Ecological Restoration in Mexico: The Challenges of a Multicultural Megadiverse Country

exico, with a land mass of 1,964,375 km2, belongs to the group of megabiodiverse countries with more than 23,400 plant species (Sarukhán 2008).Within its boundaries lie tropical evergreen forests, deserts, and coastal and alpine ecosystems.This biological richness is matched by a cultural diversity that is the result of a long history of human occupation.In what is today central and southern Mexico, the vestiges of the main Mesoamerican civilizations can be found, from the sites of the ancient Olmec civilization in the Gulf of Mexico to Mayan, Aztec, and Tarascan sites, the three most advanced civilizations that the Spanish conquerors discovered more than 500 years ago in this region of the Americas.Even today, approximately 7.6 million of Mexico's inhabitants speak a native language.These languages can be grouped in 12 linguistic families (Díaz 2010).Among the ethnic groups, some have occupied their ancestral lands for centuries, creating landscapes that merge nature and culture.High biodiversity in a multicultural country presents particularly difficult challenges for restoration.In many cases, for restoration to occur, careful consideration must be given not only to barriers to ecosystem recovery, but also to establishing a dialogue between cultures that typically share little in terms of their views on nature.Furthermore, as a consequence of the social struggle that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century that led to the Mexican Revolution, almost all the national territory was distributed among the population.Nowadays, 52% of the Mexican territory is owned by ejidos, a type of communal land ownership system rooted in pre-Columbian social structures and rural communities.About 40% is private property, and only 8% is owned by the state (Rivera Rodríguez 2003).