I sat in the passenger seat of Juan Trujillo’s pickup truck, careening through a dense forest in northern Guatemala. The road we were driving on—and I use the word road here with some hesitation—was simply a deeply grooved dirt trail that had been coarsely etched through the jungle so that trucks like this one could travel between the town of Flores, a lovely little place overrun by tourists on an island in the middle of a scenic lake, and the many tiny villages and Mayan ruins that dot the northern jungles. Rains had turned parts of the road into muddy mush, and the trip was about as smooth as the swirling teacup ride at Disneyland. I was being jarred in all directions, my head occasionally thumping up against the roof of the truck, as I tried to do some basic fourth-grade mathematical calculations using the numbers that I had written down in my little notebook at the village we’d just departed.
In that village—it’s called Carmelita—as in several other villages in the northern Guatemalan region of Petén, farmers make a modest living by selling products harvested from the forest itself. These include both wood products and nonwood products like pepper, a tree gum called chicle that is used to make chewing gum, and ramón, a seed that apparently the Mayans munched on while constructing their intricate temples and that the Guatemalan chamber of commerce would like to market as the next international superfood of the twenty-first century. The farmers also tend to various types of palm trees. Not the tall, swaying, tropical, coconut-bearing palm trees of Southern California or Miami Beach, but squat little plants and bushes that sit in the shade of the forest and whose leaves are harvested and sent overseas to be used in floral arrangements and carried aloft by celebrants during the spring holiday of Palm Sunday.
Palm Sunday is a Christian holiday that falls on the Sunday before Easter and commemorates the day that Jesus Christ entered the holy city of Jerusalem while crowds of admirers laid down palm leaves on the ground before him. Like most people, before I started working on this book, I had never considered for a second where the palm leaves used every year for this holiday actually come from. It turns out they come from a handful of Latin American countries, including Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico, and it also turns out that for the most part they are harvested in a haphazard fashion without any regard to the long-term sustainability of the forests. There are, however, some exceptions. In a few select villages in northern Guatemala and the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, local farmers—with the help of savvy non-governmental environmental organizations, forward-looking governmental agencies, and a conglomeration of religious organizations in the United States that have come together under the leadership of an unassuming University of Minnesota professor to form the so-called “Eco Palm” project—have revolutionized the way that palm leaves are harvested in the region. In February 2012, I spent a week in Guatemala and Mexico to learn about these harvesting techniques so I could understand what role religious groups have played in both creating and solving the problem of palm deforestation. But why was I furiously doing long division in the front seat of a pickup truck tromping through the Guatemalan jungle? We’ll get to that.
I first learned about the potentially deleterious effects of Palm Sunday on Latin American forests when a colleague pointed me to a fascinating article about a Colombian bird published in Audubon magazine. In the piece, a terrific freelance writer named Susan McGrath tells the story of the yellow-eared parrot, a glorious creature, mostly bright green with yellow patches on the side of its head, that lives in a small area in the Andes Mountains of Colombia. The yellow-eared parrot is highly sensitive and can only nest in a single type of wax palm tree. Unfortunately for these feathered fellows, however, the local church in the region where the birds live had been using this tree’s leaves for its annual Palm Sunday celebration, thus decimating the tree population and driving the parrot to the brink of extinction. When the bird’s defenders first tried to convince the town’s priest to use a different type of palm, they were not well received. Specifically, according to McGrath, the priest “blew a gasket” and “admonished parishioners to stand fast and keep using the palms.” It was only when the priest was transferred and replaced by a more flexible religious leader that the bird lovers started to make progress. In the end, the church replaced the wax palm leaves with an abundant native species called iraca (which some still oppose because it is too “puny”), and as a result the birds have made a remarkable recovery.
The Eco Palm project that I mentioned earlier is another super-awesome effort to protect the unique environment where Palm Sunday palms grow. It can circuitously be traced back to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the 1994 accord between the United States, Canada, and Mexico that eliminated tariffs and other impediments to free trade among the three countries. One argument that free trade opponents often raise is that lifting barriers to trade can sometimes harm the environment. An importing country that cares a lot about the environment, for example, cannot always insist that an exporting country do things in an environmentally friendly way as a condition on importing the exporter’s goods.
An example of this problem occurred in the mid-1990s, when the United States insisted that it would only import shrimp caught in nets with a turtle-excluding device that would prevent shrimpers from inadvertently ensnaring and killing endangered sea turtles. This requirement was fine for big, rich Western shrimpers, but for poor independent shrimpers in places like Malaysia and Pakistan, installing these turtle excluding devices was completely unfeasible (the shrimpers’ yearly income in some cases was about the same amount as the cost of one device). These small shrimpers brought a high-profile case against the United States in front of the World Trade Organization, which ultimately held for the United States, but not without placing some limits on our ability to insist on environmentally friendly processes as a precondition to importing foreign goods. Some environmentalists were really angry about this. If you remember back to 1999, when a loose and weird coalition of unions and environmental groups and anarchists (anarchists!) protested the WTO’s Seattle conference and caused all sorts of property damage—some called these events the Battle of Seattle—you might recall that a bunch of the protestors were dressed up as turtles. This is why.
Anyway, due to these concerns about free trade, the three NAFTA countries established an organization called the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) to study NAFTA’s environmental effects and to take steps to mitigate them. Sometime in the late 1990s, the head of the Trade and Environment Program at CEC, a woman named Chantal Line-Carpentier, became aware that palm forests in southern Mexico were being harmed by unsustainable harvesting techniques. Line-Carpentier knew that consumers in the United States are often willing to pay a premium for products they know are helping (or at least not hurting) the environment. She had previously worked on projects to harness private market demand as a way of promoting sustainably grown coffee, and she wondered whether the same approach might help the palms. In 2000, she contacted Dean Current, a forestry economist at the University of Minnesota who had a great deal of experience with Latin American forests, and asked him if he would conduct a study to figure out whether such a thing might be possible.
At first, Current was skeptical about doing the study. As he told me when we met in his office in the University of Minnesota’s Soil Science Building in St. Paul, he is trained as an economist, not a marketer. But he eventually agreed, and along with a graduate student, he not only visited and talked to all the wholesale florists in the Twin Cities but also did a nationwide study of the entire palm importing business in the United States. He learned that although most of the demand for palms from Latin America comes from florists who use the palms as part of floral displays, churches that buy palms for Palm Sunday also make up a significant portion of the market. Plus, many of these churches seemed to be quite willing to pay a little extra for palms that were sustainably harvested, if the churches were guaranteed that the additional money would go back to the communities to support sustainable practices and other important community needs, such as education. As Current put it when I asked him if any churches refused to participate in his program: “No one says that they don’t want to pay twenty more dollars for sustainability.” And thus, the EcoPalm project was born.
