Environment : Mexico Turning Peasants Into Ecological Pioneers : At El Triunfo biosphere reserve, officials are re-educating the people in an attempt to preserve the land.

If the panorama of cloud-shrouded peaks covered with lush tropical vegetation doesn’t take your breath away on the trek up the mountain to Luciano Perez’s farm, the thin air will.

Perez seems to notice neither as he trots in sandals along the mile of narrow switchbacks that lead from his one-room cabin to his 10 acres of corn, beans and coffee bushes. He is far more interested in discussing the difficulty of scraping out a living when the price of fertilizer is rising by one-fourth at the same time coffee prices drop by half.

But these days Perez cannot completely ignore the magnificent mountains of southern Mexico. The government decided two years ago that the land he and his neighbors farm is crucial to protecting the cloud forest above them and the endangered, green-plumed quetzals that nest there and come down the mountain to forage.

So, Perez’s tiny plot became part of the 294,500-acre El Triunfo, the newest of Mexico’s nine biosphere reserves, and he became a reluctant pioneer in a style of environmental management that is drawing increasing international attention. El Triunfo is certified by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization as one of 300 strategic ecological areas identified around the world since 1974. There are 47 in the United States.

Biosphere reserves are like oddly shaped doughnuts. The “hole” is the core zone, a completely protected area set aside for scientific research. The “doughnut” is the surrounding buffer zone, where people like Perez are meant to live and work in ways that do not endanger the core area.

Seventy-five countries around the world have created biosphere reserves, which emphasize cooperation over expropriation. Based on researcher recommendations, the government designates a reserve and assigns responsibility for its administration, usually to a local university or research institute.

Scientists and researchers from the administrative institution work with the people who own the land inside the designated reserve to help them use resources without destroying them. Buffer zones contain everything from farms and sawmills to archeological ruins and recreation areas, such as those in national parks.

“Biosphere reserves differ from national parks because the objectives of the parks are recreation and education,” said Victor Hugo Hernandez, director of nature areas at the Natural History Institute, the Chiapas state agency that runs El Triunfo.

In the short term, the reserves are a way to protect natural resources in areas where land is in short supply. They are especially useful in developing countries such as Mexico that have little arable land and lots of landless peasants, and where expropriating large tracts for nature preserves is not feasible.

In the long term, proponents say biosphere reserves foreshadow the way we all will live some day.

“In the next century, the entire global landscape will have to be managed for sustainable use of resources,” said Geoffrey S. Barnard, vice president of the Nature Conservancy, an international environmental organization based in Arlington, Va. “Every human action is going to have to be managed.”

That management will require alliances between such traditional opponents as conservationists and local industry. Partnerships are beginning tentatively as biosphere reserves develop.

In Paraguay, the management plan for the 143,260-acre Mbaracayu Reserve includes finding industrial uses for the seeds and plants that the Ache and Guarani Indians gather there.

Biologists and fishermen are working together to develop a plan for sustainable fishing in the Micronesian archipelago of Palau and are consulting with diving companies on a task force for planning a biosphere reserve.

Tourism has become a key element in preserving Costa Rica’s privately owned Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve.

El Triunfo had the cooperation of some its most powerful neighbors from the start: Owners of the surrounding coffee plantations signed a petition asking the government to create the reserve, and the two biggest plantations each pay the salary of one of the reserve’s 20 full-time staffers.

The plantation owners, descendants of German immigrants, quickly saw that the reserve would be a way to protect themselves from invasions by land-hungry peasant farmers because it would not only allow them to hold land for conservation but require it.

Outside reserves, Mexican land that is not being farmed is considered idle, giving peasants the right to invade and claim it. Liquidamber, a plantation named for the coffee-colored stone found in the region, cultivates less than half its 3,500 acres and has been threatened many times with invasions by nearby farming communities.

“They say they want to work the land, but what they do is destroy it,” said Manuel Diaz Alvarez, a longtime Liquidamber employee. “They cut down the forest to plant one year, then they move on to another piece of land. What they don’t seem to see is that when you cut down the trees, the (rain) water also goes.”

The peasants also burn off tree stumps and ground cover after clearing away trees--a practice that they repeat at the end of every harvest season. That quickly destroys the thin, fragile forest topsoil, forcing the farmers to find yet more land to clear.

The results of such farming techniques are strikingly clear on the three-hour drive from the nearest airport at Tuxtla Gutierrez to this town on the outskirts of El Triunfo.

The road winds for three miles through the hills of El Parral, a lunar landscape of white rocks, sandy soil and patchy grass that stretches from either side of the highway to the horizon.

A generation ago, before decades of slash-and-burn agriculture, chemical pesticides and fertilizers--and the resulting erosion--this land was tropical rain forest. And without a radical change in the way he farms, this is the kind of land Luciano Perez will pass on to his children.

“What good will it do to have a nature reserve (in the core zone) at El Triunfo if the land around it is like El Parral?” questioned Jose Hernandez, the reserve’s director.

The success of a biosphere reserve clearly depends on good relations with the people living in its buffer zone.

At the Monteverde reserve in Costa Rica, conservationists went so far as to borrow $185,000 to buy 100 acres of land from an uncooperative dairy farmer. They then resold the land with easements that guarantee the new owner’s help in protecting the food sources for the quetzals that live in the core zone but feed in the foothills.

It was a drastic action that might be unfeasible for many biosphere reserves because of the cost, acknowledged George V.N. Powell, director of conservation biology at Philadelphia’s Rare Center for Tropical Conservation, a foundation that played an important role in the deal.

A more practical solution is for the reserves to provide alternative ways for residents of the buffer zones to make a living.

It is also a moral obligation, according to Enrique Jardel, director of the Sierra Manantlan Biosphere Reserve on Mexico’s Pacific Coast.

“We cannot just insist on preserving ecosystems the way we find them, including the peasant dying of hunger,” he said. “We must help them design alternatives.”

That way of thinking is changing the approach of scientists that work in biosphere reserves.

“Traditionally, we have put too much emphasis on counting how many trees or how many birds with how many toes are in the reserve,” said director Hernandez, who is a biologist.

“We have to do more research on how to conserve the land and to do it in a way so that people can eat,” he continued. “Right now, the only way that people know how to get food is by cutting down the forest.”

El Triunfo’s first efforts in that direction are modest compared to the overwhelming size of the task. In cooperation with Liquidamber, reserve staff members are developing a program for cultivating mushrooms in coffee-bean peels to discourage farmers from dumping the peels in streams and to give them an alternate source of protein.

Cesar Velazquez, the staff’s community extension director, is working with farmers, including Luciano Perez, in three villages surrounding the core zone to develop organic-farming techniques. They have stopped burning off cornstalks at the end of the season and have begun pruning to improve production, terracing to prevent erosion and making compost heaps to replace chemical fertilizer.

“I decided to go along with it because I can’t afford chemical fertilizer any more anyway,” Perez said. In addition, his cousin found out that organically grown coffee commands a higher international price, bringing 25% more than other types when sold to a nearby cooperative.

It is barely a beginning, Velazquez acknowledged, noting that getting people to participate in this type of program is difficult because they don’t accept that there are serious changes under way in Mexico’s land distribution system. Only 16 of the 105 farmers in Perez’s village have signed up for the organic-farming effort.

“We have to win them over,” Velazquez said. “In the end, they are the ones who will decide whether the reserve survives or not.”