The cardón cactus, endemic to Baja California, is one of the most massive and ubiquitous cacti on the planet. Huge groves of multi-limbed old timers that witnessed the arrival of the first Europeans over five centuries ago can still be seen the length of the peninsula, and single young upstarts that haven’t even sent up their first arm yet crowd the desert landscape. What accounts for such rampant success? In a word, bats. Now of course there are many factors that help the cardón survive – isolation, summer rains, water retaining skeletons – but none of this would matter if it wasn’t for the bat, because the cardón is a cactus that deigns to open its flowers for pollination only as the sun is setting, a time when the kings of the PM pollination scene are emerging from their caves ravenous for their first meal of the night. That’s right, bats.
But not just any bat. Researchers have known for years about the role of the lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae) in cardon pollination. In fact, when a young graduate student named Winifred Frick arrived in Baja in 2004 to work on her dissertation in bat ecology, the lesser long-nosed bat was considered the only cardón pollinator game in town. Says Frick, “The lesser long-nosed bat is highly specialized for nectar-feeding. It can hover at an open cardón flower and use its
Lesser long-nosed bat. Photo by Rick Jackson.
long tongue to extract nectar, transferring pollen from one flower to the next in the process.” Clean, precise, targeted. Evolution at its most elegant. “So I was really surprised to see this other desert bat, the pallid bat (Antrozous pallidus), regularly visiting cardón flowers. The pallid bat has a short face, long ears and loves to eat scorpions off the ground. At first I thought maybe it was visiting the bat-adapted flowers of the cardon to opportunistically glean insects attracted to the flowers. But as we observed it over 2005-2007, we realized that the pallid bat was actually indulging in cardón flower nectar. Apparently it likes a little something sweet to wash down savory scorpion meals. However, unlike the lesser long-nosed bat, the pallid bat doesn’t hover but dives onto the whole flower, caking its whole body in pollen.” A cardón pollinator usurper?
Frick, now Dr. Frick of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was doing her dissertation on “the relationship between the size and isolation of (Baja) islands and bat species richness in a near-shore archipelago …” so didn’t follow up on her pallid bat observations at the time. But she didn’t forget the pollen-laden pallids, and a few years later teamed up with some of her UC Santa Cruz colleagues to study bats and cardón pollination in more depth, resulting in game-changing research that was published in American Naturalist in 2012 (Frick is the lead author of the study conducted with her colleagues Ryan Price, Paul Heady and Kathleen Kay). For the study, which was funded in part by the National Geographic Society and UC MEXUS, Frick and her team monitored cardón flowers at several sites in southern Baja. When they saw a bat visit a flower they would identify which of the two cardón-nectar-loving rivals it was, then retrieve the stigma of the flower to determine how many grains of pollen the bat had deposited. They also recorded the total number of flower visits by each of the two species at each study site. Turns out, pollination’s not just for the long-nosed crowd.
Pallid Bat on Cardon Flower. Photo by Merlin Tuttle. http://merlintuttle.org
“The results blew us away. The lesser long-nosed bat has an ancient cardón-pollinating lineage that has been co-evolving with the cardón flower for a very long time. We were therefore very surprised to see that the newby, the pallid bat, is a far more effective pollinator, delivering about 8 times as much pollen per visit. We observed several factors that account for this. One is that the pallid bat rests its body on the flower and plunges its whole head into the flower to get at the nectar. It therefore gets far more pollen on its body than the hovering lesser long-nosed bat, who is using its tongue only to access nectar. So this new pollinator is actually better than the more specialized pollinator because it is not well-adapted to nectar feeding. (The pallid is the only nectar feeder from an insect-feeding family, Vespertilionidae). Its stats are also helped by the fact that the lesser long-nosed bat uses pollen as a source of protein, so therefore regularly eats the pollen off its fur, reducing the amount available for pollination. Finally, the lesser long-nosed bat is migratory while the pallid bat is a year-round Baja resident, a fact that makes the pallid bat especially important to the cardón.”
