Conservación with Two C’s
Often enough, when I give a presentation about my work to a colleague from north of the border, I find myself explaining how the practice of conservation in Mexico significantly differs from that in the U.S. This isn’t surprising, since every binational venture, partnership, plan, strategy, discussion, or project reaches a point where peers from our very different countries notice discrepancies in our expectations—with the outcomes ranging from startled looks to heated arguments. Recently, however, it struck me that we take too little time to explain our respective approaches to one another such that we prevent conflict in what is increasingly becoming an international community of conservationists.
So I decided that a good starting point for my contributions to Wildlands Network’s blog would be to summarize the key similarities and differences between conservation in Mexico and the U.S.—if for no other reason than to save me the trouble of writing extensive and repetitive footnotes in later entries! Assuming I am sufficiently thorough, I hope to refer you back to this essay when I discuss the conservation needs of Mexican wolves in Mexico, or the trials of jaguars trying to run the gauntlet of mounting obstacles between Mexican Highway 2 and the infamous border wall. I must clarify from the start that this essay does not intend to compare the merits or efficacy of both countries and is limited to highlighting some of the differences that, in my experience, shape our expectations of how we should go about protecting nature. It also does not intend to be authoritative or complete and there are many individual exceptions to the trends and explanations here included.
A Tale of Two Countries
From this foreigner’s point of view, the two pillars of conservation in the U.S. are the extensive public lands system and the visionary laws providing long-term protections for these lands and their wild inhabitants. Resting upon these two pillars are public institutions comprising all levels of government and charged with the stewardship and management of the natural capital, and citizen groups that have been instrumental in achieving conservation on the ground—from watchdogs to collaborative partners to more independent agents of change. Public and private institutions employ many scientists and lawyers in their ranks, serving as unlikely champions of progress. And finally, private and to some extent public entities channel the resources of a diverse philanthropic community, whose members range from schoolchildren donating their allowance, to the wealthiest corporations on the planet.
How does this differ from conservation in Mexico? To begin with, there are no significant public lands in my country. Sure, there are patches here and there, and in theory, every coastline and perennial riverbank belongs to The Nation. But you can forget about vast swaths of land, ripe -or not- for congressional or executive designation. As for those coastal and riparian lands, very little can be done to enforce domain over strips of sand a few meters wide and thousands of kilometers long. In practice, then, land here is mostly owned or possessed by individuals, corporations, or communities. Notable among the latter are ejidos, tracts of land owned by a set number of members (ejidatarios) who bequeath their ownership rights to their heirs. Yes, there are federal nature parks in Mexico, but these are not public lands managed for the public good. Natural Protected Areas, or ANPs as we call them, represent a layer of regulation over a mosaic of tenures. This regulation can be—but isn’t always—used to limit the expansion of adverse development and to promote best practices among ranchers, farmers, fishermen, tourists, and others within the geographic limits of the protected area. ANP status also, in theory, doubles the fines imposed for environmental transgressions.
Looking at a map of Mexico’s Natural Protected Areas one could be led to believe there are vast public lands designated for conservation, while in reality this shows areas with an extra layer of regulation over mostly private and communal lands.
What we do have in Mexico is a legal framework that places conservation solidly in the public agenda and provides legal mechanisms for it to be effected. In some regards this legal framework is similar to that of the U.S. in others it differs significantly and it would be beyond the scope of this essay to explore the specific differences. However some things to note are the nation-wide prohibitions of poisoning and trapping of animals and the—fortunate—absence of publicly funded “wildlife-control” agencies that focus on eliminating animals that happen to be inconvenient to humans, particularly predators.
The Law and the Lands
What strikes foreigners the most is that despite having good laws for conservation, there is little enforcement capacity. Park rangers in Mexico are not law enforcers; they have no such training or capability, and are not armed or authorized to perform arrests. State environmental agencies do not regularly conduct law-enforcement activities, and the federal agency in charge of legally protecting wildlife and ecosystems, PROFEPA, is a Federal Attorney’s Office with “inspectors\” that can carry out some law-enforcement duties but who are also not, armed, trained or authorized to perform arrests, so they depend on coordination with police for many actions, leaving out any chance of catching someone red-handed and placing forceful actions in the hands of the same people that already struggle with the much more patent conflicts among humans. Government agencies are not the only ones to be blamed for the lack of enforcement, we the Mexican citizens need to know our laws better and demand that they be applied.
