Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountain range and the land around it has experienced heavy deforestation, and many of its endemic species are threatened with extinction due to habitat loss.

The Wiwa use traditional conservation and cultural practices to manage forests, and believe it is their purpose to act as environmental stewards.

For around 20 years, local communities like the Wiwa have been buying up land around Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Natural National Park, aided by The Nature Conservancy.

Satellite data indicate this may be helping prevent deforestation, with less tree cover loss within the Indigenous territory than outside of it.

Driving towards Wiwa territory, the dusty roads of Colombia’s desert region start to change. The view outside goes from dust bowl to tropical grassland to forest. The trees get taller and the land more verdant as, slowly, you climb the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

The Wiwa have called this mountain range – which stretches from the snow-capped peaks to the shores of the Caribbean – home for centuries. Although chunks of their territory have been lost over the years to colonizers, marijuana plantations or encroaching farmland, the indigenous reserve that they share stretches for 400,000 hectares, twice the size of the island of Mauritius.

This is a region celebrated for its biodiversity, containing two national parks (the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and Tayrona), and two indigenous reserves whose boundaries overlap with those of the parks and which are home to four different indigenous communities, one of whom is the Wiwa.

As soon as you leave the road you see dozens of small yellow butterflies and are hit by the sounds of the forest: the birdsong and the wind rustling through the trees. For an outsider, this place is beautiful. For the Wiwa, sacred.

“As part of the Sierra we share the responsibility for conservation and equilibrium between man and nature. We are the interlocutors. For nature, for the animals,” says Edinson Videl Daza, a member of the Wiwa community and a spokesman for the environment. “We see the earth as our mother. Our father, the sea. The rivers and streams are living. The animals are our younger brothers,” he says.

In many ways, the Sierra Nevada has lucked out with the Wiwa, a people who see their very purpose as conservators of the forest around them and repairers of the damage humans do elsewhere. Here there are no big hotels, no large dams, no intensive mining projects.

Edinson pulls out a hand-drawn map. On the Wiwa side, the land is green, the forest untouched, with monkeys in the trees. On the other, beyond Wiwa territitory, he has marked the deforested zones in brown, and labeled them as “dead.” It is not subtle, but it highlights his point.

“We need to work now. The damage that you see here we could see in the Sierra Nevada. We need to look after the little that is left. If tomorrow there were no people like us it could happen.”

A destructive past

Today we are in one of the newer Wiwa camps in the foothills of the Sierra, an area where farmers and the indigenous communities live side by side. We are sitting on stones under one of the bigger trees, but even in the shade the heat makes the sweat trickle down the back of your legs.

“This was campesino [farmed] land before: it was very dry, infertile. Pure straw. You could not grow yucca,” says Antonio Pinto, one of the Wiwa leaders. Behind him the mountains rise up into the distance, here at the camp there are a few straw huts and areas planted with new saplings.

“There was a lot of disorder here, in the basin. They grew marijuana, they grew a lot of illicit crops. They left a lot of plastic. This has an affect on the earth, physically and corporally,” he says. “We have been working here, starting to improve it so it will cultivate.”

A man of the mountains, Pinto has straight black hair that falls over the white shirt he and his people wear to show that they are a community of peace. He is on his way back up to the Sierra, and is pausing here, in one of their sacred sites, to purify himself before he goes home.

As we talk, he sits “popporeando,” using a yellow gourd he holds in his hand to mix coca leaves with a ground seashell substance. It’s mildly stimulating, like taking a sip of coffee, but also ceremonial for the Wiwa. With the leaves held in one cheek, he talks slowly from the side of his mouth as he tries to explain what these mountains, this forest, means to them.

“All this land was indigenous,” he says, looking over his shoulder at the territory around him, explaining how Wiwa land once stretched from the sea to the border with Venezuela. At the edges of their territory, they see the soil overworked, the trees cut down, the water mismanaged.

In La Guajira, a desert province that has suffered from years of drought, the Sierra Nevada provides the lifeblood of the region: water. But even here, on the edge of Wiwa territory, there is evidence of deforestation and, in places, the rivers run dry.

“They took so much water the river is dry in some parts,” says Pinto, explaining how the Wiwa believe that when the land has been mistreated, the water “hides.” “In the water, how many types of animals are there? And those you can’t see? And if the fish die?”

Trending deforestation

Deforestation is a huge issue in Colombia. While some 52 percent of the country is covered in natural forest, according to Ideam, the governmental environment institute, unauthorized mining, drug cultivation, illegal felling and the expansion of farmlands have led to serious deforestation in recent years.

According to satellite data from the University of Maryland and visualized on the forest monitoring platform Global Forest Watch, Colombia lost around 2.8 million hectares – more than 3 percent – of its tree cover between 2001 and 2014. In other words, an area of forest bigger than the U.S. state of Massachusetts was cleared in 14 years. The government has made a series of commitments to reduce human impact on the nation’s forest (including a promise to cut net deforestation in the Amazon to zero by 2020), and while last year the rate fell compared to 2014’s figures, the country still lost around 124,000 hectares of forest – an area three times the size of the second-largest city, Medellin.

The Sierra Nevada straddles three of Colombia’s northern departments – Magdalena, Cesar and La Guajira – which are experiencing even higher rates of deforestation than the country as a whole. Together, the three departments lost nearly 8 percent of their tree cover from 2001 through 2014.

