My interest in learning and collaborating with indigenous communities in Mexico came from personal experiences as a migrant woman of indigenous heritage.

I am a third-generation Oaxaqueña living in the United States with ties to Mexico City, Mazatlán, Tijuana and most recently, Tepic. My family from both paternal and maternal sides come from a long history of circular migration, moving from one place to another and returning to the original homelands. On my paternal side of the family, my grandfather is from San Juan Sayultepec, a pueblo in Nochixtlán District in the southeast of the Mixteca region of Mexico. On my maternal side, my grandmother, as a young teenage girl, came from the Valle of Oaxaca to work in the field of Mochis, Sinaloa. Due to traumatic and painful disconnection, my mother never met my grandmother and my maternal lineage is still in the process of healing, but through my academic studies and research in anthropology, I have been able to study in Mexico to connect with local communities and indirectly connect with my cultural heritage. 

In 2011, I was invited to participate in a gathering with native communities in Tequepexpán, Nayarit. In this gathering, I met Wixárika women and I was invited to visit their community of Las Piedras in Compostela, which led me to visit the Wixárika community of Taimarita and later Y+rata, on the outskirts of Tepic in Nayarit. Every year, I returned to the community to learn with other mothers and their children. By then, my daughter Ixchel was born, and I brought her with me for every field trip. I was a student of Culture and Performance at the Department of World Arts and Culture/Dance at UCLA, working in their PhD program. Through my research I shared most of my time with other mothers, young Wixárika and caregivers in the family. In many of my interactions with the community, I was taught how to be a “good mother” by very young Wixárika girls, which initially felt uncomfortable, I didn’t believe I could learn from younger, inexperienced girls about motherhood, but I was wrong as the best lessons about Wixárika motherhood came from young girls. It was my very first ethnographic lesson: to learn and not impose my ideas. With time, I made kinship ties with the Y+rata community and began to learn about the Wixárika connection with the so-called natural world. It was then that my research evolved to a multi-species approach as I learned from more-than-humans in a meaningful, reciprocal and sustainable way.

Academically, I am in training to be a so-called expert on Corn, but personally I am a devotee of the teachings of Tatéi Niwetsika, Our Mother Corn. I cultivate native seeds from Northern Mexico in multiple ecosystems (Great Lake Region and El Gran Nayar) to enter kinship relationships with Tatéi Niwetsika. I follow strict principles and protocols of coexistence guided by ancestors and Elders to maintain and sustain a relationship with Corn outside of colonial logic.

Many people ask me about this other logic and to put it in simple terms. In many indigenous communities in the Americas, the environment is an extension of kin, land is our relative. Once we understand this and position ourselves as human beings in the same plane as land, we can understand our place in a complex network of relationships.

In many indigenous communities, plants are also viewed as relatives. The Wixárika’s way of knowing Tatéi Niwetsika as a plant person, offers community members a framework to understand human and more-than-human relationships. In Mexico, settler colonialism and its effects disrupted how indigenous communities relate to plants. For Wixárika families in urban spaces, maintaining ties to their homelands have relied on language to sustain relationships with the land. Language has been a way for communities to maintain ties to their indigenous identity.

For humans, language is a code for exchanging information based on a system. While we have a very clear understanding of human communication, inter-species communication is not easily understood. In our society, inter-species communication is often limited to what humans perceive as communication through the use of phonetics, yet plants communicate in several ways using a language that can be understood if we pay attention. 

A plant sees light through phototropism, which refers to the growth of a plant towards light and how a plant responds to light. A plant can emit odours and sense the odours of other plants. As Daniel Chamovitz discusses, a plant uses a “nose-less process” to perceive odour or scent through stimuli. For instance, the molecule ethylene found in Chinese incense induces ripening in lemons. Plant communication exemplifies the type of information they are capable of transmitting using their intelligence and their actions within an environment, like how mushrooms communicate with the root system of a tree through complex networks; or how flowers and the colours of leaves communicate different maturity stages of a plant; or how a plant may release a scent during an inter-species encounter; or a plants’ movement towards the sun offers a story of how it responded to its local environment.

Our Mother Corn for example, grows vertically to maximise its absorption of light during the day. Their stalks require wind to form strong stalks, to reach greater heights. These behaviours are crucial in ensuring its survival. Our Mother Corn also communicates with humans by transferring energy through consumption. Eating the nutrients of Corn, like all vegetables and foods, is a process of ingesting the properties of a plant, which is another way to communicate with them. 

In the Wixárika community of Y+rata — which means “a place to grow greener” — communicating with plants is both a practice and cultural process. The women continue the labour of husking, selecting the best Corn seeds while also planning the next trip to the Yeturita (the field for cultivation). In Wixárika ways of knowing, Tatéi Niwetsika is central to the life of families. According to the ethnohistory of the Wixárika people, Tatéi Niwetsika gifted daughters to the Watakame (the first farmer) to begin planting. Yuawima (blue corn) became a human person to live with Watakame, beginning Wixárika genealogy. Throughout their life, Wixárika families exchange offerings and devote their labour to maintain right relationship with Tatéi Niwetsika. Teukarita ceremonies (naming ceremonies) — which usually occur in Autumn during the harvesting of Corn — when newborns receive names connecting them to their ancestors. According to Saul Santos García and Tutupika Carrillo de la Cruz, professors at the Universidad Autónoma de Nayarit, Teukari — grandparents with dream interpretation abilities — name the newborn after an interaction with an Elder Ancestor in a dream.

When Wixárika speakers utter personal names related to Corn, they act and impact the lives of people by embodying the properties of the plant. Mamachali, the name giver in Y+rata family, dreams of personal names related to Corn and assigns names to express how she wishes her grandchildren to grow in relation to the plant. In Wixárika language, some children’s names are indices of the life of Corn: Y+ra or Y+rama, to grow greener; colours of Corn Yuawima (blue corn), Tuxame (white corn); and roles of people in the cultivation Watakame (male farmer or first farmer) and Etsima (female farmer). By uttering personal names related to Corn, members of the community reconnect to the plant and remember their responsibilities as part of the family. 

Ceremonial language is a particular form of communication that connects with ancestors. Though not completely understood by many members of the community, the chants performed in ceremonial spaces evoke the presence of the ancestors. Corn names and vocabulary are generally indexical of the associations with Tatéi Niwetsika . When children receive their name,  it becomes an active reminder of the importance of offerings in devotion to Tatéi Niwetsika in exchange for health. Names also act mnemonically, reminding individuals of their responsibilities to their ancestors, as well as ontological connections with Kaka+yarite and Kaka+ma (elder ancestors).

Throughout my research I maintained a “Corn Diary” where I noted my observations of how Our Mother Corn communicates, like the sound of the stalks when the wind moves them and makes a tura, turaaa sound. My process of observing and learning from the Corn connected with how knowledge of the plant developed within Wixárika culture, as Corn interacted with natural forces providing behavioural cues of her being. In dreams, these behaviours are also important. Mamachali confirmed this with me when she elaborated on how the plant communicates in her dreams to indicate a name. The name is recognised through interaction with the elements, like how it interacts with rain when the thunder strikes the land and makes a tura, turaaa sound.

Through my observations, and through conversations with the community, I learned the language of plants by analysing how Corn behaves and interacts in the field. I documented in my Corn Diary how Our Mother Corn communicates through the colour of the leaves, the size of her body, and how the vertical structure of the plants provides support for other crops, such as beans, to grow in co-existence. Wixárika families create in the coamil (a field) a space for multi-species interaction, from edible and medicinal plants to predators. Some families cultivate beans, squash, chillies, tomatoes and herbs. Wild medicinal plants grow around Corn, such as Dandelion, Epazote, Malva and Chiclacayote. Additionally, the coamil serves as an ecosystem for many other species such as worms, fungus (huitlacoche), ants and pollinators.

I also noted in my Diary the acoustics of Our Mother Corn when her leaves (known as ear shoots) moved with the wind. In this moment, Our Mother Corn communicated that she grew tall and green. Our Mother also communicated when the roots of the stalk grew under the ground and expanded, like K+iwima (roots of squash), with the bean roots growing alongside it. Another note was how Our Mother Corn communicates through the different stages of reproduction when the stalk grew a spike, Zit+ama or Xitakame, indicating she was ready for reproduction and Corn cobs would soon arrive. We prepared to protect the Ikú (Corn cobs) while other families prepared for the necessary ceremonies. Later, when the silks began to form, the plant communicated the colour of Maize.

Tatéi Niwetsika teaches the Wixárika principles of coexistence and reciprocal relationships between people and plants. Wixárika people involved in cultivation practices and cultivation ceremonies become cognizant of Our Mother Corn through a plant’s life. From cultivation to harvesting, the levels of interaction between people and plants increase, as well as the levels of intimacy between the two species. In the science of Our Mother Corn, Wixárika families gather the knowledge and the wisdom to continue practices that become vital to Wixárika identity and health. Our Mother Corn becomes a relative to maintain Wixárika humanness. During the cycle of Corn, people maintain close ties and dietary restrictions from the time of cultivation to harvest. In the harvesting ceremony, families devote the entire celebration to Tatéi Newetsika. Through chants, storytelling and dances, members of the family maintain inter-species relations with Corn. Later, families use the offerings presented in the ceremony and take them to key geographical locations across Mexico. In this exchange, families make kinship, learn from inter-species interactions and strengthen relationships with their ancestors. 

The knowledge I am sharing through this article was possible due to the collaboration and the labour of many humans and more-than-human species. This work is possible because of the trust and the continuous community engagement through my years of fieldwork in Tepic.

I teach in the Critical Ethnic Studies department at Kalamazoo College and my commitment to my students is to challenge their way of thinking. I do this work not just in my department but within the wider academic institution. Two years ago, my “Plant Communication and Kinship” course adopted a laboratory model to teach theory in praxis. This was an effort to learn how to approach plants in  an ethical and responsible way. I teach about different indigenous communities and their understanding of the natural world both practically and experientially. We follow principles and protocols that we as a class come to as a consensus, as well as other principles that Elders come and teach us. Part of my work is to continue collaborating with the Wixárika community and we invite individuals from Y+rata to participate in our community garden and to share teachings at Kalamazoo. Personally, this lab has become more than just a place to collaborate with the students and visitors, it is a space to reconnect with land and the teachings of ancestors.

I teach about how plants listen when we speak to them and how they speak in a language that we humans can understand. From our human-centric perspective, plants communicate in simplistic ways to function and serve specific purposes in their local ecosystems. However, plants also communicate in a poetic way to captivate our attention. Humans have been socially constructed to think rationally, in objective and scientific terms making it difficult to show how other species communicate through complex relationships. For many, the divide between society and science has made it almost impossible to comprehend other systems of communication. However, for non-western communities, this cognitive orientation to conceive the more-than-human world is a common practice, even for those families in the diaspora living with the influence of Western political, economic and cultural forces. 

The anti-colonial genealogies of Our Mother Corn within the Wixárika serve as a poetic model to envision the relationship between humans and plants. This relationship is consensual, reciprocal and manifested through the embodied practices of community members who live in constant interaction with the natural world, without the scientific divide or hierarchical approach of academic studies.

Cyndy Margarita García-Weyandt is a mother, a poeta, an immigrant, and an assistant professor in the Department of Critical Ethnic Studies at Kalamazoo College. She is also the coordinator and co-founder of Proyecto Taniuki in Zitakua, Mexico.

You might also like this story: Bread is not a commodity

The post The Poetic Language of Corn appeared first on eco-nnect.

Willem van Aalst worked in finance.

“I met a commodity trader with EF Hutton. I thought his lifestyle was interesting and exciting, so I decided that’s what I want to do.”

His career began with an internship in Chicago, which led to work as a correspondent at the European Options Exchange in his hometown of Amsterdam.

“I spoke French fluently, so I was responsible for selling seats on the exchange to French speaking countries.”

Although he enjoyed his job, Willem missed the USA and wanted to return. Eventually, an opportunity emerged through a training program with Bankers Trust.

“It was a lot of fun, I spent time in New York where I met my wife Kathryn in 1980. We were engaged in 1981, and we got married in 1982 in New Orleans, which is where she grew up.”

After the training program, Willem was offered a job with a posting in either Jakarta or Amsterdam. Again he chose to return to his hometown, this time to be close to his father who was sick with lung cancer. After his father passed, Willem left his role with Bankers Trust, enrolled in a MBA, and eventually took a job in London where he moved with his growing family.

“Kathryn was pregnant with Sasha, my daughter” — she also gave birth to two sons, Nicholas and Philip — “and we lived in London for the next 12 years. I worked for Smith Barney first as a bond trader and salesman, and then with Salomon Brothers, where I was a bond salesman to Dutch and Scandinavian insurance companies, pension funds and the like.”

