A Guide to Mexico’s Ruins--the Ecological Kind

Here in L.A., we think of Mexico as a vast and varied playground. We swap stories about the most remote beaches, the best outfitters and the most exotic ruins. We know the places to avoid because they are so polluted or denuded that they are no longer appropriate for vacations. As guests, we can always leave.

It is not so easy for Joel Simon, a journalist and associate editor with the Pacific News Service who lives in Mexico City and cares deeply about the future of Mexico’s rich, beautiful, varied and vulnerable environment. “For the most part,” he writes of the air in his hometown, “you can make a decision to live with it. The same cannot be said of the country’s other environmental threats--a lack of water, eroding farmland, and a massive depletion of natural resources.” Reading Simon’s account of these threats, their histories, the stories of the people whose lives are caught up in the fate of Mexico’s environment, is like looking through a telescope at the possible future of our own country, where resource consumption and depletion for economic reasons is slowed sometimes effectively and sometimes marginally and sometimes too late altogether.

More than anything in this heartfelt and heavily researched book (the best kind of research: 50% in the field and 50% in the library), one comes away with a sense of Mexico’s fragility. Again and again in Simon’s travels, he was told “porque la tierra ya no da,” because the earth no longer gives. He describes how the people of Mexico--given land in the reforms created by President Cardenas in 1934 (through which Cardenas gave away 20 million acres in his first two years in office), and through the ejido system, in which land was granted to entire villages--were encouraged to literally farm that land to death, in the fear that it would be taken from them if they did not force it to produce. Today, writes Simon, only 12% of the land owned in ejidos is still arable. The same shortsightedness encouraged Mexican landowners to cut illegal deals with logging companies that, in a matter of years, converted throbbing jungles to bare rock and dust. Today, he writes, “Mexico continues to clear as much as 2.5 million acres a year of forest--the highest rate of deforestation in the world.”

And so, as varied as the reasons for Mexico’s vast migrations to the United States, Simon convinces the reader that the bottom line, the undeniable reason for illegal immigration, is erosion. “It is simplistic,” he writes, “to see Mexican immigration to the United States as a function of underdevelopment. In fact, the environmental and economic disruption that comes with development is generally what triggers migration.” And population is no excuse: “The correlation between Mexico’s growing population and its growing environmental deterioration is far from exact. More important than the size of the population is how resources are managed.

“There is simply no easy way,” writes Simon, “to reverse centuries of environmental decay and 50 years of failed rural policies.” The Mexican government has moved slowly and inefficiently to correct degradation. “Nearly 50 years after the first scientific report confirmed that extracting water from the aquifer [under Mexico City] was causing the city to sink, 70% of Mexico City’s water continues to come from wells in the valley.” As for the air in Mexico City, “the government has proved incapable of resolving the problem.”

Simon is sensitive to the trade-offs and to the arrogance of telling another culture what it should care about: “Balancing the Zapatista’s desire to develop and exploit the jungle’s few remaining resources against Mexico’s and the world’s right to preserve the last vestige of a dying ecosystem is an exceedingly delicate task.” In this, as in all his examples of environmental problems, Simon takes great pains to describe the history of the issue, at times going all the way back to the Aztecs and the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 1500s.

Simon documents tourist development in Cancun (“a capital-intensive style of development geared toward quick returns”); the sinking of Mexico City; the deforestation of the Sierra Madre; and the city-state of Pemex, the oil company that is the pride of the Mexican government and the responsible party to spills, explosions and toxic dumps that have taken hundreds of lives and will damage thousands more. He describes the efforts of environmentalists like Jacques Cousteau’s son Jean-Michel in Cancun; the Group of One Hundred, poets, writers, painters and intellectuals who have enormous influence in Mexico; and Edwin Bustillos, who grew up among the pines in Caborachi and who just won the 1996 Goldman Prize, an extremely prestigious environmental award, for his work in the Sierra Madre. “Environmentalism,” he concedes, in Mexico has shallow roots . . . the country can point to only a handful of conservationists of any consequence.”