The project started small. In 2005, its pilot year, Current and a graduate student took orders themselves from religious congregations in Minnesota and North Dakota and delivered a total of about five thousand palm fronds to the churches from the back of a van. Over time, however, the project grew substantially. Current brought in religious organizations like Lutheran World Relief and the Episcopal Church to spread the word to their congregations, and he had a professional florist take care of the sales and deliveries. Media stories, like one published in the New York Times in 2007, brought the project added publicity. By 2012, the project filled orders for over nine hundred thousand fronds. This was still a relatively small percentage of the palms that are used in Palm Sunday services around the country, but it marked a great advance over the situation just a few years earlier, and it meant that a good deal of money was being sent to communities in need.
It was clear from what I had read about the EcoPalm project and talking to Professor Current that I had happened upon a very cool initiative that was providing real benefits to the environment. But I still had a lot of questions. What were these harvesting techniques that the villagers were using to protect the palm forests? What do palm forests even look like? Do the villagers know who was buying their palms, and why? Most importantly, how did these select villages in Guatemala and Mexico happen to develop sustainable harvesting techniques? Did the EcoPalm project, with its promise of paying extra for sustainably harvested palms, create the incentive to start harvesting the palms in a sustainable fashion, or were the palms already being harvested sustainably in some places? Reading the newspaper articles about the project, I believed that the EcoPalm project itself had created the incentives. The New York Times piece, for instance, suggested that the primary consumers of the sustainably harvested palms were indeed the churches. Was religion really that important of a factor here, either in creating or solving the palm forest crisis in Latin America? I wanted to learn more. And so I traveled south.
In 2013, I left for Guatemala in mid-February, which is a good time to leave for Guatemala if you live in Boston, where just the week before, we had received twenty-three inches of snow during a single storm. I had never been to Central America, so I was a little worried about the things that people who have never actually gone to Central America tend to be worried about when they go to Central America, like whether it was safe. The assistant dean who approved my funding for the trip didn’t exactly put me at ease when he told me there was “no money in the ransom budget, so be careful.” As it turned out, though, I had no use for such funds. The trip went as smooth as can be.
One thing that made my research in Guatemala and Mexico more difficult than it needed to be was my poor language skills. My Spanish is muy crappy. I should have taken Spanish in high school, but instead I took Latin, I guess because I thought it was more important to be able to talk with the pope than with the 350 million or so people who speak Spanish all over the world. Anyway, a couple of years before I took this trip, for reasons I won’t get into, I decided to start studying Spanish. My university has a great perk that allows faculty members to take courses in other parts of the school for free. So one summer, I enrolled in Introduction to Spanish, along with fifteen nineteen-year-olds. Let me tell you, when you’re an old guy and you take a class with a bunch of kids who were born after you graduated from college and who are constantly playing with their phones while the teacher is talking and who drink twenty-four-ounce Red Bulls at nine in the morning, it’s really weird. I kept expecting them to ask me to buy them beer (they never did). Well, long story short, I ended up taking three semesters of Spanish this way, and although I certainly did learn something (witness the magnificent and heart-warming semester-ending play in which two of my teenaged classmates and I reimagined the ending to the hit biopic Selena), my Spanish still leaves a whole lot to be desired.
After about twelve hours of flying and sitting around at the Guatemala City airport, my turboprop airplane touched down at the tiny Flores airport, where I was met by Juan Trujillo, a squat, barrel-chested guy who works for a great NGO called Rainforest Alliance, where his official title is non-timber forest products coordinator. Juan is originally from the village of Carmelita (the place we were coming back from when I was trying to do my math), and his career has taken him back and forth from running the nontimber products cooperative in the village to working in the city for the NGO. While I was in Guatemala, Juan worked twelve-hour days and drove his truck for what seemed like thousands of miles to help me understand what was going on in his country. Because Juan’s English is about as good as my Spanish, however, he brought along Celeste, a young woman with excellent English whose prior translating job was with a United Nations soldier force in Haiti. There was some trouble getting me to my hotel, as a religious procession for some saint had closed down some of the roads on the island, but before long, I was checked into a decent if a bit grungy place called Hotel Casazul, where I practiced my terrible Spanish with the lady in charge to try to figure out how to access the Wi-Fi system (I failed).
The schedule for my three days in Petén was jam-packed with travel to isolated villages and meetings with NGO people, government representatives, and others involved in the palm trade. Over the course of these busy days, I tried to figure out what was really going on with the palms in Guatemala the best I could, but it was not always easy. Part of the problem was the language—even though my translator was great, speaking (and listening) through her was not the same as speaking directly to the people who were explaining things, and much meaning inevitably got lost. I also came with various preconceptions from my reading and just my general background, and some of these preconceptions were difficult to shake. I gained some key understanding early on, fortunately, over breakfast by the lake with Juan Trujillo and José Román Carrera, a bigwig at the Rainforest Alliance for Central America and the Caribbean. I had simply assumed that the villages I was about to visit were all on privately owned land. In fact, as Carrera explained to me, the villages are all located on land that is owned by the government.
Specifically, the villages are all within the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, a 21,000-square-kilometer government-owned area that was set aside in 1990 to protect the extremely valuable forest resources of northern Guatemala. A government agency known as CONAP manages the area, which is split up into three types of land designations—core zones, the primary ecological sites where nobody is supposed to do anything that would harm the forests; buffer zones, where some farming is allowed; and multiple-use zones, where the government may enter into concession agreements with communities to do certain types of more invasive activities, including harvesting of timber and nontimber products like the palms.
Beginning in the mid-2000s, CONAP entered into concession agreements with at least a dozen community organizations within the multiple-use zones to allow the communities, under very specific terms and with extensive monitoring, to harvest and sell various wood and nonwood products. The arrangement has been incredibly successful. According to Carrera, the rate of deforestation in the community areas is twenty times less than in the rest of the reserve, even than in the core zones, which are supposed to be pristine. This last part took me a while to understand, I have to admit. In the United States, a protected zone like a wilderness area or a national monument is almost guaranteed to be in pretty good shape, ecologically. But in northern Guatemala, the supposedly unspoiled lands are often destroyed by narco-traffickers, who clear huge swaths of land out of the forest and who the government is either unable or unwilling to stop. In the communities, however, where the villagers know that the health of the forest is critical to their own future (and where the government and the NGOs provide them with a lot of help), the forests remain more or less protected.
