Recent deforestation only a few kms.
from the Lacandon community of Najá.
photo by R. Johnston

"For a people whose mythology describes the whole earth as covered with jungle, to destroy the jungle is to destroy their world." - Didier Boremanse

Deforestation and the Lacandon Maya

Rain forests have a far greater variety of animals and plant life than any other ecosystem on earth. At home in the rain forests are native peoples who have superbly adapted their ways of living to this environment. In fact, they are a part of the integral balance of this ecosystem. Many indigenous cultures no longer exist because of deforestation. The Lacandon Maya lived in the rain forest for hundreds years without destroying it. But suddenly the vast expanse of pristine forest has been violated and the lives of the Lacandones irrevocably altered. In less than half a century, and despite the protests of environmentalists, 80 to 90% of the Lacandon Rain Forest has been destroyed. Significant encroachment of outsiders along with massive deforestation began in the middle of this century with mahogany tree cutters and oil prospectors. In an attempt to relieve population pressures and landlessness, the government began a large land distribution program in the rain forest. The onslaught continues as new waves of immigrant homesteaders arrive and the next generations need new land for subsistence. These "agrarists", slash and burn farmers and cattle ranchers, cut down the trees and leave the land exhausted beyond repair. Since the 1950's, the population of the Lacandon Rain Forest has exploded from a few thousand to over 200,000 people.

Dr. James Nations, an ecological anthropologist with Conservation International, who lived with the Lacandones for three years in the mid-1970's:

The Lacandones practice a complex farming system that cycles forest land from garden plot through re growth and eventually back to forest again, allowing them to live in the forest without destroying it. The inter-connectedness of their culture and agriculture is revealed in story, song and prayer. The Lacandones and the rainforest are one. Their existence is intertwined: Indigenous peoples such as the Lacandon keep the rain forest alive; without the rain forest there would be no indigenous peoples, and without the indigenous peoples to protect it, the rain forest would not survive.

At the end of the 1800's, the richness of the Lacandon Rain forest of southern Chiapas, Mexico, was discovered by loggers who cut and sold mahogany and cedar trees for use throughout the world. To them, the rain forest was a source of profit. Soon after the loggers cleared out parts of the forest, immigrant farmers and cattlemen followed and continue to this day to be a threat to the rain forest and the Lacandon way of life. The trees of the forest are cut and burned, then the soil that is temporarily rich in nutrients from the ash will sustain only a few crop cycles of intensive agriculture. Then the land is sold or abandoned to cattle ranchers who sow it with african grass for the cattle to graze upon. In time the cattle are sold for beef and shipped out to large urban and foreign markets. In the end the land is exhausted beyond regeneration.

The Lacandones' practice of sustainable use of the forest contrasts with the wasteful consumption of the industrialized world. Using their sustainable system, the Lacandon can produce food in abundance from their fields without devastation to the forest around them. Until recently, they lived without the need to rely on anyone outside their community for the necessities of daily life. We need to learn from the Lacandones how to respect our environment and manage the use of it's resources.

Under ideal circumstances, the rainforest could be a sustainable source of tropical hardwoods - if only the mature trees were extracted and the younger ones left to hold the top soil and fertilize it with leaf mould. [Cynics might say that where profit is involved, resources will always be over exploited.] The most devasting damage is being done by hungry, desperate agrarists, peasant farmers, who access the rainforest by the roads left by the lumber companies. They are often wrongly blamed for the continuing destruction of the rainforest. It is the Mexican homestead laws that permit it and the government’s neglect of national land reforms that is forcing people to do it.

Robert Bruce, an anthropologist working with the Lacandones since 1953, puts it in a human perspective:

...to properly damn the animal stupidity of such destruction it seems to me that it would require a certain lack of imagination. One would have to be unable to imagine what he himself would be willing to do in the position of a poor devil with no profession nor any skill except this primitive form of subsistance, but with a wife and children to feed. In fact, I could hardly imagine a man not relegating to Hell such abstractions as "ecology" or "the future of mankind" before the immediate necessity of putting something besides more hookworm and amoebas in his children’s swollen bellies. Deplorable as it may be, it is all too understandable.

Trudi Blom, anthropologist and long time friend of the Lacandones, knew better than most people what the destruction of the rain forest would mean to Lacandon culture:

I have learned through bitter experience that you cannot hope to protect the Lacandones without safeguarding their forest...In the dreams of the Lacandones, which regulate their waking lives, each animal, each plant and each ritual object is an instrument of prophecy or protective magic. As the forest is burned and cut down through our stupidity and greed, the animals disappear one by one; the jaguar, the boar, the puma the spider monkey - they all disappear, and soon the souls of the Lacandones will also disappear...it makes no difference how many of them will be left - the fact is, their souls will wither and die as their magnificent forest is destroyed, and all of us will share part of the blame.

[...] What you are seeing is the last whisper of a magnificent culture. The missionaries, the timber prospectors, the Tzeltal colonists and the seductions of occidental technology are merely accelerating an inevitable process. Lacanja' (the southern Lacandon community) has already gone to the devil. They are spending all the money the government gives them [for having signed lumber contracts] on worthless gadgets and junk. They have gone mad with spending, like the Americans in the twenties. And when the mahogany is all gone, they will have nothing. Absolutely nothing. They will be worse off than the poorest Indians on U.S. reservations....But in Nahá, if you gain the confidence of Chan K'in Viejo and other elders, you can still get an idea of what the Lacandon culture was about. Chan K'in in particular is an extraordinary man. So far, he has not permitted the government to cut mahogany around Nahá. When he dies, there will be no stopping them.

return to Contents * next page

Links to other sites on the Web

The Usumacinta River: Building a Framework for Cooperation between Mexico and Guatemala
Conflicts of Land Tenure and Conservation in the Lacandon Forest - by Hugo A. Guillen Trujillo

This page hosted by Geocities Get your own Free Home Page