Willem was then offered a job with Lehman Brothers.

“It was when the structured finance business took off and I got heavily involved in that, which was extremely profitable.”

In layman’s terms, structured finance refers to the sector of the financial industry that is concerned with leverage and risk. 

“Basically, if you are a fixed income investor, a bond investor, and you’re only allowed to buy bonds, but you also want equity exposure, then a bank can create a bond and its redemption or its coupon is linked to an equity market. So essentially it’s an equity, but you’re allowed to buy it as a bond investor, because it’s structured as a bond.”

Does this make sense to you? It didn’t make sense to Willem.

“It is totally bogus and that’s what the financial industry is all about. The financial industry is essentially a big bunch of lies” and structured finance, and specifically the mortgage backed securities market, is what led to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

“What got us into the financial mess of 2008 is greed, basic greed. I mean, the financial industry is a very, very greedy environment. People were paid ridiculous amounts of money, including myself, and when that happens things go awry. I was working for Lehman Brothers in 1999, which led to a personal burnout caused by being responsible for a large sales force, about 45 people, which was extremely stressful.“

Willem quit and he returned to Amsterdam with his family. After a few years of running a radio venture with a friend, he was pulled back into the finance industry.

“I started working for a very small investment bank here in Holland, simply because I wanted to go back to something I knew. I was talking to my old clients, old institutional investors, and they were talking a lot about hedge funds and that they wanted to invest in them. So I said to this small company, ‘we ought to start a hedge fund because it’s what our investors want.’” 

After a few years working for that company, Willem received a phone call from an old friend. 

“We used to work together at Lehman Brothers, he was a trader and he asked, ‘can you help me set up a hedge fund, because I’m sick and tired of working for Lehman Brothers, I think the world is going to hell in a basket, we’re going to have a huge credit crisis, and I don’t want to be in dollars, I want to be in emerging markets, I want to protect my own wealth and that of others, so I need a fund.’” 

They started a hedge fund in London in 2003. 

“It was a very successful, very large fund, and I was splitting my week between London and Amsterdam. Then in September 2007, when the first cracks of the credit crisis started to appear, when the Bear Stearns hedge funds went belly up, we lost quite a bit of money, around 6.5%, which is not enormous in hedge fund land, but it was twice what we had lost before in any given month.” 

He and his business partner discussed the position of the fund and felt to make different choices, which ultimately led to them parting ways.

“People took advantage of a system based on trust. Trust was put in the rating agencies believing they were doing their job correctly, rating all of these instruments according to the true quality of the underlying assets in those structured transactions, but they weren’t. And people were buying three, four or five apartments financed by mortgages, which they never should have gotten, but the salesmen who sold those mortgages were making so much money on commissions they would have sold them to their dying grandmother. It was a market on steroids. It was fraud.

“In splitting from my business partner, I realised how ruthless the financial market is and how little it actually adds to anybody’s wellbeing, other than making a lot of money for people that are thus motivated. The finance industry, for me, was not an end, it was a means to an end, it afforded me to live a certain lifestyle, to do certain things. I was running after money for money’s sake and I think that’s basically how the financial industry works. If you are not motivated that way, I don’t believe you can actually function in that environment, because it’s eat or get eaten, it’s not pretty, it’s not good. So I became very, very disenchanted. I mean, what do we need a bank for? We need a bank to lend us money when we need it, or transfer money to different accounts, that’s it. We don’t need banks to speculate, we don’t need banks to make huge amounts of money of their own accord.”

In 2008, Willem left the finance industry. 

“It was the second time I quit, but this time I decided it was going to be for good, which meant I had to find something else to do. I had made a fair bit of money in the hedge fund business, so I could afford to take time to think about what I wanted to focus on. I thought if I do something that I’m passionate about, that I really care about, it would probably be alright.”

Willem had fished and hunted his whole life and had always enjoyed the time he shared with Mother Nature.

“I felt an enormous amount of support and trust from the environment.” 

Willem was looking online and he came across Geoff Lawton’s permaculture program. 

“I liked him as a teacher and as a storyteller, I liked his project, I like where he came from, with Bill Mollison, one of the original thinkers of perennial and permanent structures. I did two courses with him that taught me to look at land in a totally different way, to look at mountains in a totally different way, to look at valleys in a totally different way, to look at the keyline aspect of how water flows down these valleys, and how incredibly potent water is, not just potent in the sense of giving life, but also destructive if it’s obstructed by human intervention in the wrong way. Water will destroy anything that’s in its way.”

He then came across Mark Shepard, the author of Restoration Agriculture, again through the internet. 

“That was an eye opener for me. I put the system he described in his book into a spreadsheet, and I did some calculations and I asked myself, why is there anybody in the world not farming like this? Why are they all doing something different in terms of monoculture and stuff like that? It does not make sense when you look at those numbers, which is an incredibly profitable, multi-crop, multifaceted system compared to an acre of corn. The acre he describes in his book, with chestnuts and apples and berries and chickens and pigs and cows, you name it, that acre you can live off. But this other acre you can’t live off, you just have corn, you will die. And the acre of corn has all of these inputs like fertiliser, pesticides, herbicides and all the crap that you don’t need and you certainly don’t want to eat. And it is far more expensive than the acre that takes advantage of the symbiosis of interconnected nature.”

Willem travelled to San Diego in the USA to study with Mark, and on his return, he stopped by his wife’s hometown of New Orleans.

“We flew over the Mississippi Delta and I saw the lushness and the beauty of the Delta, which I’d spent an enormous amount of time in, hunting and fishing. And right on those edges where salt water meets sweet water, where forest, marsh and mangroves meet the land, in those edges of nature life is palpable, it jumps at you, it is teeming with life. And so flying in, looking over that, I thought, that’s beautiful, that’s where I want it to be.”

His wife Kathryn’s family are one of the owners of a large property on the Atchafalaya River. 

“It’s a very interesting property. You have a polder, a diked piece of land, and then you have pure marsh, it’s about 7000 acres in total. It’s a huge property, and they found oil underneath it in the 1930s, they put all sorts of pipelines under it and exploited the hell out of it. About seven families owned it, including Kathryn’s family, but the oil is now dry or at a depth that’s not feasible to actually exploit. And from the original shareholders, it now has 107 shareholders, and it’s not bringing in any money, or at least not the kind of money that they were used to through oil. So I looked at it and thought if I build a regenerative farm there, a very diverse regenerative farm, it’s going to be incredibly profitable.

“I researched it for five years. I got Mark Shepard to come over to have a look and discuss what we could develop, and we came up with a beautiful system of mounds and meadows with water in between. It was not only an incredibly beautiful system, but it was also going to be — I did calculations — it would have made millions once that system got running, because it was mostly perennial structures and animal structures that were self-sustaining. It would have been stupendous, but the shareholders didn’t want it.“

During this period, Willem continued studying, shifting focus from the restorative agriculture of Mark Shepard to regenerative agriculture with Allan Savory. It was through his friendship with Allan that he met Will Harris.

“Will was a fourth generation farmer who decided to do things differently. He says he has got 100,000 beating hearts on his property, which means he’s got beef, pigs, turkeys, chickens, geese, vegetables, you name it. In the ten years that I’ve known him, I have seen him take over neighbouring industrial farms and regenerate them and generate revenue off them. He has 154 people working for him, he inspired change in the town of Bluffton, where his farm is.  I saw the accounts and I talked to him about it and it works, it feeds people, it builds a community, it builds territory, it builds land.“

It was Will’s example of regenerating land, as well as communities, that inspired Willem’s next venture.

“I had been baking sourdough bread for 12 years. It started when I was studying permaculture and realising there is no difference between my biome and the biome out there in the fields, where healthy food grows. If it’s healthy, it feeds me and I am healthy, if it’s not healthy, I get sick. If you don’t care about the food you eat, you’ll get sick. If you don’t know where your food is coming from, you will get sick. I mean, there’s no two ways about it because the microbial fungi in the soil is no different from the microbial fungi of our intestines. And so realising that I realised that yeast is a bad thing, I realised that fermenting is a good process, I realised that fermented bread is a good thing, so I started baking for my family and my friends.”

Willem had returned from his American Dream and it was during the Covid lockdowns when his son Nicholas saw an ad on Facebook. 

“It basically said, is there somebody who wants to bake in my bakery? My son saw it and responded ‘my Dad’, and that’s how it all started.”

In October 2020, Willem began baking with his other son Philip and his daughter Sasha. A longtime Ashtanga yoga practitioner and teacher, Sasha was drawn to the energy that was growing between her father and her brother. She recalls this first period of baking as “a little mad scientist’s experimental kitchen”.

“It was very spontaneous. Through my brother Nicholas, Pap got access to a little space and he remembered the bread, because my father didn’t do it for a while, he was so focused on the swamp in Louisiana. And then my brother Philip got involved and helped evolve his process into something bigger. It was during the lockdowns, and I needed something of the earth to connect to, with other people and with my hands, and it gave me that. We were just opening the garage door, baking for people and selling lots of bread. It was very playful in the beginning, it was just an experiment from October 2020 until April 2021, something like that.”

Willem had set out to understand how to nurture nature, and it seemed that nature was now nurturing him, as this small venture with his family started to expand. They decided to commit to what it was becoming and they found a bigger space, a storefront on Ceintuurbaan in De Pijp, which is now the home to their family bakery, Bakkerij Mater.

“When we moved over here, it became a whole other thing. This was much bigger and I felt like rolling up my sleeves and bringing some feminine energy into this place. And when we arrived here we just realised we could connect it back to everything, to this whole bigger story for him, but to my story too.”

Through teaching yoga, Sasha appreciated people’s need for community and had experience in cultivating it through her shala. So when the bakery started to evolve, and eventually opened to the public, she saw how her own experiences could support what she was creating with her father and her brother. For Willem, it is a continuation of his journey since leaving finance. 

“The baking is a result of the passion for nature. I see the bakery as a platform to continue to work in this transition of agriculture and to continue to work in spreading the word about how concerned we ought to be about how we treat Mother Nature. The bakery enables us to tell the story of what’s important out there, as baking is on the edge of the most destructive agricultural practice in nature, ploughing.

“If you look back in history, basically every civilisation that disappeared, disappeared because of the plough. The plough is a tool for industrial farmers to turn over the land and make it barren so that they can easily sow into it. What it does is it hurts nature, because when they plough, they plough in the early stages of spring, they turn the land upside down, exposing the biology of the land in the sun for it to bake and die. It becomes dust, and so they kill the biology in the soil, and they need to add biology to grow anything in it, so they add fertiliser, pesticides, herbicides and all that crap. Also, when they are ploughing at that same depth, continuously, year in and year out, they create a hard bed that water cannot penetrate. When rain drops on that land, it will go through the soil and hit rock, and that rain streams out to wherever it wants to go and pollutes surrounding environments with the herbicides, pesticides and all that they’ve thrown onto that land. 

“How can we produce wholesome, good food on land that does not have biology? How can that biology that feeds the plants, that creates the symbiosis through all those nematodes and all the bacteria and all those things in the soil, which bring in the sugars and the nitrate to the plant to make it grow strong and give it nutritional value, how can that happen in a ploughed field? It can’t. So what you end up having is land that, after a while, is basically no longer feasible for farming and basically the Egyptians, the Romans, you name it, they disappeared because of it.”

Willem has been collaborating with local farmers, sharing his knowledge of nature to ensure the flour and dairy used in their baking nourishes the community and the landscape in and around Amsterdam.

“Bread is the essence. If it’s there, it’s a life supporter, and if it’s not there, well, look at what happens in Gaza or any other troubled land. When they don’t have flour, they have famine.”

Bread has long fuelled healthy societies, and for Willem van Aalst, it has brought together the wisdom from his long journey in a small yet significant way.

“Bread is a commodity that is not just a commodity, it’s the essence of life.”

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer. He leads storytelling at eco-nnect.

You might also like this story: Planting is Love

The post Bread is not a commodity appeared first on eco-nnect.

The Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa and Kankuamo communities have long safeguarded the sacred lands of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range in northern Colombia. These lands hold profound spiritual significance, deeply rooted in their cosmologies and belief systems. The snow-capped peaks are considered the Heart of the Earth, and its ecological balance is of high importance in maintaining environmental balance across the world.

The Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa and Kankuamo see themselves as humanity’s “elder brothers and sisters”, responsible for preserving this balance. Rivers represent the veins of the Earth, connecting the mountains to the spirit realm, while trees and forests are living beings that sustain all life. These indigenous groups honour nature through ceremonies, payments to the Earth, and sustainable use of resources, maintaining an intimate relationship to the land that is central to their cultural identity. Specific natural sites are sacred spaces for rituals of divination and healing, and keen observation of ecological patterns guide their ceremonial calendar, as Mamos and Zagas — the spiritual leaders and elders of these indigenous groups — draw on ancestral knowledge to read signs from nature to maintain equilibrium with Mother Earth.

