CHINAMPA
As the lily-pad lined canal narrows to where the hanging floripondia bush (Angel’s Trumpet or Brugmansia arborea) meets an explosion of truffula-tree like pine needles, we feel a nudge on the back of our boat. The gentle rock pulls me out of a trance born from the golden hour dappling on the water and a silence broken only by birdsong. The wide bench of our barco, shaped like a canoe flattened from above, has plenty of space for me to pivot in my seat and face the source of the bumper boat action.
I see a smiling woman, standing firmly in her identical barco, and her two large dogs questioning us curiously (probably about our inept paddling techniques). Her barco is empty, she may have ferried around family or tourists, or be commuting home from a day’s work in the nearby town of Xochimilco. The deftness with which she wields her paddle, much longer than those used in Canadian canoes, reminds me of my place as a visitor in these floating oases.
I’m trying to resist the urge to wax poetic on nature in an overtly cloying way, but the straight-out-of-Avatar landscape I find myself in has me at a literary loss. My partner and I have joined a group of 5 young Mexico City residents who are renting a chinampa, a man-made, floating-island style of farm plot originating in the Aztec civilizations. For $200 USD per year, the group, called Chinampa Atzin, tends to vegetable beds they have prepared, builds geodesic structures from reclaimed materials and drink pulque, a milky alcoholic drink made of fermented maguey sap, after a long day in the hot sun.
Xochimilco and its canals of otherworldly beauty are designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but the chinampas are not untouched by the realities of modern agriculture or the unbelievable proximity to Mexico City, the 6th largest urban population in the world. Chinampa Atzin explained how despite their group and other chinampas farmers growing organically and regeneratively, the canals that directly irrigate deep-feeding crop roots are picking up copious pollutants in the water. Sewage run-off and agrochemicals complicate the best of intentions. Draining of aquifers to support Mexico City’s ever-expanding population have lowered water levels significantly, further compounding the pollution problem. Decorative water lilies (Lirio aquatico) introduced in the 1980’s for aesthetics have exploded in population, covering the canals’ surfaces and shading out oxygen-dependent plants. These algal blooms encourage methane producing bacteria production and have been found to sicken migratory birds who rest in the waterways. I think back to Canadian farmers I’ve spoken with who farm organically and regeneratively, but without an Organic certification because of the prohibitive cost of testing and verification. Prohibitive pollution is a new concept for me.
My visit to volunteer with Chinampa Atzin coincided with World Wetland Day. Swallowing pessimistic sentiments on the greenwashing and conscious-clearing stickiness of themed environmental days, I’m glad the work at Xochimilco aligned with a global acknowledgment of the immense store of biodiversity, carbon, spiritual significance, and livelihood that wetlands are.
When pessimism and frustration over my/the collective’s inaction abound, my only solace can be found in grassroots, hands-in-the-dirt style work. The only antidote to inaction is action, and for a generation of cerebral, anxious, computer-tethered beings, I think this most obvious of statements is also the most important. And selfishly, I write these words not for others -Chinampa Atlzin is proof enough of the enthusiasm of restorationists in CDMX- but for myself.
If it resonates with others, it’s worth sharing. Despite the potential of the pandemic slowly dissolving into collective immunity and tentative reentry into the world, there’s a heaviness that lingers. A heaviness that I feel is palpable both in my own pocket of consciousness and beyond. My balking at themed concepts like World Wetland Day rings of nihilism and burnout. To counter that, I’m choosing to remember and reflect upon our specie’s love for ritualization. For embellishing the passage of time, for lighting a candle of awareness to what we value and what we must hold onto.
*For some spirit-bolstering, recent updates on a promising solution to the water pollution problem of Xochimilco, check out Sarah Freeman’s article, “This fragile wetland is dying. Tour boats could be its unlikely saviour”, published by National Geographic. And who wouldn’t love to cite nanobubbles as a silver bullet to an ecological crisis?