By this time, I was incredibly eager to actually visit one of these villages, so as soon as the first of about fifteen meals of eggs and tortillas and beans I would consume on the trip was finished, we set off for the village of Uaxactun (pronounced kind of like “Washington”). A community of about a thousand people approximately ninety kilometers north of Flores, Uaxactun is located near a set of impressive Mayan ruins (for what it’s worth, the sequel to the original Activision videogame hit Pitfall, known as Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, was apparently based here). Our group included Juan, Celeste, Jorge Sosa (one of the greatest guys ever), and me. A thirty-year forestry veteran who works for the association of forest communities called ACOFOP (Asociación de Comunidades Forestales de Petén), Sosa knows the name of every tree, seed, and leaf in the forest and wears a white sombrero at all times. Everyone loves Jorge Sosa, even though they all give him grief about the hat. With his dark features and slight frame and that hat, he looks like somebody out of an old movie, so I surreptitiously tried to take as many pictures of him as I could. I even drew a little sketch of him in my notebook and still entertain plans of painting a portrait of him someday if I ever start painting again.
The drive to Uaxactun took about three hours, during which time I kept my eyes peeled for jaguars and monkeys and other exotic Guatemalan fauna frolicking in the forest. Sadly, I did not see so much as an interesting spider during my entire trip. We arrived in the village around midday. It was a charming place. The main living area consisted of a series of little houses surrounding a cleared-out rectangular area maybe three football fields long, which had been used as an airstrip at one time. Pigs and horses and dogs ran freely around; kids were playing in the field and looking at me with my pen and little notebook as if I were a weirdo.
I was escorted into a small wooden house, painted green with a tin roof and concrete floor. There I met with four community leaders who explained how palm harvesting had changed in the village over the past ten years. There were three men and a woman. One of the men looked remarkably like a darker version of Burt Reynolds in Cannonball Run, and this distracted me several times during our conversation because I kept expecting Dom DeLuise to show up. The four villagers explained to me how before they entered into a concession agreement with CONAP in the mid-2000s, the xateros (in Guatemala, the palms are called xate and the palm-cutters are called xateros) would cut as many palms as they could as fast as they could, because the buyers paid for the palms solely by quantity. The buyers would pay the xateros very little and then send the palms on to Guatemala City, where an exporter would sell them to overseas distributors. As a result, the xateros were destroying the forests.
Beginning in 2005, however, the village, along with government and NGO forest engineers, developed a management plan that totally changed how the palms were harvested. Now, the community’s forest is divided into four zones. Harvesters are allowed to cut palms in only one of the four zones at a time and only for thirty days, after which they must move to a different zone. Consequently, the palms in each zone get ninety days to recuperate before harvesters return to cut some more. Also, the xateros were trained to cut the palm leaves in a way that benefits the palms. Instead of cutting all of the plant’s leaves, regardless of their quality, the xateros now only cut the leaves that are good enough to be sold overseas. Leaves that have holes, or that are yellowed, or that are otherwise flawed are left alone; they may not be perfect enough to be put into a floral display or carried on Palm Sunday, but they are still very important for the health of the plant and thus the forest and the entire ecosystem.
The community sells the palms directly to an importer in the United States (how this came about is an important part of the story, one that I did not learn about until later on in the week, so stay tuned), and to ensure that the xateros are only cutting the good leaves from the plants, the harvesters must bring the bags of leaves to the bodega de xate, a special building where village women sort through the leaves, note how many of the leaves received from each xatero are good ones, and decide how much each xatero will get paid for his harvest. The part about the women being the ones who run the sorting part of the operation is universal in these sustainably harvesting communities, and it is one of the great benefits of the new approach to palm harvesting. Before these developments, women in the village were often unemployed, but now they participate in the work of the community while also bringing home extra money to help their families.
Once I got the basic gist of what was going on, I asked about the contribution of the US churches to the village. After all, although I was learning a lot of fascinating stuff about internal Guatemalan conservation efforts, my original goal in studying these changes was to understand whether and how religious groups in the United States have contributed both to the problems and to the solutions here in Latin America. The villagers were extremely positive about their relationship with the EcoPalm project. According to the four people I was meeting with, the churches had given the community a great deal of extra money above and beyond the normal price of the palms. (I had not yet gotten into exact amounts—this was what would end up getting me all flummoxed and doing long division on the way home from Carmelita.) The community has used the money for all sorts of things—not only to keep up its forest management practices and to get those practices certified by Rainforest Alliance (which the government requires), but also for infrastructure and education. In the past, for instance, the villagers used the money to hire teachers for older students and to put a concrete floor into a school so the children wouldn’t have to study on dirt.
Our next stop was the bodega de xate, a long, open warehouse constructed from wooden slats painted turquoise and topped with a tin roof. On the side of the bodega, a group of students had painted a mural depicting the steps of the palm harvesting and selling process—from a xatero cutting the palms in the forest, to a woman selecting the usable palms in the warehouse, to a truck transporting the palms to a refrigerated room in Guatemala City, where they are stored before being sent overseas. Inside the bodega, a dozen wooden tables were covered with palms, some in rough piles, unsorted, just in from the forest, and others in neat stacks of uniform bundles of twenty palms each. Burt Reynolds and some of his friends showed me how they wrap thirty bundles together in brown paper to make a package of six hundred fronds—the basic unit in which the palms are exported. An older woman wearing a short blue skirt and a black top explained how she sorts through the just-harvested palms and throws the ones that are too small or misshapen or otherwise flawed on the ground. The woman’s name was Raina Isabel Valenzuela, and she showed me a notebook in which she keeps careful notes about how many bad palms each xatero brings in. She claimed that before the harvesters instituted the new sorting system, nearly 85 percent of the harvested palms were unusable; now, she said, very few are discarded. If the records show that a xatero has been bringing in too many unusable leaves, then the villagers will have a talk with him, because every unusable leaf that is cut from a tree harms the forest without getting anything for the village in return.
