Battle for N. America’s Last Rain Forest May Already Be Lost : At 86, Author Is Voice Still Crying Out to Save the Wilderness

The elderly Swiss-born woman tends a garden to pass the time, something you would expect of someone her age. But her garden is a thick jungle that covers more than 1 million acres: It is North America’s last rain forest.

Her name is Gertrude Duby Blom and for half of her 86 years she has been waging a battle to preserve the Lacandon jungle in southern Mexico and with it, its inhabitants’ way of life. She is losing--perhaps already has lost--the fight. During the four decades in which she has lived in Mexico, a Socialist refugee of Nazi Germany, the jungle has shrunk by half.

Development has won out. Loggers brought chainsaws and felled precious mahogany. Land-hungry peasants brought fire to burn away bush and hoes to plant corn. And ranchers brought cattle to graze on land that once supported tangled vines and towering silk-cotton trees. Promises and plans to save the jungle made in far-off Mexico City have never been enforced.

The tiny Lacandon tribe, descendants of the Maya and the special object of Blom’s affection, fled deeper and deeper into the rain forest until lured out by offers of money for their logging rights and Christian salvation for their souls. Jaguars, an animal sacred to the Mayas, disappeared.

Familiar Story

The story of the Lacandon forest is one that could be told in Brazil or Africa or Malaysia--anywhere that virgin lands provide a lure for economic change. Over the years, voices like Blom’s have called for the preservation of the jungle’s resources, of its oxygen-creating qualities and the refuge that it provides for rare animals. Mostly, the calls have gone unheeded.

The photographs that Blom has taken, the books and articles that she has written, all have done little in safeguarding a once-distant corner of the world. Now in advanced years, she speaks with the harsh candor of a woman without illusions.

“Who can control the devastation?” she asks. “Who can be hopeful? We are a species trying to put an end to nature.”

Blom hobbles about, steadied by a carved walking stick, flicking off electric lights in her Colonial-style house while lamenting the carelessness of guests who, accustomed to the excesses of modern life, leave them on. She lectures visiting schoolchildren on conserving the forests, wagging bent fingers adorned with turquoises the size of peach pits. She maintains a greenhouse with seedlings for anyone who wants to plant a tree.

Living Memory

Blom is the living memory of the Lacandon forests. Age has not made her forgetful. She seems to recall everything from four decades of visits to the jungle: the geography of cliffs surrounding the ancient Lacandon settlement of Laguna Miramar; the worship, in native god houses, of timeless deities; the workmanship of dugout canoes, and the way things were before.

She rails against the changes. The editor of “Bearing Witness,” a 1984 book of Blom’s photographs, wrote: “In her old age, Blom has come to resemble the Old Testament prophet who cries, not in the wilderness, but for it.”

The forests that Blom loves are located in the state of Chiapas, where Mexico meets Guatemala. Rich in natural resources yet relatively undeveloped, Chiapas has for decades been seen as Mexico’s last frontier. By the 1940s, when Blom first traveled from Mexico City to San Cristobal and then to the forests, the loggers and slash-and-burn settlers were already making gashes in the forest. The cattlemen followed, supported by government loans.

“I can’t tell you how big the rain forest is today. I only know it will be smaller tomorrow,” Blom said with a sigh.

Steady Development

Recent development in Chiapas has been steady. During the 1960s, the government built roads to penetrate deep into the forest and ease the transport of logs. In the 1970s, PEMEX, the giant government oil company, began to explore there for petroleum. It was seen then as Mexico’s trampoline from poverty to riches.

The Lacandon tribe, which had fled the invasions, found the pursuit both relentless and seductive. Government grants of land to the Lacandons for protection of the forest went awry as many of the native dwellers sold logging rights for more money than they had ever known was needed.

“The Indians are no different from anyone else,” Blom said with a tolerance one might accord errant youth.

The government of President Miguel de la Madrid has come up with a new plan to preserve what is left of the Lacandon forest. Blom is skeptical. Fifty years ago, the jungle once stretched to the stately Mayan ruins of Palenque. But now it has receded to a corner of Chiapas that juts into Guatemala.

