The Climate Crisis Is an Economic Crisis
And how the Grupo Ecológico de la Sierra Gorda built a conservation economy
“Climate crisis” is a reductive term. The changing climate is a symptom of the human species rapidly growing its population and energy consumption while acquiring that energy through a capitalist economic model that prioritizes linear extraction of natural resources with very little consideration given to effects outside of profit, such as degradation of ecosystem services. It’s a classic market failure – myopic focus on profit, especially in natural resource industries like oil & gas, agriculture, mining, etc, generated massive costs in the form of environmental degradation that are not incorporated into the calculation of economic profit.
The climate crisis is really an economic crisis. The capitalist engine served its purpose to rapidly increase quality of life, food security, and healthy lifespan, but it did so by exploiting natural resources to the enrichment of the few and the disenfranchisement of the many. Corporations and ultra-high net worth individuals accrued overwhelming wealth and power and buy government influence. The government, meanwhile, has enacted legislation to perpetuate and subsidize the industrial complex so that shareholders reap the benefits, and ordinary citizens, rural communities, flora, and fauna bear the costs. In theory, they should be regulating the economy to maximize societal value rather than shareholder value. I don’t think the free market system is broken so much as corrupted.
When you zoom in to micro-economies, rural communities often depend on exploitation of natural resources as well. A fantastic documentary by Alex Pritz, The Territory, depicts the struggle between the indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people in the Amazon and encroaching deforestation by farmers and settlers. Alex fairly even-handedly tells the story from the perspective of both the indigenous community and the settlers, and it’s not a straightforward good versus evil battle. Most of the settlers are impoverished themselves and seek economic opportunity.¹ Another example comes from the forests of Nuristan in eastern Afghanistan, which contains some of the region’s oldest and most biodiverse forests. Local communities are rapidly logging the forest out of economic desperation. “Working as a logger is exhausting, but at least it allows me to feed my family,” says Dilaram, a community logger.²
This is why I’m excited about projects and mechanisms that directly tax emissions and environmental degradation and pay for carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and ecosystem health. Fully incorporate the costs of resource extraction and benefits of land stewardship to systemically adjust behavior from the corporation to the rural community to the ordinary citizen.
With that in mind, I took a bus to Santiago de Querétaro, the capital city of the central Mexican state of Querétaro then drove 4 hours east to explore La Reserva de la Biosféra Sierra Gorda. La Sierra Gorda is the most ecodiverse reserve in México, encompassing 10 of the country’s 11 ecosystems, and the 2nd most populated. It is also home to the remarkable Grupo Ecológico de la Sierra Gorda (Sierra Gorda Ecological Group, or “GESG”) that orchestrates a comprehensive economic system that correlates economic development with biodiversity conservation.
¹ There is also evidence that the settlers are bankrolled by wealthy land barons and much of their doctrine comes from colonialist “manifest destiny” doctrine. I find much of the settler attitude to be repugnant, but I empathize with the plight for economic self-determination and providing for family and community.
² “A Rare Glimpse into Afghanistan’s Spectacular, Vanishing Forests” Kern Hendricks, Scientific American.
La Sierra Gorda, Ark of Life
It doesn’t take a conservation biologist to understand that la Biosféra de la Sierra Gorda is biodiverse. I stayed in a cabaña managed by GESG on the outskirts of Jalpan de Serra, a town of 20,000 in the heart of the biosféra. In the 60 second walk from the cabaña to the car: lizards scurry across the path, heading to work. At least 4 birds hoot, trill, screech, and tweet the morning news to one another. Several shades of butterfly flutter around the long, woody pods of the flamboyant trees (actual name). Ants harvest the flamboyant’s fiery fallen flowers to take home to the kids.
La Sierra Gorda ranges from semi-arid and arid desert on the western slopes to oak and pine cloud forests, craggy 3,160 meter peaks, and tropical jungle on the eastern side. The biosféra counts 2,308 plant species, 343 birds, 110 mammals, 134 reptiles and amphibians, and 800 species of butterflies in an area the size of Rhode Island.³
How did all this come to be?
³ “Sierra Gorda, Ark of Life” Roberto Pedraza Ruiz, Maptia. Roberto manages GESG’s conservation projects and is the son of the founder, Pati, in addition to being an excellent conservation photographer.