Unfortunately, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta has experienced high rates of deforestation for several decades — estimates range from 50 to 65% of forest cover loss — with logging, land clearing for cattle ranching, and cultivation of illicit crops being the primary drivers. Along with climate change, the loss of forests has led to altered rainfall patterns, flooding, soil erosion, declining water resources and the increasing threat of desertification across the region.

Massive agricultural expansion and mountain top mining have also severely impacted biodiversity, polluting rivers while fragmenting critical wildlife habitat. Studies indicate that over 50% of mammal species and over 65% of amphibians in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta are at an elevated risk of extinction. Several endangered animal species, like the spectacled bear, have already disappeared from lower elevations. Rising temperatures have caused accelerated melting of the Sierra’s glaciers and high mountain snowpack, which are critical water sources sustaining ecosystems, agriculture and human settlements across the region during the dry season. Glacier retreat and changes in seasonal precipitation are disrupting the sensitive high mountain environments, threatening endemic species specially adapted to thrive in these conditions.

For the Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa and Kankuamo communities, environmental degradation represents profound spiritual loss that threatens the continuity of their traditions and their relationship to the sacred landscape that has sustained them for millennia. Consequently, revitalising sustainable practices has become an urgent priority. Jaguar Siembra is a community-centred agroecology and reforestation project that supports this need, transforming both the natural and cultural landscapes in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The project focuses on the environmental challenges in the region through grassroots efforts for ecological regeneration. Their model is centred on the notion that individual healing requires connecting with ancestral lands and teachings through the wisdom of medicinal and food-bearing plants. Their immersive workshops and hands-on agroforestry projects empower the communities to write a new story of hope.

Jaguar Siembra was founded in 2016 by Santiago Roa, a filmmaker from Bogota, who travelled to Santa Marta to visit the Lost City, also known as Teyuna. This journey was inspired by his personal interest in reconnecting and discovering Colombia’s ancient cultures and sacred sites. He was particularly interested in meeting the Mamo who is the spiritual guardian of the Lost City, to understand the imbalances in our relationship with Mother Earth, and the subsequent consequences.

“I am a filmmaker, and the idea was to research and document the knowledge and cultural heritage we have, which is getting lost, and we don’t have much access to due to the way we grew up in an education system that is more focused on Western history than indigenous history. My interest was always to try and find out where we really come from and to learn about the stories that they didn’t tell us, the stories that are still alive in the territories with communities that have been thriving for thousands of years. In looking for those stories and researching that cultural heritage, the idea was to work hand-in-hand with nature through cultural projects that support regeneration.” 

Humanity has been slowly losing the ancestral ways of growing food. The crops and techniques that were once common are more difficult to find, as farming has changed in many ways, even in indigenous communities.

“We are working with regenerative agriculture to regenerate that soil, to plant food forests again to recover ecosystems with biodiversity and economies like cacao, and other food crops that are important for food security for indigenous families. Basically I’ve travelled alone in this area, documenting the planting of these food forests, and I’ve been doing that for eight years, working with the local communities and farmers across the Sierra Nevada.

“Essentially we focus on the intersection between nature and culture, indigenous rights and cultural heritage, as well as other scientific ways that the communities here relate with nature, such as spiritual payments and concepts related to ‘el buen vivir’, how they live in harmony with nature without destroying it. Basically it’s about how we can learn from indigenous communities, working more interculturally to live in harmony with nature.”

Over the past year the focus has been on creating a community food forest. 

“We started with a pilot project, uniting a community with four acres of food forests that they use for gatherings and community work. There is a school where kids from different communities travel to and stay and study during the week, and this food forest will also support food security at the school.”

Santiago highlights the collaborative nature of the project. 

“There are different people working together in ways that resemble the traditional minga, or community work. Sometimes we gather every Saturday, and there are several days throughout the year dedicated to maintaining the forest, creating fences, planting, and nurturing our relationship with the food we are growing, but in a communal way.”

Despite being a small organisation — with just three people working mostly as volunteers — over the past few years, Jaguar Siembra has made significant strides with its collaborative regenerative efforts: a total of 62,800 trees and plants have been planted, benefitting 14 native families and their lands; while eight cultural media projects have been created, furthering the mission of documenting and preserving indigenous knowledge and traditions. While Jaguar Siembra is clearly thriving, Santiago also acknowledges the many challenges he experiences. 

“This is a really demanding job in terms of energy, as I need to travel and follow the holistic processes that the Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa and Kankuamo communities have here, going through spiritual payments and spiritual work before, during, and after every process we are doing. I think one of the most difficult things is how to work together with more harmony and how we can communicate better. Every project is going to be difficult because that’s the nature of how it needs to be, and we don’t need to be afraid of that, we just need to have the tools and the resilience to overcome everything in the best way we can. That’s the way we need to work in community projects. It’s not about everything being perfect, harmonious, and flowing all the time, it’s about encountering challenges together and collectively finding solutions, which ensures everyone is part of the project.

Jaguar Siembra is currently restructuring some of their projects. 

“We are evaluating the impact we are generating, and using design thinking to figure out how to do it better: with more energy efficiency, fewer resources and higher quality, more nutrient-rich food. It’s a super interesting time because we don’t have all the answers, but we are actively working to find them and explore different possible ways we can best do this.”

One of these ways is acquiring land for a new farm. 

“We will apply different techniques and design processes for farming there. That way, we can share that knowledge with communities, farmers and anyone interested. Basically the idea is to create a space of interculturality where we can learn directly from nature and from the community elders, applying different forms of science in the territory. It will be a living school — a school for life, thought and creativity — that will gather different branches and expressions of regeneration, so we can work at the intersection of food, health, personal wellbeing, community wellbeing, while creating and working in community.”

This project will also involve establishing a seed bank and tree nursery, and is being led by the territory through spiritual payments and holistic processes conducted by the Mamos. The Mamos determine the most suitable locations on the land for the different elements being planned, and Professor Felipe from Madre Tierra Permacultura — a collaborator on the project — will assist with the design of the farm’s layout based on the Mamos’ guidance.

Jaguar Siembra is yet another inspiring example of how agroforestry can heal degraded lands and empower communities, as the Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa and Kankuamo peoples revitalise sustainable farming practices by blending their ancestral knowledge with complementary technologies. If you feel to support this project, and all of Jaguar Siembra’s work, their website provides information on the different ways people can get involved.

Ivan Sawyer García is a media producer, communicator, collaborative project designer, environmental activist and the founder of Voices of Amerikua.

You might also like this story: Dreams of Territory

The post Regenerating the Heart of the Earth appeared first on eco-nnect.

Earlier this year on a warm May morning, I volunteered with a friend, Cesare, at the Ortobioattivo farm, in Bellosguardo, a town a stone’s throw away from Florence. Every Monday morning, Cesare volunteers with the NGO Fili d’Erba, which takes care of children with disabilities. At Ortobioattivo Andrea Battiata, the founder, teaches the children of Fili d’Erba how to grow their own vegetables, which they then sell on Thursdays at a farmer’s market in central Florence.

That morning, after tending to the garden with the kids, Andrea showed me around his farm and offered me a sweet strawberry that was circling around the hedge that held his biodiverse vegetable garden.

“I am Sicilian by origin, I lived my first twenty years in Trapani, in Western Sicily. And perhaps my propensity for good food derives from these origins, because in my family we ate very well. When you got up in the morning everyone’s first thought was what are we eating today? And then our day revolved around the meals.”

Andrea has a gentle yet jovial demeanor, as an observer it seems that he runs his farm with ease and positivity.

“Here we do everything by hand and everything with good will. We put the wellbeing of the people who work here in the foreground. We’re a small team of four people, and run a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program that delivers a box of seasonal and bioactive produce to 120 families every week.”

A few months later, this September, I moved to Florence, and remembered the sweetness of Andrea’s strawberries. Andrea is known to accept a new subscription to his program only after he has personally met you. So I called him up to see if he remembered me, he did, so I signed up to his weekly box of goodies. After a week of tasting his scrumptious salads, tasty aubergines and the last of the summer’s juicy tomatoes, I was hooked. I wanted to learn about Andrea’s method, so I returned to the farm to understand the magic of Ortobioattivo.

“About 12 years ago I got sick and a doctor advised me to decrease my meat intake. I began to feel much better and became vegetarian. One day I complained to my wife and said ‘how can we eat this supermarket salad, it tastes like plastic to me.’ My wife replied, ‘you’re an agronomist, you run a company that already works with plants, you should be able to figure out how to grow your own salad.’”

Andrea studied agronomy at University, then he had to run his family’s meat and dairy farm in Southern Tuscany for many years, traveling the world to sell the meat and milk they produced to large companies. This experience developed his understanding of the broken industrial food system from within. With this understanding, he broke away from the family business and settled in Florence. Once there he opened a company with a subscription service of house plants for hotels and offices.

“My wife’s comment caused a spark in me, she was right, I had spent many years on a dairy farm yet I had never grown my own vegetables. So with my wife’s challenge in mind, I remembered a trip I had done a couple of years before to the Amazon Rainforest. After seeing the natural fertility of the Amazon and its exuberant and abundant vegetation, I began to wonder how to replicate that fertility for my vegetable garden’s soil. So I asked myself, is fertility what we create with our tractors, with fertilizers, or is it with the biodiverse black soil of the jungle? So I closed my eyes and dreamed about how to replicate that fertility. The morning after, when I woke up, I realised that it could be done.

“So I started my own vegetable garden in my lawn. I added compost and volcanic sand, to replicate the Amazon I had to activate the soil, so I also added several key bacteria and fungi. I had started from scratch, and after a mere month I had an incredible vegetable garden. I said to myself, wow this is incredible, I need to tell everyone. So I started to host meetings to spread the word within my local community, to teach them how they too could start their own abundant vegetable garden with this method, because it’s simple and the results are amazing, and they’re within everyone’s reach. In one of the meetings two ladies got up and said ‘look Andrea, you have a company, you know how to do it, we can’t do it, we have families and work, why don’t you do the work for us.’ And so that is how the CSA program was born in 2012. We started with 25 families and from there it was all a crescendo.”

Andrea not only grows organic produce, he grows bioactive produce. He describes this as food that has certain nutritional compounds that are scientifically proven to be better for you. In fact he has been working with the University of Florence’s medicine department and with doctors at the main hospital hosting clinical trials that prove this.

“I had a father who was a pharmacist, back then they were apothecaries. I guess in my lifetime I witnessed the transition from formulated and personalised medicine to the evolution of modern pharmacology. I remember watching my Dad create what looked like potions out of powders, liquids, plants. He worked in alchemy. So I think he instilled some of this alchemical passion in me.

“Today, I see people getting sicker and sicker, the system profits on these diseases, it has reduced food to an almost annoying, daily commodity, without thinking that we are what we eat. This is a rather banal phrase, but it actually encompasses the human being very well, because we are made of light. Plants transform this light into organic substances that we eat, so we eat light. But if this light is turned off then we eat rubbish and therefore we are turned off, and we get sick. For some reason, few doctors are focused on food, which is the true source of one’s wealth, one’s health and one’s positive thoughts.”

In most western medical degrees, nutrition is not part of the curriculum, so the fact that Andrea is encouraging the medical community to look into the benefits of food is a much needed step in incorporating nutrition into the west’s understanding of medicine.

“I was always intent on the idea of food as medicine. Our objective with the garden is to grow hyper-functional and nutritional food. This is what then led us to engage with university studies that give scientific backing that our produce has bioactive compounds that are much better for us. If you think about it, plants absorb all of the nutrients of their environment, they can’t move, so our method ensures that they have as many minerals, vitamins, bacteria–essentially bioactive substances–around them as possible. Sometimes I wonder, with the CSA program, is the community supporting the farmer or is the farmer supporting the community?”

I found this a very compelling comment. The term CSA implies that agriculture needs support from its community. However, if bioactive food is a form of preventative medicine, then Andrea’s clients need this type of agriculture as much as he needs them. This reminded me of a Quechuan philosophy known as Ayni, where achieving health is finding balance and energetic reciprocity. A beautiful concept when applied in a community context.

Through this work of deepening his and the medical community’s understanding of the nutritional value of food, Andrea began analysing the biochemical properties of unusual, albeit edible plants. This is how he rediscovered the amazing value of certain leaves that are not being consumed anymore. This is his latest initiative called “Mangia la Foglia”, which translates to “Eat the Leaf.”

