Mexican Town Gives Life Back to Forest That Sustains Villagers

Dawn has yet to break over the wooded horizon. The logging trucks are quiet. But Ixtlan’s people know that, come morning, the old forest will feed their families, clothe their children, support their schools, fix their churches.

And the woodsmen will saw sparingly so the pines will come back soon.

It is a bargain renewed each cool sunrise in Ixtlan de Juarez, a timber town in southern Mexico that will never again forget to preserve the pine-oak forest that sustains it.

Fifteen years ago, Ixtlan’s leadership seized back control of its ancestral land, kicking out an outside paper company that left a litter of pine stumps and broken promises in the village’s backyard.

Today this small town about 300 miles southeast of Mexico City is doing things its own way, with a community-owned company that plows timber profits into local jobs and services.

Other towns in Mexico’s poor rural south also have tried what’s known as sustainable forestry. But most lack the strong local management and abundant woodlands that Ixtlan has used to preserve both trees and profits.

Though too small to appear on most maps of North America, this mountain hamlet is a rare success in a nation with a record of environmental abuse--in a world of perishing natural resources.

“We have to give back to the Earth what we take from it,” Lorenzo Perez said during a break from sawing logs in one of Ixtlan’s pine-fragrant mills, sounding more like an environmentalist than a woodcutter.

Each dawn breaks in this old Indian village as it has for centuries, lighting a patch-quilt of mud-brick homes, bean farms and crumbling stone churches, similar to other communities in Mexico’s heavily indigenous south.

But Ixtlan’s distinctions grow in the waning shadows.

Signs along roads and parks declare in bold type that Ixtlan has no future without its forest. Biologists truck to the woods alongside foresters to monitor the health of plants and animals.

By afternoon, children blare centuries-old music from trumpets and trombones in a band indirectly supported by timber profits, cementing a bond between nature and culture. The town’s efforts to preserve both harken to the ways of its Zapotec Indians, who flourished for thousands of years until outsiders invaded.

“Indigenous peoples have been trying to connect their cultures with the developing world since colonial times,” said Alvaro Gonzalez of the World Wildlife Fund’s Mexico headquarters in Oaxaca City, about an hour’s drive west of Ixtlan.

“But what they don’t like, like everybody, are things that are forced. They like to manage their own identities.”

How Ixtlan de Juarez preserved its natural heritage to save its future is a tale rooted in the neighboring Sierra Norte forest--with 6,000 species of plants and animals, including rare conifers, wild pigs and mountain lions.

More than 500 years ago, legend has it, a muscular warrior seeking to relocate his Zapotec tribe shot an arrow from a hilltop over the pine forests to the remote valley below, where it lodged deep into a tree trunk.

Today that long-gone tree is the site of a crumbling Catholic church at the ancient heart of Ixtlan. Over the centuries, homes and farms crawled up the foothills. Hunters visited the forest seeking game to augment their corn and beans. Wood provided fuel for cooking and heat.

Historically, most communities in Mexico have owned their forests.

But it wasn’t until this century that trees on the land abutting Ixtlan were cut for commercial use, starting with a small logging operation that provided jobs.

The logging intensified in 1954, when Ixtlan, lured by the promise of more jobs and pressured by the federal government, began leasing land to Fapatux, the national paper company.

But only about 80 Ixtlan residents were hired, with management and other jobs going to nonresidents. Profits from selling wood also went outside the town. Local folks didn’t see many benefits.

By 1981, aerial photographs revealed that wide swaths of prime woodland had been severely damaged. Fapatux cut nearly all the large valuable pines.

That’s when the town realized that if pell-mell cutting continued “we would have no more left to work,” said Pedro Vidal, a local forester and government official.

Banding together with other communities on the outskirts of the forest, Ixtlan fought Fapatux to retake the land, refusing to renew the company’s 27-year concession despite pressure from the federal government.

Ixtlan, heading up the contingent of communities, had a plan to preserve the forest while giving people more work. The idea was to make wood products in town instead of just selling logs to outside factories. Leaders of Ixtlan’s 500-year-old democratic government limited jobs mostly to local representatives, all heads of Ixtlan households, and their families.

Today, the wood operation has about 220 employees, ranging from tree cutters to sawmill operators to managers, making from $3 to $18 a day--not bad pay for the area.

