Guardians of the Selva Maya: Rainforest Sustainability

This story is about restoring a whole biosphere, not just the plants and animals but also of restoring the legacy and future of the Selva Mayan communities.

It's common practice for rainforest programs to "purchase" land lots and place them in trust so as to "protect" the land, animal and plant species. Unfortunately what happens actually contributes to more devastation because it disrupts the working, interactive relationships between indigenous communities who have traditional management practices that go back hundreds if not thousands of years and which the other land, animal and plant species are dependent on.

Here in North America we can relate that to the interruption, if not complete devastation of indigenous land practices involving controllable burning. Controllable is just once aspect of traditional indigenous practices, but we can see it's long term effect every summer when hundreds of thousands of acres of forest lands and private homes, even lives are lost due to uncontrollable fires.

So what happens to our rainforests, identified as key places to the health of the earth, when the entire process is interrupted, even destroyed.

Rainforests2Reef in their efforts to keep communities in place, interacting with one another and involved in the environmental conversation actually does tremendous preventative work.

In watching this movie it was the faces of the children that really moved me.

These are the faces of children who might have been displaced from their ancestral homelands and relocated to large cities. This might have been the children who sell trinkets in the streets to make the pennies that families need to buy food - when they could have been eating their native foods grown in the rainforest as their ancestors once did. It might have been, if not for the efforts of Rainforest2Reef

Groups such as Rainforest2Reef that are taking that next step in conservation efforts to plan for sustainable management of rainforests are setting the mark for going "way beyond green" and are the kind of example we should all be looking to.

So instead of learning the art of trinket making, these children will learn to manage their environment. They'll have the opportunity to learn management techniques from their grandparents and continue the ancient traditions hidden within their culture. And..they and will learn how to teach their children so that generations from now that cycle of traditional environmental knowledge goes uninterrupted. That's sustainability.

Their future, our future intricately linked with the actions of these children's hands in dirt, planting our future.