On a sweaty October day in a dense, vine-laden forest near the town of Noh-Bec, Mexico, in the Yucatán Peninsula, a dozen American and Mexican conservation scientists bounce in the back of a truck headed down a narrow, rutted track of red mud. After a bone-jarring hour, the road widens. Teams of men haul logs from the forest and saw them into pieces, which they will later saw into lumber or carve into Popsicle sticks, feeding slash into furnaces to make charcoal.
The truck stops, and the scientists climb down and file into a small, sunny clearing. Noh-Bec forester Pascual Blanco Reyes, the tour leader, shows the scientists some of the forest’s most pampered residents: stick-thin, 3-foot-tall mahogany saplings. Reyes and his colleagues planted them after cutting mahogany trees nearly 2 feet in diameter. Each year for the next five years, forest workers will return to check on their young trees and remove competing species, Reyes tells the group, even though the slow-growing mahoganies won’t be large enough to cut for timber for another 75 years. Until then, the valuable trees will provide habitat for forest-dwelling animals and seed for the future forest.
Peter Ellis, a forest carbon scientist with the U.S.-based environmental nonprofit The Nature Conservancy (TNC), is impressed to see foresters caring for trees that only their grandchildren will profit from. “They’re really investing in the future here,” he says.
