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Temples and Trees

"Nature-Culture Conservation" in the Maya Forest

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA — March 24, 2008 — Culture and conservation meet in the Maya Forest, a 6-million-acre region covering parts of Mexico, Guatemala and Belize where jaguars and howler monkeys roam in a forest dotted with the ruins of an ancient civilization.

“We’re working in a landscape with a very strong cultural component, where the sacred places of the indigenous people overlap with areas of high biological diversity,” said Marie-Claire Paiz, Southern Mexico Program Director for The Nature Conservancy.

Ms. Paiz will visit Pennsylvania in April as part of Penn Museum’s Maya Weekend, one of the largest and oldest meetings in the United States devoted to Maya studies. She is the keynote speaker for the opening day of Maya Weekend (April 11) and she will be available for media interviews before the event.

“It’s a forest where nature and people have been historically connected and where the future of both is inexorably intertwined,” Ms. Paiz said.

Her work for the Conservancy in Southern Mexico includes overseeing conservation work in the Maya Forest, along the Mexican Caribbean coast and in Chiapas. In that role, she works closely with the descendants of the Maya people whose advanced civilization once ruled this region of the world. The Nature Conservancy is connecting tropical forest and coastal protection with conservation of the cultural environment including archeological preservation and efforts to sustain modern Maya cultural traditions.

The Maya Forest is the second-largest contiguous tract of tropical forest in the Americas (only the Amazon is larger). It includes the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, where the Conservancy and partners recently protected 370,000 acres in a historic public-private collaboration to purchase critically threatened lands. Building on this success, the Conservancy and partners are seeking to purchase and permanently protect an additional 210,000 acres in the neighboring Balam Ku State Reserve.

The Maya Forest includes numerous archeological sites of the ancient Maya civilization, as well as jaguars, howler monkeys and more than 400 species of birds – including numerous migratory bird species that spend their summers in Pennsylvania and over-winter in the Maya Forest.

Marie-Claire Paiz is a graduate of Universidad del Valle in Guatemala and has a Master‘s Degree from the Forestry and Environmental Studies School at Yale University. A Guatemalan native, Ms. Paiz previously worked for Defensores de la Naturaleza, one of Guatemala’s leading conservation organizations.

Maya Weekend: The Nature Conservancy is collaborating this year in Penn Museum’s annual Maya Weekend. The weekend combines illustrated talks by more than a dozen world renowned scholars with engaging films, interactive hieroglyphic workshops and an optional Maya banquet.

Photographs are available, including Maya Forest landscapes and individual species.

The Nature Conservancy is a leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at www.nature.org.