Welcome to my newsletter
Hi, it’s Lizzie. That’s me in the ruins of an old hacienda deep in the Selva Lacandona, or the Lacandon Jungle, in Chiapas, Mexico, where I recently traveled on a reporting trip for Science. At one point I would have shared this photo with you on social media. But I’m not doing much of that anymore. I’m off Facebook, barely tweeting, and using Instagram almost exclusively for craft updates. Not the advice you usually receive as a fairly successful media professional, but it’s working for me. Still, there are many of you I’d like to keep up-to-date on my work and my life, and hopefully at least some of you are interested in reading those updates. I’m also hoping this will be a space where I can explore ideas I’m pondering, talk about amazing places I’ve been, and generally write more freely and personally than I do for my job. (I think this is what they once called “a blog.”) I’m planning to send this newsletter every week on Sundays. Ambitious, yes, but I need deadlines. All content is free and will be for the foreseeable future.
So yeah, I went to the jungle! I was there with a team of scientists for nearly two weeks. I can’t talk about the story yet, but it’s a good one and I’m so excited to share it with you when it comes out later this summer. For now, I can say that it was the most intense outdoors experience I’ve ever had. We were camping deep in the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, a gigantic protected area in Chiapas with a deep well of human history but not much current human presence.
A few weeks before that, I went camping with my dad in Point Reyes, California. The contrast got me thinking about the different experiences and philosophies of “being outdoors” in the U.S. and Mexico. Now, I wouldn’t say I’m an outdoors expert in either country, but I like hiking and camping and have climbed my fair share of mountains and the like. In California, we backpacked in over a ridge to a campsite on a bluff overlooking the beach. It was windy and wet when we arrived and set up the tents—so windy the tents nearly blew away. But the next day was beautiful. We walked along the beach and hiked to some lakes. There were condors circling overhead the whole day. I ate several absolutely transcendent salami sandwiches. Is there anything better than a salami sandwich in the middle of a long hike several days away from your car and your next shower? No, there is not.
We weren’t alone, exactly—there were plenty of strangers to make small talk with—but we were independent. We had done all the physical and mental work of getting ourselves and what we needed out there. That’s the point of backpacking, isn’t it, to feel completely self-sufficient.
That’s not how it felt in Chiapas at all. When you go off-the-grid in Mexico, you almost always need to be taken there by someone who knows the land (and has permission to be there, both from the government and, more importantly, from the local communities). We were a group of 6, and we always had 3-4 guides with us. It is an understatement to say they were indispensable. They knew how to machete through thickets of vines, how to drag kayaks over small waterfalls when rowing upstream, how to cook delicious meals and set up a comfortable camp far away from the last town. I was never alone. I never felt self-sufficient.
But of course, we were actually far more alone and isolated than I had been in California. If something had gone wrong, we would have been completely on our own, potentially days away from the nearest town with no shortcuts or rangers to check up on us. In the U.S., the philosophy of national parks is one of conservation but also of access. We want people to be able to visit and appreciate those spaces. And there’s all this infrastructure—trails and campsites and maps and permits and rangers—to make that possible, and to make it possible for you to feel like you’re doing it on your own. In Mexico, the point of protected areas is to keep (most) people out. The communities in and around them decide how much access they can or want to provide for tourists, and that’s what you get. Being outdoors in Mexico doesn’t make you feel self-sufficient. It makes you feel humble and grateful for the deep knowledge and experience being personally shared with you.
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Recommendations
If you want to have your own life-changing outdoors experience in the Selva Lacandona, visit Las Guacamayas. That was our home base, and I can’t recommend them or their guides highly enough.
The Problem with “Fixers,” from the Columbia Journalism Review. Did you know that nearly all international stories you read in U.S. news outlets were produced with the help of local journalists from those countries? I didn’t, until I became a journalist outside the U.S. They are called “fixers,” and yes, the power dynamics are as troubling as you would expect.
Their Eyes Were Watching God audiobook. Like everybody, I was assigned this book in high school. And like 99.9% or more of teens, I was too young to fully understand it, let alone appreciate it. If that describes you as well, do yourself a favor and revisit it. Ruby Dee’s performance for the audiobook is extraordinary.