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Sacred Spaces, Protected Places
The creation story of the Hualapai tribe tells of a great flood that swept across the desert. As the waters rose, one family placed their daughter in a hollow log and sealed it with pine pitch. The girl floated across this ancient sea and came to rest atop the peaks of San Francisco Mountain, the jagged remains of a massive volcano just north of Flagstaff, Arizona. Thereupon, she conceived two sons, the deities from which the tribe has descended.
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| Himalayan peaks above 14,000 feet are sacred to Buddhists and Hindus. Local communities are working with conservationists to protect these mountains. (photos.com) |
Five years ago, the Hualapai faced a second deluge. The Arizona Snowbowl ski resort has been in operation on the tallest of the peaks, Humphrey's, since 1938, and has been gradually expanding operations ever since. San Francisco Mountain is officially managed by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), and in 2002, the Snowbowl's owners applied to purchase approximately 150 million gallons of reclaimed wastewater from the Flagstaff sewage treatment plant each year, freeze it, and spray it on their ski runs. The Hualapai were not pleased. Nor were the 12 other Native American tribes who also consider the peaks sacred. They collect water from the region's creeks, harvest the mountain's medicinal plants, and conduct ceremonies on its slopes.
"The mountain can be seen on the horizon in the four sacred directions," says Robert Tohe, a Navajo who works for the Sierra Club. In the last year, he has visited San Francisco Mountain seven times, and he still remembers his first trip with his parents 50 years ago. "As you approach the mountain from any direction," he says, "you realize the power and the magnitude of the strength that emanates from it."
From its base in the Sonoran Desert, San Francisco Mountain rises up to 12,633 feet through the seven life zones first identified by naturalist Clinton Hart Merriam in the 1880s. As the barrel cacti and prickly pear thin, the valleys fill with ponderosa pine. Climbing higher, Merriam found Douglas fir, then bristlecone and spruce. The summit is alpine tundra—a small piece of the Arctic in the desert Southwest.
Tohe remembers Navajo elders taking up arms when a group of developers first proposed to expand Snowbowl on their sacred mountain in 1969. The developers wanted to turn the ski area into what the Sierra Club's Andy Bessler calls, "the next Aspen." In a devastating blow, the courts ruled against the tribes and in 1979, the USFS approved the construction of four new ski lifts, a paved road, a larger parking area, and a new ski lodge.
The region is not naturally suited to winter recreation. The first Spanish explorers had christened the peaks Sierra Sin Agua ("mountains without water"), and in the last several years snowfall has been marginal. Attempts to produce man-made snow were hampered by a dearth of groundwater, so the operators developed their wastewater plan.
This proposal was roundly endorsed in 2005 by the USFS, which saw no conflict with tribal beliefs or environmental concerns. Bessler, however, says there is growing evidence that chemical pollution in wastewater, ranging from caffeine to antibacterial soap, can have profound effects on wildlife. "These studies are ongoing," he says, "and a lot of this is really new science." He notes that reclaimed wastewater contains a class of chemicals called endocrine disrupters—primarily estrogen mimics—that disrupt the sexual development of animals ranging from amphibians to mammals.
Following the decision by the USFS, the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity joined forces with the tribes to challenge the proposal in court. In March of this year, three judges in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the snowmaking plan hindered the ability of Native Americans to practice their religion, a clear violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The tribes' attorney, Howard Shanker, said, "We've established a substantive basis for Native Americans to protect sacred sites."
But the battle has not ended. Shanker and the tribes are preparing for a possible rehearing, which was filed by the U.S. Department of Justice on behalf of the USFS on May 30 and would involve 15 judges from the Ninth Circuit Court. In a statement posted on the Arizona Snowbowl website, Eric Borowsky, a general partner at the resort, says he intends to take the matter all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, "to insure once and for all that radical groups who hold utter contempt for the public's rights will no longer be able to abuse the process to achieve their ultimate goal of control of our nation's resources."
Around the world, sacred lands that have been protected by indigenous peoples for centuries are under siege, and conservationists and anthropologists are developing strategies to protect them. Scientists estimate that 12 percent of the Earth's land surface is formally protected as national parks or other management areas. Yet in many countries, regulations are rarely enforced and local people who depend on natural resources from these areas will continue to do so. Most protected areas are located in places that provide few economic resources to local people—mountaintops, for example—while the biodiversity in fertile valleys has typically been supplanted for agriculture. Sacred sites offer an opportunity to preserve native biodiversity in these agricultural landscapes and other threatened regions with the cooperation of local people. Conservation biologist Shonil Bhagwat of the Natural History Museum in London says sacred sites are crucial because "they offer habitat to species where they would otherwise not be able to survive."
