A visit to Beef National Park
LAGUNA DEL TIGRE NATIONAL PARK, Guatemala — The sign announcing the entrance to Laguna del Tigre National Park is large and impressive. The problem is, that’s about the only visible sign that you’re entering a “core protected area” of a massive national wilderness preserve.
We traveled about five hours by four-wheel-drive pickup truck on drenched dirt [...]
On patrol with Guatemalan environment officials and soldiers
LA PASADITA, Guatemala — The signs were all there: tree stumps, hastily constructed barbed-wire fences and stray cattle. All that was missing was the perpetrator — or perpetrators — of this all too common environmental crime.
About 45 hectares of forestland had been burned, replaced by corn plots and tall grasses, with a few cattle scattered [...]
Sustainable forest agriculture spawns its own verb
UAXACTÚN, Guatemala — Everyone in this village down a muddy, rutted road, 23 km past the world-famous Maya archaeological site of Tikal, knows how to “xatear.”
The verb, which would stump most Guatemalans, means “to cut xate,” a decorative plant used in floral arrangements in the United States and elsewhere.
Peteneros descend on the capital, dubious of another presidential initiative
GUATEMALA CITY — This morning I flew to Guatemala City with half a dozen officials and NGO representatives from the Guatemalan state of Petén. They were all rushing to the capital for an impromptu meeting with President Álvaro Colom, who is unveiling a proposal that he says will promote forest conservation on a grand scale.
The view from the top of the Maya world
We came to northern Guatemala, and slogged through the mud for two days straight, to find out whether there was anything to the claims that archaeology could help save a Rhode Island-size chunk of roadless tropical forest.
The trip
Lost in the jungle at night with no water, but lots of mud and mosquitos.
Paco went missing. On the first of two days of walking, on Monday, I was enjoying a series of mini botany and archaeology lectures from Paulino, the archaeologist we’d nicknamed “The Philosopher.” He was pointing out the differences between the ceiba [...]
Distorted views from the sky and the ground
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 [...]