The way to Nueva Vida: in the Yucatan, where jaguars lurk and pyramids poke out of the forests, human are learning to live peaceably with nature

Sierra, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Barbara Kingsolver

Suddenly we found ourselves surrounded not by eerie silence but by a wilderness of wake-up calls. A troop of howler monkeys began to stir in the treetops just below us, letting loose a loud, primordial bellow. Emerald battalions of parrots darted past in formation, flashing in the white-washed light.

Then came the chachalacas, the chickenlike birds we'd seen the previous day, whose call, I had been promised, I would never forget. "Sh!" our friends said, "Escuche," and we listened, but I didn't hear it at all. And then I did: a barely audible chorus in the far distance, Cha-chalac? Quietly, distantly, their neighbors answered back, Cha-chalac! The more I listened, the more plainly I could hear how they followed the call-and-response rhythm of a gospel choir: Cha-chalac? Cha-chalac! They stirred one another to voice in increasing numbers to announce their revelation. This forest, I began to understand with a chill, was entirely filled with chachalacas. The birds themselves don't move, but their song does as they awaken one another each morning, their dawn chorale moving through the whole jungle in a vast oratory wave. The rising tide of their gospel song raced toward us, growing louder, louder and faster: Cha-Chalac? CHA-CHALAC! CHA-CHALAC! Glory hallelujah! The song came from everywhere at once, a musical roar like water, and then like water it divided, passing around us as a rush of singing, and then it receded and fell away.

None of us spoke. I imagined this wave of hallelujah traveling all the way to Guatemala and beyond, on down to the southern edge of the jungle, where the trees once again gave way to roads and cornfields, billboards and gas stations. But we were still deep inside a green, crowded world where parrots and monkeys were not isolated survivors but citizens of a population. It was a city of animals here, as surely as each mute temple stood for a city of people who had once climbed up to greet the dawn. On carved slabs of stone they left us clear pictures of their world, with man and beast facing off nose to nose in a thousand configurations: warrior and monkey; jaguar and emperor. Now in our latter days, another story may be rooting itself and taking hold. In some quarters, farmers named Carmen and Don Domingo rule, in a reign that allows no poison and holds its breath for the moon and smiles at the sweet nightsong of an owl.

Yucatan Plan

A LAND TRUST HELPS SAVE A BIG CAT'S SPOTS.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER stood on high ground and saw "not one single sign of humanity." Yet the area of the Yucatan she explored, the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, is far from secure. While some farming cooperatives such as Nueva Vida are managing their lands wisely, others are tempted by the financial rewards of large-scale logging.

But there's more than one way for the cooperatives to make money. A California-based nonprofit called Friends of Calakmul and its sister organization in Mexico, Amigos de Calakmul, have set up a land trust that pays for conservation. Cooperatives receive interest payments from the trust in exchange for making a pledge to forgo logging and other extractive industry on lands adjacent to the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. The result of each pledge is a more secure future for the Calakmul's people and its wildlife.