But conserving these sites poses a number of problems. Many of these lands are not widely publicized or documented, and some may even be kept secret. Indigenous peoples are often oppressed and ignored by their governments, which compromises their ability to maintain the integrity of their land. And as these people modernize and disperse, they lose their languages, cultures, and inevitably their ties to the landscape. In some cases, such as large-scale pilgrimages in sensitive areas or the commercialization of medicinal herbs, religious practices may inadvertently harm the landscape.
Wahi Kapu
Upon visiting the Tonga people in Polynesia in the late 18th century, British explorer Captain James Cook took note of their behavior. He found the islanders friendly, but they always refused his offers of food or a seat at his table. Cook wrote in his journal, "When any thing is forbidden to be eat, or made use of, they say, that it is taboo." The concept of taboo was broadly applied across Polynesia. In New Zealand, 1,200 miles to the south, Maori priests declared a fishery or forest tapu to protect it from overexploitation. Edwin Bernbaum, a climber and religious scholar, says that Hawaiian chiefs declared mountains like the Kilauea Volcano Wahi Kapu, a sacred place, to prevent the citizenry from incurring the wrath of Pele, the goddess of fire. The more imminent threat to those who violated a kapu was corporal punishment and, in some cases, death. To this day, the word kapu is placed on private property signs in Hawaii to ward off trespassers.
Bernbaum is the director of the Sacred Mountains Program at The Mountain Institute. He is a bearded man in his early 60s who has a casual way of speaking about a landscape he reveres. In the 1960s, he was a volunteer for the Peace Corps in Nepal. After his service, he joined an expedition to a peak in the rugged Annapurna Sanctuary; on the way in, the locals were grumbling about landslides, which they claimed were caused by Western women who were trekking in the sanctuary. Sure enough, during the hike, Bernbaum was caught in an avalanche, swept 1,000 feet down the face, and buried in snow. A month after recovering, he hiked to Kathmandu with a Buddhist monk, who opened Bernbaum's eyes to the traditional beliefs surrounding the mountains. These beliefs are part of a complex theology that also prohibits bringing meat and eggs into the sanctuary. While Himalayan valleys have been degraded significantly over thousands of years of human exploitation, reverence for sacred mountains has helped preserve their alpine ecosystems.
Working with Ang Rita Sherpa at The Mountain Institute, Bernbaum has consulted on the Sacred Sites Trail that follows a circular route passing through monasteries, caves, hermitages, and nunneries in Sagarmatha National Park, the gateway to Mount Everest. Beginning in 2003, Ang Rita designed the trail around existing routes and has been helping to restore and protect both man-made and natural sites along the way. The trekking boom around Everest has helped boost the local economy, but it has also degraded the region's fragile environment and weakened cultural traditions. Bernbaum thinks conservationists can only go so far with regulatory approaches, and they need to begin asking "What is the importance of these places in contemporary society, and how can people develop some understanding and appreciation so they don't negatively impact them?"
Throughout the Himalayas there is essentially a contour line at 14,000 feet, and everything above it is sacred to both Buddhists and Hindus. At these altitudes, trees are confined to moist canyons, and the densest vegetation is typically a lichen clinging to a cliff face. Creatures like the snow leopard (Uncia uncia) and the bharal, or blue sheep (Pseudois nayaur), still find refuge in these sacred mountains. Below this contour line lies a patchwork of sacred groves stretching from the Nepalese and Tibetan highlands through India.
The Mountain Institute has been working in this area with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on a larger project, the Sacred Himalayan Landscape, which aims to connect a mosaic of wild lands encompassing some 40,000 square kilometers (about 15,450 square miles), and to encourage sustainable management and local governance. Last September, with the support of the WWF, the Nepalese government turned over areas surrounding Kanchenjunga—the world's third-highest mountain—to a coalition of local communities.
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| Snow leopard. (photos.com) |
But from a scientific perspective, the question is whether cultural practices actually protect biodiversity. In Tibet, ethnobotanist Jan Salick of the Missouri Botanical Garden has found that sacred groves harbor greater biodiversity and unique species than other intact forest sites. For millennia, Sherpas have engaged in intelligent land-use practices to ensure a sustainable supply of firewood and construction materials, but their religious beliefs have afforded even greater protection to these sacred forests. "Every time a new household is formed," Salick says, "they go out and designate a tree or a sacred area. Every time a living Buddha comes through, or one of the high lamas, people will ask them to designate new sacred sites." With eight sacred mountains in the area in which she works, Salick says the region has remained remarkably pristine. "Although sacred sites do seem to be ideal conservation vehicles," she warns, "they have a much deeper meaning to people in the area, and we have to realize we're tapping into something more fundamental in their cosmology."
