Breathing life into the biosphere.

• Author: Stafford, Kathryn
• Position: Cover Story

IN MEXICO'S CALAKMUL BIOSPHERE RESERVE, RESIDENTS ARE REVITALIZING A CONSERVATION ETHIC PROMOTING "PARKS WITH PEOPLE"

There is an immense forest in Mesoamerica that extends across the borders of three nations. In the Western Hemisphere, only the Amazon rain forest is larger. Called variously the Maya Forest, for its ancient inhabitants, or el Gran Peten, it extends from southern Campeche and Quintana Roo in Mexico, through the Peten in northern Guatemala, and east to Belize. In the time of the ancient Maya, several kingdoms inhabited this lowland area - from Tikal, Uaxactun, Naranjo, and El Mirador in the Peten, to Caracol in Belize, and finally to the most northern, and isolated, area in Mexico, called Calakmul. It is said that Calakmul in Maya means "entre dos cerros," or between two hills, and today, the region seems to stand between two alternatives, two ways of existence, as it attempts to address the modern conservation dilemma of "parks versus people" by forging a new ethic of "parks with people."

In 1989 the Mexican government declared 1.7 million acres of land along its border with Guatemala a biosphere reserve, essentially joining the area to its so-called sister reserves in Belize and Guatemala, to create a five-million-acre protected forest. Then, in an unprecedented move four years later, the federal government ceded control of the entire area to the state government of Campeche. At the time of the landmark accord, the governor of Campeche, Jorge Salomon Azar Garcia, a politician praised by environmentalists for his pro-conservation stands, said, "A decree doesn't preserve a natural protected area. It puts us In the position to send police or guards into too large an area. Well, we just don't have the resources to do it. And later, we'd have to send in guards to watch the guards. The only way we see of protecting this area is involving those who live within it."

And so they have. In the first arrangement of its kind in Mexico, the state of Campeche, in turn, designated that protection of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve would be shared among the reserve's management; local elected bodies representing inhabitants, such as the Consejo Regional de Xpujil; and Pronatura Peninsula de Yucatan, A.C., a conservation group based in Merida. How these three groups have come together to manage one of the hemisphere's largest reserves is a stow of modern conservation practice in the making.

On a map the long, jagged shape of the reserve resembles more a decorative architectural motif, or perhaps an inscrutable Maya glyph. In reality, its borders have been carefully drawn to incorporate federally owned, and unclaimed, land. Delineated within the reserve are two zones: a nucleus, or core area that comprises about a third of the reserve, where development is forbidden; and a buffer zone, which constitutes the remaining two-thirds, where the reserve's inhabitants live and use of resources is planned and regulated.

In ancient times, Calakmul was the most remote of Maya kingdoms of the lowland Peten, and it remains isolated today. Bisected east to west by a highway that cuts through southern Mexico from Chetumal on the east to Escarcega on the west, and by a lone seasonal road running north to south, the region is home to about twelve thousand people living in some seventy communities scattered through the eastern part of the reserve, and another twenty-five hundred to three thousand just outside its borders. They have eked out a living principally by growing subsistence crops on cleared forest and scrubland, where the average rainfall is only forty to fifty-four inches yearly. While some descendants of the original Maya who settled this area a millennium ago remain, many present-day inhabitants are from such varied states as Chiapas, Veracruz, Tabasco, and Nayarit. In fact, some twenty-three different Mexican states are now represented in the biosphere's population, lured to the area over the last...