Although it would take until the Mexico part of my trip for me to really hike into a forest to see these palms in their natural habitat, we did take a walk to the edge of the forest in Uaxactun, where Jorge Sosa and the guys showed me the different kinds of palms that are grown there. Only the so-called xate jade—a frond of about eighteen to twenty-four inches with maybe twelve or fourteen leaves on each frond—are really exported in serious numbers. There are a couple of other types as well, including one called fish tail (cola de piscado), which looks like the tail of a fish, and a narrower palm called the xate hembra. The narrower palm used to sell but now, much to the chagrin of the villagers, has become nearly impossible to export. (At one point, the villagers pulled me over and implored me to convince more of my fellow Americans to import this type of palm—which is what I’m doing here, now, in this sentence.) The villagers also gave me a little primer on how they cut the palms to keep the forest healthy (don’t cut the principal stem, only cut leaves of a certain size) before we had to say our farewells and hit the so-called road back to Flores.
Although my days were filled with activities planned by Juan and the other good folks at Rainforest Alliance, I did get a little time at night to relax by myself. My hotel room had a nice balcony overlooking the lake, so I sat out there as the sun went down, reviewing my notes and drinking a can of Gallo, the national beer whose label sports a squawking rooster. Being a tourist town, Flores has a lot of really good restaurants, so that night, I went to an Italian place with a leafy terrace. I sat down on the far right of a tiny bar with only three stools. While I was drinking another Gallo and waiting for my dinner, a gray cat jumped up onto the far left stool and sat down. I said hello to the cat. The cat ignored me. Then the waiter put a shot glass with a piece of ice in front of the cat, and the cat licked it. I sipped my beer. The cat licked the ice. Together we drank in silence.
Juan and I got on the road to Carmelita the next day early enough that when we arrived, the first thing we did was eat breakfast. This is the village where Juan is from, so he knew just whose house to go to for a morning meal. We sat in someone’s outdoor thatched-roof kitchen, chickens wandering around clucking, the radio playing Spanish music (including, unbelievably, “Macarena”) in the background. A wood stove was heating up a metal plate on which was set a large pot of water that we dipped our cups into for instant coffee. The coffee situation was puzzling to me at first. Guatemala is one of the great coffee-producing countries in the world—indeed, when I left on my trip, I had a big bag of Peet’s Guatemalan coffee in my cabinet at home—but all of the coffee I had been served since arriving was instant or otherwise not too good. Somebody explained the obvious to me later on in the trip—the people who harvest the coffee are poor, so they need to sell the best coffee to big companies that can sell the coffee to people like me in the United States, who will buy it for three dollars a cup, which means that the coffee that’s left in Guatemala for the coffee harvesters to drink is fairly terrible. But the eggs and beans and tortillas that Juan’s friend cooked up for us on the outdoor wood stove were definitely delicious. While we ate, Jorge and Juan chatted about their many grandchildren and how hard it can be to get kids to stop looking at some kind of screen, which is something I think about all the time when I’m back at home.
Carmelita is a bit smaller and farther out than Uaxactun, but it was otherwise quite similar. As in Uaxactun, we started by meeting the village leaders to discuss their new harvesting techniques (which are much the same as in the previous village) and what they purchased with the extra money donated by the churches (not just education, but health benefits, life insurance, fire protection, and even coffins). Then we hit the bodega de xate. It was here that I started confusing myself with numbers and math. I had realized by this second day in Guatemala that my original notion of the relationship between the EcoPalm project and the development of sustainable harvesting practices was not correct. The EcoPalm project itself was not, as I had originally assumed, the cause of these sustainable practices. Instead, the villagers (with help from the government and NGOs) had developed the sustainable practices independently, and then the churches in the United States basically decided to invest in the villages by agreeing to buy palms from the Guatemalans for a premium. But how much of an investment were we talking? Have the churches been a major player in supporting these villages, or did religion just have a bit part?
I asked the woman who was showing me around the bodega how many more palms the villagers sell around Palm Sunday than they sell during the rest of the year. She told me they tend to sell about two hundred extra packages during those weeks. At 600 palm fronds per package, that’s an additional 120,000 palms for the holiday. Each package costs, on average, about twelve dollars. So far, so good. But then when I asked how much the churches paid as a premium, I thought she said that the churches pay an additional sustainability bonus of five cents for every dollar that they pay in total for the palms. Now, I have never been all that good in math, so I couldn’t really process the numbers in my head, but I started to think that maybe we weren’t talking about that much money. This concern was nagging at me while Celeste, Juan, Jorge, and I were eating lunch on the patio of one of the villagers’ homes. As I nibbled at a chicken leg served in a bowl of soup with rice and potatoes and worried about whether the red Kool-Aid that I was drinking from a small plastic glass with a smiling cow on it was made with purified water, I started to wonder whether I had come all this way to Central America to research a program that was donating but a piddling amount to the sustainability of this critical ecosystem.
And so that’s why I was trying to do some basic math in Juan’s truck as the four of us—Juan and I up front and Jorge and Celeste in the backseat—bounced our way out of Carmelita and back toward Flores. It was a strange ride for other reasons too. As usual, dogs and turkeys and pigs were all over the road; several chickens crossed the road, seemingly, truly, just to get to the other side. At several points, Juan pulled over to pick up random people to give them a lift in the flatbed. I guess this is just the custom where we were, although I was a little worried about the six- or seven-year-old kid who must have been flying around the flatbed as the truck jumped over the road’s bumps and grooves. Apparently, Guatemala doesn’t have the same laws that we do here in the United States—that is, laws that require kids to sit in car seats until they’re old enough to get a learner’s permit.
Anyway, according to my calculations, if the churches paid twelve bucks per package for two hundred packages and paid an extra five cents per dollar, then the sum total contribution of the churches to the Carmelita community was about $120 per year (0.05 × 12 × 200). I did this calculation three times and then fell into despair. I knew the village was pretty poor, but seriously, how many pencils, pens, and coffins could $120 actually buy? Luckily, at this point I decided to check my understanding with Juan and Jorge. It took a while for me to explain myself, for everyone to be sure that the translation was accurate (translating mathematical relations and equations is no easy matter), and for Juan and Jorge to understand that I was totally off base. But ultimately they assured me that the churches paid five cents extra per frond, not five cents extra per dollar otherwise spent. In other words, instead of paying about twelve bucks per package, the churches paid about forty-two dollars for every package, or about a total of $6,000 extra per year (0.05 × 600 × 200). I can’t tell you how relieved this made me; with four communities in Petén selling nearly equal amounts of palms to the US churches, this means that the churches are contributing something like $25,000 extra per year to the Guatemalan forests, which, as the economists will tell you, is no chump change (and this amount doesn’t even include the money donated to Mexican villages).
