Good Hosts and Good Visitors
Baja California Sur
If only they could talk. The giant cardón, or elephant cactus (Pachycereus pringlei) dominates the dusty landscape of the Sonora desert. Monumental in scale compared to all other flora they tower above their neighbours containing, perhaps better than any other species, the secret to life in Baja California Sur.
In the arid desert conditions these immense cacti serve as reservoirs of water, wisdom and nutrients, providing food, shelter and guidance for a large array of wildlife.
Edging upwards at a painfully slow rate of 1 cm to 5 cm a year, the worldʼs largest cactus needs more than three centuries to reach heights of up to 20 m.
Each of its arms can take up to 75 years to become fully formed, weighing upwards of two tonnes, storing over a ton of water in the fleshy, pulp-like tissues of its trunk sustaining their own life and that of many others.
Birds, lizards, insects, butterflies and bats interact with these magnificent desert life centers. And not to forget the symbiotic relationship the cactus has developed with bacteria that enable it to grow in the most inhospitable places by fixing nitrogen from the air and breaking down rocks to produce nutrients from which it can grow.
As one of the keystone species for Baja California Sur, the cardón not only helps bind the desert ecosystem together, they hold much of the wisdom of the place.
“The cardón is like the grandmother of the desert,ˮ says Carolina Fernandez-Jansink co-founder of the regenerative agency, Dear Wise Earth. “Itʼs there to support many forms of life, sharing its wisdom with its surroundings by constantly informing other species of how to live in harmony with one another.While there are thousands of different cactus species in Baja California Sur, itʼshard to imagine life in the desert without the cardón.ˮ
Much can be read into its harmonious, matriarchal relationship with other species. In particular its ability, as the host with the most, to draw clear boundaries with other endemic species and the migrating visitors that pass through Baja California Sur in search of a temporary respite from changing conditions elsewhere. Bats and birds migrate south each year in search of food and a seasonal sanctuary where they can repeat once more the cycle of life by mating and giving birth to the next generation.
In its formative years, the alkaloids the cactus produces and its spines act as a dual deterrent to herbivores and other species from feasting on its flesh. It is only after they have matured for 50 years that they flower and offer something more than shade to their neighbours and hungry visitors.
Between April and June, its beautiful, pinkish-white flowers open providing nectar, pollen, fruits and seeds as a primary food source for more than 60 faunal groups.
An important food source for the indigenous people of Baja California Sur, such as the now extinct Pericúes, Cochimíes, and Guaycuras, as well as for the current Seri people of Sonora, the fruit has spurred on life in the desert for millennia.
Flowering at night until the midday heat, these desert flowers attract bats and other migrating species looking for sustenance on their way north on their annual migration. Other non-migratory species feed on the fruit also.
One of the most important relationships it has is with nectar-feeding mammals like the lesser long-nosed bat Leptonycteris yerbabuenae).
Migratory species, too, create conditions conducive to Life. None of the cardónʼs undisputedly measured generosity would be possible without the delicate, interconnected dance between migratory species and their sedentary hosts.
Migrations are a type of behaviour of a species, where they present a movement and temporary habitat relocation to ensure the survival of a large part of the group. Migrations are triggered by the deterioration of the habitat in which the migratory species resides, such as snowfall and low temperatures, creating conditions that the species is unable to withstand, so the adaptive strategy is no longer to survive in the place, but to move from the place.
The annual visits of thousands of individuals of a species can have a significant impact on the ecosystem that hosts them. The close relationship of an ecosystem and its cycles with the populations of species that visit them are key to the co-creation of life.
Directly, migrations create life by allowing organisms to find the ideal conditions to fulfil their cycles indifferent stages of their life (development, mating, and reproduction).
The cardónʼs close companion, the lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae) is a good example.
It heads south when temperatures plunge in its natural habitat in North America, seeking refuge and nourishment in southern Mexico. Every year it completes a 1,600 km round trip. On its journey it helps create the conditions needed for the cycle to repeat itself.
Its symbiotic encounter with the cardón aids the cactiʼs reproduction by pollinating the flowers and transporting seeds. Helped by other migrating birds, cardón seeds are distributed throughout the desert where they find refuge in the roots and branches of other host plants to repeat their own 300 hundred year-cycle of life.
And with this, the cardón itself migrates slowly across the bioregion providing more conditions conducive to life and supporting future generations in the same delicate dance of nature. Migrating species, upon arriving at these destinations where they only spend a season of their life and sometimes will end their life while the new generations will travel back, always contribute to the
The intricate cycles that weave their way through the landscape to create the conditions conducive to life are almost invisible to the human eye, but each species has these unwritten rules imbued in their very existence. It is what has resulted in their success through the years.
