FEATURE - How to save threatened Costa Rican wilderness?
Date: 20-Mar-02
Country: COSTA RICA
Author: Andrew Stern
Nearby, a luminescent green-and-black poison-arrow frog lingered underneath a wooden stair built for hiking tourists who clamor up to be whisked along steel cables strung between thick, ancient trees.
This short stretch along the rugged southwest Pacific coast of Costa Rica near the untidy surfer's haven of Dominical is a rarity: a privately owned rain forest designated for eco-tourism, not development.
The project is the brainchild of a Colorado expatriate with wealthy American backers who bought tracts of unspoiled rain forest, adjacent pastureland and cacao trees, then allowed the jungle to take over. Dubbed Hacienda Baru and recently granted national park status, the preserve has a few guest cabins, an enclosed butterfly garden and offers chaperoned hikes.
Local environmentalists envision this 800-acre (324 hectares) jewel as one pearl on a strand of primeval forests strung along a corridor traversing Costa Rica's humid Pacific coastal mountains, and perhaps spanning the entire Central American isthmus.
"We need to create a corridor, so these species can survive," Georgie Wingfield, a 27-year-old British-born guide whose clients often seem less interested in the forest's complex ecology than in horsing around on the steel cables, along which they roll on a wheel-equipped harness.
Wingfield worries that heavily touristed Manuel Antonio national park 29 miles (47 km) up the coast will one day typify what remains of the equatorial richness of this rugged land: An isolated remnant supporting a diminishing genetic pool of slow-moving sloths, mischievous capuchin, howler and squirrel monkeys, and dozens of other species.
ENVIRONMENTALLY ENLIGHTENED?
This nation of fewer than 4 million people, often hailed as the unarmed "Switzerland" of civil war-wracked Central America, is recognized as the region's most environmentally enlightened state. Roughly one-quarter of its 19,700 square miles (51,000 sq km) has been set aside for conservation and deforestation has effectively stopped. But that can be misleading.
Real estate developers obtain permits to build in prime areas by purchasing idle land elsewhere, meaning no official net loss of forest but pockmarking the steeply sloped landscape and potentially wrecking hopes for rain forest corridors.
Tourism with its accompanying hotel construction can do harm as well as good, and endemic poverty makes unoccupied land vulnerable to homesteading.
Reconnecting Manuel Antonio to another tract of unspoiled rain forest is doubtful, experts say, requiring purchases of adjacent farms and restoring lands degraded by pasture.
Some environmental groups such as the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund have bought tracts of wilderness across Central America to link up to a nature corridor that is envisioned from southern Mexico to Panama.
Others, like the Rainforest Alliance, work with timber companies and farmers to develop sustainable industries while preserving the Costa Rican forest.
"It's impossible to stop development, and people are dependent on agriculture. The question is how do we manage development and maintain the corridors?" said Ronald Sanabria of the Rainforest Alliance in the capital of San Jose.
Among the efforts is to offer an environmental certificate to coffee and cocoa farmers who grow their crops in the shade of the forest that can be used as a marketing tool.
Finding the best approach to saving the wilderness with limited resources can be vexing for environmentalists, who sometimes find themselves at odds with each other.
A visiting scientist from the World Wildlife Fund, who admitted spending too much time in meetings and seeking grants, seemed to irk Wingfield with his global perspective and brusque criticisms of her opinions about saving the rain forest.
"When are they going to realize that this won't wait? That we have to save one piece at a time?" she said.
CHEAP TARGETS
While Hacienda Baru's American owners