When the Vultures come Knocking on your Door
When the Vultures come Knocking on your Door
A conversation with Roberto Pedraza Ruiz, who shares the pain and beauty of his homeland in the Mexican Sierra Gorda forest.
Ironically, I met Roberto around a fire, at a conference on land regeneration in the Netherlands in April of this year. I had noticed over the day how he kept sharing videos of the burning Cloud Forest in Sierra Gorda, his homeland, to some people. Around the evening fire, I sat beside him to hear his story. Roberto was more than willing to share the deep inner upheaval caused by the ecosystem collapse around him. I found his accounts both resonant and deeply disturbing, while also noticing that the source of his anguish lies in a profound love for the aliveness around him, transmitted through his parents. Sit down with us at this ambiguous fire and see for yourself:
“I live in the Sierra Gorda mountains in central Mexico, that are part of the big Eastern Sierra Madre. I'm a fifth generation here in these mountains, so we have been here for a while. My mother's side is from the state capital, Querétaro. My father was an accountant. My grandfather sent him to Querétaro to study where he met my mother. They married. They were a happy couple. They were successful within the system. And after a while they decided they didn't like modern life and they wanted to live off the grid. So when I was nine years old my family moved into the Sierra Gorda.
We were homeschooled. My parents were serious about our education. My mother was a very, very lovely lady. But you can't mess with her. And I'm really thankful about that kind of education.
Once they were living here they aimed at a mellow life in the forest, growing their organic vegetables. But they soon realized what an environmental mess the Sierra Gorda was already then. Growing corn in the mountains of Mexico is a pre-Hispanic practice and has taken a lot of forest in this country. And then the cattle arrived in the 16th century, and everybody embraced the cattle but it is an exotic animal on this side of the planet.
I also come from a family of cattle ranchers. My grandfather was one of the big cattle ranchers in the Sierra Gorda. He was the most hardworking guy you can imagine. A lot of land and cattle and always struggling with his finances because it was too much work and too many expenses to keep a ranch going, too little revenue. So I know the farming struggle. And then my father became a vegetarian. And he sold the cattle of my grandfather, who had always been so proud of his pastures with African grasses and Swiss cows. It was very hard for my grandfather to see all of this sold off. But that's why we have this beautiful forest around here. Last evening, 25 macaws flew over my head. So I live in this kind of neighborhood and we're so proud about it, because if you take off pressure from nature, it can still heal herself. It's incredible. Just abandon the pasture or a cornfield and the forest will come again. Granted. And despite the harsh conditions of climate now, it is still happening.
My father also began to replant the forest here. He thought it was the right thing to do, 37 years ago. He knows everybody in the region. Because everybody knew my grandfather and my great grandfather and my great great grandfather. So we're really part of the local tapestry. Very important. We were not aliens landing, proclaiming „Let’s save the forest!“ No, we were locals.
My mother used to be a school teacher in Querétaro and a music teacher. She began to visit the local schools, sing with the kids and her accordion and talk about the environment in that way. So the whole project had very humble origins. Just the effort of two persons, and it has grown to be a strong environmental organization here in Mexico. My mother is still the big brain and heart behind everything, she's a force of love, working with so many people in the region (scroll to the end of this letter to see videos of Roberto’s kick-ass mother please. You can also see Roberto and his brother in action, as well as hear how the project works with carbon credits to stop logging and cattle farming in the protected areas and allow the cloud forest to regenerate).
I grew up with this project and have never done anything else in my life than trying to protect nature. I don't want to do anything else. It gives me a purpose.
So I grew up as a tree planter. And now I'm a firefighter.
We're in the third heat wave in Mexico. Just now, the second heat wave of this year broke all the previous records in the country, the beginning of this month. We had a little break of four days and then came the third one. So just in a single month, we're breaking national records within two or three weeks of each other.
I think a tipping point was broken in 1998. It was also a very strong El Nino in the Pacific Ocean. And that year we had a megadrought, heatwaves and huge wildfires. When I was a kid in this place, we may have had three weeks of nonstop rain. It was a cloud forest, always in the mist and raining 24 hours a day. But that year we just got a third of the regular amount of rain. And so this first half of this year has been horrible because the lack of rain. Last week I was involved in three different fires. Fires have happened sometimes before, but not in this scale and intensity. Fire behavior is changing. It's far more violent because it hits a super dry environment. Everything is tinder. Just ready to burn. It can change so quickly and you can get engulfed in it and you get roasted. So we have to be careful.
This year, the heat waves have been killing wildlife all over the place, and that really slaps me in the face. Birds dropping dead out of the trees. Howler monkeys in southern Mexico. Hundreds of parrots. Their populations were already small and threatened. But this year, without deforestation or people poaching them, we have a huge population loss. So I don't know what people imagine to be an extinction event, we can witness it happening right here with the heat waves. And our species keeps encroaching and taking and pumping … That really pisses me off.