“Mangia la Foglia came about as I was learning about leaves that are not your typical lettuce or chard, but other less common leaves that have several incredible benefits. We already have some products that are doing well: olive-tree leaves, dried pomace leaves and the laurel. Did you know that the healthiest part of the olive tree is not in the oil but in the leaves? For example hydroxytyrosol and olioromycin, are two powerful antioxidant substances for humans that are abundant in olive leaves.”

Alongside deepening Ortobioattivo’s relationship with the medical community, Andrea has also established partnerships with local high schools, designing educational and interactive vegetable gardens for students.

“We design projects for schools. For example, for Dante High School in Florence we designed it with their computer science department. We did this to be able to speak to the students in their language, technology. So we not only grew a vegetable garden but also programmed an app and a digital greenhouse that could go with it. On the app the students can monitor the changes that are happening in the greenhouse in realtime. From the CO2 levels, to the temperature changes, and the oxygen and glucose levels. The greenhouse is powered by solar panels, so the app also tracks the electrical energy transfer, as well as the chemical energy that a plant gives off. This enables the students to compare the energy that a solar panel consumes to the one that the plant produces, electrical energy versus organic energy. This helps them relate to everything that is happening in the greenhouse.”

Other than the clear educational aspect of the school partnership, Andrea hopes that the gardens will widen the students’ worldviews too.

“My mission with this project is to encourage students to observe deeply, and thus develop critical thinking to go beyond what they’re taught. I think education goes further than learning from books: it is the ability to see something that might not be obvious to everyone else. You know, when you’re in the traditional school system you believe everything they teach you, because that’s the system. Only when you go out on your own do you begin to question and to build your own path. It is people that have the ability to observe keenly that are able to do this, and for me this is how I built the Ortobioattivo. This is a company that sees beyond the status quo. It really observes and sees clearly the people who work for it, the land it sows and the people who eat its products.”

I asked Andrea what has been the most satisfying aspect of Ortobioattivo since it began in 2012?

“Providing food for the same families for ten consecutive years and meeting lots of fascinating people along the way. We have never invested in any form of marketing, every new client has arrived through word of mouth. We are not interested in exponential growth. I have a personal relationship with every customer, and the business is very financially successful, we don’t rely on any government or external financing. So I think overall, I’m very happy that we can be an example to others, a concrete one that shows that there is another way of building a solid and independent agricultural business that provides health and nourishment to its community. In the end it’s simply a question of change in perspective. Not going to the supermarket and buying something ready, but rather having a more conscious diet that is seasonal, local and healthy.”

The Ortobioattivo is not a traditional organic, community-supported farm, it is a hub that attracts people from every walk of life that want to learn about the healing power of plants. Andrea’s innately curious personality and constantly positive attitude are its guiding force, a humble leader on a mission to improve lives through the wisdom of food.

You might also like: Forest Gardeners 

Isabella Cavalletti is a storyteller and co-founded eco-nnect.

The post Eat the Leaf appeared first on eco-nnect.

“I studied to be a technician to solve technical issues, like changing the type of fishing nets that were being used… Nobody had taught me how to understand a culture, how to engage with the community, how to appreciate how they feel and how they live, not just by understanding their language, but all of their expressions. This realization made me grow a lot and see conservation work in an entirely different light.”

I met Alejandro Robles on a sunny afternoon in his countryside home in San Bartolo, Baja California Sur, Mexico. Alejandro and his wife Monica grow their own produce there and have built nature cabins for guests. Their home was welcoming and peaceful, a sweet countryside relief nestled within the giant cacti that are so symbolic of Baja. They normally reside in La Paz, the capital of Baja California Sur. Baja is known for its marine wildlife and ecosystems, it’s often described as an “open air aquarium”.

Alejandro has been working in ocean conservation his entire life. At the tender age of 26 he was on the scientific boat that had one of the first sightings of the vaquita marina in the wild —– the elusive endangered and tiny porpoise that is endemic to the Sea of Cortez. 

“The totoaba is a huge endemic fish in danger of extinction and looking for it I ran into the vaquitas. So, I was part of a marine mammal scientific team and I collected the first fresh specimens of the vaquitas back in 1985. Until then the vaquita was virtually unknown, they only knew it existed because of a skull that had been found in 1955, upon which the new species was classified in 1958.”

He then focused on the sustainable management of fisheries, administering the sardine and anchovy fisheries at the national level in Mexico — the basis of the ocean’s food system.

“I was in charge of negotiating the first sardine fishing bans and to stop all juvenile fish catches. That’s when Conservation International arrived in the region and hired me in ‘88 to run The Sea of Cortez program. They were interested in birds and in the islands of the Gulf and sardines were their main food source and I understood what was happening with sardines. Eventually I became their Mexico director working on the protection of the Lacandon tropical rainforest in Chiapas and also in Oaxaca.”

A few years after that, in 2000, Alejandro became Vice President for Mexico and Central America Conservation International (CI) based in their Washington DC headquarters.

“After some years as Vice President of CI in the US, I moved to to San Diego to start Noreste Sustentable (NOS), and in 2008 my wife and I decided to move back to Mexico. We chose to settle in La Paz in Baja California.”

Upon his return to Mexico, Alejandro founded Noreste Sustentable (NOS), an NGO that sought to combat illegal fishing and to protect the vaquita marina.

“In the north of the Gulf, in the towns of Santa Clara and San Felipe, the vaquita was disappearing. So, we started working with the national government to establish a vaquita refuge inside the already established marine reserve and to make certain gill nets illegal. However, I eventually realized that the technical solutions don’t really work if the social fabric of the community is sick. The towns in the north were rampant with drugs, trafficking and illegal fishing.  But as environmental NGOs we are not really able to deal with social issues, so we just pretended they didn’t exist and kept lobbying the government to create a marine reserve, but in truth, the society needed help.

“Whilst we were working to create a marine area in the north we also established a citizen watch group against illegal fishing in La Paz. We would show up to the illegal boats and essentially do the police’s work. One day the Marine Admiral noticed our work and told us to call him next time we saw illegal shrimp boats, he promised to send help and intercept the boats. So we did, and he kept his promise. The shrimp boat didn’t even have any licenses and the next day news traveled fast around the bay that illegal shrimping wasn’t tolerated any longer. The illegal shrimp fishing boats stopped after that. And once they stopped we began looking into the local fishermen who had a tendency to fish with harpoons at night, an illegal method of fishing.”

When Alejandro had relocated to La Paz, he leased the NOS office space in an area known as el Manglito, a notoriously difficult community, one of the most violent in La Paz. He found it hard to assimilate into the community, so a neighbour advised him to hire Alicia, a loved local that knew everyone in the neighborhood.

“One day, Alicia was in the office. It was quite funny looking back on it, because we were checking night photographs from the illegal fishing observatory. The photos revealed faces despite the darkness. So we’re all checking the images when Alicia walks in and asks: ‘What is this? Why did you take these photographs?’ I replied, ‘we’re just checking photos of fishermen fishing illegally.’ ‘But it’s my cousin! What does this NGO do exactly?’ I responded that ‘we try to stop illegal fishing.’ Alicia then shouted ‘but everyone in this neighborhood is involved in illegal fishing!’. Unknowingly I had rented an office in the heart of La Paz’s illegal fishing community. For a year we remained in this very tense situation, where the local community didn’t want anything to do with us.

“Then something interesting happened, Alicia’s 20 year old son Omar asked me to help him with his football team. Of course I agreed and told the team I would help if they agreed to fair play rules and to give back to the community in some way or another. They agreed to the conditions and I helped them buy their kits and set up team rules. At the same time my wife and I kept insisting on finding a way to connect with the community, nobody would even say hello back to us. But then, one day, walking around the area we started picking up litter that was on the streets, and everyone started to notice. Without saying anything, they started picking up trash too and giving it to us when we walked by, and this is how our first interactions began. People would show up and say ‘we noticed you like picking up trash, so we collected some for you’. Then, Cano, the captain of the football team came up to me and said ‘you helped us, now we want to help. We want to organize a neighborhood clean up.’ 

Morre than 50 people showed up to that first clean up. They collected 20 tonnes of garbage and even turned a landfill into a football field. 

“This day changed the energy completely. Eventually, we cleaned up the whole neighborhood, organising six clean up days. Once the garbage was dealt with, the group started washing off the graffitis from the walls too. It was almost as though the process had to start on land first to eventually reach the shores. 

“Then about a year later, in 2010, we placed the first denunciations of two local illegal fishermen Huber and Guillermo… But by then some people in the community trusted us and encouraged Guillermo and Hubert to come talk to us. So the first discussions began. Back then I was figuring out how to engage in a healthy dialogue to create a shared vision. You know it’s difficult because we didn’t really know how to achieve that dialogue.” 

By 2011, Guillermo and Hubert, along with NOS, led the project to recuperate the Catarina clam in the La Paz inlet. The Catarina clam became functionally extinct in the area and had to be brought over from neighbouring coastal lagoons.

“Together, we brought the Catarina clam from Concepcion bay and reproduced them in a lab. That year we planted the first 25,000 clams. Months after we planted them, once they had reached their commercial size, they were all stolen. The theft was in defiance to the project, because they were just thrown away. Interestingly, this really peeved off the local community. Everyone was shocked. ‘This can’t be possible, that was a good project,’ they’d say in the streets.

After the theft, six more fishermen joined Guillermo and Hubert. 

“‘We want to join the project too,’ they said. Within a year, instead of 25,000 clams they planted over 500,000, however, again the clams were stolen, but each time there was a robbery, the community would respond more aggressively and more people would want to get involved.”

Five days after meeting Alejandro, I drove to La Paz to meet Hubert at the NOS offices in el Manglito. Huber proudly introduced himself as an ex-illegal fisherman and gave me a wonderful tour of the regenerated area aboard his panga (a traditional Mexican fishing boat). Throughout the tour, Huber opened up about his journey. I could feel his pride and joy as he explained the arduous underwater work.

“For years the community overfished, and the area became overexploited. When my father fished he could take out 40kg of Catarina clams in an hour, whereas I would spend all day trying to find only 1kg. Eventually we tried to look for work elsewhere, going around the whole of Baja fishing illegally. We would be chased by the local coast guards, and we felt like the worst delinquents in the world, but all we really wanted was to survive. Nobody was teaching us how to fish in the best possible way, that was all we knew. We would harpoon at night and the citizen watch group would chase us away. Now the same people that chased us are our friends.

“Initially we thought NOS was out to fuck us. But eventually we realised they weren’t as bad as we thought. We didn’t trust Alejandro at all at the beginning, and he didn’t trust us either, but then the idea was born to recuperate the clams in the bay, and manage it well, and take care of them. So NOS helped us get all of the permits and do an overview of the restoration area. Together we regenerated the whole of the Ensenada area. A few years after the project began, even the turtles and the dolphins came back to the bay.”

The Bay of La Paz is a heavily trafficked shipping area where most of Baja’s resources arrive. La Paz also has a big thermoelectric plant. So it was a truly refreshing experience to witness clean waters, healthy mangroves and plenty of seabirds just a five minute panga ride from the city’s port. 

“In 2012, working with NOS, we agreed to stop fishing the pen shell clam in the bay for some years. By 2015, instead of 40,000 clams that we planted, we had 5 million. But then an invasive sponge-like species killed most of our pen shells. That taught us to diversify. So we requested permits to plant several species of clams, establish a sustainable aquaculture of oysters, and also regenerate the mangrove. Today we don’t even mind losing 70% of our clams to birds, because a scientific expert told us that it means that the ecosystem is healthy.”

The Bay of La Paz was dredged in the 1980s to enable ships to dock at the port. The dredging, along with overfishing, caused the slow demise of La Paz’s marine ecosystem, leading fishermen to take desperate measures to feed their families. Today, Huber and Guillermo teach other fishermen in Mexico how to relocate and regenerate clam populations. Recently, Huber’s daughter joined the project, offering tours of the regenerated mangroves as part of a sustainable tourism initiative. 

When speaking with Alejandro, he explained the simple act that inspired this transformation. 

“You know, what was most powerful for me to witness was to see how the simple changing of a gesture, one that was used to taking from the ocean, instead one day that same hand turned around, and instead of taking gave back to the ocean, restoring an entire ecosystem. I think this was very powerful for the fishers to experience.” 

You might also like this story: When glaciers cry

Alejandro’s work with NOS and the Manglito fishing community shows that your worst enemies can turn into your fiercest allies when you listen to their problems with compassion. 

“My entire career has been devoted to marine conservation, and my forte has been fisheries management. However, I now know that the key to success is not fixing technical fishing issues but healing community problems.”  