A Brief History of La Sierra Gorda
240 million years ago the region now known as La Biosféra de la Sierra Gorda was underwater before massive tectonic movement and volcanic activity created the stark peaks, varied topography, and abundance of minerals. The prominence of the mountain range block the moist Atlantic winds, which, when combined with mineral-laden, nutrient-rich soil and varied topography, sow the seeds for fertile vegetation, complex life forms (including humans), and a diversity of ecosystems.
Evidence of humans dates as far back as 2,000-4,000 BC with some deforestation for settled agricultural lands occurring from 600 BC – 200 CE. Peak activity occurred between 500 and 1,000 CE. The dominant Chichimecas developed an economy based on wild fruit, game, and fish, agricultural production, and mining mineral deposits such as cinnabar, which was prized in Mesoamerican ceramics for its red pigmentation.
From the 16th-18th centuries, Spanish colonists settled the area, evangelized Christianity (there’s a chain of 5 Franciscan missions in the reserve), and rapidly expanded the mining economy (especially in silver, lead, zinc, and mercury).
From the earliest civilizations through the colonial era into the 20th century, the economy largely focused on agriculture, livestock, and mining, which ultimately caused severe ecosystemic degradation in the form of deforestation, erosion, disrupted hydrological cycles, and polluted water sources.
Why does the history matter?
First, we cannot escape the reality that humans flourish from the same earthly reservoirs of energy, minerals, and nutrients as all other forms of life. This is why cultures all around the world refer to our home planet as Mother Earth. Human over-exploitation risks destruction of life itself, including us. We cannot pretend that we are exempt from fundamental natural limitations.
Second, economies developed for the sole purpose of harvesting and trading environmental resources from early pre-historical civilizations to the modern industrial machine. It is only when resource consumption outpaces the ecosystem’s ability to regenerate resources that climate crises emerge. Overexploitation of natural resources is linked to collapse of pre-industrial civilizations like the Maya as well. Jared Diamond extensively covers the link between overexploitation of natural resources and civilization collapse in his book Collapse.
Third, conventional corporate capitalism and colonialism share exploitative patterns predicated on disconnecting economic benefits and costs. Foreign settlers and corporations both extract resources on a massive scale to be processed, coveted, and sold elsewhere, while local communities bear the costs of ensuing environmental degradation. The perpetrators of ecosystemic degradation can obfuscate accountability through geographic disconnection. Moreover, consumers do not understand the impact of their buying decisions.
Enter El Grupo Ecológico de la Sierra Gorda
In 1987, local citizens began to protest environmental degradation in the Sierra Gorda. Farmers and ranchers had cleared native forest for cropland and pastureland, cattle roamed freely in forests, disrupting food supply and habitat for wildlife, and mining run-off contaminated water supplies. Out of this movement, Pati Ruiz Corzo founded the Grupo Ecológico de la Sierra Gorda (“GESG”) as a not-for-profit organization to coordinate grassroots organization, environmental education, and conservation projects.
Over the next 35 years, Pati and GESG stitched together a conservation-based economy from the landowners, micro-entrepreneurs, foresters, and wildlife on the ground up through the state government, federal government, and international organizations. They lobbied the Mexican federal government to decree la Sierra Gorda a nationally protected reserve in 1997, the only reserve established through grassroots lobbying. In 2003, they established a payment for ecosystem services scheme with CONAFOR, the Mexican federal forest service. Subsequently, they expanded the program with the state government of Querétaro and international organizations including the World Bank, Global Environmental Facility, and World Land Trust. Throughout, they extensively educated communities on sustainable lifestyles and eco-friendly tourism and hospitality. At risk of over-using an ecological-economic analogy, GESG is the mycelial web throughout the regional economy.
GESG aggregates fragmented local landowners and communities like a group purchasing organization. Then, with the demand of the region in their organization, they work closely with state and federal governments to define, fund, and implement conservation and sustainability programs. Trust and subject matter expertise is central to the GESG model. Communities trust GESG to negotiate in their best interests and teach programs that work. Governments trust GESG to ethically and efficaciously funnel payments. They combined marketplace connectivity with value-added services to raise capital and funnel it through the region directly into conservation activities.