The cardón. Amazing record of longevity and survival. How has it done that? It has been scientifically shown that plants respond to stimuli such as sound and touch. Some wounded plants produce a chemical that acts as an alarm signal, prompting nearby plants to produce chemicals that help them defend themselves against insects – or attract insect predators. Venus fly traps just eat the interlopers. So is it possible that the cardón has sensed that it’s a hair risky to continue entrusting its future solely to an endangered, migratory, picky eater like the lesser long-nosed bat? Has it therefore made its flower scent / nectar taste so enticing that even – or perhaps especially – a scorpion-loving, insect-grubbing, and – until recently – flower-snubbing permanent Baja resident like the pallid bat would literally plunge in head first to its rescue? Says Frick’s co-author Kathleen Kay, “What is actually happening in terms of how species are mutually interacting can be more complicated than what meets the eye.” Wily cardón. Lucky bats.
Pallid bat photo by Merlin Tuttle. http://merlintuttle.org
Photographer Merlin Tuttle
MerlinTuttle decided to devote the remainder of his career to bat conservation in 1982 “as an act of desperation. It was obvious that without major improvement in public attitudes, the situation for bats would continue to worsen.” Battered by centuries of harmful myths and misinformation, bats were despised and casually slaughtered around the world. Merlin has made education – correcting those myths and teaching the economic and ecosystem benefits of bats – a major part of his work. Distressed that most bat photographs showed roughly handled bats snarling in self-defense,Merlin taught himself photography. He became a world-class wildlife photographer whose images have appeared in books and magazines around the world and played a crucial part in his education efforts. To view his amazing photographs and contribute to his bat conservation efforts, please visit http://merlintuttle.org/.
If famed aviator Charles Lindbergh had not fallen in love with the daughter of the US Ambassador to Mexico, the story of Isla Espiritu Santo might be just another sad tale of extraordinary natural beauty undone. But the courtship of his future wife in Mexico instilled in Lindbergh a lasting affection for the country. So when in 1973 his friend and fellow conservationist George Lindsey invited him on a scientific exploration of the Sea of Cortez, Lindbergh jumped at the chance. The two men and their scientific team wended their way through numerous islands between Bahia de Los Angeles and La Paz, ultimately arriving at Espiritu Santo. Lindbergh was enthralled. The islands made such an enormous impression on him that during a trip to Mexico City a few months later, Lindbergh requested a meeting with the president of Mexico to discuss protecting what he now considered one of the most beautiful areas on the planet, the Sea of Cortez. Four years later the Mexican government issued a decree establishing 898 islands of the Sea of Cortez a Flora and Fauna Protection Area (Zona de Reserva Natural y Refugio de Aves Migratorias y de la Fauna Silvestre). George Lindsey, then the Director of the San Diego Natural History Museum, strongly believes that Lindbergh’s intervention helped to create the governmental awareness needed to get the decree enacted. It was a good beginning.
Espiritu Santo photo by Cabo Rockwell
Around the same time as Lindbergh’s transformational trip to Baja, a former Grand Canyon river guide named Tim Means was setting up the first major ecotourism company in La Paz, Baja Expeditions. Means’ business thrived as word of Baja’s remarkable flora and fauna spread, and demand grew for access to the natural wonders that the area’s remote location had kept pristine long after the west coast of the US had been heavily developed. But conservation-minded eco adventurers were not the only ones attracted to the area, and by the 1990s the pressure on Isla Espiritu Santo was intense: a real estate developer wanted to create a resort casino on the island. From the outside it seemed absurd that a casino had even the remotest possibility of being approved in a natural protected area, but Mexico’s traditionally lax approach to conservation enforcement afforded the developer optimism.
Espiritu Santo photo by Craig Ligibel
While most of the islands in the Sea of Cortez were federal lands, a few were privately owned, and Espiritu Santo was owned by an ejido. Ejidos, created as part of Mexico’s land reform movement after the Revolution of 1910, are rural collectives of people who own property communally. Traditionally ejidos were not allowed to sell their property, but the constitutional obstructions to ejido land sales were removed in 1992, and the ejido owners of Espiritu Santo lost little time in taking advantage of this new freedom. By 1997 they had sub-divided 90 hectares around Bonanza Beach into 36 lots and were selling them off. Cabins were actually constructed on some of the lots, but in a move that would have made Lindbergh proud, a federal judge deemed them illegal under the 1978 decree and they were torn down. But the real estate developer who owned some of the properties was pushing hard on his casino proposal. Tim Means was prepared to push back.