Such enforcement deficiencies, have many obvious limitations. But to its credit, the federal parks agency (CONANP – Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas) has managed to advance conservation goals by encouraging people to embrace conservation as a necessary part of their lives and work. CONANP—created in the year 2000—is the main public vector of conservation in rural communities all over the country, as it struggles to balance traditional extractive practices and the sustainable management of resources. It does so in great measure through collaborations with private and communal land-owners.
CONANP is an office of SEMARNAT the Secretariat for the Environment and Natural Resources, an agency that has other tools in its land-conservation toolbox. Two of these tools are designed to provide some level of protection, or at least responsible management, in private and communal lands; these are the UMAs (for Unidades de Manejo Ambiental) and the ADVCs (Areas Destinadas Voluntariamente a la Conservación). UMAs are parcels registered for extractive or non-extractive use of natural resources, including wildlife. Anybody that wishes to hunt or harvest wild animals or plants in their property needs to register it as an UMA and present studies and reports supporting the management actions undertaken. SEMARNAT provides limited amounts of money through open calls for proposals to fund studies, improvements and management of the UMAs. Zoos, plant nurseries and other facilities that manage wildlife in captivity also need to register as UMAs and follow reporting protocols.
ADVCs are parcels certified by CONANP as private reserves that live in a legal gray area where they are not quite ANPs but have some of their protections by voluntary request of their owners. How will those protections stand the onset of multiple threats from development is anybody’s guess as landowners could in principle ditch the designation if it proved unprofitable, or it could be lost as the parcels change hands, or it could be contested in court by third parties. Being a relatively new concept, it is hard to say how effective ADVCs will be, and until SEMARNAT or some other entity, starts providing partial funding for their management they are unlikely to serve the strong role Land Trusts in the U.S. now serve. In any case the role of private lands in conservation in Mexico cannot be overstated, given the lack of significant patches of public lands, and despite both UMAs and ADVCs over-reliance in private goodwill, it is hard to tell what other mechanism would be more effective at this point.
So who’s in charge of wildlife and other issues?
Because of its field presence throughout Mexico, CONANP is also entrusted with planning for and funding the recovery of government-designated Priority Species, which include thick billed-parrots, jaguars, Mexican wolves, vaquitas, sea turtles, and many others. Management of these and other threatened and endangered species, it should be noted, is the realm of the General Directorate of Wildlife (DGVS), a bureaucracy within SEMARNAT that issues permits for research, management, and (for some) hunting.
DGVS has almost no field experience and is mostly geared towards regulating exploitation. Its permitting process is opaque and in the case I know where it was contested in court it proved to be unlawful. This office was supposed to create and foster Consultancy Committees for priority species to inform its management decisions, but has failed to do so in over 10 years, thus perpetuating its opacity and ineffectiveness in regulating science-informed management and permitting.
Collaboration becomes indispensable when land owners and conservation agencies are never the same. In this picture personnel from TNC work with CONAFOR in a controlled-fire exercise within private lands owned by the Mexican conservation group Naturalia AC.
CONAFOR is SEMARNAT’s third conservation branch, a Forest Service-like organization, if you will, without the land stewardship, and very few law-enforcement components. CONAFOR has a strong focus on regulating extraction, it is also the agency charged with fire management in rural and wild areas.
State-level agencies charged with conservation are usually mediocre bureaucracies that manage most hunting permits, namely those of non T&E species. These agencies are easily infiltrated by minority interests, they half-heartedly tolerate carnivore conservation, and begrudge effective federal involvement. I leave it to readers to judge the similarities within your states. Meanwhile, county-level offices that deal with conservation are practically non-existent; some municipios—the county equivalent—have Directorates of Ecology that deal mostly with waste disposal and water issues, though there are numerous and commendable exceptions that actually engage in land planning and long-term stewardship, a difficult task to achieve with three-year administrations.
No Word for Wilderness
Mexico’s public institutions view nature as a conglomerate of resources and services to be managed. You might say that the same is true in the U.S., but at least there are U.S. laws recognizing the intrinsic value of wild animals and places—with the most famous of these being the Endangered Species Act and the Wilderness Act. Despite a robust legal framework for managing and protecting nature, Mexico has no laws that recognize wilderness; heck, we have no word for the concept in Spanish. I struggle to understand the historic origin of this linguistic want, but that is a matter for another essay.
Our current laws, agencies, and philanthropists, along with most citizen groups, share one well-intended but painfully incomplete vision: sustainable development. The intent that originated our environmental agencies was to regulate extraction, not to preserve intrinsically worthy aspects of nature for their sake and the sake of future generations of humans.