Exploitation Limited

Earlier this year, the Ministry of Ecology and Urban Development signed agreements with settlers granted land bordering the jungle. The settlers are to keep loggers and other colonizers out. Native exploitation of lumber is supposed to be limited each year to give the jungle a chance to grow back, although a new road that loops along the border may undermine the effort because it makes transport of logs out of the area easier than before.

Meanwhile, PEMEX has promised to limit the width of roads that lead to exploration sites to inhibit settlements from springing up along newly accessible tracts of land. The government has also pledged not to build proposed hydroelectric dams along the Usumacinta River in the heart of the jungle, although the promise seems more in response to lack of money than any long-term policy of keeping the region in its natural state.

For instance, the government maintains an active plan to place a dam on the Usumacinta north of where the river ceases to form a border between Mexico and Guatemala and enters Mexican territory.

“The Usumacinta has the greatest potential for producing electricity in all the country,” said Agustin Cardenas, an official with the government power agency. “We have an obligation to study the potential of all such rivers.”

Ruins Threatened

If the dam, planned for a place called Boca del Cerro, is built, it could flood parts of the Usumacinta in both Mexico and Guatemala. The valleys hold numerous rich ruins of Mayan cities and some, explored or not, would be inundated. Many of the Mayan sites on both sides of the border are well-known for their high pyramids and graceful carved reliefs: Yaxchilan and Bonampak in Mexico, Piedras Negras in Guatemala.

Archeologists in Mexico City have protested the plans, and it is another crusade taken up by Blom.

“Building the dams would be criminal,” Blom said. “The landscape changes, the farms come, the Maya sites go under. They say they will not build now, but that is no guarantee for the future.”

Blom speaks with special sadness not only at the change in the forest but also parallel changes in the Lacandon tribe that calls it home. Her links with the Lacandones are long and emotional. She first met them in 1943 when, as a journalist, she accompanied an expedition into the jungle. There she also met Frans Blom, a Danish archeologist and explorer who mapped much of Chiapas. They were later married and in 1955 published a two-volume study of the jungle. Frans Blom died eight years later.

Adopted 2 Children

Gertrude Blom came to consider the Lacandones as family. She adopted two ill Lacandon children and raised them to adulthood in her home in San Cristobal, a town in the pine-studded Chiapas highlands. When she greets her oldest Lacandon friend, Chan Kin, they exchange an almost mystical salute: “He is my father,” she says, to which he replies, “She is my mother.”

The tribe, which subsisted for many years on small plantings of corn along river banks, has found the taste of modern life all but irresistible. Once jungle trekkers, they have bought pickup trucks to carry them on new dirt roads. Recorded mariachi music has replaced ancient chants to the jaguar, and canned goods have replaced game felled by hand-hewn arrows. Now they sell the bows and arrows as souvenirs at tourist centers, such as the Palenque ruins.

Baptist worship supplanted the burning of incense at ruined Mayan temples. Of the 2,000 known Lacandones, only about 200 practice traditional religion, anthropologists say. Many have changed from their homespun garb--loose, white pajamas--to Western wear and have even cut their characteristic long hair.

“I asked them, ‘Why do you change?’ ” Blom said, “and they answered, ‘Why do you wear the kind of clothes you wear?’ ”

‘What Is the Point?’

So much of the fading jungle life is preserved only in the museum at Blom’s home and in her straightforward photographs and writings: eight books and dozens of articles that through the years have grown more and more pessimistic. In one 1983 article entitled “The Jungle Is Burning,” Blom asked, “What is the point in all this effort?”

Yet, she plans yet another trip to the jungle in late July, despite a cracked thigh suffered during a similar journey last year. For all her dismay, Blom still cannot resist the place. In an article, she once described the jungle as holding her “spellbound by the incredible sounds of the insects . . . the exotic plants with leaves as big as parasols . . . the peculiar cry of the howler monkey . . . the enormous flocks of parrots and macaws describing a rainbow of colors in the sky.”

It is perhaps an antidote to her sense of doom.

“We are a species coming to an end,” she said to a recent visitor. Then off she moved, supported by her stick, to turn out the electric lights left on the night before.