Peten crafts a future.

• Author: Stafford, Kathyrn
• Position: Peten Island, Guatemala - Includes related article

In Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, residents are becoming pioneers in new techniques of sustainable living

Islands, by their very nature, are fragile environments--surrounded, sometimes engulfed, other times stranded. The ancient Maya of northern Guatemala called their island capital in Lake Peten Itza "El Peten," or the big island. This was the last refuge for the Itza, who had fled south from Yucatan to the tropical forests of Guatemala, and who foretold correctly the year, 1697, when this last Indian stronghold would fall to the Spanish.

The Spanish, in turn, named their conquered capital Remedios (present-day Flores), meaning relief or aid, and called the entire northernmost region of Guatemala "El Peten." The name seemed to fit this isolated area, remote as it was--and remained so for nearly three centuries--a sparsely populated island of dense forest, cut off essentially from the rest of the country. But today Peten is an island no more.

The population of Guatemala's frontier state has ballooned over the last two decades--from 20,000 to about 375,000. This rapid migration has been aided by logging companies, which have opened up roads in the once impenetrable forest. An area once thought bereft of natural resources and attractions--archaeologist Sylvanus Morley called it "one of the most difficult New World areas in which to live"--is now home to seven logging companies, and has also caught the eye of oil speculators.

The new residents of Peten, or Peteneros, are landless and unfamiliar with Peten's agriculture and forest products. Seeking ways to support themselves and their families, they move north from the highlands to carve a living out of the forest as farmers, or milperos. Ranchers, too, over the last two decades, have discovered the last frontier of Peten.

This successive combination of logging, farming, and ranching forms what anthropologist Norman Schwartz, in his book Forest Society, terms a "negative symbiosis." He has pointed out that increased deforestation over the last fifteen years has led to longer dry seasons, and that the process appears exponential, that is, the presence of large-sized, contiguous ranches seems to threaten whatever forest patch may be nearby. Perhaps, Schwartz speculates, this is because certain seed-carrying birds and bats, among other animals, will not fly over extensive areas lacking the trees typical of their habitat.

In 1990, in response to Peten's worsening plight, the Guatemalan government legislated fully 40 percent of the department, or 3.7 million acres, as the Maya Biosphere Reserve. The reserve is divided into three areas: multiple use, core (including biotopes and national parks), and buffer, a nine-mile wide belt, relatively well populated, that surrounds the bio-sphere and helps protect the reserve. And, the government set up an agency to administer the reserve--the National Council for Protected Areas (Consejo de Areas Protegidas--CONAP).

However, as Peteneros, conservationists, and government officials have discovered, designating a reserve is only the first step in the process of forest conservation, re-education, and retraining. What about life after the biosphere?

It is a cloudy afternoon on the shores of Lake Peten Itza; a light rain has been falling intermittently throughout the day. At Rolando Soto's open-air woodcarving workshop in El Remate, on the road to Tikal National Park, six men are huddled around a table only slightly larger than a chessboard, with knives, saws, and vises, their heads bowed, radio blaring.

Not unlike a surgical operating table...