Ecuador ranks 25th in the list of Covid-related deaths per capita per nation, according to the Johns Hopkins University. But my friends here in Mindo doubt this statistic. “The death rates are much higher,” they insist. “Look at all the coffins outside the hospitals. There are so many uncounted deaths.”

A few months ago, I nervously watched two coffins borne past the town plaza and into the local church. “Oh, no!” I thought. “The virus has finally invaded this remote pueblo!”

I asked a friend about them. “Not Covid,” he assured me. “They were driving drunk on a motorcycle.” He shrugged. “These days, what else is there to do? There are no jobs.”

My friend is a chef in Mindo. Locals know him as Signor Crab because he sautés crabs in coconut milk and spices, in the style of his coastal village. Before the pandemic, we barely had time to talk because he was too busy serving his signature dish to tourists visiting the pueblo. Nowadays, I see him sitting alone in Mindo’s formerly bustling, now silent, plaza. Without a job, Signor Crab asked me if he could cook for me in exchange for money. He told me he needed to buy medicine for his two sons.

I am in Mindo to study the cloud forests around me. Each cloud forest is a unique habitat, a home to scores of plant and animal species that are found only in Mindo. Over eons, these forests formed when the Pacific Ocean’s warm vapors wafted against the cooling Andes peaks, creating the ideal environment for orchids, bromeliads, and ferns. These mountains are home to Guadua Augustoflora, the South American bamboo that, with greater efficiency than most plants, sucks carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converts it into material used to build local houses.

Before leaving the United States, I worked on environmental, computational models. Now, I use Artificial Intelligence and satellite images to track tree cover loss in these forests. My studies suggest that in the past two years, in a place about a third the size of Washington, DC, Mindo lost tree cover in an area equivalent to more than 3000 tennis courts (Tracking Cloud Forests With Cloud Technology and Random Forests).

These trees are victims of the perfect storm brewed by joblessness, poverty, record gold prices, Covid, and climate change. The desperate poor hunt for gold in illegal, artisanal mines. The rich raze forests to build country homes to escape Quito, Ecuador’s congested capital, where infection rates are at an all-time high. Beyond these immediate threats, climate change insidiously destroys Mindo’s ecosystem. With warmer temperatures, the clouds to which the trees have adapted over thousands of years are dissipating.

The same week I witnessed the funeral of the two victims of the motorcycle accident, the International Panel for Climate Change issued its report, referred to by the United Nations’ Secretary General as a “code red for humanity.” Destroying the Andes cloud forests amounts to a negative, feed-back loop: the forests around me can potentially buffer the world against the effects of greenhouse gases; but they are being destroyed partially because climate change is wreaking havoc on local farms that must contend with dramatic, climactic changes.

At the end of each day, I watch the clouds drift down from the heavens to rest upon Mindo. They are like feathery intimations of hope. As long as the clouds persist, so too will the forest ecosystem.

Similarly, I see hope in the stoic persistence of Signor Crab and of my other friends on Mindo’s streets: the shopkeepers; the Venezuelan refugees; the artisans and buskers. They stake their lives on ecotourism. They know that without the trees, the tourists will not return if and when the world regains some version of normalcy after the pandemic.

Stubbornly, I make the deliberate choice to cling to hope. On Tuesdays, I muster hope by teaching data science and Artificial Intelligence to a small group of students. They are graduates of Mindo’s school for at-risk families. All of them are healing-from poverty’s ills; from familial instability; from domestic abuse; from the violence of classism, racism, colonialism, and sexism.

My ambitious students are my heroes. With each backpacking, laptop-toting tourist they see in Mindo, my students are reminded that opportunities exist beyond their threatened mountains. They talk about this as they type their code and run their algorithms, using my project to monitor deforestation as an example of Artificial Intelligence’s power. They muse that perhaps in the future, they might conquer the virtual, data-intensive world of rich nations, in the way their ancestors’ lands were once conquered by white Europeans.

