James Deutsch films the flight into El Mirador National Park—the ruin of an immense, 25-story-tall complex of temples and palaces—El Mirador, The Lookout.

November 4, 2022 – Because I had never been to Guatemala before, I snagged the co-pilot seat in the helicopter. The dense rainforest rushing under us seemed endless, impenetrable, wild, eternal. Until a mountain loomed ahead. No, not a mountain, but the ruin of an immense, 25-story-tall complex of temples and palaces almost completely choked by trees and vines except for the central tower that had been partially excavated—El Mirador, The Lookout.

A few minutes later, we were climbing that tower on foot when we were interrupted by the raucous cries of howler monkeys and our pressing need to stop and gawk at a bird so exquisitely beautiful it didn’t look real—a Keel-billed Toucan. It was hard to believe that, in Mirador’s heyday, 600–200 B.C., as many as 3–5 million people may have lived in this and surrounding cities.

How did they thrive here, on the Yucatan Peninsula, which is made entirely of ancient coral, now transformed into limestone? Why, in the space of a century, did they die out and abandon their civilization? Professor Richard Hansen, our guide, had answers. These ancient Mayans thrived by mining the carbon-rich, waterlogged soil of the swamps that cover a third of the Mirador Basin. They piled it onto raised beds to grow maize, and burned limestone to cement their huge pyramids, stucco their exquisite friezes and pave their vast network of highways.

Then they died or fled when two finite resources ran out: carbon-rich peat to nourish their crops and trees to burn their lime. By the second century B.C., only a few hundred residents remained, mostly members of the royal family, camping in hovels at the base of the pyramids.

Even in the midst of troubled times, we like to think that progress is inevitable, that history moves in one direction rather than in circles. But that depends on how we use the resources on which our civilization depends. To the residents of El Mirador, the peat and the firewood must have seemed inexhaustible. To us, too, the capacity of the air, the seas, and the forests to absorb CO₂ and provide rain and sustenance can also seem infinite.

In the 1980s, Guatemala designated Mirador National Park to protect the core of the ruins—and the rainforest and the toucans and the howlers—and buffered it with community-managed forestry concessions. Five years ago, Rainforest Trust agreed to support FUNDAECO, a national NGO, to transition some of the concessions from logging to tourism and carbon and to protect the landscape from narco-traffickers. So when our partners Global Conservation and FUNDAECO invited me to attend a workshop near Mirador for non-profit and government protected-area managers from across Latin America, I jumped at the opportunity. I could scout for new protected area creation projects and partners and see what FUNDAECO had achieved. I could also learn Mirador’s lessons.

As I walked through the jungle, the busy past few months at Rainforest Trust kept intruding on my thoughts. Thanks to the generosity of our donors, our board had been able to approve the largest portfolio of projects we had ever committed to. Remarkably, these included two projects in Africa to create large, brand-new national parks to protect rainforests: Krahn-Bassa National Park in Liberia, the country established by African Americans on the Atlantic coast of Africa that harbors 80% of West Africa’s remaining rainforest as well as chimps, forest elephants and pygmy hippos; and Reserva de la Paz in Equatorial Guinea, a tiny, oil-rich country nestled between Cameroon and Gabon, in the heart of the Congo, the world’s second-largest rainforest.

The Equatorial Guinea project will protect 237,706 acres of pristine forest right next to the site of the country’s new capital city—habitat for gorillas, pangolins and African Grey Parrots that would otherwise succumb to suburban sprawl. Have we learned the lesson of El Mirador? Can we steward nature that lies right next to our cities rather than consuming it and perishing ourselves? Can we do that on a global scale, not just a local one?

With your continued support, I think we can.

Rainforest Trust’s mission is to build sustainability from the bottom up—supporting work in the field to protect acres of rainforest with implementing partners like FUNDAECO—and from the core out, starting with national parks like Mirador and extending out to community conservation areas and buffer zones. But over the past year we have also been asked, without diverting significant resources, to assist with a powerful, global, top-down effort.

We are helping to persuade countries to commit to protecting 30% of their lands and seas by 2030. That’s what Rainforest Trust’s own Mark Gruin and Rina Mandimbiniaina achieved with the Environment Minister of Madagascar last year at the Glasgow Climate Conference. Nothing will do more than a global commitment to 30×30 to ensure we don’t follow the ancient Mayans into oblivion. And nothing will do more to ensure that we at Rainforest Trust have great new protected-area-creation projects, like the ones in Liberia and Equatorial Guinea, for you to support!

Just a week later, on October 25th, I met with the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, together with a few other conservation leaders, to rally his support for 30×30 in advance of the decadal Global Biodiversity Conference in Montreal in December. There, all the nations of the world will be asked to sign on to 30×30—I’ll be there, and will report back. In the meeting with Guterres, I represented the nine private funders of conservation (including Rainforest Trust) who pledged $5 billion last year for biodiversity. I asked the Secretary-General to challenge governments to respond by doubling their financial commitment to conservation.

But, finding myself back in the co-pilot seat, I also told Guterres about the lesson of El Mirador.

For the rainforests,
Dr. James C. Deutsch, CEO

P.S.  Your gift in support of the Conservation Action Fund allows our conservation team to take immediate action to save tropical habitat and rainforests when and where they are most imperiled. With markets down, our fundraising is off somewhat from last year, so your support this year would be particularly valuable. Thank you for considering a gift in support of our work today!

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