Conserve, restore and exploit: The fate of ecosystems.

The world as will and representation, I, p. 416: “As if on the rough sea, which, unlimited on all sides, raises and falls roaring mountains of waves, a navigator is in a boat, trusting in the weak vessel; thus, in the midst of a world of torment, the individual man, supported and trusting in the Principium individuationis [principle of individualism]”

The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Faced with questions such as the responsibility to pay for environmental services and the protection of natural capital, reflection on the issue of the social appropriation of natural elements and the role of rural communities in the management and conservation of biodiversity is taking on renewed validity.

Although in many cases an absurd conflict persists in the opposition between productivist and conservation approaches, it is necessary to recognize that production and conservation are complementary components, as is the case of forest resources. The conservation of resources through the regulation of the harvest, based on the principle of sustainable yield (stated by Hans von Carlowitz 300 years ago, in 1713), and the conservation of soils to maintain the productivity of the site on which the production of wood and other resources depends (as Heinrich Cotta pointed out since 1816), have been considered part of forest management since its origins as a profession and as a scientific-technical discipline. However, an erroneous perspective of forest management, focused only on the management of wooded masses for wood production aimed at the supply of industry and the market, without paying attention to the complexity of forest ecosystems (Puettmann et al. 2009), has diverted attention from the role that conservation plays as part of forest management, which has had consequences not only in the degradation of forest areas, but also in the reduction of their productivity (Smith et al. 1996, Perry 1998).

The environmental tradeoff.

Nowadays, environmental problems worry us because of the serious effects they cause. This has effects on humans because of our dependence on ecosystems to survive. The obtaining of raw materials, food and other materials through productive activities such as agriculture, aquaculture and forestry, is done on the basis of ecosystems.

The management of these is then proposed as the process through which both the ecological conditions that are required to be maintained to ensure a healthy ecosystem and the actions that are required to achieve it are defined (Harwell et al. 1999). In this process, it is recognized that it is essential to understand the relationship that human groups have with ecosystems and the ways in which societies make decisions about the resources and services they provide.

Forests: the emblem of ecosystems.

Forest ecosystems are the combination of landscape, species, topography and climate united by physical and biotic processes specific to any site and, most importantly, they are occupied by trees as the dominant vegetation. The larger it is, the more complex the potential interactions will be. However, human beings affect forests on many scales. In individual stands, our activities influence the composition, cover, age and density of vegetation. At the landscape scale, we modify the types of stands present and their spatial arrangement, which influences the movement of wind, water, animals and soils. Regionally, we introduce by-products into the air that can fertilize or kill forests. On a global scale, our consumption of fossil fuels has increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and has possibly changed the way that carbon is distributed in vegetation, soils and the atmosphere, with implications for the global climate.

According to data from the Federal Attorney's Office for Environmental Protection (2020), in Mexico, there is an area of 137.8 million hectares (ha) covered by some type of forest vegetation. Of these, 65.7 million ha (47.7%) correspond to the area wooded by forests, jungles, mangroves and other plant associations; 56.3 million hectares (40.8%) are covered with xerophilous scrub, that is, vegetation from arid and semiarid areas; and other forest areas cover 15.8 million ha (11.5%).

Temperate forests constitute 20% of the forest cover, making them the most widely distributed type of forest. Of this proportion, 5% is occupied by oak forests, 14% by pine and pine-oak forests and 1% by other conifers (Rzedowski, 1991).

Historically, pine and oak forests have an average annual deforestation rate of greater than 0.5%, and in some regions they have a higher rate of deforestation and land use change than forests; this has had an impact on the decrease in their extension and in the number of species they shelter (Galicia, 2015). Because of the above, temperate forests contain a high number of threatened, endangered species subject to special protection by NOM-059-SEMARNAT-2010 (Official Journal of the Federation [DOF], 2019). For example, coniferous forests contain a total of 453 species in different protection categories.

The primary productivity of the forest is extremely important because it is one of the basic variables of the ecological system, since it determines all the interactions of the food chain, as well as the economic benefits for rural communities. Changes in biomass and its components are an important indicator of the productivity, energy potential and atmospheric C (Carbon) absorption capacity of forests. According to figures from FAO (2015), over the past 25 years, global carbon stocks in forest biomass have fallen by almost 17.4 Gt, equivalent to a decrease of 697 million tons per year or approximately 2.5 Gt of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. These emissions are the result of cover change and land use change, mainly derived from the conversion of forest land to agricultural land.

Silvicultural use.

Currently, in Mexico about 6% of forest areas are under a silvicultural management program; this could be considered an extension of forest where forest practices can be recognized. However, the illegal extraction of industrial wood is estimated at around 13 million cubic meters per year (Masera Ceron and Ordóñez, 2001).

Today we know that the success of the illegal extraction of wood is based on the efficient operation of the production chain, which includes everything from poaching, transportation, industrialization to commercialization. On the other hand, Caballero-Deloya (2008) mentions that legal and organized forestry practices at community and ejidal levels have been unfeasible due to the discrepancy between the reality of forestry practices and the policies of excessive regulation that exist around the use of the forest.

In Mexico, it is estimated that there are 8,500 forest communities, and that their economy is characterized by the diversification of activities related to the use of the forest or the transformation of surfaces to agricultural and livestock uses.

While it is true that community forest management has been highlighted in international literature as an efficient mechanism for providing income while generating practices for the conservation of forest systems, the mechanisms by which this type of practice becomes successful go beyond the community itself. In Mexico, the factors that influence successful community forest management include a clear institutional framework, short- and medium-term economic and ecosystem benefits, property and use rights (Adcharaporn Kim and Daughtery, 2006), equitable access (Vázquez, 2015), the capacity of communities to adapt to external conditions, and a relationship of trust between government and communities (Segura-Warnholtz, 2014).

