By Marco Fidel Suárez Bedoya
It is curious how art tends to become heritage and, although it may sound trite, there is no better artist than our Mother Nature. She, in her infinite generosity, has given us hundreds, or thousands, of masterful works in which the sublime beauty of landscapes is combined with the magical singularity of life, the same thing that we have called biodiversity. They are works of a selfless mother that, in her unfathomable wisdom, she has decided to bequeath: the story of her first days, those in which humans were not even in her creation plans; the mysteries of the biological cycle, which we still cannot fully understand; and, endless resources that support our existence and that, ironically, we are depleting. It is not enough for the Earth to have her beauty, but she also dresses in the clothes of perfection. When humans approach that revelation, we decide to admire it, study it, decipher it, we begin to feel proud and say: “this work of the Mother is worthy of preserving for us, for our children and her children's children.”
This is how I, a lover of nature, try to describe with some poetry what is officially considered natural heritage. Our Mother is so wise that she not only allows us to contemplate these works, but, like any other artist, she provides them to obtain economic support from them. Perhaps we have not understood it well, perhaps we are destroying a source of income that needs to remain intact. Let me explain: Colombia currently has some 59 protected areas, two or three of them that are on the UNESCO World Heritage List. These protected areas contribute close to US$3,439 million to the GDP annually (Bohórquez, 2019), all by remaining in complete tranquility, in sovereign harmony.
These areas limit their commercial uses. In certain and certain spaces of some of them, ecotourism is allowed. Nothing else. Therefore, their monetization is, to a large extent, representative: they provide vital resources, such as water, for use and consumption, they are carbon sinks and help in the control of climate change and, the greatest benefit, perhaps impossible to monetize, is that they preserve our life and that of our planetary companions (animals and plants). Ah! And we cannot forget that these sites, for the most part, connote spirituality for the native communities that inhabit them or develop around them.
Trying to make a synthesis of all this, possibly erring on the side of too much verbiage, natural heritage goes beyond the inventory of world heritage, it goes beyond how beautiful and surprising, particular and majestic, nature itself is. Let us remember that heritage is a social construction, so we cannot forget the relationship that natural places have with collective imaginations, with all aspects of human life. Natural heritage is all those works of Mother Earth, no matter how simple or small, that deserve to be preserved.
In that order of ideas, there is natural heritage from local scales to global scales. For example, in Jardín, the municipality where I live, we enjoy unmatched natural wealth and although we often see it threatened by the ruthless, dark and selfish economies that come from outside, or that even arise from within, as a community we have tried to appropriate her, in part thanks to the environmental education that we have striven to provide to the younger generations and that it is necessary to continue strengthening. For us, the gardeners, they are heritage: the large amount of water we have in rivers, streams and lakes; the Cave of Splendor, the Cueva de Los Guacharos and Angel Falls; the Cock of the Rock, the Yellow-Eared Parrot and the hummingbirds; the Palm of Wax, the guayacanes and the sevencueros; the Andean bear, the deer and the ocelot; roses, orchids and the endemic Passiflora Jardinensis. In short, it would be a long list to mention all the elements of the protected forest that we are proud of, that we inhabit and with which we interact daily. For Latin America, and for the entire world, the Amazon should be one of the greatest monuments of natural heritage thanks to its function of oxygenating the planet and its spectacle of flora and fauna. The moors, cradles of water, should follow him; the oceans, climate regulators; deserts, innate fertilizers; coral reefs, living food beds.
There is natural heritage in any town or city, in any country, in any corner of the planet. The task is to recognize it, value it, defend it and conserve it, because by conserving the natural heritage we are preserving life, our life.
Sources
Bohórquez, Kevin Steven. (2019). Las áreas protegidas naturales aportan US$3.439 millones anuales al PIB. La República. [En línea]. Disponible en: https://www.larepublica.co/economia/las-areas-protegidas-naturales-aportan-us3439-millones-anuales-al-pib-2900067
UNESCO. (2021). Patrimonio Natural. [En línea]. Disponible en: https://es.unesco.org/themes/patrimonio-natural