My final day in Guatemala was spent in a series of meetings—with people from the Rainforest Alliance, with Jorge Sosa’s ACOFOP, and with a government representative who works for CONAP. During the day, I learned an incredible amount about how the government uses law to regulate the concession communities, how the NGOs assist the communities to harvest sustainably, and how eating Mayan nuts (aka, the ramón that I mentioned earlier) can make you stronger, smarter, and more likely to build architectural masterpieces that will survive for millennia. I’ll spare you most of the details of what I learned, but two larger points that came out of our discussions are worth mentioning.
First, it became clear to me only after meeting with the representative from CONAP just how remarkable it is that these harvesting communities in the north were able to transition from serving essentially as just a supply source for big exporting companies in Guatemala City to being their own self-sufficient villages. Prior to about 2005, only these large exporters in the capital were really making any money from the palm trade. Not surprisingly, when the government and the NGOs stepped in around then to help the communities develop environmentally friendly harvesting techniques so the communities could export the palm leaves directly to the United States, the big players in Guatemala City put up a lot of resistance. When the communities, acting along with the Rainforest Alliance, finally convinced the big US importer Continental Floral Greens to import directly from them (a process that took at least six months and many trips between Guatemala and the United States), the big companies in the capital ended up losing a lot of money.
In a developing country where corruption is prominent, the fact that the government stood up for small communities and environmental protection in the face of moneyed interests in the nation’s capital is pretty amazing. I asked the CONAP representative what could explain the government’s ability and willingness to make such efforts. The representative cited, among other things, pressures from civil society, the peace treaty of the late 1990s that put the government in the position to empower local communities, and complaints from Belize that Guatemalan xateros were illegally entering forests in Belize to cut down and sell their palms. Belize’s complaints had attracted a lot of international attention to the problem of palm harvesting in Central America.
A second, and related, point is that the Guatemalan government—specifically CONAP and its detailed legal regulation of palm harvesting—has been an incredibly important part of the success story of these villages. Throughout my visits to the communities, I had been skeptical of whether the government was truly playing a beneficial role in the narrative or whether, as I had suspected, the only real movers were the communities themselves, the marketplace (as supplemented by the US churches), and the NGOs. A couple of times, I had asked Juan and Jorge and others whether they thought that the government was a positive or negative force, and each time, although they might have disagreed here and there with the government’s approach, they were very supportive of the government’s efforts. Still, though, when I was going into my meeting with the CONAP guy, I was definitely expecting someone who was super-official or grumpy or haughty or dopey or something, but that turned out very definitely not to be the case. The guy was incredibly knowledgeable, helpful, down-to-earth, and concerned about the quality of the environment and the people’s well-being. Of course, it’s always possible that I was hoodwinked by some very good acting, but my strong impression coming out of the meeting was that the government is very much a force for good in Guatemala, at least on this particular issue. Score one for the law!
The westward drive from Flores to San Cristóbal, Mexico, takes about ten hours. Juan drove me the first three hours, and then some guy in a tiny boat ferried us over a river to the border station, where I met Oscar, who was from the Mexican NGO Pronatura Sur and who drove the next seven. Here are some of the things I saw on the drive on the other side of the border:
• More than one dog with only three working legs
• Several very large, open fires
• Lots of military guys with machine guns rifling through some guy’s trunk
• Occasional Zapatista graffiti
• Very little kids walking on the side of the crazy, curvy road, even in the dark
• Women and children carrying sacks of wood on their backs with a belt-like contraption strapped to the top of their heads
• Grand, glorious vistas of forests and valleys and hills
• A kid riding a mule
• Many old VW Beetles
• No traffic lights
This was just the stuff on the side of the road. The road itself is also worth a mention. You would think that the unpaved Guatemalan road was bad enough, but the road on the Mexico side, paved though it was, was even worse. Not only is the road curvy and only two lanes, so there’s constant passing around slower cars and near crashes into oncoming cars, but wherever there is any semblance of human settlement (that is, almost everywhere), people have built speed bumps in the road to slow down the cars. As a result, driving on this road (and most of the other roads I experienced in Mexico) involved driving fifty miles per hour for about thirty seconds, then decelerating to about two miles per hour to clear the speed bump, and then reaccelerating back to fifty for the next thirty seconds, and so on, over and over, nonstop, for seven hours. By the end of the ride, my insides were like slush.
At my hotel in the beautiful old town of San Cristóbal, I met with Romain Taravella, the head of the community forestry program at Pronatura. We spoke in the courtyard, where I was shivering, because the city is seven thousand feet above sea level and I, like an nitwit, had simply thought “Mexico: hot” and failed to bring anything warmer than a T-shirt. Romain is a French guy who speaks a bunch of different languages, has lived all over the world (he did field research for his doctorate in Brazil), and speaks a mile a minute. He explained to me the details of the trip-within-a-trip that I would take the following morning—two days and two nights at two village communities in the Sierra Madre range along with a Pronatura representative named Lubenay and Cesar, a translator from a nearby university. Since the villages are many hours away from San Cristóbal, we would not be returning to the city at night. I asked where I’d be sleeping, and he said he wasn’t sure, but probably they’d put me up in somebody’s house somewhere in the villages.
We got on the road early the next morning on our way to Santa Moreno, the smaller of the two villages but the one that has been most influential when it comes to palm harvesting in the area. Lubenay didn’t speak any English, so we did not communicate very much, but Cesar and I quickly hit it off. A herpetologist who enjoys wading through deep water at night to count toad croaks, Cesar is a motorcycle-driving, ponytail-sporting twenty-something from an academic family. He speaks perfect English and does work for several environmental groups in Chiapas. Cesar and I spent pretty much the entire next two days together, not just talking with various people in the villages but also hanging out, chatting about Mexican and US politics and society, life as an academic, what it’s like to be an only child, music, frogs, and lots of other topics. At one point, he found a huge toad with a tick on its foot and picked it up and showed it to me.
But back on our first day, after a drive of about 4½ hours, we arrived at the village, where we were met by the patriarch of the community and, indeed, of the entire palm-growing industry in the Sierra Madres. Luis Corzo Dominguez—or Don Luis, as everyone calls him—is a big man and can accurately be described as a character, a real piece of work. The day we met, he was wearing a straw hat, jeans, boots, blue-tinted sunglasses, and a stained, brown-striped Izod shirt. Loud, proud, and swearing like a sailor on leave in a foreign port, Don Luis showed us around, pointing out a large greenhouse where he plants palm seeds (when the plants reach a certain height, they are transferred into the forest). We saw the bodega, where his granddaughter oversees the women who are sorting the palms brought in by the harvesters in the field, and a huge coffee-bean-sorting machine that has been lent to the village by Starbucks. The area around Don Luis’s house is like a palm museum. Right at the entrance, Cesar recognized a type of palm plant that he said hasn’t changed in millions of years—apparently an endangered species that is basically a living fossil.
