Learning to Value a Jewel : A broad alliance holds hope for Mexico’s Selva Lacandona forest

Southern Mexico’s Selva Lacandona, the last big patch of rain forest in North America, appears from the air “like a green serape tossed over a campfire. It is tattered, scorched and smoldering--slowly being burned to bits.” So wrote Frank Clifford, a Times staff writer, in a stark assessment of this endangered treasure.

An estimated 40% of its original 4 million acres may have been destroyed by human depredation--timbering, cattle ranching, slash-and-burn agriculture. But there is a way to protect the Lacandona. It will require forging a partnership among the people of the forest, government authorities, international funding agencies and conservation groups.

In the Lacandona there are hundreds of thousands of peasants who, desperate to find arable land, keep moving deeper into the forest, opening the ancient woodland to the curse of erosion through slash-and-burn agriculture.

Migration to that region has to stop and the estimated 300,000 settlers already there must find a lifestyle that will preserve the environment. Groups like Conservation International and the Tropical Forest Action Program have been working with communities to promote alternatives. For example, they are encouraging the growing of crops like vanilla, which is making headway against synthetic substitutes.

Perhaps more exciting is the prospect of eco-tourism, offering the rare experience of travel through an environment still relatively primitive, and not so distant for Americans and their dollars. A fine example of this alternative is the visionary project of Fernando Ochoa at Laguna Miramar, a lovely and barely accessible lake in the forest. He has opened a campground where visitors pay $180 for four days of exploring. The locals earn money as guides and cooks.

The key to preservation, Ochoa says, is to make the local people realize they have to take the responsibility for their environment. “Miramar,” he said, “is a jewel. But it is their jewel.”