Means started his onslaught by personally buying two properties smack in the middle of the developer’s proposed casino area. This immediately diminished the attractiveness of the project for the developer, and inclined him towards negotiation. Means then enlisted the aid of leading Mexican businessmen in the area, who retained and paid for the law firm that was ultimately able to arrange the buy out the developer and all but one of the remaining properties for sale on Bonanza Beach. This all took a great deal of time and maneuvering, but Means and his team persevered. All the properties they bought were donated to the federal government.
Espiritu Santo photo by Carlos Gajon
When the immediate threat of the casino was neutralized, Means and a coalition of conservationists were able to put together a deal to purchase the rest of the island, which they bought from the ejido for US$3.3 million. Their subsequent donation of Espiritu Santo to the nation is commemorated by a famous sculpture of a dove on the malecon in La Paz.
The purchase structure that resulted in Espiritu Santo’s conservation in perpetuity demonstrates the power of collaboration among a diverse group of constituents when fighting to preserve wilderness areas: about one third of the money came from Mexican funders, another third from American funders via the Nature Conservancy, and the rest through an anonymous gift to the World Wildlife Fund. The David and Lucille Packard Foundation then donated US$1.5 million towards the future management of Espiritu Santo. This type of international cooperation set the stage for future and ongoing battles against mega-developments elsewhere in Baja California Sur. As a direct result of Means’ successful activism, Espiritu Santo and 244 other islands in the Sea of Cortez were subsequently named a World Heritage Site in 2005.
But none of this would have happened without the will of the Mexican people. As a result of colonial rule, the Mexican citizenry traditionally felt they had no voice in government, so agitation for change was not a big feature of public life. But in the 1970s this started to change, most notably in the environmental arena, and Mexicans began to create organizations committed to protecting the country’s immense natural resources. This process lead to the creation of the Secretaria de Desarollo Urbano y Ecologia (Secretary of Urban Development and Ecology) in 1983, and in 1987 the general law of ecology and natural resources. One of the early successes of all this effort was the 1988 declaration of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in the states of Mexico and Michoacan.
Worthy of Protection. Photo by Carlos Gajon.
The people of Mexico in general, and of Baja California Sur in particular, are now intently focused on protecting their natural heritage. In Baja California Sur residents have banded together in recent years to defeat mega-developments in Balandra Bay, El Mogote and Cabo Pulmo, using the reach and resources of both local and international NGOs to aid their cause (See our blog post Conserving the Beauty of Baja). Public outrage and grassroots campaigning have stymied the efforts of companies seeking to operate open-pit gold mining companies in the Sierra de la Laguna Mountains. Like Lindbergh and his nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic, they are succeeding against considerable odds. Like Tim Means and his environmental coalitions, they are hunkered down and ready for the long haul. As the great conservationist Teddy Roosevelt once said, “Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.” The protection of Isla Espiritu Santo and the islands of the Sea of Cortez wrought by Tim Means and his coalition will speak to the world for generations to come.
Sources: Two excellent books and Tim Means provided the source material for this article. The books are Isla Espiritu Santo: Evolución, rescate y conservación by Exequiel Ezcurra, Harumi Fujita, Enrique Hambleton and Rodolfo Garrio; and Wildlands Philanthropy: The Great American Tradition with essays by Tom Butler and photographs by Antonio Vizcaino.
Todos Santos Eco Adventures operates a tent camp on Isla Espiritu Santo from which visitors can explore the wild natural beauty of the island and the Sea of Cortez.
Why do we care about Espiritu Santo and other areas of Mexico?
