Paradise Sustained/Planeta.com

ECO TRAVELS IN COSTA RICA

Preaching "Paradise Sustained"
by Jon Kohl

June/Junio 2003
Last Updated:

COSTA RICA -- There's an evangelism growing just outside the town of Dominical. The evangelists -- a cattleman and a former chicken breeder -- have chosen this land to wage their modern day conservation crusade. They bear the ecotourism staff, but the tourists they shepherd are but a means to an end.

Costa Rica is a holy land for tropical conservationists. There are enough names and stories to fill a Bible-sized tome. One chapter chronicles this evangelical story of Hacienda Barú Wildlife Refuge. That story goes something like this.

JACK EWING, ONCE A CATTLEMAN

In 1972 Jack Ewing emigrated from Colorado. He was trained as a cattle breeder and triple-crossed his own breed of Brahmin, Charlouis, and Chianina. He arrived in the south Pacific town of Dominical to manage a cattle company. He claims to have pursued work, but any outsider could see that his transformation was anything but coincidence.

The original forest had already been fragmented as if giant feet stomped down leaving large, footprint pastures in the lowlands amidst primary forest on the hilltops. Mangroves hugged the rivers and two small wetland forests skirted the coastal plain. The intervening forest was sacrificed to the cows.

Jack ruled over this realm that would one day become a refuge. It didn't take long before Jack began to see the signs. Writing about his dog Lobo, Jack recalled an event from 1973 in his scriptural work, "Did You Ever Wonder Why Dogs Don't Climb Trees?"

HEEDING THE SIGNS

"Lobo was more crazy than mean. Any animal that came across his path would put him in a frenzy whether it be a cat, opossum, iguana, coati or another dog." One day, while Jack was "coincidentally" watching, a young male white-faced monkey came down from the mangrove trees near the mouth of the Barú River, ejected by the troop's patriarch. This primate had struck out on a one-way pilgrimage across the half-kilometer of treeless no-man's-land.

mundo "I remember thinking how out of place it looked 200 meters from the nearest tree." Then Lobo spotted the monkey. "That big dog hit the monkey full force, but it seemed as if the primate bounced into the air and came down on top of the dog. The monkey rode Lobo like a bronco, gouging his eyes, biting his ears and head and scratching his flanks." As nearly impossible as witnessing this miraculous encounter, Lobo yelped away in defeat.

Later that year Jack planted living fence posts across the pastures. When the posts had grown a few meters high, Jack noticed that the simian pilgrimages no longer crossed by land, but by trees. As the trees grew bigger and Jack planted more fences, the monkeys were joined by sloths, kinkajous, opossums, iguanas, and olingos (of the raccoon family). Barú's first wildlife corridors were born.

The year after Lobo's defeat, another sign appeared. This time a local cowboy showed Jack an ocelot he had just killed. Jack had been a hunter himself back in Colorado -- bear, deer, ducks -- yet in Jack's eyes a shroud of shame covered the beautiful cat. Despite his hunter instinct, he wondered if this was the last of these magnificent creatures to roam this place. The vision changed him forever; he never hunted again, and Jack began to see his destiny.

In 1976, Jack and a couple of partners began thinking about tourism. The government was planning to build a major highway just three kilometers from the beach with a world-class surf break. The opportunity to invest in tourism seemed right around the corner, even though his partners' motivation never evolved beyond amusement that people would actually pay to see a rainforest. They continued to graze some cattle and cultivate until the day tourism could pay the bills. In the 1980s the highway started, and Jack worked to create a zoning plan for the area -- a requirement for tourist development.

As Jack looked beyond ranching and hunting, new ideas began sprouting. One day, Jack admits, it occurred to him to let the forests grow back on some 100 hectares. It would be good for tourism. And he didn't want it to be Acapulco-style.

CONVERTS IN THE MIST

As Jack's new ideology developed, so did his powers, including his power to heal. In 1991, Juan Ramón Segura came to his door looking for a job. He was married to a woman who worked at the Hacienda, but Juan's telling feature was his condition.