The Manglito community was suffering: dependent on fishing for generations, most turned to illegal methods out of desperation, as fish stocks worldwide collapsed due to commercial overfishing. Alejandro managed to win the communities’ love and respect through small acts of compassion, slowly paving the way to a successful collaboration that both regenerated the entire bay and provided a better economic alternative for the fishers who call it home.

Isabella Cavalletti is a storyteller and co-founded eco-nnect.

The post Fishing with compassion appeared first on eco-nnect.

Zack Sanders grew up in the small town of Chester in Connecticut.  “Everyone knew each other, it was the kind of place you could walk into somebody’s home and it was totally fine.” Growing up in Chester made Zack what he calls “a community oriented person”, and when he left his hometown to study urban planning, Zack found community working as a bartender.

“You meet a lot of people working behind a bar, a lot of people who need to pay rent, a lot of people who lost their jobs… It is definitely a place where people go to find community when you don’t have family support or you don’t have that traditional connection.” I’d always appreciated a bar as a kind of meeting place to connect with friends or family, but I’d never visited one to meet people for the first time, even though I was meeting Zack for the first time, as we sat at the bar of De La O Cantina in Guadalajara. Zack was part of a delegation of Los Angeles-based bartenders — Zack and Max Reis from Mírate; Matthew Belanger from Death and Co.; and Edwin Rios, who works at both venues — that took over De La O for one night, to serve cocktails with Mexican produce and to connect with Guadalajara’s hospitality community. I was invited by one of De La O’s owners, Pedro Jiménez Gurría. 

I met Pedro in 2018. I was in Guadalajara to learn Spanish and my teacher recommended I visit De La O. I sat at the bar and raised my eyebrows while smiling at one of the bartenders who came over and introduced herself, “yo soy Karla”, and then asked what I wanted. I tentatively used my newly acquired Spanish, “puedo poder un mezcal?” Karla smiled, “Inglés?” I nodded. She told me I had come to the right place as one of the bar’s owners, Pedro, ran a not-for-profit called Mezonte. She turned around and took a bottle from one of the shelves behind her and placed it on the bar in front of me. The glass bottle was adorned with a simple red and white label: big letters in the middle spelled “MEZONTE” and “JALISCO” was printed in smaller text at the top. 

“A not-for-profit mezcal company?” I’d never heard of such a thing. She smiled and nodded and asked if I wanted a “coppa”. I didn’t know what that was, but figured it was a cup. “Sí!” Karla placed a small shallow dish on the bar, it was made with a material that resembled wood. She noticed my curious eyes, explaining “this is what the communities traditionally drink mezcal from, it’s made from cuastecomate” as she poured the liquid from the bottle into the coppa and small bubbles or pearls appeared on the liquid’s surface. I looked up at her, she raised her eyebrows, “salud”. 

She turned and entered my order into an iPad as I picked up the coppa and sipped: different layers of flavour graced my tongue as a warm heat descended down my throat and suspended in my chest. It was a unique experience distinct from my memories of drinking tequila. While savouring the taste in my mouth, I considered this concept of a not-for-profit alcohol company. Karla’s eyes met mine and again I raised my eyebrows while smiling. She walked over. “I’ve never heard of a not-for-profit alcohol company. How does Mezonte work?” She smiled. “You should meet Pedro. He conducts tastings close by, there is one tomorrow.”

The next day, I visited Mezonte, a small tasting room close to the Mercado Juárez in Colonia Americana. I knocked on a closed wooden door and was greeted by a tanned bearded man. “Pedro?” He nodded. I introduced myself, explaining the conversation I had shared with Karla the night before and the curiosity it sparked within me. “Come in, come in.” He guided me to a stool at a small bar and introduced me to his two friends already seated there. América and Rico both worked with mezcal: América as a researcher focused on agave management, Rico in a bar in San Francisco. The four of us tried different mezcales as Pedro shared the stories of their producers. I asked him when did he start Mezonte? “I started Mezonte when we started Pare de Sufrir.” 

Pare de Sufrir is a bar next door to De La O. “I had just moved to Guadalajara and I was very into mezcal… It was at the beginning of the 2000s when there was more access in Mexico City to traditional mezcales through La Logia de los Mezcólatras, this group of biologists, agronomists, sociologists, all types of people, obviously producers too, that were gathering in different places to talk and taste traditional mezcales. It started to create this awareness of this type of mezcales, because most of the places that were selling mezcal weren’t selling the traditional ones, but the first commercial mezcales. And I got hooked, I was really happy that the city where I was living finally had access to really good mezcales, but then I decided to move to Guadalajara, and when I arrived here, there was nothing… So every time that I went to different places in Mexico for work”, Pedro was working in film production, “I would go and ask for any spirits that they had in that place and brought them back to our house. It was surprising for me, because obviously Guadalajara is a place of tequila, but I didn’t know that a lot of people didn’t know about mezcales, not even tasted them, and I was like wow, we have to do something about this.” 

So with his partner at the time, Monica Leyva, they started doing tastings at their house. Initially for friends, around ten people would join, but soon their friends wanted to invite their friends, and suddenly these small tastings attracted fifty or sixty people. “It was too much.” So Monica and Pedro decided to create a small mezcalería, and in 2009 they opened Pare de Sufrir.

“When we started Pare de Sufrir it was about making a lot of tastings and talking about the producers and how they produce this beautiful spirit… We were aiming for a very small, quiet place, somewhere to appreciate the mezcales… But that’s not what people needed… At the time, a lot of the bars were really hip, they were focused on their decor, like it had to be really fancy and you had to wear certain clothes to get into that place and so on. Pare de Sufrir was like we don’t care, you have fun with good music and good mezcales and that’s it… It quickly became something completely different from what we planned, a place of party… And we were like just have fun, dance if you want, don’t dance if you don’t want, just enjoy yourself while you’re here, stop suffering.”

Despite the success of Pare de Sufrir, Pedro and Monica still wanted a small tasting space, a place where the mezcales were the focus.

“We decided to open another place where it was only and exclusively to taste the spirits and talk more about it and the importance of the surroundings of the making of these mezcales or agave spirits, to create that awareness. And that’s our belief that if people get more information and get to know all what is surrounding the making of these spirits, they will appreciate it more and will try to preserve it as we do.”

This is the focus of Mezonte, which is dedicated to preserving and disseminating the biocultural values ​​of traditional mezcales. Discussing these values extend to Mezonte’s production costs, which they openly discuss on their website to increase consumer awareness of traditional mezcales and what is necessary for their existence. In 2018, while sitting at the bar with América and Rico, the threats to traditional production were less severe than now, in 2023, as I sat with Zack at De La O, and the popularity of this spirit continues to grow, with a significant proportion of demand emanating from the USA. In 2023, agave spirits — tequila and mezcal — are set to become the best-selling spirits category in the USA, and its growing significance is reflected in Zack’s relationship with mezcal: despite working in bars for most of his adult life, his interest in mezcal developed over the past twelve months.

“I was a big rum head, I had worked in whisky bars for years, so I had a lot of experience in those fields, and I knew that agave was a weak point of mine. And probably like four months before I moved,” Zack moved from Washington DC to Los Angeles last March, “one of my friends and I were like we don’t know enough about mezcal. So we pooled our mezcal collections, we had like fourteen different bottles, and that tasting set a seed, and by the time I got out to LA, that seed was blossoming into something bigger.” During the first few months of his life in LA, Zack met Max Reis, who leads the bar program at Mírate. “I was like, this guy’s a pro, I need to work with him, he is intimately connected with the producers, with the curators, he is intimately connected with the tension that is a white man selling Mexican spirits, and as soon as we started talking I was like, oh you, I can relate to you.” I looked over to Max, who was behind the bar mixing a version of a Paloma that was designed specifically for the pop-up. He was busy, so I waited until after the event to speak with him. 

Max was born and raised in California. He was a musician, so he was drawn to the restaurant industry due to its empathy for his death metal band’s touring schedule. Initially employed as a server, he shifted to bartending on his 21st birthday. He lived this double life — touring and bartending — for a few years, until he felt a shift.

“A lot of my friends in music, I would see them pick up a guitar and people would be like, oh my God you’re amazing, you’re a natural, you were born to do this kind of thing, and I was always like shit, I want to pick something up for the first time and just have someone go, oh my God you’re so good at that, you know? And eventually I had gotten to bartending and I was better than people and more creative than people years older than I was… And I remember realising that I was enjoying bartending more than my band… And eventually I went man, I want to play music for fun, because I enjoy it more when it’s not my career, and so I decided to make the transition to bartending full time.”

With all of his energy now focused on life as a bartender, Max’s career gained more momentum and he was offered a job at Gracias Madre. It was here that he fell in love with agave.

“I had already been very spirit obsessed for a while, but I started getting more and more exposed to agave spirits, which is why I came over to Gracias Madre, as it had an extremely high reputation for their agave selection at the time. Mezcal was very new, like very very new, and for years there was just like Chichicapa, you know, and there was not a lot on the market. So I took the job at Gracias Madre, I was learning.” 

As his knowledge and awareness of mezcal and its production developed, Max began to question Gracias Madre’s bar program.

“The agave spirits selection we were curating was pandering to the neighbourhood. It was a vegan organic restaurant, where they were all about ethics and ethical sourcing, but then at the end of the day, we were one of the top accounts in the United States for Casamigos and Clase Azul. The restaurant cared so much if there were additives in the food and it was supporting the farmers, but when it came to alcohol, we were just like everyone else you know?” 

Max felt he needed to further his education, and though he continued working at Gracias Madre, he took a job at Republique, splitting his week between the two venues.

“I was drawn to Shawn Lickliter’s program at Republique, I was amazed at how ethically driven he was. It wasn’t an agave spirits bar, but it was all about different rums and whiskies and not carrying things you didn’t like because people liked to buy them. It was about educating our audience by taking control of what we were selling.” 

It was through this period that Max met Pedro, as he continued to deepen his relationship with mezcal, often traveling to Mexico to do so. It was also when Max was offered the job to lead the drinks program at Gracias Madre, and when he truly started “going down the agave rabbit hole”. 

“I remember going down to Mexico and coming back and I went to the owners of Gracias Madre, and I said hey guys I want to pull Casamigos and Clase Azul and all these brands off the shelf that I think are unethical and here’s why, and they told me no because it was too financially ingrained within the program. So I put my head down and went back to work and went down to Mexico again, and came back and said hey guys, I think we should pull these things off and they said no again.

“And then I remember I came down to Mexico, I was with David Suro”, the founder of Siembra Spirits, “at a hotel in Morelia, and we had a conversation about ethics, and I talked about what I believed in and he was asking me details about how I was running my program. At the time I had negotiated a pretty amazing deal with Pueblo Viejo, and we were getting litre bottles of mezcal for $10.20, and then David broke down the math for me, and he was like, listen, in order to get a litre of agave distillate into the United States it costs $16, so if you’re buying it at $10, where do you think that money comes from? And we had a whole conversation about it, I remember we were both tearing up and getting very emotional. So I came back and I said, hey guys, it’s me or the shitty tequila, and they said we’ll do it, but you have to make it make sense financially… I put my head down and got really focused on what I believed in, which was ethical spirits and educating based around that, and the rest is kind of history. I turned that program from a Casamigos factory into what was one of the top earning agave bars in the country, like top three, and we were only selling ethical spirits, like private batch mezcal that we sourced for the restaurant, and nothing with additives.”

Max has since left Gracias Madre and is now leading the bar program at the newly opened Mírate.

“The whole idea behind Mírate is a bar full of lots of special items, things you can’t get somewhere else, and every single bottle on the back bar is something we’re excited about… I wanted to create a more focused, ethically sourced bar program with fewer items that we know exactly where they are coming from, and go education forward.”

After hearing Max mention the word many times, I asked him what makes a mezcal ethical?

“Have you ever visited any producers?”

I shook my head, “not yet, but Pedro is taking me tomorrow.”

“That will be amazing, he will show you.”

I went to sleep then woke and met Pedro at La Trompada Caligari, a small cafe next to Pare de Sufrir. We drank coffee and ate tortas then got into a small van and drove south toward two towns, Canoas and Chancuellar. As he drove, Pedro explained that these towns are in “a region where there are a lot of producers, but very few stick to the traditional way of making mezcales.” Recalling my question to Max regarding ethics, I asked Pedro what makes a mezcal traditional?