Education and Community Engagement
People generally don’t wake up eager to exploit the environment. It’s backbreaking work and locals know that destruction of the native forest accelerates the effects of climate change. However, rural communities do not have the luxury of readily available alternatives to support their families.
Each year GESG provides education and training to 120 communities in the reserve through 80-100 educational jornadas on topics ranging from healthy eating and recycling to sustainable agriculture, forest fire prevention, and eco-tourism. Additionally, GESG runs frequent workshops through the Centro Tierra (Earth Center) to transfer subject matter expertise to agriculture, forestry, government, and civilian organizations.
The educational activities help locals live ecologically sustainable lives while building self-sufficient, environmentally friendly income streams across eco-tourism, sustainable forestry, and regenerative agriculture and ranching.
For local entrepreneurs and workers, GESG offers payments for ecosystem services, equity-free grants, and training programs to renovate and launch ecologically-sustainable income replacements to environmental exploitation. They train local guides in eco-tourism to profit off conserving and sharing the forest. Erick, a local guide in Jalpan de Serra, told me that “environmental education can change the world… who were we before being guides? We killed animals, messed around in the forest. [Environmental education] taught us to care for the forest, speak with the trees and the birds. You can learn these things through eco-tourism. It’s a good alternative.”
In el ejido de La Trinidad on the other side of the border in San Luis Potosí, I spoke with José, a local guide, and Alberto, a local manager of community environmental activities. In La Trinidad, GESG funnels funding directly to the community to protect the forest from illegal loggers, create firebreaks and clear brush to prevent forest fires, and build eco-tourism facilities. GESG also showed me projects where they made equity-free grants to micro-entrepreneurs such as the restaurant Las Orquídeas, where GESG funding turned a roadside shack into a full-service restaurant.
There’s no silver bullet, but diversified income streams from eco-tourism, forestry projects, and payments for ecosystem services combined with ecologically sustainable subsistence farming provides a promising model of a self-sufficient, conservation economy. Prior to GESG, many communities predominantly earned by selling lumber and deforesting for cropland and pasture. Now, GESG programs deliver transformational, ecologically sustainable income streams that recognize the asset value of healthy ecosystems.
Funding & Policy
GESG works closely with local, state, and federal government to design public policies that directly fund conservation projects with a renewable stream of regional revenue.
GESG implemented the first payments for ecosystem services scheme on 15,000 hectare with CONAFOR in 2003. Demand quickly overwhelmed the availability of funding and GESG backfilled demand with participation from the World Bank and Global Environmental Facility among others. To smooth out the fickle nature of federal programs and international funding, GESG partnered with the state government of Querétaro. In 2013, Querétaro added a surcharge to vehicle registration fees that funnels directly into conservation projects. Most recently, GESG worked with Querétaro to implement a new law that levies a carbon tax on corporate emissions in the state with matching funds from CONAFOR.
What’s next for GESG?
With humming programs in la Sierra Gorda, an incoming influx of funding from the Querétaro carbon tax + matching funds from CONAFAR, and inclusion in the United Nations’ Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (“NAMA”), GESG has the opportunity to scale their ecosystemic approach.
Community land ownership and sub-national action are central to the success and scalability of GESG programs. In la Sierra Gorda, 97% of land is owned by individual landowners and communities (through the ejido system). In México, 80% of forests are community-owned, compared to 56% in the US and 20% across the rest of Latin America. With consolidated funding through GESG, the organization is currently evaluating opportunities to replicate the model throughout México.
Final Thoughts
GESG turned the extractive economic model on its head by securing government support to limit natural resource use to sustainable, renewable levels and broadening the economy to include ecosystem services. It’s not perfect. La Sierra Gorda illegal logging still happens. Poverty is still an issue. The region experienced depopulation as residents sought economic opportunity elsewhere.
However, they re-wrote the economic rule book to incorporate the value of ecosystem services and the costs of environmental degradation. They wrangled sub-national, national, and international governments to utilize tax collecting authority for direct investment into ecosystemic health. And they did so by focusing on sub-national action, community asset ownership, and the needs and rights of the many micro-entrepreneurs, smallholder farmers, homemakers, small communities, and wildlife that form the backbone of the Earth.