After driving into the deep forest, woodsmen select and mark only some trees. Areas close to streams are left alone. About 8,000 of nearly 30,000 acres of pine-oak forest are excluded from cutting because they harbor rare plants and animals, including four threatened bird species.

Townspeople are building watchtowers to check for fires and hunters. To help the woods regrow, the people are planting 35,000 seedlings from local greenhouses.

“We don’t want to cut all the forest, only what’s necessary for the community to survive,” said Gustavo Ramirez, a biologist and community authority who regularly goes into the forest to make sure loggers follow the rules. “Now, there is no deforestation here.”

Although it spares so many trees, the town enterprise last year made about $300,000 by selling products such as logs and pallets. The money helps pay for local services, including $100,000 to schools in the last two years--buying, for example, computers for students. Funds also go toward fixing the town’s oldest church and offering medical care for workers and their families.

In a world of numerous communities that have sacrificed their environment, polluting waterways and razing forests in the name of progress, Ixtlan’s amicable truce is a bright sign.

“Mexicans are very environmentally conscious--but it comes down to economics,” said Jorge Lopez Paniagua, head of Grupa Mesofilo, a regional organization that works with area communities to preserve natural resources and cultures.

Not all is pristine in Ixtlan. Its forests are still scarred, with oaks often growing in place of the large pines that were devastated.

And environmentalists worry that the forest may one day take a back seat to pressure from Ixtlan’s 2,000 residents for more woodcutting jobs--a common story in this nation.

Mexico’s varied landscape, from desert to rain forest to temperate mountains, is home to 10% of the world’s plant and animal species, as well as 56 ethnic groups and languages. But up to 250,000 acres of Mexican forest are destroyed by developers, timber companies and farmers each year, according to environmentalists.

The destruction has eaten away at traditional ways of life. Many natives who once lived off forests have been forced to look elsewhere for jobs, sometimes traveling hundreds or thousands of miles. Oaxaca, the southern Mexico state where Ixtlan is situated, is a major exporter of migrants to the United States.

The migration has drained native interest in the customs of Oaxaca and neighboring Chiapas state, which together have more than half of Mexico’s indigenous cultures. In Oaxaca, at least two native dialects have become extinct in the last 10 years.

Other cultural threats are at work. Unlike some Oaxaca villages, most children in Ixtlan never learned their Zapotec dialect because the federal government insisted Spanish was better for getting jobs.

But Ixtlan is rediscovering its old ties. Timber jobs here have helped keep young people in town, resurrecting pride in community heritage. Of young residents who do leave, some return with forestry or biology educations that they use to nurture the forest.

Although Ixtlan’s people haven’t turned back the clock, they haven’t turned their backs on the past, either.

One recent afternoon, a tape recorder blared old-style regional music as children practiced 400-year-old folk dances in the outdoor square of the local culture center. The dozen boys and girls faced each other in two lines, then coupled in the center, girls twirling, their dresses flaring in the sun.

And no one in the town’s traditional music band, housed in a white building a short distance away, seemed to mind that their trumpets, trombones and clarinets were sending out-of-tune melodies over the hills.

“It’s more beautiful than popular music,” said a boy trumpeter, joined by nods from other children in La Banda del Barrio Soledad.

Just down the road, you see something else.

Flames crackled across a blackened hillside, curling around freshly hacked trees and bushes. A man with a machete strapped to his waist stood vigil over his smoldering handiwork, clearing land to build a small house to live with his mother and sister.

This is the traditional slash-and-burn method of denuding land for homes and farms that has destroyed so much of the developing world’s forests.

But this was approved by Ixtlan’s government, along with a few other such projects this year. Although the town is slowly growing up the verdant hills, local officials think the environment can cope.

To an outsider, the images may seem contradictory, like the satellite dishes and electrical lines in Ixtlan that frame the paths of elderly women grunting under stacks of firewood.

But come darkness, the scent of pine and moonlight mingle with hope and expectation in the mountain air.

If the forest is willing, town leaders hope to finance a furniture factory that will create 40 more jobs. If the trees yield enough profits, the town will build an ecotourism center with hiking trails and bungalows to help preserve 20,000 acres of jungle that are part of Ixtlan’s vast holdings.

There’s no shortage of ideas in Ixtlan de Juarez.

For this much the people know as they settle down to sleep: The trees are growing back. And only the people can cut them.

It is their forest.