Today I had a very “Peace Corps” experience, and I want to share it. Two of the neighborhood kids that we’re buddies with (Chalio and Alberto) came up to me this morning and said they were going to go shepherding, and would I like to go with them. As they know, I like that sort of thing, so I said OK and we were off. After about 10 minutes of walking in the countryside without sheep, I started to get suspicious. Turns out, they ACTUALLY were assigned by their grandma to take a lunch to Nas Palas, our good friend who also happens to be their grandfather. The kids didn’t figure I’d go with them for such a mundane task. They were wrong.
We finally came across Nas Palas, working in a field near the next village, a field that I had seen before but never realized was his. Many of the Mayan farmers have small fields scattered across the valley, in no sensible order, as a result of generations of complex inheritances and subdivisions. When he saw us, he stopped what he was doing and we sat down together. The kids passed off their cargo of lunch, and began playing in the dirt with some toy cars they also brought with them. Thus, I was blessed with the accidental opportunity to talk to Nas Palas about life.
He’s a friendly, ralaxed guy but he spends a lot of time watching what goes on around him, and he applies a critical eye to what he sees. Besides his selfless community involvement, which I’ve talked about a few times before, he’s also a farmer. Farmers today tend to have a stereotype of being dumb guys that stick plants into dirt, but that’s not usually the case. They are very connected with the earth, and oftentimes have the pulse of the planet. They watch the shifting weather, note which crops thrive in each location, and try to make the soil more fertile for the next season.
He explained that they plant different types of corn seeds in different fields, depending on the altitude. The white corn is very tall, so it only gets planted in the valley where the high winds won’t knock it down. Yellow corn goes in at higher altitudes, and there is a special variety that produces less but grows denser in the humid north-facing slopes that get less sun. All of this specialized, unrecorded knowledge has been collected and tested over generations, and serves the Mayans well. Then he started to talk about climate.
“Something in the mother earth has changed,” he said. “Twenty years ago, those of us with fields farther down the hill were able to grow a lot of corn on small acreage. Those unfortunate enough to be at higher altitude, like Cerro Maltin, had fields considered ‘poor’ because they only produced one or two stalks per mound.” He took another bite from his tortilla. “Now, the fields here produce only a fraction of what they once did, and those higher up give great harvests like we used to get.”
He seemed to throw that out, to see if I had anything to add. He knows I am not an agronomist, I am an architect and health educator, but he is also acutely aware that Emily and I have more years of education between the two of us than our entire village put together. Turns out, I actually DID have some information for him. I learned in pilot school that the standard lapse rate for temperature by altiutude is 2 degrees Celsuis per thousand feet of altitude gained. Therefore, a cornfieldfield on a thousand-foot mountain would experience the same temperatures as that in the valley did, if the planet got hotter by 2 degrees. And the one in the valley would then be too hot by 2 degrees.
“The world has a problem that is not visible from here,” I said. “In the first world, we have factories and cars that put a lot of chemicals in the air. These chemicals change the environment, and over the course of many years, cause the whole planet to get a little warmer. This might not seem so bad, except that many types of plants and animals are sensitive to even small temperature changes.” He understood that last bit; this can be readily seen in the different varieties of corn they plant all over the valley. “This problem has been growing for 50 years, and is getting worse.”
“What can we do about it?” he asked. I was touched by his sincerity mixed with naïvety.
“Well, the world’s scientists agree, for the most part, that we need to make factory owners reduce their poison emissions,” I answered. “But it’s tricky to enforce, because businessmen and countries that make a lot of money from these factories don’t want to change. They don’t look to the future, they only see their own pocketbooks.”
He nodded sadly, having experienced similar shortsightedness in his own village. Some people build latrines next to the river, and don’t care who downstream gets cholera. Or they don’t believe their latrine caused it, or they don’t think it’s their responsibility to pay to build a better latrine. Our global warming problem is the same thing, on a larger scale. To the Mayan farmer, it’s plain to see that climate change is REAL. They might not understand why or how, but they know it’s there… and they can see where it will lead if unchecked. So why can’t we? The shame is, we as “Powerful Well-Educated White People from an Industrialized Nation” often forget that those closer to the earth might still have stuff to teach us, if we can let go of our pride and listen.