Conserve and restore to take advantage of ecosystems.

There are important regions in an excellent state of conservation despite the pressure exerted by the anthropogenic practices that are developed there and, on the contrary, there are areas with low demographic pressure that are strongly impacted by various economic activities. The clearest example is the new open-pit mining with transnational and national private capital, which is practiced even in areas considered strategic for the conservation of biodiversity.

The alternative to the debate on forms of ownership in Mexico has been given through what is called the “new patrimonial discourse in the use of natural resources” (Díaz, 2001). When community institutions remain in force, resources are conserved, renewed and last over time. Fragmentation conditions of agricultural land, low profitability, the imposition of technological models adverse to the conservation of natural ecosystems and local cultures, and the decline in the productive capacity of soils, have induced changes in the use of forestry soils. Although in much of Mexico the fragmentation of land into small farms is an indisputable fact, it occurs both in individual properties and in collective properties.

However, it should be noted the abundance of examples of good agricultural management in small farms around the world. Private forms of use of natural resources in communities and ejidos are fundamentally activities related to agricultural production that have a logic associated with community management of community resources and territories. Agricultural calendars, forest utilization times and work outside the community, among others, are processes related to each other and to collective decision-making mechanisms.

Production systems under a sustainable development scheme must be economically profitable, socially acceptable and ecologically viable. This hierarchical and multiscalar nature of ecosystem processes makes it impossible to establish precise limits on where one ends and the other begins. Rather, there is a continuum of interrelated components and processes that are interspersed at different spatial and temporal scales. When working with an ecosystem, it delimits its borders in a somewhat arbitrary way, depending on particular objectives and interests. Once the spatial and temporal scale at which we will work has been defined, it must be recognized that in reality it is a subsystem of a larger ecosystem that contains it, so it receives influences and, in turn, has an influence on the larger system.

Ecosystems are not uniform and static environments but rather diverse and dynamic. What is seen as homogeneous and static on one scale becomes very heterogeneous and changeable on another. For example, a type of soil will seem relatively homogeneous to us if we analyze a hectare of land, but if we do the study at the scale of square kilometers, we will realize that there are a wide variety of soils with markedly different origins and properties. Similarly, if we analyze the composition of tree species in a forest over a decade, we will hardly see significant changes, however, an analysis of the palynological (pollen) record in lake sediments will show that important changes have occurred in the species composition of vegetation over periods of thousands of years.

Natural ecosystems are not teleological systems, that is, they are not structured or operate following a plan, design or objective predetermined by some central controller (Patten and Odum 1981). Rather, each component, biotic or abiotic, has properties and characteristics that determine its particular way of interacting with the rest of the components of the system. The structure and functioning of the ecosystem are the product of the intricate coupling of components that, simultaneously, occur in a given space and time.

For millions of years, biotic and abiotic components have been combined, in different places and at different scales, to form the ecosystems we know today. Thus, for example, we have highly diverse and productive ecosystems in tropical areas of the planet; very simple and unproductive ecosystems in polar areas; very dynamic ecosystems in rivers and strongly seasonal ecosystems in temperate zones. Many of these ecosystems have similar components and processes, but they also have very particular components and processes, which give unique characteristics and properties to each particular type.

The human species has developed technological abilities that allow it to transform natural ecosystems in a way that is unprecedented in the history of the planet, so it is not just another component of the ecosystem. Unlike the rest of the species, when man transforms an ecosystem, he generally does so for a purpose, which gives him a character clearly with a technological approach. That is, both the components and the functional processes of the transformed ecosystem are manipulated in order to achieve a desired state of the system.

Not all ecosystems are equally vulnerable to human intervention. The same disturbance will have a very different effect under different weather, topography, soil and vegetation conditions. Thus, for example, the loss of vegetation cover will have a smaller impact on a flat area than on an area with a steep slope, since in the latter, erosion will be much more accelerated. In the same way, soil with stable aggregates will withstand compaction through agricultural machinery better than soil without aggregates.

It is important to distinguish between the resistance and the resilience of an ecosystem (Holling 1973). The first refers to the ability of the latter to absorb the effects of a disturbance. Resilience, on the other hand, refers to the capacity of the ecosystem to return as much as possible to its state prior to the disturbance. For example, the thick bark of pine trees allows them to resist fire, while the regrowing capacity of some species is more of a resilience property. The stability of an ecosystem is the result of these two properties. In the face of low-magnitude disturbances, the ecosystem generally recovers without much trouble. However, in the face of major events, system recovery becomes more difficult. In some cases, the transformation of the ecosystem is of such severity that, even if the disturbance ceases, it no longer returns to a state similar to the original.

Therefore, the recognition of spaces for collective action in ejidos and communities is not a new topic, but the analysis of natural resource management guided by the theory of collective action focused on natural resources is. The emphasis of this article is not focused on the constitution of organizations, but on collective arrangements that allow the lasting appropriation of natural resources, based on equity and environmental and sociocultural assessment. Far from being a universal condition, “the tragedy of the common goods” is in many cases a false problem. Community ownership of land does not imply free access to natural resources; on the contrary, collective sanction prevents the inequitable distribution of a common good. In many cases, “the tragedy” has resulted from the impossibility of integrating possession and full usufruct, the excessive protection of the State over community lands, the impossibility of the full exercise of the community over its resources. Historically, free access and other problems of managing common goods have been addressed by different bureaucracies created by the Mexican State (Álvarez, 2000), alien to the collective processes of appropriation, surveillance and sanction. This was not an error of legal technique or an inconclusive action, but rather a deliberate attitude that, at best, has been considered transitory to give rise to forms of individual possession.

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