Image: It’s just before noon on a Saturday in the forest shared by the San Juan Totolapan ejido, or communal farming village, in central Mexico. Not a single bird can be heard in the forest, at least for the moment. What can be heard now, however, are the sounds of chainsaws and machetes as they cut into tree branches, and people shouting to each other. But here, these sounds don’t signal illegal logging activity underway. No one’s destroying the forest here. In fact, quite the opposite is happening. About 30 ejido members, or ejidatarios, along with their children and grandchildren, spend much of their weekend doing what they call faena, or various tasks to benefit their forest and the community. On this particular day, they’re pruning the trees. “We prune them so that they grow straighter and faster, and so that the trunk thickens,” says Gregorio Martínez Sandoval, an ejidatario who is also the head of the surveillance brigade for the community forest in San Juan Totolapan in the municipality of Tepetlaoxtoc de Hidalgo, in the state of México. Read More: Full Article