“It’s basically the real ones, like the first ones that were produced in regions that had the tradition to make mezcales for several generations. They don’t use any kind of chemicals, like from when they are planted, they don’t use any agrochemicals, pesticides, herbicides or anything like that. They cut only the mature agaves when they’re ripe or capon, as they say. The agaves are cooked in an underground oven, then they crush the agave and ferment it naturally, without any accelerators, which a lot of brands now use. And they use just natural water, like spring water, well water, something like that. And then they are distilled in a very traditional way… And those mezcales are a cultural element in their communities, they are produced to satisfy cultural purposes like weddings, baptisms, funerals and religious ceremonies. And some of that production is sold, but it’s mostly made for the local people.

“The difference from traditional to artisanal or industrial mezcales is that artisanal or industrial mezcal is produced to satisfy an external market. So it can actually be done by a traditional producer but for commercial purposes. Traditional producers are known in the community because they make the best mezcales for that community, and both the community and the producer decide what type of flavours and aromas they like, what they call gusto historico. So it’s a thing that they are known for, and they know how to make that mezcal and how it should taste. They do it for themselves, and if people from other places don’t like it or don’t want to buy it, they don’t care, it’s just for their consumption. But now things have changed and they’re open to other markets, there is a need to preserve those traditional flavours and profiles, the way the producers have been making these mezcales in the old way.”

While listening to Pedro, I looked out of the window as we passed the many greenhouses that lined the highway. We then started to ascend, leaving the valley to climb the nearby mountains. The landscape passed by our windows as the greenhouses made way for agave plantations. Row after row of what looked like blue agave, the necessary ingredient in the production of tequila. I ask Pedro, “that’s blue agave, right?”

“It is. It really worries me. We’re in a moment of growth that is overwhelming all the fields in Mexico, and there’s a possibility that this will become a bigger ecocide than it has already been.”

“An ecocide? Because of agave?”

“Well, Carlos Lucio wrote about the four horsemen of the apocalypse: blue agave, avocado, berries and hortalizas.” Hortalizas are the many vegetables grown in the valley, particularly tomatoes. “And the increase in popularity of tequila and mezcal is creating massive plantations of agave, deforesting mountains, which changes the soils and plants, it’s crazy. You can see right now how the landscape is changing so fast, and this is happening because we’re only thinking about the land for commercial purposes and commercial value. We’re just thinking of the value of money instead of the other things that are at stake like biodiversity, and not only agave diversity, but different types of trees, different types of bushes, different types of cactus. There’s a whole desert forest, as they call it, between Puebla and Oaxaca, that has already been devastated, losing specimens that have been there for hundreds of years because they’re shaving the whole landscape to plant more agaves to make more mezcales, and it’s just like how far do we have to go?

“Like climate change is not a joke and for us to be contributing to that, like adding more danger and heating up more soil and making a lot of changes that actually doesn’t help the earth… There’s a lot of things to be worried about and what we’re trying to do with a whole network of Mezonte – because it’s never a single person, it’s always a lot of people working – is to at least protect the ones that are making it right, they’re doing it, taking care of the balance of the ecosystems. And they care about not only the plants but also the animals that live in those ecosystems. Because you’ll see, the lands that surround those of the traditional mezcaleros, they are filled with intensive plantations of agave, so there’s no trees left for squirrels and birds or bushes for different types of rabbits and deers. But in the properties of the traditional mezcaleros there are dozens of different species of animals, and in a kind of a beautiful way, they are taking refuge where the mezcaleros are. And though I say that it’s beautiful, if you go back to the reason why they are there, it’s not pretty, they’re being pushed away. And if these traditional mezcaleros don’t preserve these refugee islands, I mean I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The further into the mountains we drove, the more agave plantations appeared. It was like Pedro had described, monoculture farms, rows and rows of agave without the biodiversity that once inspired these plants to grow.  

“In the USA, which is the biggest market for agave spirits and particularly mezcal, there is now the trend of making and buying artisanal mezcal or traditional mezcal, so all of the new producers and new companies who are focused on that market, they have to reproduce this idea of artisanal mezcal. So what they do is to create the same scenario, oh you have to do it in a pit to make it artisanal, okay we will do 20 pits to make our mezcal, and for those 20 pits you’ll need probably 40 tonnes of wood, and for those 40 tonnes of wood you’ll have to cut a whole forest. So what’s the point? I mean it’s not helping at all, it’s just like wasting more wood and wasting more water, because you also need a lot of water to ferment and to distill… And then they are producing five to ten thousand litres per month, which is not artisanal mezcal. So there’s a lot of hazard in how to read these things, it has become a marketing tool instead of representing the real nature of an artisanal or traditional mezcal.”

Pedro turned down a dusty road and up a dusty driveway. He stopped the van, lifted the hand brake and turned off the engine, as I asked him “what makes the producers that you work with different from those marketing themselves as artisanal?”

“I’ve met some great producers of mezcal and some of them are even traditional producers, but their only goal is to make money, they don’t care about preserving certain things that are surrounding the making of mezcal, like the ecosystems, the biodiversity or diversity of agaves and other species that grow in the same place where the agaves grow. So we wanted to work with people that were really fond of the places where they grew, and where they learn how to have this balance of making mezcal and making other things from the soil, from the earth.”

He nodded towards the front of the van, towards a small open air structure ahead of us.

“You’ll see.”

We got out of the van and walked towards the structure where two men were standing next to two steaming tree trunks. I was told later that these are Filipino style of stills: a copper dish buried below a hollowed out parota tree, on top of which sits another copper dish filled with water. Inside the trunk, a wooden spoon made from a tescalama tree carries the liquid toward the trunk’s base, where a tube of agave leaves release a stream of distilled mezcal into a large earthen vessel waiting below. 

I was introduced to Santos and Ricardo Juárez, father and son. Pedro immediately asked how the distilling was going and Santos walked us over to one of the stills. He sat down on a stack of empty buckets and picked up two cow horns from the ground. Santos placed a horn under the stream to catch the mezcal, filling it to the brim, and then transferring the liquid into the horn in his left hand. Pedro leaned towards me, “he’s cooling it down”. We watched Santos: left to right, right to left, left to right, pouring mezcal between the horns before. He offered Pedro a horn filled to the brim. Pedro enjoyed a few sips of freshly distilled mezcal before passing it to me. I took a sip as Pedro explained Santos observes the strength of the mezcal through trying the “puntas”, the head or the beginning of each distillation. This was the “puntas” of the second distillation and Santos would continue distilling the mezcal, tasting throughout, until he decided the strength was appropriate and the flavour represented both his family’s methods and the community’s taste.

While we passed the horn between us, we watched Ricardo get into a bulldozer parked on a hill behind the stills. Santos explained they were excavating the land, looking for stone fermentation vats that a local woman believed had been buried by floods and landslides. Not knowing they were definitely there, Santos and Ricardo hired the necessary equipment to begin the resurrection process. Santos gestured for Pedro and I to follow him as we walked down the hill, passing Ricardo in the bulldozer. We climbed a small mound of earth and four stone wells became visible. Santos believes these fermentation vats are over 400 years old, he explained there could be another eight still buried.

We walked back to the stills and Santos asked Pedro if we had eaten lunch, he shook his head. Santos told us to drive to his house, so we got back into the van and Pedro drove along a dirt track to a bridge that crossed the Armería River. We ascended a hill on the other side as the landscape shifted from rocks and dust to a beautiful garden of trees and plants. We parked the van next to a chicken coop, opened a gate and entered the garden where we were met by Santos’ wife Ilda, who welcomed Pedro and I with open arms. “Are you here for lunch?” Pedro nodded and Ilda led us to a table on the house’s verandah, indicating for Pedro and I to sit. She served a jug of aqua jamaica, and when Santos eventually joined us, he placed a tall glass of mezcal beside it. Ilda then placed a stack of tortillas, salsa, salad and chicharron on the table and Santos began serving himself. Pedro and I followed. The meal was one of the best I have eaten in my many trips through Mexico.

Once we finished, Pedro walked to the van, returning with large plastic containers. “These are necessary for the bumpy road back to Guadalajara.” Santos brought out three 10 litre glass bottles filled with mezcal that Pedro transferred into the empty containers. “Once I am back in Guadalajara, at the warehouse, I will immediately transfer the mezcal into glass bottles that are waiting there.” This process took about half an hour, and when they finished, Pedro and Santos sat down at the table, each with a notepad to document the transaction. Pedro and I then carried the heavy containers of mezcal back to the van and followed Santos’ truck back to the stills where we said goodbye to him and Ricardo.

We drove twenty minutes to Chancuellar. We parked in the town square — a church characteristically at its apex — across the road from a small shop. A man emanated from the shop’s door, waving at us. “There’s Tomás”. Pedro got out of the van, embraced Tomás and then introduced him to me. We then walked across the road, through the shop door, through to the back room and into the family’s kitchen. There, I was introduced to Tomás’s wife Guadalupe and his son Jesús, as we sat at the kitchen table.

Tomás is the son of Lorenzo Virgen, or Don Lencho, an 87 year old mezcalero that Pedro has been working with since first starting Pare de Sufrir. As Lorenzo ages, Tomás assumes more and more responsibility for the family’s land and the making of their mezcal, with support from his son’s Jesús and Rodrigo. Tomás, Jesús and I sat at the kitchen table, listening, as Pedro discussed the events of our day and explained why I was accompanying him, “Anton wants to tell a story about Mezonte. But Mezonte is just the story of the producers, our story is your story, it’s your father’s story, it’s your family’s story.” Tomás smiled at me, raised his eyebrows and then started laughing. “Of course you don’t need to share any stories if you don’t want to, but please share anything you feel to.” This sentence and its sentiment was not represented by my limited Spanish vocabulary, so I asked Pedro to translate. Tomás nodded and then asked, “do you want a mezcal?” I said “yes”, Pedro said “of course”. Tomás stood, took a bottle and three cups from a nearby shelf, and then filled the cups he had placed in front of Pedro, Jesús and I.

With my basic understanding of Spanish, I listened as Pedro and Tomás talk of Lorenzo, how he used to live and how he makes mezcal.

“I was so inspired by his way of working that to date we are doing the same… It feels the same to the ear, the eye, the smell. Not much has changed, but let’s say that we are industrialized because now we are producing more, much more… But other changes, no.”

Tomás has remained true to his father’s values despite the many changes to the community and industry that surround him.

“People are taking advantage of the fact that mezcal has gained a value that it did not have before. Before, if they distilled a mezcal, it was for us to drink, the community. And if you offered it for $100 it was an offense to sell it. In other words, nobody was going to buy it. Now people are seeing the opportunity that everything is a business. Now over there, there is a new mezcalero… Even though they have no idea what a mezcal is, they are already selling a mezcal with their brand. They are good at selling. In other words, they want money, they are no longer interested in how it is done, how it is supposed to be done. Where does that plant come from? How did it grow? They don’t care… You can bring them anything and they’ll think it’s a good mezcal…

“Everyone thinks they can do it, but can they? They think ‘yes yes just tell me how to do it and I’ll figure it out’, but behind that, there are things that even I myself don’t know. I mean saying I want to make a good mezcal and actually making a good mezcal are different things. These people will say that it is a good mezcal for fear of not being sure of what they are selling, that is, because they have never seen how good mezcal is made. They do not know what is behind a good mezcal. So then what they want is, I repeat, money…

“Each distillation for me is like having a child… And it is your child, you see it grow and it does not look like any other. And it will not be repeated in time or years, because I put 2019 on this bottle. When am I going to make a 19 again? I will never in my life make a 2020, 2021, 22, 23, 18, it goes by… And these are things that cannot be explained so easily, it is a feeling that, as I say, the days do not repeat themselves.”

As the conversation deepened, it focused on the changing landscape. Not the landscape of mezcal, but the landscape that creates mezcal.

“My future are my lands. I don’t have many, I have five hectares. I want to see them with a lot of local mezcal.”

In this moment, when Tomás says mezcal, he is referring to the plant. When driving, Pedro had explained that in this region mezcal is the name of the plant; vino de mezcal, or sometimes just mezcal, is the name of the spirit; mezcal also means cooked agave; and mezonte is the heart of the cooked agave.

“This is what I want my sons to learn, I want them to see what I have, to keep my lands full of mezcal, and not tidy mezcal, I want it in random places. And over there, a different tree, local trees, and also animals like rabbits and quails, they can all live here, this is how I see my place.”

I sipped the remaining mezcal from my cup, appreciating how its complex flavour reflects a moment in time, like Tomás had explained, but how it also represents the biodiversity of his land.

“I have to do something different from what is being experienced around our land. It’s good to hope that this spreads, because you have to lead by example. Hopefully more people understand why it’s being done like this here… Because right now, the truth is, it is a very difficult time, things are getting very critical, there is climate change and there are elections and there are horrible politics, and there are wars and there is everything, like the outlook is pretty ugly. But how to redevelop oneself, to live one’s life?

