Should Chiapas Farmers Suffer for California’s Carbon? “We are
not responsible for climate change—it’s the big industries that
are,” said Abelardo, a young man from the Tseltal Mayan village
of Amador Hernández in the Lacandon jungle of Chiapas. “So why
should we be held responsible, and even punished for it?”
Abelardo was one of dozens of villagers who had traveled to the
city of San Cristóbal de las Casas to protest an international
policy meeting on climate change and forest conservation. At a
high-end conference center, representatives from the state of
California and from states and provinces around the world were
working out mechanisms intended to mitigate climate change by
protecting tropical forests. The group was called the Governor’s
Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF), and California’s interest
was in using forest preservation in Chiapas as a carbon offset—a
means for meeting climate change goals under the state’s 2006
Global Warming Solutions Act. Such an agreement among
subnational governments i