Referred to by scientists as one of the world’s most irreplaceable nature reserves, the Sierra Nevada provides habitat for a plethora of wildlife – many of which are endemic, meaning they’re found nowhere else in the world. The Alliance for Zero Extinction (AZE) lists 12 known species that are both endemic and endangered, including the Santa Marta parakeet (Pyrrhura viridicata), the unicolored oldfield mouse (Thomasomys monochromes), and several kinds of frogs. Even while most of their range is protected by Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Natural National Park, these 12 species are all declining due to habitat loss, according to the IUCN.

Research indicates that only 15 percent of the original vegetation in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta remained as of 2000, largely due to deforestation activities before it was designated an official protected area. And while the park has experienced far less recent forest loss than surrounding areas, it still lost around 1 percent of its tree cover between 2001 and 2014. The Wiwa believe they’re best equipped help protect what’s left – and they’re not the only ones who think so.

Collaboration

The tribes in this area, who trace their ancestry back to the ancient Tayrona civilization, which existed until the 1600s, were never completely colonized by the Spanish. For generations, they considered their isolation to be their greatest strength, but over the years a creeping agricultural frontier has had an impact on their communities, as has illegal land grabbing.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in recent years was Colombia’s civil war. First came the “marijuana bonanza” at the end of the 1970s, when the Farc and other armed illegal groups forced many community members off their land. Then came the killings. Some of the community fled to the cities, others higher up the Sierra.

But a look at a map of the indigenous reserve reveals that it is growing once again. One small parcel at a time, the Wiwa and other indigenous groups have been reclaiming their ancestral lands, buying back farmland from areas they lost generations ago and slowly restoring it to how it was.

“[The indigenous communities] have a vision,” explains Eduardo Ariza, from American NGO The Nature Conservancy (TNC). “All their culture is about conservation. The strategy is to recover their traditional territory, which they believe is marked by the ‘black line’ [an invisible line that marks the outer reaches of the Sierra where there are sacred areas important to the communities]. To that end, they spend nearly all the money that they receive. While it’s not feasible that they will recover all of this territory, they are moving in that direction, with the support of the government and other NGOs.”

This kind of solution isn’t unique to TNC and Sierra Nevada. A 2014 report by the World Resources Institute found that forests managed by local communities and indigenous groups tended to be better protected than land managed by governments or private entities. The researchers found deforestation rates at indigenous reserves in the Colombian Amazon were more than 90 percent lower than in the region as a whole.

TNC has purchased 5,241 hectares of the Sierra over the last 20 years under programs that transferred ownership from cattle and crop farmers to the Arhuaco, Kogui y Kankuamo tribes. The indigenous communities had to keep 70 percent of the land for conservation, while the remaining 30 percent could be used for traditional uses. The result? An analysis the organization carried out two years after the sales found that tree coverage was increasing in the former agricultural areas, and that the land was being inhabited by indigenous families from the higher reaches of the mountains that tend to have a more positive impact on the mountain’s ecosystems than do other communities.

In 2012 the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) bought a slice of land called Jaba Tañiwashkaka, a sacred site that would give the Kogi community access to the sea. So far, the ACT says, the results are promising: the territory is being restored, local waters are decontaminating, vegetation is rebounding and trash-filled lakes are being restored “to beautiful freshwater lagoons.”

Two years ago the Arhuaco tribe bought a 736 hectare plot, according to government figures, while the Wiwa recently bought four plots totaling 202 hectares. Their plan? “To buy more. Without territory there’s nothing to talk about, there’s nowhere to sew,” says Pinto. “Without any land, what can you do?”

But where farmers might talk of yields, or corporations of profits, the Wiwa have a different relationship with the land they live on. On this plot where we are sat today, for example, they are planting mango trees but also allowing other areas to recover. They might catch iguana to eat, but feel they cannot take too much of the forest, or from it, else they will be destroying its natural equilibrium. Community needs are managed within the framework of their belief system: that their ancestral lands are sacred, and that the health of this mountain range has an impact on the entire earth.

A commitment to conservation

Pinto takes out a handful of stones from his pocket. Some are blood red, others crystal clear. Smooth and polished, each represents something different: the see-through quartz the water that they find underground, another stone the energy the animals and fauna need so they can grow.

“The earth has all these minerals. Some are cold, some are warm,” Pinto explains. The Wiwa’s is a mystical interpretation of the merits of conservation, and also of the causes and effects of climate change. But while their belief system is more spiritual, less scientific, their interpretation explains in remarkably similar terms how man’s impact on nature can cause damage to the world around us. Mining for carbon, he explains, creates “hot air,” which in turn warms the world and prevents the rains.

High up in the Sierra Nevada, the snow is retreating and Wiwa elders are concerned.

“For the gringos, the mining is money, but mining strangles the flora, the fauna. They go taking out petrol, but when you take it out it’s like leaving a body without blood,” Pinto says. “As indigenous people of the Sierra we are here to help the fauna and flora, not to no plunder what is under the earth; the gold, the copper, or all the animals that are in the mountains.

“Humans have a liver, heart, kidneys. With the earth, it has carbon inside. Taking it is like taking out the liver. In time you see, it starts to dry out. If we find gold, we can’t take it out or sell it. It’s like the soul of our mother.”

Edinson puts their mission another way. “We are caring not just for the Sierra Nevada, but the world. The Sierra Nevada is the lungs, we are the heart. It can’t be a mistake that we were born in the Sierra Nevada and grew up there. Why were we born there? It was because we had orders to look after it.”

Laura Dixon was a 2016 Adelante Latin America Reporting Fellow with the International Women’s Media Foundation.