According to Bhagwat, between 100,000 and 150,000 sacred groves exist in India alone. "They can be as small as a backyard garden to as large as Central Park in New York," says Bhagwat, who works in the moist tropical forests of the Western Ghats, a long mountain chain in southwestern India. These groves go back a thousand years and, Bhagwat speculates,"People probably realized that unless they had batches of native forest they wouldn't have these birds and insects and biodiversity around them." He says that the groves represent a link to the spirit world, but they also provide habitat for medicinal herbs and plant species that are uncommon elsewhere.
It is not just the size of the groves that is important; their spatial distribution around the country allows them to act as unique reservoirs for threatened plants and wildlife throughout the country. In Kodagu Disrict, Bhagwat has documented threatened tree species in these groves that are not found in formally protected areas. In one grove, he remembers spotting the elusive Malabar trogon (Harpactes fasciatus), a cinnamon-colored bird with a throaty call. In the town of Madurai in southern India, Indian flying foxes(Pteropus giganteus)—which are hunted for their body fat—find respite in the ancient groves at four sacred sites. Although the total area of India's groves is small—0.01 percent of the country—they make up a system of wildlife corridors that will play an important role in the coming years as species' ranges shift due to climate change.
In some cases, sacred sites are not attractive to wildlife. Peter Leimgruber, a mammalogist at the Smithsonian's National Zoo, has been using satellites to track the movements of endangered Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) in the muddy jungle of Alaungdaw Kathapa National Park in Myanmar. The largest park in the country, Alaungdaw Kathapa is named after Maha Kathapa, a 13th-century Buddhist monk from India who traveled through the region and is credited as an early conservationist. On his pilgrimage back to India, Kathapa is said to have died in his sleep in a cave near a river. Soon after, the cave closed over him. In the dry season, when the river is low enough that it's possible to enter his shrine, some 30,000 pilgrims come to pay their respects.
"It's in the center of the park," says Leimgruber, and people come in bush taxis and buses. Some high officials arrive in helicopters. For almost two years starting in 2002, Leimgruber followed the movements of one elephant, Silver Moon, until the battery in her transmitter died. Silver Moon tended to avoid the edges of the park and the rough track that leads to the shrine. "Wild elephants will avoid areas with a lot of human activity," Leimgruber says.
The story has parallels in other parts of the world. A pilgrimage called Romeria del Rocío that takes place on the seventh Sunday after Easter brings hundreds of thousands of Catholic pilgrims to the Andalusian town of El Rocío by way of Doñana National Park, where they trample vegetation and leave trash in their wake. The Huichol people of Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental undertake a yearly pilgrimage down to Wirikuta, a 1,200-square-mile area in the Chihuahan Desert that is also a victim of its own popularity. With summer temperatures exceeding 100°F, Huichols say this desert is the land where the sun was born. Each year they hike several hundred miles to the site, which is in the state of San Luis Potosi, along ancient routes in order to eat sacred peyote cacti and communicate with their deities and ancestors. But because Wirikuta lies outside their homeland, the Huichol have little power in preserving the site or the ancestral paths that are now situated on a patchwork of private land. In recent years, cattle fences have gone up along the way and commercial collectors have decimated the region's diverse populations of cacti, threatening this tradition. In other parts of the world, particularly Tibet, sacred lands with medicinal and psychotropic plants are being exploited for the Chinese market and beyond.
Saving Grace
Although there are a number of isolated cases where religious practices indirectly harm biodiversity, no one interviewed for this story specifically blamed religious teachings. "Tribal culture," says Bessler, "has environmental protection as a core tenet." The real problem seems to be that indigenous peoples are losing their cultural connection to the landscapes.
Bhagwat says that the sacred groves in the Western Ghats are threatened by an influx of coffee workers and other immigrants who do not have the same values or traditions as the locals. Powerful plantation owners often allow these workers to make temporary shelters in sacred groves. In lean years, native trees may even be harvested by the owners themselves, only to be replaced by fast-growing exotics. Ownership of the groves is no longer in the hands of the local communities but the governments, which frequently have a hand in logging operations.
