Restoring the Mother
As an aspiring Tenderfoot, I learned the Boy Scout Rule for camping: “Always leave your campsite better than you found it.” It’s fundamental to Scouting. Decades later a version of this standard reappeared during my Sterling Men’s Weekend when I overheard the rule of strike: “Respect the site! Leave it better than you found it.” It was another way of saying: “Be impeccable in your relationship to your environment.”
That was in February, 2007 – shortly after I had taken possession of a badly degraded, 247-acre cattle ranch in the highlands of Veracruz, Mexico. Veracruz, famous for its shade grown coffee, is home to some of the few remaining patches of Cloud Forest in Mexico. Cloud forest is a unique and magical ecosystem, a hold over from the end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. While a Cloud Forest could receive as much as 300 inches of rain a year, its principal source of moisture comes from being constantly shrouded in clouds. The damp cloud cover nourishes tree mosses, orchids and bromeliads. Cloud forests are only found at certain latitudes (from 23°N to 25°S), and at certain altitudes (never below 1,600, rarely above 10,000 feet). Less than 1% of the global forest qualifies as Cloud Forest. Typically, the Cloud Forest contains plant species from both tropical and temperate forests, making it one of the most bio-diverse eco-systems in the world.
Sadly, these amazing forests are disappearing at an astounding rate. Mexico looses approximately 1 million acres of forest per year – equivalent to 2,075 football fields per day. Cattle farms, avocado orchards, sugar cane and coffee plantations, banana groves all promise modest revenues, sufficient to justify, in the minds of land owners, clearing away the forest. In fact, Cloud Forests are among the world’s most threatened ecosystems, and many of the unique inhabitants of these forests are on the red list of endangered species.
Hundreds of years ago, my cattle ranch had been covered by Cloud Forest. Progress and development erased the forest. Ten years ago, my wife and I decided to put it back. The problem is, no one really knows how to restore an intact ecosystem, once it has been destroyed. Soils change, invasive species dominate, key insect species disappear, and the entire chain of life is altered.
Fortunately, a contiguous neighbor had a postage stamp sized patch of preserved cloud forest, tiny compared to what had preceded it, but enough to allow for study of the diverse tree species. We collected seeds and started a nursery for 27 different hardwood trees native to the Mexican Cloud Forest. In the first two years of the restoration project, during the rainy season, we planted over 20,000 trees. While not all of the transplanted seedlings survived, to our delight, a high percentage did. Once the canopy layer was established, the saplings began to throw off enough shade to control some of the worst invasive ferns, like bracken, which choke out less competitive understory shrubs and ground cover.
Today the restoration project is barely ten years old and already it has created a remarkable new habitat. Much like Noah’s arc, the fledgling forest has invited in hundreds of birds, mammals, amphibians, insects, rodents, bats and the like. We have seen exotic birds like the toucan, as well as coyotes, armadillos, and even a small mountain lion. We are still waiting for the resplendent quetzal, the bellbird, the tapir, the jaguar, and the spider monkey. That may take a while.
Biologists speak about “keystone species”, referring to any plant or animal that plays a unique and crucial role in the way an ecosystem functions. Without a specific keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically different or cease to exist altogether. In our forest, the Chicalaba tree (Quercus Insignis) is a keystone species. This noble oak, with the largest acorn in the world, is on the red list of endangered species. Despite its value to other plants and animals in the forest, landowners eliminate the Chicalaba because of the dense shade it casts. In honor of this mighty tree, the virtual Sequoia of the Cloud Forest, we have named the ranch: El Rancho Las Bellotas de Chicalaba (the Chicalaba Acorns).
Now that the Cloud Forest at El Rancho Las Bellotas has taken charge of its own rejuvenation, we have launched a new project. Every October, we gather up the giant acorns, putting them into bags, nursing them into hardy seedlings. Then we distribute them to neighbors throughout the region, to anyone who will agree to care for the trees into adulthood. The reforestation effort, when accompanied by education about the importance of this endangered species, has the potential to spread the seed of the Cloud Forest to other farms and ranches in the area.
For 10,000 years “civilized” humans have been harvesting the fruits of Mother Nature, taking and wasting, the non-renewable resources as well as the renewable ones. Since the early 1980s the rate of exploitation and waste has exceeded the earth’s capacity for natural regeneration. In other words, we have begun depleting at an ever-accelerating rate, the material abundance of our planet. While we cannot turn back the hands of time, nor can we revert to living as leaver indigenous people, perhaps we can promote a new class of human behavior to emerge, one which embraces the Sterling Men’s standard of respecting the site by restoring the planet’s natural abundance. Perhaps we can leave the site better than we found it.
Alan Wright SMW February ‘07