But the idea around here, years ago, and still very much today is „kill everything that moves, no mercy“. Every snake, every mammal. Shoot it, shoot it, shoot it. For example the Macaws, there are very few of them left, maybe one hundred macaws in the entire Sierra Gorda. And they mate for life so if they lose their partner, they're not ever mating again. So they're very decent folks, but not very productive unfortunately. In a dry year like this, they are not laying eggs because they know there are no resources, so why would they bring another chick into that situation. But years ago there were big flocks. There's still old folks around who remember 300, 500 macaws in a flock. And I know some of the flocks done in a single afternoon. They will shoot 30 macaws just like that, because they were “too noisy”. But people were also shooting them because of the corn. And yes, they can eat a lot of corn. You have your corn fields and you have 100 macaws eating your work. At some stage, the 22 caliber, the small bullets that are cheap were available on the market. People were using these to to kill the macaws. Local people behaving as if they don’t belong here .
In the rainy season, salamanders used to be like chickens around here, hanging out at the patio of my parents house. And now they are so scarce. Tree frogs also. They're gone. I mean, where can amphibians be with this drought and heat waves? I will be very surprised if I can find a single one. If it rains this year. Maybe they are already gone. We used to have thousands of fireflies in the forest. It was magical to be out there when I was a kid and them glowing in the dark. Last year during the rains, I saw maybe three in the night. It's because of climate change and so many lights now out in the forest. Human encroachment. More houses everywhere. I know I am part of that. I'm ashamed. I have electricity in this house. So we're part of the system. You really would have to be like a hermit. Growing your own carrots in a cave to be completely nature friendly (laughs).
And then, wildlife encounters are taking place here which I’ve never heard of before happening here.
It was during the first heatwave this year in April. My cousin texted me on WhatsApp asking for help because in her patio, she found about 40 vultures. They never get that close to the houses. And they were knocking on her door with the beaks. I found that very creepy. I mean, those birds were desperate. Yeah, they knew the heat was too much for them, and they were trying to find shelter with humans. Come on. That's crazy. It’s wild. You have to be really desperate as an animal to look for shelter with humans. She was asking me what to do. Because you don't want 40 vultures inside your house. I told her to put some water outside and at some stage they left again.
When I met Roberto in the Netherlands, the immediacy and harshness of his stories struck me. I asked him if he also experiences softness in his life. With a much more tender energy he told me about his “happy therapy”, Wildlife photography.
It was in 2010. We were working in a jaguar monitoring project. So I had these photos of jaguars in the wild from camera traps. And then I went to the UK for a trip with our partner, the World Land Trust. We met in London with two ladies from a big company. And I made my PowerPoint presentation: “I'm from the Sierra Gorda and we're working to protect Nature …” I could see the faces of the ladies, “oh, this boring person, when is he going to shut up” (laughs). And then by chance, I had the photo of the jaguar that just came from the field the week before. And when that big fat jaguar appeared the ladies changed so much, they were hooked!
So coming back to Mexico I purchased my first camera. But that was not enough. So I purchased a big and expensive lens from the US and felt so ready to publish in National Geographic (laughs). And that’s exactly what happened a year and half after. My first photo with them. I didn't really have the know how but I knew how to find a way.
And now that's my big passion. Wildlife photography. And this has become such a big tool for our project. To advertise in the Sierra Gorda for environmental education, for campaigning, for activism, for stopping logging projects. I spend most of my spare time chasing creatures around, um, in a nice way (laughs).
I like to think of myself like the voice. For those who don't have a voice. All the small folk of the forest.
It really tortures me that they keep disappearing because of the pressure of our species. I feel ashamed to be a human, actually.
Do you dream about all of these things? Are you a person that dreams in the night?
I'm a person that doesn't sleep.
You lay awake with it at night.
I don't have kids, but my brother does. And I really love the small ones, the kids I didn't have. And sometimes I just lie awake, concerned about their future. What those young folks are going to witness and suffer. I would be terrorized to be a parent now, planning to give them a school and education. That's nonsense. You’ll have to ensure they're going to have water and food next year. Mexico is running dry. Absolutely. All the major cities. They are just pumping the last drop. So the breaking point for us is coming soon. And what about the crops. Plants don't like harsh weather. Of course, trees are dying in the forest, but also the maize and the wheat and so on. Everywhere. Food production is going down. India is not exporting wheat and parts of its rice since three years because they're keeping the little wheat they have for themselves, of course. And just in India and Bangladesh, there are almost 2 billion people. Where will they move with the heat waves? I'm sure the Chinese don't want them. We're heading to such a big crash and people don't want to see that.
I mean, we know that the war is lost. We don't fool ourselves. But we can be winning small battles. And that's good enough. And also I want to think that I'm on the side of life. Not on the side of human selfishness and greed. So I wake up doing all what I can to stop human pressure. And that's good enough for me.
As promised above, here are some videos to dive deeper into the origins and work of Grupo Ecologico Sierra Gorda, seeing some of the people mentioned in Roberto’s accounts and seeing the beauty of the Sierra Gorda Cloud Forest.
The first video is 13 years old, made by famous videographer Yann Arthus Bertrand and gives very personal and poetic insight into the thoughts and ways of Roberto’s Mother “Pati”. The video also touches upon the challenge of nature restoration work facing the rights and needs of indigenous populations who are often tied into further marginalization by conservation work worldwide and the need to find communal ways:
This one is a more recent video and it shows the project and its members several years along, explaining the project and how carbon credits are used to finance the work of forest regeneration in place, sorting some beautiful quotes by Pati again:
Please also check out Roberto’s wildlife photography on his Insta page.