Inside the house, we arranged ourselves around the long dining room table to hear Don Luis tell us the history of the village. Much of what he told us was later corroborated by the current head of the Biosphere Reserve in which the village is located. I should say a couple of things about listening to Don Luis tell the story. For one thing, Don Luis really likes to talk and really does not like being interrupted (by, for example, Cesar, saying something like “Can I please now have a chance to translate the five complete paragraphs that you just spoke at lightning speed?”). So the fact that Cesar was able to translate anything that Don Luis was saying at all was incredibly remarkable and a testament not just to Cesar’s ability to understand and speak both languages with skill and nuance, but also to his capacity for remembering long, long tracts of sentences and ideas at a time. Second, the room was incredibly fly-filled. Don Luis’s wife gave us each a little glass of something to drink—I think it may have been some sort of iced coffee—but although I drank a little of it, and although I know it was probably rude of me not to finish it, I had to stop drinking because the number of flies that were walking around the lip of the small glass was simply overwhelming. At one point, I counted twelve flies in and on the glass. It was downright Amityville Horror–like in there.
The story, in short, is this. Between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, the palm trade in the region was dominated by a guy named Pablo, a so-called coyote who trafficked in illegally harvested plants. Anyone who cut down palms in the forest had to sell them at an incredibly low price to Pablo, who had bribed the authorities to leave him alone and who would then export the palms to the United States and elsewhere at a huge profit. As in Guatemala, Pablo paid for volume, not quality, so the only incentive for the low-paid harvesters was to cut as much as possible as fast as possible. As a result, the harvesters were completely decimating the forests.
Don Luis recognized this problem, and so did the director of the reserve at the time, a guy named Carlos Pisana Soto, who by all accounts was a true hero to the local population. Don Luis and Soto worked together to try to find new markets where the harvesters could sell their palms for a higher price, thus cutting out Pablo. They also worked to figure out how to grow palms from seeds in a greenhouse, something that was surprisingly difficult but ultimately essential to reforesting the area and creating a sustainable yield of palms for the future. Eventually, they solved the seed problem, and somewhere around 2004, Don Luis’s son Laison Corzo Montejo (who is now the head of the palm-growing group in Santa Morena) grew the first successful new palm field in the forest and convinced others in the area that they could do the same. Meanwhile, the government and Don Luis convinced Continental Floral Designs to enter into a contract with the village to supply the Texas importer with palms directly, thus circumventing Pablo.
None of this was easy, and in fact both Don Luis and the current director of the reserve (Alexser Vázquez Vázquez) told me that Pablo and his people shot at government officials on at least one occasion. When the contract with Continental was finally signed in 2005, it was a day of great happiness for everyone in the region (well, except for Pablo). As Vázquez told me later in my trip, the day they signed the contract, he wanted to jump for joy. Now, Santa Morena and several other villages in the area have organized themselves into something of a cooperative that meets regularly to share information and promote their products.
I thought this sounded like a great success story, but once again, I was unclear on whether the religious groups in the United States had anything to do with it, so I asked Don Luis about the churches. It was clear that he was grateful for the extra money the churches provide; he mentioned that the village uses the money (which is about the same amount as what the villages in Guatemala receive) for important infrastructure improvements like plumbing and water supplies as well as to help older residents and various other good things. And it was also clear that he has a lot of respect for Dean Current, who he described as a “pilgrim spreading good deeds around the world.” But Luis was snarky about the churches themselves. He said that the churches “realized they were covered in gold with fancy cars and houses while the world was burning up and the forests were shrinking” and were looking to provide a little help (I verified on the spot with Cesar that this was an accurate translation). Later, when I asked Luis how the churches should feel about their efforts, he told me that the “gringos should be happy that they have helped the forest.” So, there’s that.
While we were talking, a thirty-something guy wearing jeans, a pink polo shirt with a surfing logo, sandals, and a Nike baseball hat walked into the dining room. This was Luis’s son Laison. When Luis was done talking, Laison led us into the woods to take a look at some palms. We hiked maybe a quarter of a mile, stopping on the way to take in an extraordinary mountain vista with the Pacific Ocean in the distance, before coming to the fields of palms, spread out underneath the forest canopy, different areas of the fields marked with various orange and yellow ribbons to mark their ownership and age. Laison led us through curtains of six-foot palm trees, the smell of lemons and sweat and the buzzing of mosquitoes in the air, until we got to the very first field, the one that Laison successfully planted with seedlings first cultivated in a greenhouse, the one that convinced everyone around that it was possible to grow new palms in the forest. He explained that, twenty years ago, the lush forest we were standing in was basically a burned-out cow pasture; now you could hardly see fifty feet in front of you. The village’s policy is to plant the palms as densely as possible, so the planters and harvesters don’t have to intrude further up the mountain and so the forest is protected against erosion. Laison was obviously exceptionally proud of what he had accomplished here, and with good reason. As we were about to hike back out, he pointed to a collection of seeds that were stuck to the side of a large tree. “The seeds are so grateful to the mountain,” he said, “that they grow off the sides of the trees.”
Back at Don Luis’s house, after a delicious dinner of fried fish, beans, and plantains, all prepared by Don Luis’s wife, we were all sitting around outside talking when a small girl walked by carrying a dead chicken. A few minutes later, she returned, chicken-less, but holding a small, pretty flower, which she presented to me. The girl was Laison’s daughter. When she heard that I had studied a little Spanish, she went and got one of her schoolbooks and started teaching me some more. It was incredibly cute and endearing. Soon after (although not until Don Luis had shown us how he manufactures insect-repellent fertilizer with cow manure, worms, coffee grounds, and ants), Cesar and Lubenay and I said our farewells. It turned out that we were going to spend both nights in the other village—Tierra y Libertad, where Lubenay had grown up. Before we left, Don Luis hugged us and gave us some inspiration: “The way I got this contract with the US importer was not to be afraid to try. You should do the same.”