There are over 200 countries in the world today but only 12 of them can claim to be “mega-diverse”. A country is considered mega-diverse if it has between 60% and 70% of the total biodiversity of the planet, and Mexico is one of only 3 such countries with coastlines on both the Atlantic and Pacific (the United States and Colombia are the other two). Mexican government sources indicate that Mexico’s global ranks for biodiversity are as follows:
Reptiles: #2
Mammals: #3
Amphibians: #5
Vascular plants: #5
Birds: #8
That’s something worth bragging about – and protecting!
When you arrive at Areli Sarah Castillo’s house in Pescadero on a late summer afternoon, the look and feel of the front of her house is very similar to that of her neighbors: there’s a teenage boy working on his truck in beat to the radio’s tunes; two young girls are playing with dolls on the sofa under a well-placed beach umbrella; and several dogs are enjoying afternoon napping bliss in various poses. There’s nothing to suggest that the Castillo family is at the forefront of a movement to change the eating and health patterns of a town – until you go around back. There you find the riot of green and rampant plant life that is the greenhouse built by Areli and her children, and from which they feed the twelve people who now call their house home. Beautiful long vines of tomatoes, steamy-looking chiles, delightfully prickly pineapples, all manner of herbs and spices, all lovingly cared for in a space next to the chicken coop where the happy, well-cared for hens oblige the family with at least 15 eggs a day. All healthy, all organic, all the time. It’s not really what you’d expect from a woman who used to sell hotdogs for a living.
Greenhouse Greats of Pescadero
Areli is one of 18 women in the Sistemas Naturales y Desarrollo AC (SINADES) greenhouse program in Pescadero run by Inés Melchor Pantoja, with assistance from her husband, Julio César Rivas García. Inés and Julio, with a grant from Fondo Acción Solidaria AC, or Fasol* , started a community center about five years ago where their first program was teaching the children of Pescadero in accordance with the SINADES motto, “Educar para conservar” – Educate to preserve. Here kids were able to learn about composting, recycling, healthy eating, and growing things. The kids loved the program so much (seriously, we’re playing in dirt here – what’s not to love?) that they wanted to get their parents involved, so Inés and Julio started a pilot program for women in the community called Conscious Cooking. It has transformed the lives of the women and their families.
Like many Mexican towns across the country, Pescadero is plagued by health problems associated with poor diets. Manuela Tapis, one of the participants in the Conscious Cooking program, has lived in Pescadero for 40 years. She says that many of her neighbors in town suffer from diabetes, severe allergies, gastritis and other chronic health issues. Pescadero is not alone. Mexican government statistics indicate that 71% of the entire Mexican population is either obese (32%) or overweight (39%). That’s over 48 million Mexicans walking around in plus sizes. According to journalist Olaya Astudillo writing in The Lancet, a leading medical journal, one of the key culprits in this rise in obesity in Mexico is the global trend away from traditional diets towards highly processed foods. More specifically writes Astudillo, “Cost is highly influential for when a family with limited income has to make decisions about the home diet. They will spend their money on the food that contains more calories for lower prices. But the food might not necessarily be more nutritious, of best nutritious quality, nor contribute to a more adequate diet than other products with less calories.”
Clarisa
The Conscious Cooking program aims to change all that by making healthy foods affordable, desirable and an integral part of family life. And it was the desire to procure organic, pesticide-free produce at a reasonable price that drove SINADES and the women of the Conscious Cooking program to start building greenhouses. As Margarita Vasquez, one of the women in the group explains, “The older people in Pescadero used to grow their own food, but we lost all those skills. Now with SINADES and the greenhouse project we’re recovering those values. Through this program we’ve learned how to make our own organic fertilizer by composting, we’ve learned about watering our plants using gray waters from the house for irrigation, we’ve learned great skills like how to make nutritious snacks by drying fruit in the sun and so much more. We have learned such an incredible amount here about how to have healthy food at a low cost, and the impact on our personal health and that of our families has been remarkable.” Janette Albañez, who has lived in Pescadero for 25 years agrees. “Health, health, health is what this program means for me. I used to have chronic asthma and ate very poorly. Now my asthma has cleared up and even my junk-food guzzling husband loves eating raw vegetables.”