Interconnectedness, reciprocity and a deep, almost implicit understanding of the limits of any place govern these relationships.
“The only way for the good visitor to know if they are being good visitors is because the host was able to explain what is expected from them,ˮ says Fernandez-Jansink.
ˮSo the one that knows how the context works and how the land works and how to best nourish the land, respect, honor, nourish and listen is the host. The role of the visitor is to listen to the host, and the role of the host is to inform, invite and help the visitor fall in love with the land. To know and understand it better. That is the order we cannot expect good visitors to always be good visitors, but they become good visitors when they have good hosts.ˮ
There are examples when good visitors can become good hosts, helping to pass on wisdom from their own place. Something like this appears to be happening in Baja California Sur where the pallid bat Antrozous pallidus), a native with a short face and long ears that eats scorpions off the ground has started to feed from the fruit of the cardón cactus like the lesser long-nosed bat which feeds only on nectar. Botanists believe that this unique phenomena (the pallid bat is the only bat of its kind which eats both insects and nectar) has supercharged the pollination of the cardón.
Even though the pallid bat feeds less frequently from the fruit, because it as it is far less adapted to doing so it increases the transfer of pollen from plant to plant by a factor of eight. As the migration patterns of the lesser long-nosed bat shift, the cardón has thus successfully become more resilient by working with its new local partner.
“Visitors that are good hosts in their own land can teach hosts that are new to the land to nativize better, to listen to their own land, its cycles and flows better. Listen, observe and attune to how Life of the Place creates more Life, more conditions conducive to Life,ˮ says Fernandez-Jansink.
In Baja California Sur, the migratory species play a culturally and economically relevant role, in the specific case of visiting species in Baja California Sur, they represent the livelihood of a large part of the population as well as its identity.
While the plants and animals of the bioregion, have always understood the need to find balance and to seek a mutual respect for life in the peninsula as the ongoing existence of their species depends on it, human migration in the last fifty years (the time it takes for one cardón to flower for the first time) has had a very different effect on the regionʼs delicate ecosystems.
While millions of birds, bats and butterflies pass harmoniously through the desert each year and many more aquatic species explore the oceans to find food and safety in the bays of Baja California Sur,there are and have been other, more stressful migrations taking place on the peninsula.
Humans, like their non-human counterparts have gravitated to Baja California Sur attracted by the relative peace of the desert landscape.
In many cases they come fleeing deteriorating conditions in other parts of Mexico, fleeing violence in search of safer conditions for their families. In other instances they arrive fleeing the cold of the winter further north, in search of sun, sea and relaxation, a friendly place to seek food, shelter, protection and mates.
Perhaps the first significant challenge to thousands of years of harmonious life cycles in Baja California was the first wave of migration by Spanish inhabitants in the 18th century. The arrival of the Jesuits with plans to colonize the peninsula marked the start of a new human relationship with the land, and a clear shift from a nomadic hunter-gatherer form of co-existence towards the dominant western culture built around agriculture and the nomadic pastoralism of other desert regions in Spain and the MiddleEast.
With it went 13,000 years of wisdom of harmonious human co-existence with the landscape. The establishment of Jesuit settlements and the creation of oases with the intention of supporting human life in the desert, had a devastating impact on the original inhabitants of Baja California Sur leading to the elimination of their cultures in the space of a century.
According to La Paz-based anthropologist and historian, Micheline Cariño.
“The arrival of the Jesuits was devastating for the Pericú, Cochimí, and Guaycura indigenous groups, completely destroying their previous way of life because wandering around the mountains, from the perspective of Western culture, is completely backward. They (the Jesuits) do not perceive it as an ancient culture that also has a highly intelligent capacity for environmental wisdom because it is highly adapted to a region like this. “In the Western vision, it is backwards. You know, the Neanderthals, the cave era and God taught us to live from the sweat of our work, etc., etc. So all the ideology and the way of Western life, then the construction of the oases, seen from the perspective of Western culture, yes, it is a positive transformation because it allows the sedentary establishment of the population, but seen from the perspective of the natives, it was to completely destroy their way of life.ˮ
The strain placed on the landscape in the last 50 years has been even more profound. The human population of Baja California Sur has ballooned from 128,019 in 1970 to 798,447 people in 2020.
The arrival of so many new inhabitants in such a relatively short space of time has placed enormous strain on the systems that support life in the bioregion. In particular, on the hydraulic systems which are showing signs of reaching their limits. Due to the lack of permanent rivers, water is mainly obtained from underground sources. Currently, the amount of water extracted is equivalent to what is recharged, indicating that there is no more availability of groundwater. Out of the 39 aquifers in Baja California Sur, 10 present saline intrusion and18 are overexploited; that is, extraction exceeds recharge.
