The Future of Petén

There are two very distinct ways of seeing the destruction of a tropical forest: peeking at the green-brown patchwork through the dense cloud cover sipping orange juice from 30,000 feet, and trudging through the mud to the edge of the artificial tree line and getting explanations from some of the people who helped make that happen. On this trip, we are going to do both.

We came to Guatemala to solicit a wide array of viewpoints about how and why the forest was losing ground to human development. In 1997 as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor I had the chance to take a detour to see many of the Maya ruins of southern Mexico. What made the biggest impression on me was Palenque. The Maya city in Chiapas is still surrounded by jungle, and it’s quite impressive to see howler monkeys swinging on the branches below you as you climb to the top of a still-buried pyramid. Yet even then, the jungle had been reduced to a mere island. All the land surrounding the park had been mowed down for agriculture.

The same fate could befall the Maya ruins in the Guatemalan state of Petén. But if that happens, whose fault will it be? There seems to be a growing conservation sensibility on the ground.

After I touched down this morning in an overcast, bustling Guatemala City where the owner of the restaurant where I had breakfast offered up this lament: “Guatemalans don’t know Guatemala! They’ve never been to Lake Atitlán. They’ve never been to Tikal.”

The fate of the Maya region’s natural and cultural riches definitely lies in the hands of the people whose country encompasses those wonders.