Ines Melchor Pantoja
Janette got involved when she saw one of her neighbors building a greenhouse, and this is the type of knock-on effect that the SINADES program is having in Pescadero. As more people see the health benefits that their friends and neighbors are achieving, the more that are interested in learning the skills to achieve similar results for themselves. And even more than for themselves, they are motivated on behalf of their children. Angeles Caballero, mother to two children ages 3 and 7, really speaks for all the women involved when she says “I started this program because of my kids. I’ve only been in Pescadero 10 years and was so surprised to see all the young children here that already have diabetes. I was motivated to save my children from this fate, but now my kids are even more motivated than me. Their friends think it’s weird that they’ll have tomatoes with salt instead of potato chips, but they don’t care. My kids love working in the garden and love this program. It is wonderful for us as a family.”
Areli couldn’t agree more. “My children are actually even more excited about the greenhouse than I am. They love coming out here and working every day. They love that we no longer buy any canned food, and they love how much better they feel with so much less junk food in their diet. These are benefits that you just can’t put a price on.”
But there is a price of course, and the 4,000 pesos (~US$285) required to build a greenhouse is a fairly high barrier to entry for many of these families, a barrier that they must surmount once again as Hurricane Odile (September 2014) destroyed every one of the greenhouses built by the women and children of SINADES in Pescadero. But they are not discouraged. Says Inés, “We recovered some of the material from the greenhouses and received a small donation to buy more mesh, so we are slowly coming back around. Some of the families are already in production again and everyone is continuing to move forward. It’s a strong community and we will rebound.”
Before the hurricane, there were signs around the Pescadero community center that read “Cue da-temba, nuestra casa”. Cue da-temba means Mother Earth in the language of the Guaycura Indians, the now extinct indigenous people of Baja California Sur. And of course nuestra casa is Spanish for “our home”. The goal of Inés, Julio and the women and children of SINADES is to create a sustainable and healthy lifestyle for the families in their community. Helping them to do that is really just enlightened self interest because, after all, “Cue da-temba, nuestra casa” applies to us all. Inés can be reached at and the SINADES Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/SinadesAc.
*Fasol, headed by the dynamic Artemisa Castro and a group of likeminded environmental activists, provides financial support to grassroots groups that are working for social and environmental change in Mexico. SINADES is a great example of the type of success they have achieved in communities across Mexico. For more information please visit their web site at: http://fasol-ac.org/fasol_wp_ing/
If science had all the answers, poets and dreamers would be out of a job. So when scientists tell us that they’re not really sure why humpback males sing – and it is only the males that sing – then it’s up to the rest of us to look at the evidence and help science along. And here’s what the evidence shows us. Like traditional mariachis, all-male college a capela groups, and the Rat Pack, humpback whales in Baja clearly understand that singing, particularly with the harmonious help of your mates, is the best way to get the girl. Now some scientists theorize that humpback males are singing only as a type of echolocation exercise of the type used by their dolphin cousins, a way to map out the world around them. This certainly
Humpback Happiness. Photo by Erika Peterman
may be true – because how else are they going to find the girls? But that really doesn’t explain why some humpback whale songs are several hours long and, according to the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, grammatically complex and loaded with information. Like a ballad. Or why sexually immature young males join their virile older brothers in song. Like frat boys with their pledges beneath a sorority girl’s window. Or why all the males in one region will congregate in an arena and sing the same song. Like a boy-band in an outdoor stadium. Or why a male escorting a female and her calf will sing. Like a lullaby. These are all great mysteries that the poets are currently best equipped to ponder, but they don’t begin to touch on the greatest mystery of all – how does the female humpback decide which singer is worthy of her affections? Science presently has no answer, but maybe this is why Elvis always sang alone.
When the fireman tossed the first baby to her at about 1:00 AM, Karina was dizzy with fear that she would drop the little girl. She didn’t. By the time the fireman tossed the third baby to her she was confident in her skill, had an assembly line set up with hand offs to Lorena and Julio, and had the whole situation managed so brilliantly that by 10:00 AM 150 people who had lost all or part of their homes in the fury of Hurricane Odile were safe, dry and having breakfast in the Casa del Estudiante del Todos Santos.