My students dream of the future. They want to conduct non-extractive, profitable, sustainable work. They want to produce knowledge-based goods and services for the world. My students-who have lived their entire lives among the marginalized and the discarded-long to conduct creative, intellectually challenging work…while being nestled within Creation’s embrace…while being nurtured by the Divine work unfolding among the clouds.

For more on Mindo, Ecuador, read Mr. Pasky Pascual’s scientific journal of Life in Mindo, Ecuador.

The post In the Andes Mountains: The Grand, Silent Victims of Climate Change and Covid appeared first on Traveling Archive.

Dozens of millions of years ago (mas o menos), at the bottom of the western Pacific Ocean, the Nazca plate insinuated itself under the South American continent and began to drift east at the rate of 80 millimeters a year. The continent began to buckle upwards, in the same way a yogi’s mat buckles up when the yogi pulls hands toward feet during her downward dog.

Over eons, all that buckling produced the Andes Cordilleras, the world’s longest continental mountain range. It spans much of South America, from Venezuela to Argentina.

I live on the northern end of the Andes, in a tiny pueblo called Mindo, one of the world’s hotspots for endemic biodiversity. That is, much of the animal and plant life surrounding me evolved here and cannot be found anywhere else. Mindo is completely surrounded by cloud forests. Over time, when warm water vapor from the Pacific hit up against the cool Andes mountains, clouds formed. Mindo became a perfect spot for epiphytes-plants like moss, fern, orchids, and bromeliad that have evolved the ability to pull moisture out of the atmosphere.

Orchids grow wild on the trees that line the road leading up to the cascades in the mountains. As one walks up this road, one is invariably startled by blurred flashes of orange, blue, yellow, and red feathers. Based on my study, there are more than 300 species of birds in Mindo’s forests, an area about one third the size of Washington, DC.

Despite its small size, Mindo is host to an eclectic group of individuals. People from all over the world live here, including those who migrated from Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Germany, Canada, the U.S., Poland, and France.

Without a doubt, most people from North America and Europe visit Mindo because they read that it is one of the world’s top sites of biodiversity for bird species.

This includes a wide variety of hummingbirds and a species of Andean cock-in-the-rocks found only in Mindo.

The central role that ecotourism plays in Mindo can be observed in the pueblo’s central plaza. In the plaza, you can see the stone statue of a hummingbird. Sitting on one of the benches, you can look around and see the famed cloud forests of Mindo in the mountains around you.

If, after sitting a while in the plaza, you begin to crave some of the local food, there is no shortage of food choices around you.

For example, Gladys will happily serve you a delicious mix of grilled chorizo (sausage), chicken, pork, and octopus.

Or perhaps, you would prefer pizza prepared in a brick oven? Antonio can help you out.

Maybe your tastes run toward vegetarian or vegan? In that case, swing by Mechi’s place. Mechi serves these dishes using quinoa and other local vegetables, cooked in the style of her native coastal village. You’ll find her family helping her out.

After lunch, you’ll probably want some desert. Flor’s yogurt ice-cream place is just across from the plaza. Many tourists and digital nomads come here to have ice cream, drink coffee, or down some artisanal beer while they engage in people watching.

You may now feel like walking off some of those calories. Along Mindo’s streets, you’ll find artists from all of South America-from Colombia, Venezuela, Peru-showing off the art that they’ve made.

If you decide to stay a while, you’ll soon discover the charming community and landscape that have prompted people from all over the world to make Mindo a place they call “home.”

On weekends, you’ll see indigenous farmers from around the town who drive in to Mindo to sell their produce.

You’ll meet people like the two sisters who left their home in Venezuela and who have carved out a new life in Mindo selling arepas, cornmeal cakes filled with beans, avocado, spices, and optionally, meat. Their small restaurant is beside a river lined with flowers and fruit trees; as you wait for your meal, you can keep your camera ready for the birds that hover by.

Mindo’s beauty has attracted an international community, including Edyta, an artist who has lived and worked in Europe, the United States, and all over South America.

If you choose to visit Mindo, you’ll find a place that abounds with nature, art, music, and a feeling of community.

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