For over ten years, Eliska Rejmánková, a professor of Wetland Ecology at UC Davis and the faculty leader for the Summer Abroad Guatemala, “Ecological and Social Issues” program, has been researching Lake Atitlán, the deepest lake in Central America. Located in the western highlands of Guatemala, Lake Atitlán has been frequently described as one of the most beautiful lakes in the world.

Enraptured by the lake and its beauty, Professor Rejmánková decided to return to Lake Atitlán after her first time visiting in 2002.

“Once you come here [Lake Atitlán], you always come back,” Professor Rejmánková said.

Nearly thirteen years…

Roughly the size Ohio, Guatemala is one of the world’s largest coffee producers and “has the highest percentage of its crop classified as high quality.” Some of the nation’s best coffee is actually produced within its western highlands near the well-known Lake Atitlán.

Although the demand of Guatemalan coffee has significantly increased over the years, multiple environmental issues like climate change have impacted its agricultural systems as well as rates of coffee production.

Along with the hundreds of farms across Guatemala that have been impacted by climate change, local farms near Lake Atitlán have been particularly hit hard by the…

Globalization. Neoliberalism. Corporate power. Political corruption. Environmental degradation. These forces are not mutually exclusive systems as they depend upon each other to maintain an endless, perpetuating cycle that reinforces the distinction between the oppressor and the oppressed.

As scholar Heather Eaton stated, “globalization refers to processes of global economic restructuring with a specific economic and technological agenda that alters basic modes of cultural organization and international exchange in many parts of the world.” But precisely what drives periods of mass globalization?

Although this question does not have one simple answer, the rule of colonial difference is one of the primary…

As writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley once stated in his 1934 travel book Beyond the Mexique Bay, “Lake Como, it seems to me, touches on the limit of permissibly picturesque, but Atitlán is Como with additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes. It really is too much of a good thing.”‪

Located in the western highlands of Guatemala, Lake Atitlán, the deepest lake in Central America, has been frequently described as one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. Along with its breathtaking aesthetic qualities, more than 100,000 people in the region rely on the lake for their primary source…