Jayna Schweitzer of the Palapa Society with her neighbors
Why on earth would a fireman toss a baby? Down the road in Pescadero Lalo and Pili were finding out. Pili is a pretty big guy, topping the scales at 250 pounds. Lalo is a little scrawnier, weighing in at 180. The 430 pounds of them were holding onto the inside beams of their roof with their hands, trying to keep it from blowing away. They succeeded for two hours before a particularly violent gust lifted the roof – with the two of them still attached – several feet off the ground. At that point they decided not to make the trip to Oz and let go. And that’s why the fireman had to toss the children: the wind was blowing so violently through the door that Karina could not propel herself forward the two meters to take them, and the fireman had to anchor himself at the entrance or risk not being able to get back out to help others. Category 3? Category 4? Doesn’t really matter. When it’s blowing hard enough to take your roof, your home and your child’s safety, it’s blowing hard enough.
Todos Santos, Todos Juntos
Before Hurricane Odile hit on September 14 and forever changed the storyline of Baja California, the communities of Todos Santos, Pescadero and other BCS towns were already coming together to fight a manmade force with the potential for devastation far beyond anything a single hurricane could unleash – an open pit gold mine in the Sierra de la Laguna mountains. The local and foreign communities had united at huge rallies and protests across the state, and even staged a multi-day vigil to prevent the mine from illegally drilling in connection with its planned desalination plant. A feeling of unity and empowerment permeated the air, and when that air was dramatically rent by Hurricane Odile, it only strengthened the feeling of community. No one was going to back down from a fight for home.
Serena Saltzman of the Palapa Society helping her neighbors
Karina, the administrator of the Casa del Estudiante del Todos Santos – or albergue as it is commonly known – was one of the first to witness that fighting spirit on a significant scale. She’d never met Marisol, the manager at Casa Tota in her life. But when she called her to ask for help, Marisol didn’t hesitate and delivered food for 150 people in just a few hours. The grocery stores Supermercado El Sol and Guluarte’s, the restaurants Landi’s and El Zaguan – all made sure that Karina and the rest of the albergue staff could feed the people in their care in those first few critical days, even as they were struggling with their own properties. Gabriela Guluarte sent along clothing for those who had lost everything, and Kappner from Tres Santos came with boxes of much needed personal items like shampoo, deodorant, underwear and baby food. Karina and Lorena spent 17 days working around the clock at the albergue, often with 150 sleeping under their roof and up to 200 mouths to feed at any given meal. Not only did no one miss a meal, but many others were sent home with “dispensas”, or care packages with several days worth of essential food items.
But the damage was extensive and the needs were great and a surfer named Justin Lindholm who spends his winters in Pescadaro was among the first to grasp that significant funds were going to be needed to advance the recovery. “Pescadero and its people are beautiful and have made a huge impact on my life. People say hi to you on the streets, really listen to you when you’re talking, and remember stories you might have told. They live day-to-day and worry little about the future. I admire that. Starting a fund for Pescadero was something I knew had to be done. I spent the fall and winter months of 2005 with the clean up effort after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. I saw what a hurricane is capable of and how helpless people are even in a powerful country like the US. I knew the people of Pescadero were going to need help to get back to normal.” Odile hit on September 14 and on September 15 Justin opened a GoFundMe account to raise money for hurricane relief in Pescadero. $6,000 was raised in the first few days alone, and people in desperate need of work were soon being paid fair wages to help clean the town and restore order.
In Todos Santos The Palapa Society – a nonprofit whose mission is to help educate the children of the town – had an emergency meeting on September 20 to discuss what they could do to help the community. The meeting was over at 10:30 AM, and by noon they had set up a GoFundMe account to raise money for hurricane relief for Todos Santos. By 2:00 PM board members Oscar and Tori were with Karina at City Club in La Paz, where she was using the $1,000 advanced by Palapa to great effect. And by 9:00 AM on September 23 when the next meeting started, over $30,000 had already been raised. Before long people were getting new roofs, remote ranch families were receiving food, and people in need of work were getting it. Outside the venerable old Todos Santos Inn a hand written sign appeared, Todos Santos, Todos Juntos.
