CROSSED WIRES OR A THREATENED PARADISE?
04.21.08 - Leído 37 veces. Enviar esta notaKarla María Sosa
One branch of Mexico’s government seems not to have gotten the memo about the country’s most valuable protected area
MEXICO, D.F., April 21, 2008.- Mexico has nominally protected some tracts of its vast and diverse natural heritage for nearly a century, but only in recent decades have its governments taken strong action to back up the legal designation of ‘Natural Protected Area’ with resources, personnel and clear management plans. Current President Felipe Calderón has been especially energetic, expanding both the acreages under protection and the budget of the country’s National Commission for Protected Areas. So observers have been unsettled to discover recently that one branch of the Calderón administration appears to be out of the progressive loop, and is now threatening an area many consider to be the crown jewel in Mexico’s system of protected habitats.
The Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve, in the rugged Sierra Madre Oriental mountains of Querétaro State roughly 150 miles north of Mexico City, is home to threatened populations of jaguars, pumas, bearded wood partridges and peccaries, maroon-fronted parrots and North America’s southernmost stands of northern Douglas fir trees, among some 3,000 species of plants, mammals, birds, fish and insects.
So rich in biodiversity is this remote region of steep slopes, plunging valleys, tangled jungle, desert and cloud forest, that UNESCO has designated the 1,480 sq. mi. protected area as a global Biosphere Reserve.
At its center, reachable only by a corkscrew highway, is a gem of another kind: the historic mission town of Jalpan, itself a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site with a internationally important wetland recognized by the RAMSAR Convention. Both the town and the Biosphere Reserve draw a growing number of tourists eager to explore Mexico’s lesser-known cultural and ecological treasures.
Over nearly 20 years a local non-profit organization, the Grupo Ecólogico Sierra Gorda, has marshaled impressive support for conservation and restoration of this incomparable landscape, much of which had been degraded by decades of environmentally destructive subsistence farming and cattle-grazing.
Eventually, Mexico’s government recognized the Grupo Ecólogico’s effectiveness by formally naming it as a co-manager when the reserve was decreed in 1997, in cooperation with its own federal Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
Since 2001, the partners have received $6.5 million in international funding from the Global Environment Facility created as part of the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity, seed money they have leveraged to raise more than three times that amount from other private and public sources to support a wide range of conservation programs and economic options for the Reserve’s 100,000 rural inhabitants. In response to lobbying by the public-private partnership, supportive funding from various levels of Mexican government has increased more than seven-fold.
So it is all the stranger that one branch of Mexico’s sprawling federal government seems sharply out of step with what has become one of the country’s relatively few clear ecological success stories.
The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE, in its Spanish acronym) proposes to carve a right-of-way nearly 100 ft. wide and 31 miles long out of the reserve’s virgin and recovering forests, in order to string high-voltage power lines from the urban centre of Vizarrón, in the centre of Querétaro State, on some 200 steel towers measuring 120 feet tall, to Jalpan.
The Commission’s rationale for construction of the line is opaque at best. The new transmission corridor would deliver 115 kilovolts of power to the remote country town – nearly ten times the 12 kilovolts it currently draws from existing power links.
Moreover, three small power stations close to Jalpan are already capable of tripling that present supply – enough to provide easily for its needs well into the future, considering that Jalpan’s location and unnerving transportation challenges make it an unlikely site for large-scale industrial development.
More likely is that the Federal Commission harbors the hope of eventually extending the high-voltage corridor further north to the Huasteca region of neighboring San Luis Potosi State.
That would create a high-volume transmission network to deliver power from hydroelectric plants the national utility hopes to install on several rivers flowing through the reserve’s undeveloped canyons, back to Mexico’s industrial heartland (The CFE has proposed similar hydroelectric projects in other National Protected Areas, enraging critics who point to the damage such plants have done to rivers where they have been installed in the past).
One of the many objections that local land stewards have towards the CFE’s proposed project is that these power lines would obstruct the flyway for the last colony of green macaws found in central Mexico, as these magnificent birds travel between their feeding areas in river ravines and their dwellings on the cliffs of the massive sink-hole known as the Sótano del Barro.
Giving weight to the suggestion that the federal power supplier has a hidden motive, its agents have been discovered to have crossed private property without the permission or even knowledge of landowners, evidently in order to survey the proposed transmission corridor.
Other CFE representatives have threatened some landowners to sell portions of their property for the development, giving them the false impression that the Grupo Ecológico supports its plans and offering a fraction of the value. The federal power utility has also neglected to secure the approval of the national agencies directly responsible for protection of the Reserve’s natural heritage for its disruptive ambitions.
Perhaps most disturbing, the power line planned for installation in Jalpan de Serra will include two towers within a marginalized neighborhood with 3,000 residents and secondary schools.
In the end, it may be up to Calderón to rule on which arm of his administration represents his own views: the agencies carrying out his bold declarations of support for National Protected Areas, or the Federal Electricity Commission’s power(line)-hungry agents.
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