A farming lesson from the Mexican rainforest offers hope for humanity

ONE of the great myths of the more romantic wing of environmental movement has been that indigenous peoples always treat the environment better than we do. White man bad, red man “green”, as you might say.

Back in the ‘60s, there was a rash of books with titles like Touch the Earth, which portrayed the native American First Nations as wise stewards of the planet. The brutal massacre of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee, which ended their last resistance to European occupation, became a metaphor for the white man’s rape of the entire continent, from sea to bloody sea.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, the native American activist and singer, made the connection explicit in her powerful and angry song, Now that the Buffalo’s Gone. White American greed for land shattered not just her people, so this story goes, but the beautiful and pristine ecosystems that stretched from the Adironacks to Yosemite.

It is beyond question that white colonial expansion caused ecological catastrophes, turning fertile prairies into dust bowls and poisoning the rain that fell on the great forests. But the myth of the environmentally noble savage is neither entirely accurate historically nor very helpful today. It is a kind of comfort blanket for those who prefer to be angry at their own culture, without the trouble of going to the root of our entire species’ problematic relationship with our planet.

There were indeed some native American peoples who enjoyed a sustainable relationship with their environment — and a very few who still do so, with great difficulty, mainly south of the Rio Grande. But this relationship was and is far from universal. And where it was the case, it is likely to have been much more the product of economic necessity than of any ethical conviction about respect for nature on the part of the Indians. It is now disputed whether Chief Seattle ever really warned an American president: “We are part of the earth and the earth is part of us… Continue to contaminate your own bed, and you might suffocate in your own waste.” But enough folk sayings in this vein survive to nurture the myth of a culture enviably in harmony with nature.

The reality, of course, is a lot more complex. Indian deforestation wreaked ecological havoc in what is now the Boston area long before the Pilgrims set foot in New England. Plains Indians drove thousands of American buffalo over cliffs to harvest only a few hundred beasts.

And if one went back a bit further, a lot further in fact, there is considerable evidence that the first Indians were responsible for the extinction of a number of large and remarkable mammals, from the giant sloth to the mammoth. They did to them what the white settlers would do, more famously, to the passenger pigeon and, very nearly, to the American buffalo itself.

Luckily for the rest of North America’s wild animals and birds, the Indians, at least in North America, never developed the kind of expanding population that pushes entire regions towards the environmental degradation with which we are familiar today. But it is unlikely that this was because Indian sages could see that their peoples were better off in tepees with clean air and water than in slums on a dying planet.

Of course, some Indians did have the vision to see, and wax poetic about, the advantages of their own lifestyles as the white hordes shifted relentlessly west. But few of us have the inclination, much less the skills, to go back to a hunter-gatherer existence. As a way of combating climate change, a return to some romanticised past is not an option. There are, however, some principles we can extract from the experience of pre-industrial peoplesto apply to our own circumstances.

There are just a few hundred Lacondona Maya people left in Mexico. But they have a quite extraordinary skill, based on a knowledge of the plants of their forest region beyond the grasp of botanists and ecologists. They have learned this knowledge painstakingly through a remarkable variation on the common practice of slash-and-burn agriculture. Normally, this is a process of land clearance and cultivation, and when the cultivated land’s fertility is exhausted another patch is cut down, burned, and exploited. Where populations were limited by high mortality rates, the abandoned plot will, more or less, recover of its own accord. Today, of course, as rural populations expand and the forest shrinks before urban developments, slash-and-burn has become a synonym for environmental devastation, because the exploited areas have no time to recover.

However, the Lacondona had a different tradition. They limit their periods of cultivation so that the soil is not entirely exhausted. Then, while they clear and cultivate another area, they set about meticulously replanting the rainforest, so that it will recover more quickly — which of course means that the land also becomes fertile and exploitable again in a shorter space of time. What amazes scientists is the depth of their botanical expertise. The Lacondona know that the forest recovers through a process known as “natural succession”, with one group of plants replacing or complementing another over time as a complex ecological community is re-established. And they know the identity of each of these plants — some of them still unknown to science — and where their seeds can be gathered and set. They know roughly how many examples of each species is needed for optimal recovery, and the precise sequence in which they should be planted over several years.

The Lacondona demonstrate, in their agricultural practice, the kind of relationship which we all need to have to natural resources if our species is to survive. Their practice is not just sustainable. It also goes a step further — they actively restore what they have damaged or depleted, so that the bounty of the Earth is used, but never used up. Imagine if we applied that principle to global resource exploitation. Imagine if we factored in the cost of ecological depletion in all our activities into the price we pay for them. And that the funds raised from this environmental levy were committed to putting back into nature what we are taking out. It’s going to hurt, because we will have to pay more and consume less, but it is surely greatly preferable to the alternative scenario — running out of resources altogether.

Over the last 150 years, American agriculture has depleted the deep black soil of the prairies. There is so little left that crops can only be grown with ever greater subsidies of fertiliser, while the soil gets thinner and poorer ever year. But prairie can be restored. All over the midwest, exhausted corn lands are being replanted with prairie plants, enriching the soil once again. This process was started by few idealistic citizen volunteers and scientists, but now it is being taken up by state and federal agencies, and more and more farmers. A vision of long-term rotation of prairie and cornfield is taking hold. In some places, the buffalo is coming back.

Learning to live like the Lacondona, not in the rainforest but through implementing the practice of restoration into our global economy, could open up an avenue of hope through the very challenging century whose first decade we are just completing.

*Paddy Woodworth is writing a book about ecological restoration projects worldwide, Restoring the Future, due from Chicago University Press next year.