Three hours later, we arrived in Tierra y Libertad, a relatively large village of about twenty-four hundred people, many of them youthful and dynamic. If Santa Morena is the old guard of the Sierra Madres, then this place is the young gun. Romain and others believe that with its innovative farming and marketing techniques and the diversification of the products it harvests and sells, Tierra y Libertad is on the cutting edge of forest management in the region. It was late when we got there, and after maybe a half hour of chatting and eating tamales with Lubenay’s family, Cesar and I were shown to our lodgings—a concrete house that belonged to Lubenay’s great-aunt and was situated at the edge of town. The great-aunt’s husband had gone to the United States for a while to pick oranges and watermelons, so she had returned to her parents’ house, leaving this one open for visitors like us. The house was partly unfinished—apart from two completed rooms, there were two other rooms that were halfway done and still had dirt floors—but it worked out fine for us.
One weird thing about these two villages was that they were both dry. It’s apparently okay to drink alcohol, but there’s nowhere to buy it, and the nearest town where it’s available is a long way away. This wasn’t a problem the first night we were there, because I had had the foresight to bring along a small bottle of scotch that I had bought in Guatemala. Cesar and I shared the rest of the bottle and talked about the perils of childhood bullying and all sorts of other things before going to sleep under the cartoon-character blankets laid on both of our beds. The next night, however, we were out of luck. Even though Lubenay drove us to a little nearby place where it had previously been possible to purchase beer sometimes, the place had recently been shut down by the village authorities. The dryness of the towns is related to their conservative, religious nature, which surprisingly, at least to me, is largely of the Protestant rather than the much more typical-for-Mexico Catholic variety. In Tierra y Libertad, for instance, there are three churches, but only one is Catholic. The others are Pentecostal and Adventist.
The next morning, we were woken early by cock-a-doodling roosters and banging construction workers. After breakfast, Cesar and I hiked up a big hill and then pretty deep into the forest with the village’s palm group captain—a youngish, earnest guy named José Arbey Gomez Garcia (he goes by Arbey). He was wearing a soccer shirt with Brazilian colors but bearing the name of the village, jeans, and big white boots, which seemed to be the footwear of choice for palm harvesters. Arbey basically gave us a tour of the forest. At our first stop, he described and demonstrated in detail how trained harvesters approach any given palm plant. One of the leaves of every plant is clearly different from the rest—it is called the heart—and harvesters are not supposed to touch it at all, at least until a separate part of the plant, a smaller and newer stem known as the vela, or candle, is large enough. Only one or two leaves of the plant—generally the best-looking ones, with near-perfect scissors (the part at the top of each frond where there’s one leaf pointing one way and one the other way)—should be taken at any one time. I asked Arbey how many times per year a harvester can take leaves from any given plant. He said that it depends on many factors, including temperature, soil conditions, humidity, and the like, but that generally a harvester can come back to the same plant two to four times per year. There are handbooks and programs to train harvesters in these techniques, and if harvesters do something wrong, like cut a vela or the heart, they can be sanctioned.
The first stop was terrific, but the next stop turned out to be even better. A little more hiking brought us to a 150-square-meter, rectangular field of palms where every single plant was marked with a red tag. Arbey explained that the government requires that every palm field within the forest be accompanied by a small control field where the harvester—with technical assistance provided by Pronatura—collects and records data on every plant (size, age, number of leaves, amount of damage, length of the vela, etc., etc.). This way, everyone knows exactly how well the crop is doing, and the growers can predict how many fronds they can harvest in the coming season, which is an incredibly important thing to know when you are making future sales agreements. The NGOs also use the data to determine how much shade and plant density and other factors are optimal for growing, so they can advise the growers about the best way to increase their yield. Arbey pulled a sheath of paperwork out of his backpack and showed us a page that corresponded to one particular plant we were looking at. The sheet tracked all the relevant information over time in a detailed chart, filled with statistical information. What a great development, I thought, and how far the place has come since the days when harvesters would cut down trees with abandon just to get a couple of pesos from Pablo.
After the hike, we ate lunch and rested, and in the late afternoon, we went to the village’s bodega de palma to talk with a group of men who do the actual palm harvesting out in the fields every day. The idea was that I should hear from the workers and not just the people who, like Arbey, are in charge. But Arbey was there at the bodega, changed into a purple striped sweater for the meeting, and he actually did much of the talking. I was never quite sure how freely the other men felt in talking; they were fairly reserved. They did all agree that life as a harvester now is much safer than before, primarily because with the new fields, the harvesters do not have to go nearly as far into the forest, where a person was more likely to encounter a big, angry cat or fall off a cliff. I tried to get the harvesters to talk about whether there was any friendly rivalry among the four palm-growing villages in the region, but no good stories about intervillage football games or whatever were forthcoming. I kept thinking that the meeting would have gone better if we had all been drinking beer.
But nobody was drinking beer, and instead of telling stories of fun and games, the guys were far more interested in making sure I knew how serious their work was and how much more help they could use from people in the United States and elsewhere. Arbey started things off by giving a fairly long speech to that effect and then pointing out that although he is happy to show researchers his work (I was hardly the first person to come down here to learn what the villages are doing), he really does not like it when the researchers do not send what they’ve written to the villagers themselves. Then a tall guy wearing a blue dress shirt and sporting a mustache who had come in late to the meeting gave an even more impassioned plea for help. I told him I would put his words in the book verbatim (obviously presented in translation and with inevitable errors of transcription):
We are busting our asses, working really hard because the international community wants us to preserve the rain forest, and we are doing so. We don’t use the traditional ways of harvesting. But we’re not seeing the profits. The largest cities of the state [like Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of Chiapas] use our water. They have this water because we are defending the mountain. They don’t seem to care—they pipeline our streams and rivers, and we don’t see profits. We are happy to be protecting our forests, but I think we should have a better life for what we are doing for the environment. I hope that this kind of project [i.e., this book here] will make people more aware, more willing to pay to support what we are doing.
Now, I’m not particularly good at being “earnest,” but it was clear that this man’s plea called for a heartfelt response. So I did the best I could to communicate through Cesar my impassioned gratitude to the guys in the room for the work that they were doing, and I offered my commitment to try to spread the word about their efforts (not to mention a promise to send them a copy of the book). My promise wasn’t actually that hard, because I meant everything that I had said. I think the men were satisfied, because they said I could be their ambassador for what they were doing. When I got home, I wrote a short piece quoting the mustachioed gentleman for Slate and encouraging churches that don’t use palms from EcoPalm to start using them. I can only hope that the article, and now this chapter, will alert at least some people to the great things that these men and women in Mexico and Guatemala are doing for the critical resources that are necessary not just for them, but for all of us. There, how’s that for earnest?
