The Cascading Canopy Reserve
Why create the Cascading Canopy Reserve?
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El Triunfo National Park, at the top of the Sierra Madre Mountains on the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, very close to Guatemala, is one of the most biodiverse areas of Mexico and the world. It is home to 22% of all vertebrates found in Mexico, despite being just 0.0012% of Mexico's total territory! Despite El Triunfo's designation as a national park, it is mostly its extreme geography that keeps it from human harm. The authorities provide minimal to no protection of its mostly unmarked borders. The human population in the surrounding areas is relatively low, yet people clear-cut the forest for crops and cattle and plant shade coffee and cacao under the forest canopy. Almost all of the nonavian wildlife in these areas and adjacent forest areas is hunted out. In this way the human population is slowly moving up the steep mountain slopes, reducing the wild areas and decimating the animal population in the national park. The creation of the Cascading Canopy Reserve in one of the main access valleys will help protect the national park on the steep slope above it by 1. creating better-paying jobs for locals which would simultaneously reduce the need for subsistence farming and ranching. 2. creating an economy that gives more value to the animals alive than in the dinner pot and that makes the trees more valuable standing than cut. 3. protect the national park by creating a privately owned barrier that can only be crossed with permission and that can be patrolled to enforce this controlled access. The Cascading Canopy Reserve will also provide a safe haven for wild animals allowing them to repopulate not only within the 100-hectare reserve but in the thousands of hectares in the national park behind and to the sides of the reserve. Currently, there is no place where any copious amount of wildlife can be observed anywhere in the Soconusco region along the Pacific coast of Chiapas, a 100-mile stretch between Oaxaca and Guatemala. This is despite the fact that the entire Pacific Coast ecosystem was home to spider and howler monkeys, tapirs, coatimundis, white-tail deer, jaguars, ocelots, anteaters, military and scarlet macaws, and many other species. The flatlands along the coast have rich topsoil and plentiful water but have been cleared for agriculture and ranching and are nearly devoid of wildlife except for iguanas, squirrels, opossums, and raccoons. The Cascading Canopy Reserve creates at least one safe haven for flora and fauna on the Pacific Coast of Chiapas for people to interact with the natural heritage that was once plentiful along the entire coast, but that is now only found in remote, inaccessible areas that are endangered.
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