November 7, 2009 - Few trees are as well suited to the hyperarid ecosystem of the Atacama-Sechura Desert, nestled between the Andes and the Pacific. The huarango captures moisture coming from the west as sea mist. Its roots are among the longest of any tree, extending more than 150 feet to tap subterranean water channels. The resilience of the huarango and its role in taming one of the world’s driest climates has long beguiled this country’s poets. Schoolchildren here, for instance, recite the words of José María Arguedas, a leading 20th-century writer: “The huarangos let in the sun, while keeping out the fire.”
But poetry is one thing. The necessities of human civilizations, and their capacity to wreak havoc on the ecosystems on which they depend, are another.
A team of British archaeologists described in a groundbreaking study this month how the Nazca, who etched their lines in the desert a thousand years before the arrival of the Spanish, induced an environmental catastrophe by clearing the huarango to plant crops like cotton and maize, exposing the landscape to desert winds, erosion and floods.
David Beresford-Jones, an archaeologist at Cambridge University who co-authored the study, said that perhaps the only fragment of old-growth huarango woodland left is in Usaca, about a five-hour drive from Ica, where there are still some trees that were alive when the Incas conquered the southern coast of Peru in the 15th century. FULL STORY
“It takes centuries for the huarango to be of substantial size, and only a few hours to fell it with a chainsaw,” Mr. Beresford-Jones said. “The tragedy is that this remnant is being chain-sawed by charcoal burners as we speak.”