Further, the whole environmental legal system is implicitly based on voluntary compliance, as the capacity for enforcement is close to zero. In a country where journalists and students can be publicly murdered without consequence, what are the chances of wolves and jaguars being protected by public institutions—or of their killers being met with some kind of justice?
This is not to say there is no rule of law in Mexico, but social order is largely maintained by communities, regular businesses, and the remarkable work of a growing number of citizen groups—both formal and informal. Such groups not only hold the line. They are the keepers of hope for Mexico’s future.
Citizen Conservation
All over the world, organized citizens play a major role in advancing societies. In some countries, like the U.S., citizens are powerful enough to keep corrupt governments in check through a constant dance of activism, lawsuits, and collaboration. The same principle holds in Mexico, the primary difference being that the organized citizen movement is much smaller, much younger, and much less powerful. The tide is gradually changing, but it will take some time for our groups to be able to better counter government activity.
The professionalization of Mexico’s citizen movement is still happening. Most groups operate without being formally incorporated, as the steps seem complicated and unlikely to provide tangible benefits. Most groups also cannot afford to hire people to work primarily within their area of expertise and only the largest of NGOs manage to provide job descriptions that are structured, and aligned with staff expertise.
While this problem is not exclusive to Mexico or even to developing nations, it is a significant issue here. Only in countries with a more fertile philanthropic environment, a larger and more diverse workforce, a larger number of local or issue-focused NGO’s –as opposed to thinly-spread, generalist ones– do small to middle sized NGOS have the luxury of employing individuals with job descriptions focused on their expertise.
It is not uncommon in Mexican conservation ventures for scientists to be required to play the role of lawyers, human rights experts to be key players in protecting forests, transparency groups to advance the green agenda, and graphic artists like me to find themselves at the forefront of wildlife conservation in the borderlands of Sonora.
The opportunities for young Mexican naturalists to obtain hands-on experience with wildlife are still very few. Workshops -above– with U.S. instructors and bilingual interpreters have proven to be a very effective way of spreading a culture of conservation.
Members of Mexico’s scientific community have risen to the challenge and become champions of conservation. The problem is that we have too few scientists, so a few scientific leaders often occupy many niches, reducing diversity of opinion and exerting disproportionate influence on Mexico’s decision-making processes. Junior scientists and scientists in small universities have few opportunities to influence policy and other aspects related to conservation. NGO’s and government agencies seldom have enough researchers in their ranks.
Part of this problem is money, manifest in the lack of job opportunities. But this isn’t the only factor. The truth is schools are not focused on forming enough capable scientists to address the environmental challenges we face throughout Mexico. Our history of viewing Nature as a warehouse of resources has generated a culture where we have lots of ingenieros, environmental engineers, hydrologic engineers, agrarian engineers, etc. who usually end up being hired by developing or extractive operations to justify or, at best, mitigate their actions. The wonders of being a naturalist and feeling awe for the myriad of evolutionary adaptations around us are not fostered sufficiently in higher education institutions.
In Mexico, there is also an uneven distribution of research which results in regions within the radar of big universities hosting many researchers, while others outside their radar struggle to find interns willing to help conduct simple baseline inventories. This reduces the opportunities for foreign researchers to partner with Mexican peers in their areas of interest.
The same lack of diversity and engagement is true for lawyers. Good luck finding lawyers willing to work full-time for a nonprofit group, I have the greatest admiration and respect for the few who do.
Only when we have thousands of capable biologists, ecologists and lawyers working for NGOs and government agencies—and not just in universities and consultancies—will we have a much more powerful conservation movement. The professional composition of this movement is gradually changing for the better, but it is a slow process. Meanwhile, people like me learn on the job and only the larger conservation groups can pay seasoned professionals for key staff positions… if they can find them or poach them from smaller groups.
Philanthropic Scarcity
The most salient difference between the U.S. and Mexico’s philanthropic landscape is one of economic scale. The economy of the whole of Mexico is equivalent to only one or two of the bigger companies in the U.S., so even if philanthropic contributions in Mexico were proportionally equal to those in the U.S. – which they are most certainly not– they would still be much, much smaller.
As it is, philanthropy has only recently become a professional undertaking in Mexico and people don’t yet see the value of investing in their own communities, whether they take that to be their neighborhood or their watershed. Family “giving” is traditionally reserved for lavish celebrations, many of them related to religious practices, such as quinceañeras, the day of the virgin of Guadalupe or whatever local saint demands tribute in the form of expensive parties and donations to church.
