84-Year-Old Crusades to Save North American Rain Forest

After years of battling injustice in Europe and Mexico, Gertrude Blom, at the age of 84, is locked in a struggle to save the last great stretch of tropical rain forest in North America.

For the last 40 years, she has focused her attention on a vanishing world--a group of 400 Lacandon Maya Indians and their endangered jungle homeland in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state on the Guatemalan border.

Blom, born in Switzerland, is a photographer, explorer, self-taught anthropologist and ecologist. Most of all, she is a fighter. Dozens of government officials in Mexico, her chosen land, can attest to that.

“I saw the rain forest attacked in the ‘60s,” she said. “I watched the destruction, and for me it became a new fight.”

Until last year, the achievements of this formidable woman were little known outside Mexico.

In 1984, the University of North Carolina Press published “Gertrude Blom: Bearing Witness,” a collection of stunning black-and-white photographs. The book is filled with images of a sad and haunted people and of a ravaged landscape--tree trunks stacked like corpses, a charred and burning forest, smoke-shrouded, lifeless hillsides stripped of vegetation.

Critics have compared her to great documentary photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Eugene Smith. An exhibition of her photos, “People of the Forest,” is on a three-year U.S. tour.

Fought Facism

Blom arrived in Mexico in 1940, after 20 years as a journalist, political activist and fighter against fascism in Europe. In 1943, she entered the Chiapas rain forest as a member of the first government expedition to make contact with the Lacandon Mayas, a group that had not been conquered by the Spanish or Christian missionaries.

“They were independent, proud people, generous people, hospitable people,” she noted.

Most of the Lacandon men still let their long black hair fall over the shoulders of knee-length white tunics. But with the exception of one small group, all have abandoned their traditional values and religion since 1943.

When Gertrude Blom first journeyed into the Lacandon rain forest, it covered 5,200 square miles and was populated by 2,000 people. Today, loggers, ranchers and land-hungry settlers are rapidly eradicating the final 2,400 square miles of the jungle, and the population has soared to 200,000.

In her book she writes:

“The jungle is burning, the great trees are being destroyed, and the land is enveloped in a sinister darkness. No one cares. . . . They don’t stop for a moment to think. . . that when the rains come, there won’t be any plants or trees to stop the water’s fury and the rivers will flood the fields and meadows, washing even the houses away in their mighty torrent. Everything will be swept away by the dark, muddy water, and the bluish-green crystalline rivers will be only a memory.”

Roads slice through the jungle. The national power company wants to flood parts of it for a hydroelectric dam. The national oil company is exploring.

Five Years to Go

“If we cannot stop the destruction, in five years the rain forest will be gone,” Blom says. “There will be pockets, some hillsides with forest, but that’s all.”

She is as saddened by the destruction as “the old Chan K’in,” head man of the Lacandon group that has rejected missionaries, and Blom’s closest friend among the Lacandones.

“He says that when a tree falls, a star falls, and when the forest is gone, then they will be gone,” Blom recalled.

At an age when most people are content to stick close to their rocking chairs, Blom goes tramping through the smoke-filled jungle for two to three weeks each year to document the latest devastation.

James Nations, an anthropologist, describes her trips in a chapter he contributed to her book.

“Lacandones anticipate her visits with a mixture of joy and dread. . . . She cajoles them, berates them, chastises them, counsels them and jokes with them with a sternness tempered with love and a lifetime of shared experiences.”

“There is one thing that has helped me with all the Indians,” Blom said. “I never saw them as different from me. They may have been different in their customs, but they were human beings, and I treated them as equals.”

She holds court in this fog-blanketed colonial town high in the pine-clad mountains of Chiapas to the west of the Lacandon forest. Her home is called Na-Bolom, “House of the Jaguar.”

“The Lacandones still come all the time,” she said. “This is their house. I have special rooms for them. They can sit down at the dinner table near an ambassador, and if the ambassador doesn’t like it, he goes, not the Lacandones.”