Mayan land management practices

Conserving forest resources with traditional slash-and-burn methods?
by Eric Jackson

Is the problem with tropical Latin America's rainforests that ignorant traditional peasants are cutting and burning, instead of using the modern methods that scientists from the advanced industrial countries prescribe? To pose the question that way is to add a number of ideological skew factors, ignore historical, cultural and economic factors, and very probably set up an answer that's "right" only in a very narrow sense.

Yes, the destruction of forests and unsustainable use of the land that's cleared is a big problem. Yes, the people working the machetes and the chainsaws tend to be poor and not very well educated --- although quite often they're working for someone else, and even when they are not the land they clear for themselves frequently ends up in the hands of large landowners within a few years.

But meanwhile, ecological engineer Stewart A. W. Diemont, who studied anthropology as an undegrad, has his PhD from Ohio State and is an assistant professor at the State University of New York's Department of Environmental Resources and Forest Engineering, has been learning from people without all the fancy degrees. He's been studying the ways that some of the descendents of the ancient Mayas who have kept to traditional ways may use swidden ("slash-and-burn") agriculture, but they have nevertheless done a better job of conserving the resources on their land than "more modern" neighbors.

Diemont did his doctoral dissertation on the land management practices of the Lacondon Mayas of Mexico's Chiapas state, adjacent to the Guatemalan border, and has since studied the practices of other Mayan groups in the region.

The Lacondon have a cycle. First they cut and burn a piece of land, and grow crops on it for five years. Then comes two-year period of living off the produce of small bushes that replace the corn, beans and other crops. Another three-year period is spent tending larger bushes and harvesting what they produce. For 10 years after that, the land that they burned is becoming a secondary forest, off of which they also feed. Then there's another 15-year period, when the forest becomes more mature.

"At every stage, they are using the land's resources," Diemont noted in his presentation to a two-day conference on the use of native trees for reforestation and land restoration in Mesoamerica, which was held on January 21 and 22 at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Tupper Auditorium. He added that at the end of the Lacondon swidden agriculture cycle, the mix of species in the managed secondary forests looks very similar to that in nearby primary forests.

Part of the Mayan land management scheme is to grow things that attract animals, which are sustainably hunted for meat. Traditional knowledge of soil fertility management is employed. "They're doing something much more complicated than what we are doing in our laboratories," Diemont opined.

And of course, despite any and all inputs of agricultural and forestry extension agents, it's vastly more complex than clear-cutting the land, growing a few seasons of crops until the soil's fertility is exhausted, turning the land into cow pastures until the land is overgrazed and eroded, and then reforesting by planting a monoculture of teak or some other type of forest that doesn't occur in nature. The reason for the conference at the Smithsonian is because countries in this region have been there and done that, and know the deathly silence of a Central American teak forest where no birds nest and no animals can eat the produce of the trees, and of the blights that sweep through huge stands of just one species of tree.

Diemont has found that other Mayan groups, some of which have been separated from the Lacondon for more than 1,000 years, use the same rotation system or even more intricate if similar cycles. It seems to work.

With the decyphering of Mayan glyphs and other archaeological advances, we are beginning to get a better idea of why the great city-states fell. Warfare was clearly a part of it, Diemont pointed out, while noting that the splits and migrations within the Mayan cultural area were multiple and played out over many centuries. There has been some debate about whether environmental collapse compelled Mayans to make war on their neighbors over farmland and other natural resources. If the latter is the case, we don't know if it's a matter of those Mayan groups which sustainably manage their land are the ones who learned the lesson, or if it's a matter of the city-states that went to war being the ones who were forced into that position because they forgot what they once knew.

Panama, of course, is well outside of the Mayan cultural zone. We have several of our own indigenous land use traditions, some of them more sustainable than others. However, with the progressive loss of indigenous lands to outsiders and the invasions of exotic species of weeds like Vietnamese elephant grass (paja canalera), the possibilities of traditional land use are ever more reduced.

Dr. Diemont spoke of Mayan perspectives, but the other conference panelists talked about other points of view, research and practical field work. But notice the paradigm shift over 15 years. A decade and one-half ago, the Panamanian government was giving tax breaks and encouraging the planting of teak on degraded agricultural land. Now we know better, and it's mainly the hustlers seeking to separate ignorant foreign investors from their money who are promoting the wonders of Panamanian teak plantations. The science, and the serious business, of tropical forestry have become more sophisticated. Traditional knowledge, as well as cutting edge research, is one of the roots of this new sophistication.