Tomas Lugo stands before a small memorial to Maria de Ramirez. Plastic flowers are carefully entwined around the cross of the miniature chapel, which marks the site where Maria died with her baby daughter in her arms while fleeing the 1911 drought. Over the decades, villagers from Piedra Honda have placed stones beside the monument, a tribute to the dead and a prayer for the living. A Venezuelan version of the Dust Bowl, the tragedy on the Paraguana peninsula lasted two years, during which time over half of the estimated twenty-six thousand residents either fled or perished.
The disaster was not entirely a natural one. Centuries of settlement, deforestation, and extensive goat herding had reduced the peninsula's life-giving watershed, exacerbating the drought's impact. Small villages like Piedra Honda have never fully recovered their predrought population and vitality. In fact, the overall population of the area continues to decline. Feral goats still roam this arid land, promoting still further ecological destruction.
For eighty-four-year-old Alberto Revilla, the impact of the drought is more than local legend, it is a vivid memory. A survivor of the drought, he recalls that "we had no choice, either we moved to the mainland or we died." He eventually returned to live on the Paraguana peninsula, and he knows the importance of its watershed today. But Senor Revilla is also part of the pastoral economy that contributes to the peninsula's continuing vulnerability.
Today, both Alberto Revilla and Tomas Lugo support a new Venezuelan environmental organization called BIOMA, a private conservation group founded in 1986 by tropical biologist Aldemaro Romero, one of many groups currently emerging in defense of South America's threatened lands and peoples. The organization is working to preserve the Paraguana's last remaining swatch of forest while helping the local communities better manage their environment. Alberto Revilla believes in the project and hopes that "the vegetation of the area will be saved for my children, and my children's children." Tomas Lugo is a local resident hired as a ranger for BIOMA's preserve in his home village of Piedra Honda. He has a personal stake in preserving the environment.
Life other pastoralists, the residents of the Paraguana are trapped by their dependence upon extensive livestock grazing. This, along with centuries of environmental neglect, have combined to weaken their source of livelihood and their environment. The story of the Paraguana is an all-too-familiar conflict between peasant communities, the pressures for economic survival, and the problems of environmental degradation. Something usually gives - the traditional life-style, the environment, or both. Conventional wisdom has it that peasants and conservation do not mix, but BIOMA's hands-on approach has made a difference to the people and the place.
The windswept Paraguana peninsula is anchored to the Venezuelan coast by a slender dune-covered isthmus and looks more like Sahelian Africa than our image of South America's Caribbean shores. This exposed and dusty land, with its thorny shrubs and towering cardon cactus, contains some of the oldest archaeological sites on the South American continent, suggesting an ancient homeland that was once more bountiful. Naturally subject to drought, the peninsula's problems were exacerbated by Spanish settlement in the sixteenth century and the introduction of goats,
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