Adding to this problem is the fact that few sacred lands are officially protected. Salick says that families rarely share the location of their sacred groves for fear that a disgruntled neighbor may go and chop them down. "That destroys their personal family relationship with the universe," she says. Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior advisor at the World Conservation Union (IUCN), says that in Africa and Latin America, people have learned to conceal these sites, because of a long history of missionaries who destroy them in an attempt to eliminate idolatry and animism.
Even in the United States, land managers are not doing enough to identify and catalog the sacred sites of Native Americans, says Kieran Suckling, a policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona. "The agencies don't find out that these sacred sites exist until after they propose to destroy them," he says. "They spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year discovering and mapping minerals that are thousands of feet below ground. How hard would it be to find sacred sites above ground?"
Many conservationists think that the key to preserving the sites may be to empower the people themselves. Bernbaum mentioned a modest project at a temple in Badrinath, a holy Hindu town on the Indo-Chinese border. This site has a small pilgrimage tradition dating back to the ninth century C.E., but as road access improved following the Indo-Chinese War in 1962, the region began receiving half a million pilgrims each year. It is named for the once-plentiful walnut, or Badri, trees that have all but disappeared there. Since 1993, the Pant Institute for Himalayan Development has provided some 14,000 native seedlings, which the monks incorporated into a tree-planting ritual during the pilgrimage. The project has since ended, but it speaks of the power that cultural practices may have on the future of biodiversity conservation.
This approach may also help locals become involved in conservation outside of traditional sacred sites. In the Udaipur district in northwestern India—a region known for its lakes and rivers—the forest department had grown frustrated with local people flouting regulations it had in place to conserve a patch of forest. It turned out that local people had their own way of protecting forests, a system that relied not on governmental regulation, but on a small bowl of saffron-laced water. When the forest managers adopted this system, termed kesar chirkav, by sprinkling saffron around the forest, villagers began to respect the boundaries of the newly protected forest.
Perhaps the most ambitious effort was announced in March by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The new initiative, Conservation of Biodiversity Rich Sacred Natural Sites, will fund the preservation of sacred sites around the globe with the help of conservation organizations and indigenous peoples groups. Gonzalo Oviedo is leading the project for the IUCN and has received requests for support from the people of the Boloma-Bilagos archipelago of Africa's Guinea-Bissau, the pilgrims at Mexico's Wirikuta, and the inhabitants of Kodagu District of India. "The elders who normally manage the sites," he says, "worry that transmission of those values might be lost." Many of these groups are just requesting help in marking their groves, but others need assistance improving regulation and training young people. "Of course, we know the younger generation is not going to be the same as the elders," he says, but many are still concerned about protecting these areas from destruction and developing sustainable ways to use their lands.
Oviedo says one successful example of a multipronged approach is the Vilcanota Spiritual Park in southern Peru. The Q'eros people live in this diverse montane landscape high in the Andes, and for ages prohibited hunting and agriculture in the part of their land they used for traditional ceremonies. Unfortunately, these practices eroded as the people were confined to a smaller indigenous reservation, and as they shifted from subsistence agriculture to growing commercial produce. Oviedo says the Asociación Kechua Aymara para Comunidades Sustentables is working with UNEP to help the Q'eros combine modern agricultural practices with their traditional land use so that they will be able to survive in a market economy without degrading their landscape.
And soon, the Huichol will not have to worry about the future of Wirikuta. Oviedo says the organization Conservación Humana recently succeeded in doubling the size of the cultural reserve set aside by the state government of San Luis Potosi. The group is also installing gates in cattle fences along the pilgrimage route leading back to the Huichol homeland in the Sierra Madre Occidental. Oviedo expects parts of Wirikuta to be revegetated to prevent erosion, and it should also be fenced to keep livestock out of sensitive areas. He also says that the Huichol are interested in developing controlled ecotourism in parts of the park, which will help fund its management.
There is some indication that these strategies are already working. The sacred groves of Kodagu had been receiving some support prior to the announcement of the UNEP initiative, and Bhagwat says these small efforts have made a big difference. "I went to Kodagu last December," he says. "I visited some of the…sites where I had done sampling before. It seems that nothing much had changed in terms of the sacred grove itself. I also noticed fences around some groves that local temples had erected. That was their way of saying 'we value our groves and want them to be recognized.'"
—Brendan Borrell is a science writer based in Brooklyn, New York.
ZooGoer 36(5) 2007. Copyright 2007 Friends of the National Zoo.
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