The next day, back in my hotel in San Cristóbal, I enjoyed the luxury of warm running water again by taking a long shower and then headed off to Pronatura Sur headquarters for a series of meetings. I met at length with Alexser, the director of the agency in charge of the Mayan Biosphere Reserve in Mexico. Alexser, who was as impressive both in his knowledge of and his commitment to environmental protection and the local communities as his counterpart in Guatemala, explained to me the details of how Santa Morena was able, with substantial government help, to break away from Pablo and become an independent, sustainable palm operation. I also met once again with Romain. He underscored that “the government-private mix is one of the big parts of the story,” but he was also quick to point out that the long-term success of the project is not yet assured. Among other things, the Chiapas communities face stiff competition at least in the national market from cutters in other states like Veracruz and Oaxaca, where the cutters do not harvest sustainably.
This possibility of future failure was also the theme of my final interview, which was with Rosa Maria Vidal, the deputy director of the Pronatura Sur office. Vidal, who has worked in conservation for over twenty years, exudes a quiet brilliance that had me sort of entranced. We talked for a while about the relationship between religion and the environment, and she shared another local example that involves the gathering of rare flowers for religious purposes. Mostly, though, she talked about her hopes that religious groups will become more involved than they have been so far in supporting communities like Santa Morena and Tierra y Libertad. “We are looking to see if the religious groups will continue to increase their demand and their premium,” she told me. “We’re still looking to see if this type of harvesting is sustainable for the long term.” According to Vidal, individual churches have been happy to participate during the Palm Sunday season, but the umbrella religious organizations have not demonstrated the kind of year-long, ongoing commitment that may be necessary for the sustainable harvesting practices to continue in the future. Vidal worries that the churches might be more interested in the social benefits of their contributions than the environmental benefits, and that only by fully appreciating the environmental benefits of programs like those in Chiapas will the churches want to increase their commitment. In other words, Vidal was wondering how “eco” the EcoPalm project really is. It’s a good question, and one that religious groups in the United States and elsewhere would do well to seriously consider.
One unique aspect of environmental harm is that often the injury is felt far away from the actions that cause the harm. There are several mechanisms that account for this potential distance between activity and injury. For one thing, pollution travels. A pathogen emitted into a river can flow downstream and cause disease hundreds of miles away, or a factory smokestack may be built so tall that the smoke it discharges will affect the air quality in a different state or even a different country.
Second, as ecologists have been explaining for decades, because environmental systems—watersheds, ecosystems, and the like—are often deeply interconnected, harm to one part of the system can cause further harm in a different part of the system. One species goes extinct, for example, and this affects both the species it ate and the species that ate it, and so on.
Third, because of the interconnectedness of the world economy and the growth of international trade, demand for a product in one area of the world that is satisfied by a supply of that product from another part of the world can cause environmental harm far from where the product is consumed or used. Rhinoceros horns are in great demand in Asia for use in Chinese medicine, but the harm to the various species of rhinos is felt primarily in Africa, where most of these animals live.
Finally, and maybe most intriguingly, because many people value a healthy environment even in places where they do not live and will perhaps never even visit, they can suffer harm from environmental damage that occurs far away from them. A good example of this larger worldview that people have can be seen in the debate over whether the US government should allow drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Few people have any plans to visit that remote and inhospitable place, but many nonetheless value it greatly and will fight to ensure that it remains pristine. Economists call the value of environmental goods that do not depend on their use existence values and have even developed techniques to try to measure exactly how much people value, say, the existence of a beautiful lake or the continued vitality of a species of crab.
The depletion of palm forests in Guatemala and southern Mexico as a result of Palm Sunday celebrations in the United States and Europe is a clear example of the international market phenomenon described above—demand for a product in one place causing environmental harm in a different place. And although this kind of mechanism for environmental harm may not be the most common way that religious practice harms the environment, it clearly happens. The gloomy example of elephants being slaughtered in Africa to satisfy the demand of religious believers in China and the Philippines also works this way. But the EcoPalm program also demonstrates that people value a healthy environment even when it’s not their own immediate environment. As Dean Current told me in his office in St. Paul: “No one says that they don’t want to pay twenty more dollars for sustainability.” People in the United States value the health of the palm forests in Central America and will pay to keep them healthy. And herein lies an important lesson for trying to reduce the environmental harm from religious practices: governments and NGOs concerned about the environmental harm caused by religious practices can take advantage of the fact that people—often affluent and resourced people—care about the quality of the environment not just where they live, but everywhere.
In the palm example, of course, the people and institutions donating money to protect the forests are the very people and institutions that are contributing to the damage in the first place, but that certainly does not have to be the case. With the elephants, for example, a number of NGOs raise money to do all sorts of things to help the cause—protecting habitat, tracking and monitoring elephant populations, keeping an eye on court proceedings against poachers, providing aerial surveillance to help wounded animals and lead authorities to law violators. And of course, the money these organizations receive does not come from the ivory dealers or idol collectors who are driving the demand. The same situation holds true for the Ganges River. Several NGOs exist to collect money for projects to help the river through waste management, restoring water flows, planting trees to combat erosion, and promoting education. The government has even recently created a fund for the same type of projects, targeting not only residents of India but also people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and elsewhere, who care about the health of the world’s most sacred river. The point is that environmentalists can and should capitalize on the worldwide demand for ecological protection when that demand can help counter the negative environmental effects of certain religious practices.
What the palm example also demonstrates quite clearly, however, is that even when foreign aid is helping to counter environmental harm caused by religious practice, the people at the site who are actually designing and implementing the solutions are the ones most responsible for protecting the environment and must therefore be respected, recognized, and rewarded for their efforts. Writing a check is great. Writing a big check is even greater. But we cannot forget that it is the people who use the money to do real work on the ground who are doing by far the most important work—the people in India braving disease in the brutal heat to replant trees or pull waste out of the river, the men and women in Kenya flying helicopters in dangerous conditions to save wounded elephants, the mustachioed man in the blue shirt in Tierra y Libertad who does backbreaking work every day for tiny pay to save the forests for all of us. While most of us sit at our desks, wringing our hands over the fate of the environment and occasionally giving our credit card numbers to NGO fund-raisers, the people I met in Guatemala and Mexico—Juan, Luis, Arbey, Raina, Laison, Burt Reynolds, and all the rest—spend their days on the front lines of the battlefield to save the planet. We should listen to them and learn from them and celebrate their accomplishments and make sure they are paid what they are worth. We may live a great distance from each other, but we are, in the end, all in this together.