Viva México!
The sight of Mexican troops crossing the US border to help Americans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina discombobulated many US citizens (“poor” Mexicans helping “rich” Americans?), but disaster relief is actually a core competency of the Mexican military. Todos Santos woke up to Odile’s handiwork on Monday, on Tuesday Army and Navy troops were in the neighborhoods handing out emergency food and water, and on Wednesday they were also handing out sleeping pads, clearing debris from the streets and parks, and helping to ensure that the looters from Cabo didn’t make their way into town.
But in a democracy, military action is just an expression of political will, and on Thursday a helicopter carrying Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto flew over town. Skeptical gringos likened this to W’s infamous flyover of New Orleans after Katrina and rolled their eyes. But this helicopter landed, Peña Nieto got out, and he went and met with Karina and Lorena at the albergue. He toured the town, he made a speech, he made promises and he left. By Friday morning the military was helping with the cooking chores at the albergue, and on Saturday 120 workers and dozens of trucks from CFE – the Comisión Federal de Electricidad – arrived to begin restoring electricity to town. Not only did they work around the clock to get the town running again, they stayed in hotels and B&Bs across town and paid for the service. Todos Santos is a town fuelled largely by tourism, and it is hard to know if people were more grateful for the restored electricity, or for the income provided at a time when repair costs were soaring, employee needs were escalating, and cash flow was crashing in the wave of cancellations that wiped out reservations for September, October and even some of November. The town swelled with gratitude for CFE, and the skim boarders started returning to Playa La Poza to enjoy the late summer afternoons.
God Bless Rock ‘N Roll
One of the reasons that it’s not the end of the world as we know it is that Peter Buck loves Todos Santos. The lead guitarist of REM bought a house in town, and started the Todos Santos Music Festival in 2012 to raise money for the Palapa Society; he believes in and wants to further its mission of serving the educational and health needs of the children of Todos Santos. So when Odile struck, Peter and the music festival immediately fronted the Palapa Society $10,000 from ticket sales for the 2015 event to help with the rebuilding efforts in town. Said Peter, “We will donate all of the profits from the 2015 festival to help people in Todos Santos reconstruct their lives, homes and businesses.We also hope that the festival’s return in January will serve as a symbol of Todos Santos’ resilience and ability to bounce back from this terrible tragedy.”
Peter Buck and his friends have shown Baja that insanely talented and successful rock stars can also set the gold standard for generosity, so perhaps the area was not that surprised to learn that one of Mexico’s most-loved rock bands, Maná, was also pitching in to help in the aftermath of Odile. Maná’s nonprofit, Fundación Ecologica Selva Negra, working with the large Mexican corporation Verde Valle and the regional director of WildCoast, arrived at the port of La Paz on October 5 with 15 tons of rice, lentils, beans and other food basics. In Todos Santos 20 families in one of the hardest hit areas, Nuevo San Juan, directly received food from Selva Negra. They made sure that 50 families in their neighborhood benefitted from the bounty. Out at Cerritos, live music started flowing again.
The Beatles Got it Right
Oscar, Benny and their crew at a neighbor’s house working on the roof
When the communities of Todos Santos and Pescadero asked for help, the world answered. Americans, Canadians, Europeans. People for whom these communities are seemingly just vacation destinations reached deep, found their inner rock stars, and gave. They made their friends give. They held fundraisers in their communities and they showered social media with notes of support. As of this writing the fund for Justin’s hurricane relief effort for Pescadero stands at about $15,000, and the fund for the Palapa Society’s hurricane relief effort for Todos Santos is over $80,000. And they’re getting things done.