Feeding the rapid increase in residents is the ongoing expansion of tourism in the region. More than 3 million tourists visit Baja California Sur every year escaping the cold winter months in the United States to play golf in the sun. Unfortunately humans are the only migrating species that leave behind toxicity when we migrate, which is to say its waste is not purely organic matter recycled into other systems.
“Thinking of this region as a host, the first feeling I had was of abundance and extravagance and just so much,ˮ says Anne McEnany, program manager atAlumbra Innovations Foundation, a systems change investment fund that is investing in conservation projects in Baja California Sur. “But when you really dig below the surface, there's really a scarcity, there's a scarcity of water. And when you overuse something, there's also more scarcity. It doesn't come back as quickly because of the harsh conditions here. The high temperatures, the amount of use that some of these landscapes receive. So I think one of the things that a good host can bring is just to recognize that there are limits to what this landscape can absorb in terms of impact and to be respectful and listen to the land.ˮ
The arrival each year of more and more visitors places an even greater responsibility on hosts to inform new arrivals of what is and isnʼt expected of them. If only the cardón cactus could share its experience or we could speak with the original inhabitants who better understood the natural limits of the place and lived accordingly.
With the extinction of the Pericúes, Cochimíes, and Guaycuras, the last direct link to this ancient wisdom of Baja California Sur lies in the cattle ranchers who have managed, to an extent, to maintain a direct connection to the land stretching back to the last century. It is an aspect of Baja California Surʼs culture that Alumbra is focused on preserving.
ˮOne of the things that we've worked on in the past two years has been restoration of the landscape,ˮ says McEnany. “The really surprising thing to me is that most people don't know what this place used to look like. There's not a lot of recognition of what was here even 25 or 50 years ago, much less 200 or300 years ago or a thousand years ago. A million very limited touch points. And some people are moving through a lot of the communities that are on the outskirts of La Paz and in Los Cabos that are comprised of the migrant labor that are working in the fields they're moving through, they're not staying here.Tourists, I would treat them the same. They're coming here and they're leaving.They're using resources, but they're not adding much. And in terms of informing themselves, which I think would be what a good visitor is, is being careful about how you're using the resources and understanding the place where you are, and not making assumptions about what this place can absorb.ˮ
A guide for good visitors arriving in a new place is to tread carefully. Like walking in the desert barefoot, you soon become hyper attuned to the presence of cacti and other species underfoot.
“We see this happening when an indigenous wise person from a bioregion visits and teaches newcomers to a different bioregion from her own ‘know-howʼ,ˮsays Fernandez-Jansink. “In the case of human species and travellers, learning to attune is the best way to contribute, otherwise visitors will tend to bring their own value system everywhere they go.ˮ
Ethologists have for years dedicated themselves to listening to the landscape, talking with nature “in its own languageˮ, observing species to discover the nature of things and the reasons for their behaviour. Becoming better listeners to the landscape lies at the heart of our speciesʼ extended future on planet earth.
“A good visitor is not going to be a good visitor if what they bring to the place is something that is going to stop or harm any of the existing cycles. The other important part is really becoming aware of the cycles they're getting into as a visitor,ˮ says Fernandez-Jansink. ˮMigratory species don't harm or interrupt any of those cycles that are already existing in the host space, because they know that if they harm them, then they will probably not be able to come back to those spaces so it's in their interest to keep them healthy in the first place.ˮ
A better analysis of the limits of the landscape is the first step towards becoming better hosts, better equipped to inform visitors of what is and isnʼt possible in the territory, according to Cariño.
“It invites us to, first and foremost, see the place, to understand the place. One of the elements of the wisdom of this place is that we need a small, dispersed population. That's how the original inhabitants lived, that's how the ranchers lived, that's how people lived until the 1950s, and people lived very well. The territory is not designed to have large or populated cities, there is not enough water, and the burden we have on the ecosystems is too great. They are very fragile, very vulnerable, they are not made for that. Another wisdom of the place is to take care of our coasts without construction,ˮ she says.
Learning from the different roles taken on by the cardón cactus and the lesser long-nosed bat and applying them to the human condition is simple, according to Felipe Fernandez, founder of Co-Plataforma, a group of companies that are investing in systems change in Baja California Sur and beyond.
“Being a good host and a good visitor are one and the same thing,ˮ he says.“This is about being a better individual, in the larger sense of the concept. It's about being self aware and aware of the world of others. It's about having a series of skills that make you a conscious traveler or a conscious being that lives within the territory one is visiting or someone else.ˮ
How keystone species define the healthy limits of an ecosystem
Listening to the landscape, learning from nature
