The Ixcan Community
If a tree falls in the woods, and there's no one there to hear it, how will the Environmentalists react?
Unfortunately for the Santiago del Ixcan Community nobody has reacted and the trees kept on falling down, so As Green As It Gets™ decided to pay them a visit to find out why:
The Ixcan Community: A Brief History....
- The Ixcan community are a group of 250 families who were driven out of their homes by the army during the Guatemalan Civil War.
- They are located in Quiche on the edge of the Greater Peten Rainforest in Guatemala; an area that due to political boundaries remains largely ignored by Government protection initiatives.
- Originally subsistence farmers, they have minimal knowledge of how to farm the land so they have resorted to deforestation as a means for survival.
- They are a struggling indigenous community eager to rebuild their rainforest and pull themselves out of poverty.
Deforestation: The Unescapable Facts
- The community is unable to survive without burning down trees for agriculture, cutting them down for timber and consuming firewood.
- They have already lost half of their 2,400 hectares of rainforest.
- Their Slash and Burn farming techniques continue to destroy their habitat at a rate of over 100 hectares year.
They need your help If nothing is done now, most of the mature trees will be gone in 10 years, destroying the habitat of thousands of animals and leaving behind a poor indigenous community with no means of survival.
