How a Mayan town restored its sacred cloud forest and water supply

First steps toward conservation

With no technical background or contemporary concept of conservation, Concepción’s people relied on the ancient Maya knowledge of their grandparents to begin restoring Siete Orejas’s forest in the 1970s. Concepción’s municipal government turned to the local Indigenous Council, a group of Mayan leaders appointed by the community, to decide how to proceed. According to López and Aguilar, they decided to limit firewood collection and give several people responsibility for caring for the forest, including guarding against firewood collection, planting new trees and maintaining trails. Initially these community park rangers were appointed annually and worked for no pay.

“We worked for free since the idea of ​​preserving the mountain began,” Escalante says, as he wields a machete to slash firefighting trails on Siete Orejas. “For us it was a great honor to be considered by the people to take care of the forest and it is something that we continue doing with pride.”

In the early 1980s, the country entered a series of political crises as the civil war that had begun in 1966 ground on and the government intensified its massacre of the country’s indigenous populations. Although the priorities changed and the intervention of both the municipal and indigenous councils became less evident in the environmental decisions, the community park rangers continued their work on the mountain.

In the 1990s, shortly after the creation of Guatemala’s National Council for Protected Areas (CONAP by its Spanish initials), everyone who owned natural forest wanted to be a part of what Samuel Estacuy, CONAP’s regional director, called “protected area fever.” Local governments, private individuals and the Guatemalan government sought the declaration of their forests as protected areas.

“I always wanted to be involved in environmental issues, but I didn’t have the proper education to do so,” Aguilar says. His opportunity came in early 2000, when he took office after being elected as a municipal councilor of Concepción. “I immediately chose the Environmental Commission, because I knew that through it, I could make a difference,” he says.

By that point he already had a relationship with Helvetas and some basic environmental education, but he needed the help of those who knew the mountain and its fauna and flora to create the programs to protect it. One of the first actions he took at the helm of the Environmental Commission was to include Escalante and López on the payroll. “The park rangers, who had been working non-stop since the mid-1970s, taught me about a lot of things,” he says.

Between 2004 and 2009, Helvetas worked with Concepción and several other communities, to educate community park rangers and advise municipal staff, like Aguilar, on creating and maintaining protected areas. This was key for the creation of the DAP, as part of the Environmental Commission, in 2004.

In 2008, Concepción Chiquirichapa caught protected area fever itself and designated a 1,200-hectare (4.6-square-mile) park on Siete Orejas named Kum Kum Wutz. Under Guatemala’s Protected Area Law, it is classified as a regional municipal park, which means that people can harvest certain natural resources, including wood, organic matter for fertilizer and medicinal plants, as long as they do not harm the forest.

“The forest provides mushrooms and other kind of food, as well as medicinal plants for the people to use. If there is a tree that fell down of natural causes, we allow the people to get in and chop it to get firewood,” Aguilar says.

Concepción also designated five other small forests, totaling 25 hectares (62 acres) scattered around town, as protected areas. The DAP got equipment and infrastructure and began organizing programs to sustainably generate income from the forests, such as the sale of leaf litter and a way of tracking the value of local people’s volunteer forest maintenance work.

It also enrolled 190 hectares (470 acres) of Kum Kum Wutz and all five of the small forests in a program through the National Institute of Forests (INAB by its Spanish initials) that pays landowners to commit to preserving forest cover on their land for a period of 10 years. This has generated $22,000 for the DAP’s operations, according to Aguilar, and the office plans to enroll more land in the coming years.

In 2015 the DAP under Aguilar, with technical assistance from Helvetas and financial aid from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), set up a nursery to grow trees for the reforestation efforts. In 2018 it planted more than 15,000 new trees; it plans to double that number for 2019. Concepción is now considering joining an INAB incentive program that encourages landowners to supply seeds to other parts of the country for their own reforestation efforts. The town’s pine, oak and cedar trees, as well as others like aguacatillo (Persea caerulea), are now old enough to produce seeds in quantity.

The local restoration of the pinabete, or Guatemalan fir, is one of the Concepción conservation program’s chief successes. The tree is a protected endemic species that the IUCN classifies as endangered due to the illegal traffic of its branches for use as Christmas trees by Guatemalan families. To date Concepción has restored about 7,000 pinabete trees, the equivalent of 7 hectares (17 acres). “Through talks with the villagers, we have managed to eradicate the illegal commercialization of this tree,” Aguilar says.

“In a way, Concepción Chiquirichapa is a unique example of productive conservation in Guatemala, because they were able to give a sustainable use to their natural resources,” Estacuy says.

Wildlife now thrives in the forest. The DAP does not actively monitor wildlife, but tracks sightings by park rangers, community members and visitors, which have included coyotes, opossums, deer, and a great variety of bird species.