“Here my world is very different, because I do not live in a city, I live in Chancuellar. Here we live at ease, not that we are calm, but we live without stress, we do what we like to do. I mean, I can’t change the world, I can’t change people, but I can do what I want and do it with pleasure. I don’t live in the city, I live here, this is my reality, it is very different from the people there, in the city, in a different world. It looks different every single year, it keeps changing by leaps, and they bring us new things that we don’t even know about. I mean yeah, it’s worrying, it is very worrying, but” 

Tomás noticed that we had all emptied our cups of mezcal.

“Please, help yourselves.”

He poured us all another cup. 

“Please, enjoy!”

Anton Rivette is a writer and photographer. He leads storytelling at eco-nnect.

You might also like this story: The Humble Way

The post The Spirit of Agave appeared first on eco-nnect.

On a quiet Monday morning, I took an Uber to meet with Joahna Hernandez, the marketing director of arca tierra, a project rehabilitating chinampas in Xochimilco. As I headed south from the center of Mexico City at 7am, I was surprised that it only took me 30 minutes to reach the famous channeled wetlands.

“Here we sow water and harvest the sun.”

11 percent of Mexico’s biodiversity can be found in Xochimilco, a town that once fed the citizens of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire that is now Mexico City. Even though you may recognise Xochimilco, you may not be aware of these facts, as Xochimilco is largely known for its coloured trajineras (wooden rafts), where tourists drink cocktails while listening to traditional music while travelling along the last surviving traces of the Texcoco Lake, which once flooded the Anahuac Valley. The history of Xochimilco is a lot deeper than cocktails in plastic cups. The Xochimilca people have lived in the valley for over 1000 years, and were the first of the seven nahuatl tribes to occupy the lake. They expanded through the valley and survived on the lake by developing an agricultural technology known as chinampas.

“The idea behind arca tierra is two-fold: to collaborate with local farmers for the recovery of agricultural production in Mexico City and for the preservation of the ancestral knowledge behind the chinampas. And let me tell you, it is not an easy job when the country is dominated by industrial agribusiness.”

“Lucio Usobiaga, arca tierra’s founder, always says that chinampas are the best example of how human beings can be forces of good and create more life and more biodiversity. We are in a time where we hear a lot of negativity, that humans are the worst thing that has happened to the planet. Here this is not the case. I mean, chinampas are really proof that human intervention can be positive, as long as we stop putting ourselves at the centre of everything. For example, here the centre, the objective, is to generate health from biodiversity.”

“It is said that Xochimilco once fed the city of Tenochtitlan, that numbered over 250,000. Apparently, they used to harvest corn seven times a year. Crazy, right?”

Comparatively, nowadays, industrial agriculture can harvest corn only once a year.

“A chinampa is an agricultural technique that uses the lake bed sediments to create concentrated vegetable gardens along the banks of the wetlands. The word chinampa comes from the Nahuatl chinamitl, which means surrounded by roots. This is because the land is full of organic matter. This is thanks to both endemic trees, like the ahuejotes or the weeping willow, and to the volcanoes that surround it. For over 3,000 years the volcanoes’ meltwater fed this land with minerals and nutrients. The nutrient rich lake bed makes the soil incredibly fertile, which is why the Xochimilcas created the chinampa method to be able to grow several crops and reap many harvests on small plots of lands.”

As we board our trajinera, it slowly makes its way towards a deeper area of the wetlands, and I notice how most of the land has been turned into football fields and few plots remain dedicated to agriculture. Yet as we set foot on arca tierra’s chinampa, the importance of maintaining this ancient technology is obvious: the land is teeming with life, and a multitude of different crops, flowers, and buzzing pollinators greet us.

“Many scientists that have ran soil tests here can never believe the amount of life in the organic matter. This is why germination in a chinampa occurs faster. Here we have at least 50 plants of five different species in one square meter, to take advantage of this incredibly fertile soil.”

Today Xochimilco spans 12,517ha (30,930 acres) out of which less than 1,000ha (2,471 acres) are still dedicated to chinampa agriculture. Joahna explains that several chinamperos have abandoned their lands in search for more lucrative job opportunities in the city. Arca tierra’s objective is to showcase that a chinampa can still provide a thriving and sustainable economic model for the local community.

“Arca tierra is a fully collaborative and experimental place. The idea is that everything we do here can be replicated in other places. And for that reason we have begun a farmer school. We will grant eight scholarships and each student will receive a full education in agroecology, as well as training in gender equality. Once they graduate, the hope is that they either work in a chinampa or rehabilitate their own. This way each student can generate jobs whilst ensuring that the knowledge is preserved. The idea here is that the chinampas become permanent work and not temporary agricultural jobs, demonstrating that farmers can fully support a family.”

Although their main income is selling produce directly to restaurants and stores in the city and running a Community Supported Agricultural (CSA) program, Joahna mentioned several different activities arca tierra is involved in, other than regenerative agriculture. Their chinampa can be rented to host private events, which often take the form of sunrise breakfasts cooked in traditional open fire ovens by local chefs, and they also invite school children once a month to learn about the chinampa method of farming.

“In Xochimilco there are no fruit trees, so we also work with a network of 35 farming families in other communities to provide our customers with fruits too. Our CSA baskets always have the basis of a Mexican diet: onions, tomatoes, chili peppers and garlic. Whilst everything else is seasonal. Through our baskets we also like to introduce people to lost tastes, adding to the baskets varieties that are not normally found on supermarket shelves.”

The homogenisation of food is a global issue, according to the FAO 75 percent of the world’s food is generated from only 12 plants and five animal species, despite having over 20,000 edible plants to choose from.

“Lucio spent this past weekend in his experimental vegetable garden, where he saves seeds and reproduces certain varieties. He always shares his findings with our network of farmers to promote biodiversity.”

This reminds me of the seed saving movement that is growing worldwide. Did you know that over 60 percent of the world’s seeds are controlled by four agrochemical companies? It’s time to take back control of the food system, and thus of our health too. Individual efforts like Lucio’s are therefore imperative to stimulate biodiversity in our now bland diets.

As we made our way back towards the docks, we spotted around 10 different species of migratory birds. Considering our proximity to one of the world’s largest cities, it was an incredible sight.

I asked Joahna if the wetlands are fully natural, the last remnants of the Texcoco lake?

“No. After the Spanish began draining the Texcoco lake and the city became more and more urbanised, the natural water flow was lost and the increased in human activity contaminated what remained of the lake and rivers. The lake was fully drained in the 20th century and the city’s rivers were all piped and covered with cement by 1950. So the water that made it to Xochimilco became very dirty. Eventually, they had the water go through a treatment plant, which is the water you see today.”

Tenochtitlan, the Aztec city the Spanish arrived at, was built on an island surrounded by six lakes and interconnected rivers. The Aztecs managed a complex hydrological system, including a stone levée, that could control the passage of water and minimize flooding. After the conquest, the Spanish destroyed the levée, bringing a series of devastating floods that incentivised the conquistadores to begin draining the lake. In the 1950s the last remaining rivers of the city — Mixcoac, Churubusco, and San Joaquin — were piped and sent underground. Today, they are home to the city’s sewage system.

Arca tierra has ambitious plans: to continue rehabilitating the lost agricultural art of chinampas, to keep feeding Mexico City with regenerative agriculture and healthy produce, and to fully empower the local community to live off their knowledge and their land. Yet their most emblematic feat is perhaps the eventual reintroduction of the axolotl in its natural habitat. The axolotl is an aquatic salamander that can only be found in Xochimilco, it is renowned for its ability to regenerate organs, including its spinal cord, heart, limbs and parts of its brain. Today it is estimated that fewer than 50-100 axolotls exist in the wild (although there are over 1 million in captivity).

“We have biofilters in the channels to clean the swamps and encourage birds to eat the carps that led the axolotls to functional extinction. We hope that through this method we can eventually reintroduce the axolotl to all of the channels and that it can eventually thrive again among the banks of Xochimilco.”

Arca tierra is the axolotl of Mexico City. It’s through projects like this that the city will regenerate its heart and limbs by preserving ancestral knowledge and providing economic opportunities while creating a biodiverse ecosystem. It is a model to study and replicate.

Isabella Cavalletti is a storyteller and co-founded eco-nnect.

You might also like this story: The Monarch of Mexico

The post The chinampas of Xochimilco appeared first on eco-nnect.

“It was in 1965 when I entered La Latteria… I wasn’t in the trade… Arturo taught me, perhaps I already had a predisposition for this job.”

Maria and Arturo Maggi met when Maria was 17.

“I worked for Coin,” the department store, “I was a girl. I am originally from Sicily. I came with my parents, but for me work was freedom. For me working was an incredible thing. There was a girl in my department who dated Arturo’s pizzaiolo.”

He was working at a fancy restaurant near the Central Station in Milan.

“This girl says to me, come and have a drink with us and I was introduced to him. We met, and it went from there. We dated for very little, because this job takes up all of your time,” but soon they got married, and soon after that, Arturo felt to leave the restaurant. He was walking down Via San Marco, in the north of the Milanese suburb of Brera, and “he saw this small place and said this will do for me and my wife.”

They opened La Latteria, and 57 years later, they’re still there.

I grew up in Milan, only two blocks away from La Latteria, but it wasn’t until my twenties that I truly discovered this cozy hole in the wall. I can still recall my friend’s astonishment when he realized I had yet to try their famed spaghetti al limone — he insisted we go together the next day. Since then, along with influencers, Japanese tourists and old Milanese families, I too have become a regular.

Recently, on a foggy December night, friends invited me to dinner at La Latteria. Maria approached our table with her warm smile and praised our scarpetta abilities. Then the newbie at the table asked “why is this restaurant shut on Saturdays?” They tend to their land on the weekends the regulars answered in unison. It was then that I realized that there might be an environmental story behind this little neighborhood spot. When Maria returned to our table I asked her if I could interview her, she nodded and told me to come back the next day.

“This is a home. I have a way of welcoming people as if they were family. My instinct, my character is to treat people as if they were my children. I don’t realize it but I’m like that with everyone, I always try to give my best, to please them. I always work with joy. Money will come to you, but we don’t do it for that. It’s a different kind of satisfaction when you work with passion. It is constantly working with your inner truth, that might take longer to pay you back, but that in the long run always does.”

She shared these pearls of wisdom whilst simultaneously stirring a pumpkin soup in the tiny old-school kitchen. “Would you like to try it?” she casually asked. “Of course!” It was delicious. “It boosts your immune system,” she replied. We then sat down for a coffee. I ask her what is behind La Latteria’s success?

“We have always maintained that in a city like Milan where one is forced to go out to eat, you have to provide meals that you can digest, you have to serve quality. We both come from the countryside, we know good produce. In fact, the first thing we did was buy land, not a house in Milan. Because [Arturo] says he went hungry during the war, he’s from 1938, where he was born, on top of the marbles [near Carrara] there are small plots of land where they could barely grow a little vegetable garden. So for him, food has always been sacred.”

Maria has been up since 5:45. She’s the first person to open the kitchen doors. “At La Latteria, many products come from our land, and it’s hard work, it takes up most of our weekend… but it’s Arturo’s passion, he says ‘Some people go to the gym, I like working the land outside in the open air’.”

“When we first bought the land we reared animals and had them slaughtered ourselves, he wanted the quality to always be the same. We even had a space in Milan that we paid for annually… but then the government forbade this. They introduced a new law that stated that the meat had to be vacuum-packed… and we had to stop… we even tried to make salame ourselves… goose salame. Once they even confiscated a bresaola from us! Everything now has to be labeled, helping big industries that can afford it. The government gets in the way of letting small producers like us make healthy products.”

I ask what else has changed in 57 years of work in this industry?

“The most notable difference is that the flavors of the past are no longer there. I will admit that in the last couple of years the quality has improved, but we had years, mainly in the late 90s with the growth of GMOs, that we suffered a lot. You have to look for quality and you have to be able to recognize it, but it becomes increasingly difficult. The vegetables don’t taste like they used to.”

As it’s winter, Arturo and Maria can’t supply their menu from their vegetable garden, so I met with Arturo at 8:30, earlier that morning, to join him on his grocery shopping at the bi-weekly farmers market in Brera. This is the same market my Dad and I have been visiting since I can remember, frequenting our go-to stalls. I was excited to see it through Arturo’s eyes, a true local who has been visiting the same stalls for over 40 years. I ask Arturo if the vendors have changed in the last 40 years? “Barely, maybe a couple have sold in the years, but usually the son keeps it going.” A family affair, like everything else in this country.

