Ecology Ablaze

The rich diversity of wildlife in southern Mexico and Central America is in peril. Local governments are using satellites to get a grip on a vast "corridor" system of protected lands.

Central America is on fire.

In an area of rich bio diversity, where 7% of our planet's terrestrial species are packed onto less than 1% of the planet's land, a rapidly growing human population is struggling with widespread poverty that affects more than 20 million people. Many of these people survive through unsustainable "slash and burn" agriculture, putting themselves and the rain forest on a collision course with catastrophe.

Simultaneously promoting the local economy while protecting forests and wildlife is the ambitious goal of an international project called the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (CBM is the acronym for the name in Spanish).

The largest "sustainable development" effort of its kind in the world, the CBM is a sprawling web of protected and semi-protected lands that stretch the entire length of Central America from southern Mexico to the border of South America - a region known as "Mesoamerica." The lands of the CBM are collectively managed by the governments of the seven Central American countries and Mexico. Together, these governments preserve some areas of the CBM and in others promote limited, "sustainable" economic use of the land.

"The human dimension is now one of the most important factors for not only conservation but also sustainable economic development," says Daniel Irwin, a research scientist who has worked and lived in Central America much of his life.

Image courtesy CBM. This map of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor shows the same region pictured in the satellite photo above. Dark green denotes protected areas; light green denotes connecting corridors. Red areas are proposed protected areas

"It's not just a matter of fencing off animals and keeping it separate, because there are so many people who live in the region," Irwin says.

Sustainable development is a relatively new direction in environmental thinking. It acknowledges that people need to use nature's resources to survive, but it also asserts that people must do so in an ecologically sensitive way, or else those resources may not be there for future generations.

For example, farmers might be encouraged to enrich the nitrogen in their existing fields by planting legumes such as alfalfa, rather than cutting and burning more forest when the soil becomes depleted. Another popular approach is to use tax incentives to motivate a land owner to set aside some of the forest on their property rather than developing it.

To maximize the ecological benefit of saving these forests, the CBM maintains strips of land connecting the forested areas - another relatively new idea in wildlife conservation called "corridors."