There are historical reasons for the way philanthropy works in Mexico. For many years, attending to the needs of the less fortunate and to the protection of the shared heritage, whether natural or cultural, was almost exclusively the responsibility of the government and the Catholic Church. The first institution is prone to corruption, the second is averse to change and not very inclusive, both spend most of their income in self-preservation. These traits, of course, limited their efficacy, thus endowing charitable endeavors with an aura of mediocrity and mistrust.
Our citizen groups have managed to evolve and make impressive progress in a few decades, but they need to recognize and address the core deficiencies of democracy, equality, and transparency that we’ve inherited from our philanthropic past, and that still plague many aspects of Mexican culture—including NGO management.
Only by acknowledging the need to reduce opacity in their practice and to engage diverse and local stakeholders effectively, can such groups hope to foster the trust that encourages consistent and sufficient donations. While the citizen-led conservation is not in its infancy in Mexico, this movement still struggles internally with issues of responsibility, accountability, and teamwork… it also remains largely unrecognized as the game-changer it really can be.
Change
Change requires the right tools, and we have several of them in Mexico, some of which will look familiar to the foreign practitioner—such as park designations, easements, and an endangered species list (the Official Mexican Norm NOM059-2010, which is currently under review for updates). These tools are not exactly the same as their rough equivalents to the north, and local know-how is needed to wield them effectively. Other tools are customized to our realities, like long-term agreements with ejidos and transfer of coastal management to CONANP. Additionally, community-conservation incentives, provided by CONANP can be geared to produce effective on-the-ground actions, though they are limited by their focus on the “human benefit\” and the agency’ small budget. CONAFOR also has conservation incentives in the form of Payments for Environmental Services, a program which has had mixed results and has been criticized for having a very narrow focus tailored to advance political agendas. It has also effectively leveraged the efforts of small funds to provide some serious habitat protection.
There are also some significant political advantages in Mexico for executing conservation action, for instance, the lack of party division on environmental issues. While virtually all Mexican politicians can be expected to advance developers’ goals, no party is crazy enough to openly oppose the preservation of nature. Their arguments need to be more devious and as a result they are not creating the massive ideological rift between conservation and development that other countries face. And even the most right-wing conservatives acknowledge human-driven climate change as an inescapable reality that must be addressed—one for which we even have a government think-tank called the National Ecology and Climate Change Institute (INECC).
All roads lead to Mexico City
An inescapable political reality in Mexico that still affects many aspects of conservation is centralism. In some regards, it is better to have federal oversight when it comes to managing endangered species, as the state environmental agencies usually lack capable scientists who can act free of the influence from local interest groups, but in other aspects, it generates slow processes that lack diversity of stakeholders.
Centralism is not limited to government and is very palpable in the fact that researchers from UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico –its main campus is in Mexico City- have a disproportionate representation in many aspects of conservation, limiting potential diversity of opinions and of collaborations. That is not necessarily because they seek to reduce diversity, which I am sure most of them value, but it is a natural result of having a majority of opinions shaded by the same culture. And the fact is, only recently regional and local universities have started to invest more in their environmental programs, so it can’t be said that this is UNAM’s fault, it is rather the result of a culture of centralism. Full disclosure: I am a second-generation spawn of UNAM.
Another painful effect of centralism has recently been brought back to everyone’s attention. With the change in president in 2012 came the gradual neutralization of many of the better aspects of publicly led and funded conservation. By giving strategic positions in SEMARNAT and CONANP to people aligned with him but with no professional merit to justify their appointment, the current president has facilitated reducing these agencies budgets and focusing them away from the more promising initiatives of previous administrations, reminding us all that these agencies still do not respond to the mandate dictated by the people, but to the current interests of the party in Los Pinos, the presidential house.
One Wilderness for All
I hope this analysis of how conservation in Mexico is different from—and similar to—its counterpart in the U.S., helps practitioners interested in binational collaboration adapt their expectations and create more effective relationships with foreign colleagues. Wilderness needs us all. Mexico needs the abundant resources and talent dedicated to conservation in the U.S., and the U.S. would do well to learn more from the adaptability and resourcefulness of Mexico.
Special thanks for additional input: Fernando Ochoa, Tom Van Devender, Jim Rorabaugh, Gayle Hartmann, Ivonne Cassaigne and Sergio Ávila.