In Pescadero, Alec, April, Bridget and Hesed held a community meeting at Baja Beans, and 150 people showed up to see how they could help their neighbors. Sam, Ronnie, Epi, Mario and Ana Maria formed cleanup teams with the local teenagers, who have been competing to see who can clear the most debris. In Todos Santos, the Palapa Society hired two contractors, Oscar and Bennie, who are coordinating the work of 3 teams to put new roofs on homes. Over 150 houses have received new roofs so far, and the work is not slowing down. They’ve created two designs for simple wooden homes for the families who lost everything, and hope to have those under construction soon.
These stories are just the tip of the iceberg, and scarcely begin to convey the enormity of the effort underway to restore the shelter, food, work and normal life ripped away by Odile. It is impossible to relate the countless acts of kindness, generosity, selflessness, humor and grace that saw our communities through the immediate aftermath of the storm, and continue to rebuild it all these weeks later. Robert Hall, the town dharma dude and defacto non-religious spiritual leader, says that The Beatles had it right all along. “All you need is love. Odile was so powerful that it was able to tear the fabric of our lives, but the healing is love. Love is what makes it possible when we barely have the saliva to swallow these big bites of reality. Love is all you need.” Just off shore, the humpbacks returned for the winter, singing their sweet Baja serenades.
We’re Not Distracted
Water = Life. Businesses of Todos Santos Against Toxic Mining
It was about 2:00 AM when the French doors in Wendy’s bedroom started banging so violently that she had to throw her body weight against them to try and keep the storm out of her house. As the doors heaved and she pushed, a side length of her nightgown swept between the two doors, which then promptly slammed shut. She was pinned against the frame, completely unable to move. At first she was gripped by panic, but then she started to laugh. Because really, a tiny woman fighting a huge storm being trapped by her nightie is kind of funny. And while she waited for the rhythm of the storm to shift so she could retrieve the trapped material, she thought about all the wonderful water the storm was bringing, and how it needed to be protected from the lethal chemicals connected to the gold mine. She thought about the next steps the citizens of Baja California plan to take to protect our water and our lives. Because really, a tiny woman fighting a huge corporation as part of a determined community is pretty serious indeed. It’s a force of nature. Love is all you need.
Jamie Sechrist, Tori Sepulveda, Serena Saltzman, Erick Ochoa, Alec and April Tidey, Ana Maria Peters, Sam Sitkin, Ronnie Barkas, Ivo Mondragen all contributed to this story.
Get involved!
If you would like to contribute to the continued reconstruction of homes and lives in Todos Santos and Pescadero please donate to the following funds (and don’t be shy about getting your friends to contribute too!):
When you arrive at Areli Sarah Castillo’s house in Pescadero on a late summer afternoon, the look and feel of the front of her house is very similar to that of her neighbors: there’s a teenage boy working on his truck in beat to the radio’s tunes; two young girls are playing with dolls on the sofa under a well-placed beach umbrella; and several dogs are enjoying afternoon napping bliss in various poses. There’s nothing to suggest that the Castillo family is at the forefront of a movement to change the eating and health patterns of a town – until you go around back. There you find the riot of green and rampant plant life that is the greenhouse built by Areli and her children, and from which they feed the twelve people who now call their house home. Beautiful long vines of tomatoes, steamy-looking chiles, delightfully prickly pineapples, all manner of herbs and spices, all lovingly cared for in a space next to the chicken coop where the happy, well-cared for hens oblige the family with at least 15 eggs a day. All healthy, all organic, all the time. It’s not really what you’d expect from a woman who used to sell hotdogs for a living.
But there is a price of course, and the 4,000 pesos (~US$285) required to build a greenhouse is a fairly high barrier to entry for many of these families, a barrier that they must surmount once again as Hurricane Odile (September 2014) destroyed every one of the greenhouses built by the women and children of SINADES in Pescadero. But they are not discouraged. Says Inés, “We recovered some of the material from the greenhouses and received a small donation to buy more mesh, so we are slowly coming back around. Some of the families are already in production again and everyone is continuing to move forward. It’s a strong community and we will rebound.”
home”. The goal of Inés, Julio and the women and children of SINADES is to create a sustainable and healthy lifestyle for the families in their community. Helping them to do that is really just enlightened self interest because, after all, “Cue da-temba, nuestra casa” applies to us all. Inés can be reached at 
