She found in the Sierra Gorda the mission of her life: to protect this Mexican “national treasure” hand in hand with the communities

Call to Earth is a editorial series committed to reporting on the environmental challenges facing our planet, as well as showing the solutions to those challenges. The Perpetual Planet Initiativeby Rolex, has partnered with to raise awareness and education on key sustainability issues and to inspire positive action.

( Spanish) – Martha Isabel Ruiz Corzo, known as Maestra Pati, arrived in the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro in the 1980s in full search of her life mission. And there he found it: protecting, hand in hand with local communities, this diverse ecosystem recognized in Mexico and the world.

Sierra Gorda “is the last well-conserved area in central Mexico and is the most ecodiverse territory in the country,” Ruiz explains to en Español. It also qualifies this area as a “national treasure” of biodiversity in which Nearctic and tropical influences combine.

There he created decades ago the Sierra Gorda Ecological Group, a grassroots organization that works on the protection and sustainable development of an area that is home to 100,000 people. organized in 638 communities.

The challenges they have faced along the long journey are multiple, as he explains: garbage, the opening of roads, poaching, logging, arson.

However, as part of Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative, Pati has focused strongly on environmental education, involving local communities and achieving the protection of the area, which today has the status of Biosphere Reserve and is part of the Unesco Program on Man and the Biosphere.

Biosphere reserves are characterized by having three main functions: conserve biological and cultural diversity, promote economic development that is sustainable and ensure logistical support to the area that involves education and research, according to UNESCO.

Until she was 30, Ruiz lived in the city of Querétaro, where she worked as a music teacher. The woman at that time had “many existential inner doubts” and was looking for answers to be able to live a “spiritual life that was really intense,” she remembers. I sought to serve, but I couldn’t find anyone.

That changed after the move to Sierra Gorda.

She arrived there with her husband, Roberto, a native of the area, who in Ruiz’s words, although he was very successful in the city, had “a little seed of a cowboy.” “Although in Querétaro we were offered a table of abundance, we were both ready to run and that’s why we arrived in Sierra Gorda,” he says.

“I came to Sierra Gorda looking for a cause to put the passion that surpassed my heart. I was always like that, in the city I looked in the asylums, in the orphanages and well, no, it wasn’t my place. “So I came here asking life to tell me what I was good at,” she remembers.

The situation they found themselves in was an “offense,” he says, remembering “that disorder, that territory without an owner, everyone pulling the sheets to their side.”

Then they decided to start their organization: “We had understood very well what we had come to in the Sierra Gorda and it was to protect, to protect this territory. […] “I found answers to everything I was looking for.”

A pillar of the project to which Ruiz has dedicated his life is the development of sustainable economic activities for the benefit of local communities.

One of them is the responsible harvest of oregano, with which they make all kinds of products, from culinary to pharmaceutical.

Another economic solution is carbon certificates, through which landowners who commit to caring for them instead of converting them into pastures or crops are paid.

Ruiz highlights the process for certifying the reduction of your carbon footprint, which is done taking into account local conditions, unlike tools of this type that are managed in large global markets.

“Sierra Gorda works with carbon footprint reduction certificates that guarantee you as a buyer that your product is real, that it has a social fabric, that there is all this work of monitoring, surveillance, local participation, that the money goes into the pockets of the owner, the ejidos or the small properties,” he says.

Ruiz accepts that his vision of the future may be very pessimistic because “climate change has already reached us” and is manifesting itself with violence throughout the planet.

However, he believes that we can still act to “adapt, prepare, take care of what remains sacred to us.” “I remain enthusiastic because I believe that in these critical moments in all aspects of our society on the planet is when the best human beings can emerge,” he adds.

His message is very direct: “Love the planet from wherever you are, mobilize all the possibilities of releasing pressure on it, the pressure of your business, your exercise, your daily life, that of your children, that of your consumption. Put him down, put him down.”

“Within us there are forces that have not been used. I think it is time for each one, from their niche of action in life, to put them into play and together raise a wave of love for the planet.”