CUAUHTÉMOC, Mexico — On a wind-battered beach in San Mateo del Mar, Mexico, four figures haul a net into shore. Frigatebirds (Fregata magnificens) mark the fishers’ position in a high, twisting column that follows their progress from the water onto the beach. One of the men tosses a small fish onto the sand. It barely comes to rest before a dark bird wheels down from the sky to claim it. The man is José Rangel Edison, 57, a fisher from the community of Cuauhtémoc, an Indigenous Ikoots community of 900 people in the municipality of San Mateo del Mar, on Mexico’s Pacific coast. “In the past, the sea used to be over there,” Edison says, pointing to the horizon across the cresting waves. “But since I was 18, when I started fishing, it’s been coming in little by little. Now it has almost wiped out Cuauhtémoc.” Edison’s community is perched on a slim stretch of land between the ocean and a large lagoon system. Now, rapid se level advance is displacing residents and disrupting daily life. According to a report from the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, the Pacific Ocean consumed 8.4 meters (27.5 feet) of Cuauhtémoc’s land per year between 1967 and 2014, while locals describe a larger encroachment of around 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) since the first half of the 20th century. Two Cuauhtémoc residents walk past a dead tree as they make their way toward the ocean. Image by Euan Wallace for Mongabay. The effect on…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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