Our first stop is the cheese and preserves stall. Arturo and the vendor’s conversation is amusing, of mutual yet profound respect, of closeness. “I’ll stop by before lunch for a glass of wine and to say hello to your beautiful wife,” says the vendor. “Of course. In the meantime, give me a kilo of cipollotti” Arturo replies. He then turns to me, “do you know that cipollotti are healing? But you must keep them in your mouth for a little bit, the healing juices are in the cipollotto liquid.”

When I interview Maria, she speaks of Arturo’s famous interest in alchemy and how it was a passion that came to him. “One day we were at the beach and he had found a little book that sparked his curiosity. First he experimented with the saucepan, then he read every book available to him… he even found books in German and had them translated at the university. Of course he applies his knowledge in the dishes and in the vegetable garden, fermentation is important everywhere.”

At the market, the vendor reminds me “there’s a lot of influenza going around”, so I too order a bag of cipollotti. I go to pay. “Of course not, you’re here with Arturo!” the vendor exclaims.

We walk to the vegetable and fruit stall. My favorite. There’s about six different ones, so I’m happy to discover Arturo’s pick. His relationship with the stallholder is even funnier than the one he shares with the cheese vendor.

“Arturo please, buy your customers some real artichokes this time.” He mocks him. “You’re a thief with these prices!” Arturo retorts, he then looks at me and whispers, “this guy is crazy but he always has the best produce!”

Of course the fruit vendor also wants to make sure I don’t catch the crazy influenza going around. “Here, have some vitamin C you need it to protect yourself,” he says whilst handing me a huge and juicy orange. Delicious. It feels nice to be taken care of by relative strangers, it’s the beauty of Italian hospitality.

Next stop is the fishmonger. They already have what Arturo is looking for, about 30 small seppiette. Arturo seems pleased, as he crosses out the last item on his hand-written list. I wonder who’s handwriting it is, his or Maria’s?

Arturo has a gentle, quiet demeanor. You can tell he’s a dependable and loved persona within the community. Back in La Latteria, over our coffee, I ask Maria about their work/marriage relationship. “He practically raised me, we are eight years apart. He’s always respected me, and we’ve always been in tune. He’s never let out a bad word. He has a very controlled nature. He’s calm, I’m more anxious, this made us find a balance. I’m delighted to have married him, I wouldn’t change him.” Balance, the key to everything. I believe it’s this intangible equilibrium that creates the magnetism of La Latteria.

Arturo and Maria’s story has involved dedication, love, passion, trust, joy, community and respect for the land, values we have lost through the development of the west’s contemporary lifestyle. Yet as the world around La Latteria has changed in their 57 years of service, Arturo and Maria stayed true to their beliefs, watching the world modernize, whilst taking care of their community, providing a constant home away from home. “Success,” Maria explains “isn’t monetary but lies in small life satisfactions. For example when you receive a Christmas card from a family you’ve served for three generations, or when Obama’s chef mentions your spaghetti al limone in a magazine.”

Ultimately, Arturo and Maria do everything with attention, care and time — from the seedlings planted in their land, to the 40 plus year relationship with the market vendors, to their cooking and serving. In return they have been rewarded with love and praise from their loyal community.

So why is this an environmental story? For me, La Latteria truly embodies the term “slow food”. More technology, more things and busier lives won’t heal our relationship with nature. Arturo and Maria’s ideals and lifestyle reflect the shifts we need to solve the current environmental crisis, reminding me of the simple wisdom of respecting nature and its inherent cycles and rhythms, whilst following our passions and sharing them with care. It is a wisdom deeply ingrained in Italy’s food culture: love and joy can be transmitted through taste.

Isabella Cavalletti is a storyteller and co-founded eco-nnect.

You might also like this story: Merry Christmas

The post La Latteria appeared first on eco-nnect.

I recently visited my family in Costa Rica, and in each restaurant we visited, salmon was omnipresent. It was my grandmother’s go-to meal, she even ordered it when we went to the fishmongers. It made me wonder, with two bountiful coast lines, why is this country obsessed with a fish that isn’t caught in its waters? How has the salmon industry infiltrated our global consciousness with its “glamorous” appeal that has blinded locals from their own delicacies? What is it about salmon that has made its way onto virtually every menu on the planet? When did salmon become ubiquitous?

I was speaking to my father in Italy, and commented on the world’s salmon obsession. I asked him, when did salmon become a thing? He reminisced: well, I remember that when I was young in Rome salmon was considered a luxury, at the same level as caviar, just more accessible — we would buy it for celebrations. I thought of smoked salmon, blinis and caviar, and how salmon seemed to have had the opposite fate of lobster, going from occasional and high end to the second most consumed fish in the world. How did this happen? From Costa Rica to Jakarta, no matter which ocean you reside on, salmon is a thing.

Salmon farming began in Norway in the 90s as a solution to overfishing wild stocks. In fact, farmed salmon now accounts for 70% of salmon consumption worldwide and has played a key role in its meteoric rise — with a 500% production increase since 1995.

“The global salmon fish market size was valued at USD 14.87 billion in 2021 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.5% from 2022 to 2030. Increasing product launches in various forms including frozen, canned, and freeze-dried are likely to favor the overall growth.”- Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast

So I dug deeper into the salmon industry, big businesses with fishy marketing tactics tied to large seafood lobbies. In the US the American Heart Association includes salmon in its dietary recommendations to prevent heart strokes, twice a week it reads. This made me recall a similar tactic used by the dairy industry in its famous “Got Milk?” advertisements.  Today evidence shows that milk doesn’t protect against bone fractures and is actually linked to certain types of cancer, yet those ads halted the decrease of milk consumption and actually increased it by 11%.  

Salmon follows a similar story. In 2004, scientists found highlevels of polychlorinated biphenyls, a carcinogen known as PCBs, in farmed Atlantic salmon. Other more recent studies also show unsafe levels of antibiotics in farmed salmon. According to the WHO, people who eat even one farmed Atlantic salmon per month will accumulate unsafe levels of these toxins and can even show antibiotic resistance, which begs the question, when did corporate interests become synonymous with questionable national health recommendations?

The tie between corporate salmon interests and lack of federal regulation is staggering. An investigation conducted by the General Accounting Office revealed that the FDA inspected only 86 samples out of 379,000 tons of salmon in 2017. In fact, for the general public it is often very difficult to even know basic information, like whether the salmon is farmed, or which chemicals or antibiotics were used in the process. It seems the industry has remained conveniently ambiguous. 

But let’s go back to the sustainability question: isn’t it better for the wild salmon population that we are mainly eating farmed salmon instead? Well in reality the farms are driving wild salmon to extinction. Picture this, millions of salmon spend two to three years in open-net farms of 10 or 12 cages that are anchored to the seabed, usually in coves in Norway, Chile, Alaska or Scotland. Similar to crammed chicken coups, this overcrowding leads to sea lice infestations and viruses. Farmers respond to these threats with pesticides — including neurotoxins — and antibiotics. These toxins are released into the local ecosystem, attacking wild salmon populations and the surrounding wildlife.

Salmon are carnivores, so farmers feed them unnatural fishmeal. Yes, farmed fish are fed smaller, wild-caught fish, such as anchovies, mackerel and herring, which are also known as forage fish. Apparently up to 30% of wild-caught fish is turned into fishmeal. Usually these fisheries are found in West Africa or Peru, where trawlers are destroying local fish stocks to meet the rising demand for salmon. This has huge consequences on the local populations that rely on forage fish as their protein source and for the entire marine ecosystem: research demonstrates that this overfishing is a leading cause for the rapid decline in seabird populations.

What would truly sustainable salmon look like? Well, did you know that once upon a time, wild salmon migrations criss-crossed continental Europe and the USA? Virtually every stream in Northern Europe was full of wild salmon. Yet due to our shifting baseline syndrome — where our accepted understanding of the natural environment gradually changes due to our lack of memory or knowledge of its past condition — we have started to accept our empty rivers once thriving with salmon migrations. This is the result of an underlying problem: how governments and corporations work together to create unnatural global demand for products and industries located in the northern hemisphere, at the expense of the local culture.

Through my salmon investigation I started noticing a similar pattern in other food choices in Costa Rica. Virtually every tropical fruit grows on trees above your head, yet the supermarket aisles are filled with apples and grapes from Europe. Of course this is a country with 83% European descent. So it’s not salmon that is omnipresent, it’s Europe importing and imposing its culture. Did you know that we eat the same 20 vegetables in almost every corner of the globe? Despite the existence of over 20,000 plant species, zucchini and broccoli rule the world. The old world not only conquered cultures, it homogenized them too.

As my grandmother and I walked the supermarket aisles, deciding on what to eat for dinner, I suddenly realized that Europe’s dark history of conquest and arrogance was hiding the beauty and abundance that Costa Rica’s rich lands offer, which wasn’t only happening here but in many other colonized countries where native communities had diminished considerably. USA, Brazil, Colombia, Australia, to name just a few. Perhaps originally colonists had imported the foods and traditions they knew out of comfort, but today it seems that a new form of corporate colonization has taken hold, where products tied to Europe are marketed as better, healthier and more luxurious than local offerings.

Our food system is rotten and broken. Instead of celebrating diversity, heritage and natural abundance, we are still living within a framework influenced by our colonial past. To rewild our souls we must rewild our culture, and to rewild our culture we must rewild our food systems. To rewild our food systems we must rewild our plates. 

So I offer some food for thought: next time you order salmon, think about how close or far you are from the now empty streams of Northern Europe. Isn’t it time to focus on bringing life back to the rivers rather than expanding a clearly harmful industry?

Isabella Cavalletti is a storyteller and co-founded eco-nnect.

You might also like COP27: A Cautionary Tale

The post Why is salmon on every menu in Costa Rica? appeared first on eco-nnect.

A South African Court has blocked the activities of oil giant Shell, who planned to investigate offshore oil deposits along the South African coast, close to the annual migratory routes of whales. An international petition to block Shell’s activities collected almost 450,000 signatures. 

Dolphins, seals, sharks and penguins frequent the South African coast, but it is whales that are the most prominent inhabitants of these waters. The great cetaceans migrate from the cold Arctic waters, and through June to November, the coastline acts as a stage for the pirouettes and jumps of whales, delighting whale-watchers near Cape Town.

From December 1, Shell wanted to search for oil or gas deposits along the entire eastern coast, from Morgan Bay to Port St Johns. An environmental disaster was announced, which was opposed by environmental groups and local populations, which finally led to the project being stopped. The oil exploration was considered “flawed and illegitimate” by the High Court of Makhanda, which ordered the multinational to immediately cease operations and pay all court costs.

Activists from Oceans Not Oil collected almost 450,000 signatures against the project, addressing the international petition to South Africa’s Environment Minister Barbara Creecy, and to Royal Dutch Shell.

“For five months, the vessel operated by the charterers of Shell Exploration…would have dragged up to 48 compressed air guns across 6,011 km² of the ocean surface, firing extremely strong shock wave emissions that penetrate 3 km of water and 40 km in the Earth’s crust below the seabed” explained the activists. “The ship would be active for 24 hours a day, firing shockwaves every 10 seconds. In the process, the marine life of the fragile Wild Coast, in panic, will be deafened and damaged.”

This would be a huge disaster for marine mammals, who rely on acoustics as their main communication channel.

“Marine mammals live in a medium that transmits little light but through which sound spreads well and quickly, even at great distances. This is why marine mammals rely on sound to communicate, investigate the environment, find prey and avoid obstacles”, explains the Interdisciplinary Center of Bioacoustics and Environmental Research of the University of Pavia. 

If animals for any reason cannot avoid a source of noise, they may be exposed to acoustic conditions capable of producing adverse effects, ranging from discomfort and stress to acoustic damage such as hearing loss. Exposure to very loud noises, such as explosions at a short distance, can produce physical damage to other organs as well as auditory ones.

An international research investigation led by the Polytechnic of Turin and the University of Melbourne explained that when there is too much noise, whales “speak less” and have difficulty communicating with each other.

The work, published in the scientific journal Royal Society Interface, studied the effects of man-made noise pollution among Minke whales in the North Sea.

Although, it was not purely animal-related or ecological reasons that led the South African judge to issue the ruling against the Shell project, Shell’s activities would have also affected the lives of the local indigenous population.

“Shell had the duty to consult with the communities that would have been affected by the seismic investigation”, ruled Gerald Bloem, “the population has the right on that stretch of coast also for a special spiritual and cultural connection with the ocean.”

The judge highlighted how destroying the current balance of flora and fauna would bring a huge impact on the livelihood of those who live in this area of South Africa, emphasising the impacts of extractive mining on delicate ecosystems that humans have interrelated with for millennia.

It is an encouraging development, and we hope this leads to similar rulings across the world.

The post South African Court blocks Shell appeared first on eco-nnect.