Ten years ago, I visited a city park in Zapopan that a group of enthusiastic volunteers was transforming into a bosque-escuela, an “arboreal school,” where they would someday be able to teach the public all about three different kinds of forest.

Throughout the park, they had planted many trees, and as we walked among these saplings, the environmentalists pointed out a problem they had not anticipated. The smooth branches of all these young trees were covered with hundreds — perhaps thousands — of small, sticky seeds.

Engineer Ricardo López, a leader of the group, told me these were the seeds of Psittacanthus calyculatus, which most people call el muerdago (the plant that bites). In English, we call it Mexican mistletoe.

La Catrina is an elegantly attired female skeleton recognized as an iconic symbol of Mexico’s Día de los Muertos festivities. 

About four years ago, when Brian Woodward, a native of “everywhere” in the United States, bought a 100-year-old house in downtown Guadalajara eight blocks north of the cathedral, he didn’t expect the water crisis that took off this summer. But he was aware of ongoing water issues here. So, based on ingenuity, his engineering background and a longstanding interest in eco-projects, he immediately set out to build a domestic rainwater collection system.

He calls his efforts a “personal passion project.”

Drive along the southern arc of Guadalajara’s Periférico (ring road) and you can’t miss it: a steep, built-up hillside rising above the highway, crowned with broadcast antennas.

This is the Cerro del Cuatro, one of the metro area’s highest points and, many say, the most neglected: neighborhoods of thousands of people, widely considered among the poorest in the city.

Dan Turnquist has stories. 

They may be about the American prisoner in Mexico, arrested on drug charges in Cancun, who got transferred to county jails in Florida, and told Turnquist he wished he’d served out his sentence in Mexico. Or about the two Drug Enforcement Administration officers, who showed up at the Guadalajara consulate doorstep waiting for him to open the door, just one day after former Mexican President Díaz Ordaz announced that no American police were allowed in Mexico. Turnquist has more stories, and can be coaxed into sharing them and other memories of his long career in the U.S. foreign service.

Four decades after Colectivo Ecologista Jalisco began organizing for Mexico’s environment, its founders, former members and young organizers gathered in Guadalajara to celebrate a legacy stretching from anti-nuclear campaigns to organic food markets and cleaner air. The anniversary brought together people who helped shape that work — and others carrying it forward.