's land-use laws. Conservation is not considered use of the land, and ejidos can lose their lands if they don't work or develop them, said Susana Rojas, director of the Mexican organization Pronatura.
Environmental groups, which Rojas estimates have doubled in number over the past decade, are also trying to get candidates in the 2006 presidential election to endorse their cause. But given the weak economy, they acknowledge it won't be easy.
Land conservation "is pretty low on the agenda," Bezaury said. "There are a lot of needs health, education, security that are still unfulfilled, so it's hard to raise the budget for conservation."
For decades, environmentalists say, Mexico has operated without a conservationist mind set, leading to the degradation of soil and forests. Mexico in the last decade has lost 1.5 million acres per year of forest annually, although government officials say that trend was reduced to 640,000 acres last year.
Forest conservation is considered especially important since healthy forests nurture supplies of fresh drinking water, something increasingly scarce in Mexico.
"At the national level we need massive communication campaigns so Mexicans are more and more conscious of conservation," Rojas said.
In addition to the already designated protected lands, which need more funding and vigilance, environmental groups have identified another 193,000 square miles of land that needs protecting. Such a huge area will need massive funding, but environmentalists are hopeful that a change in consciousness will result in more resources.
"The whole society is realizing not fast enough that it's very expensive to restore lands," Bezaury said. "It's cheaper not to destroy them the first place." |
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