Jack writes, "When he first came to see me about a job ... his eyes were sunken back into his head and his skin had an ashy, pallid tint that hinted of anemia." The laborer had suffered the bite of alcoholism and developed a bleeding ulcer. Despite the dilapidation of his frame, his character convinced Jack to hire him as a part-time forest guard in search of poachers, his erstwhile vocation.

Barú's power of conversion nonetheless worked its power over Juan, diverting him from a nature of alcohol to an acolyte of nature. "During those weeks that he wandered through the rainforest alone a change came over Juan Ramón. Cast in the role of protector of the jungle rather than destroyer ... he saw a beauty and power in the inner-workings of ecosystems that he hadn't seen before. He began an ongoing experience ... spiritual in nature. Rather than looking at the forest as something to be exploited he came to see it as a giver of life... His health improved rapidly, so much so that the planned surgery that he had been too weak to endure was never necessary."

Juan became the most important teacher and guide in Barú, the most important Costa Rican in this conservation story, showing the rest of the staff the way of the woods. He convinced them of the conservation mission, and attributes much of his ascension to Jack. But more on that later.

TEAMING UP WITH STEVE STROUD

Aside from Jack's intrepid wife Diane, his preachings began to attract people from farther away. One was Steve Stroud. A Philadelphia native, Steve worked as a chicken breeder, a volunteer at the Smithsonian Institution's Office of Environmental Awareness, went to international business school, and even tried his hand at an environmental packaging company. But he wanted to do more. He wanted to get out on the land. "I love land," he would say with a passion that swept him from his Portland, Maine job down to Costa Rica to start up an ecotourism business, a field about which he knew nothing.

Hacienda Barú's ecotourism too continued its transformation. In the mid-1980s Jack charged the first fee for a nature walk. But Steve really moved ecotourism forward when he arrived. In 1992, he did the first canopy tour. In 1993 Steve bought out Jack's partners and became majority holder of Barú. "The Smithsonian got me interested in conservation," he says. But, "Hacienda Barú got me grounded." Then he hesitates and utters words of field-tested wisdom, "In hindsight, though, I would have come in with a very clear plan."

BUILDING PARADISE SUSTAINED

In 1994, Steve built the first tree platform from which he would eventually launch his zip-lining product. Two years later in 1995, their diligence precipitated the declaration of Hacienda Barú as a 333-hectare national wildlife refuge, decreed by the President of the Republic himself. They continued to hire more guides, develop more tourism products, and built six cabins. They offered overnight hikes, zip-line tours, tree climbing, high-elevation canopy viewing, and beach walks. All this might give the on-looker the idea that the mission was tourism. But it wasn't. Jack reminds me that, "My mission is not to do tourism, it is to protect natural areas. But I got to make a living. The only way I can do both is to do ecological tourism."

Indeed Hacienda Barú would become too small to contain the aspirations of both men. Jack now preaches Paradise Sustained. As trees grow back and new property owners come on the scene, Jack challenges them with his vision. He cites Puntarenas, Jacó, and Manuel Antonio as places that rose like angels for their touristic inspiration and have been or will soon be cast back for the overcrowded and trammeled destruction reaped by their own good fortune. He preaches not for a meteoric rise of Dominical, but for long-lasting peace with nature. Not a peace where lion sleeps next to sheep, but peace where humans live within a vibrant tropical forest ecosystem.

FRIENDS OF NATURE

Jack helped to start ASANA (Friends of Nature Association) in 1987, a local conservation group which is now dedicated to setting up what in the late 90s would be known as the Path of the Tapir Biological Corridor. Jack envisions a biological corridor -- a contiguous swath of forest habitat -- spanning 100,000 hectares and including some 50 communities from the famed Corcovado National Park to Manuel Antonio National Park. Jack is now president and Juan vice president of ASANA. The organization works with landholders to place conservation easements on their land and see, through environmental education programs in 33 schools, the ideal corridor that links wildlife and holds overdevelopment at bay. They have trained nearly 90 volunteer community game wardens to combat poaching, and aims to have 250 within two years. Many landholders have followed the vision to protect forest, including two other national wildlife refuges in the area.

Once inseparable from the forests of Hacienda Barú, Steve now occupies most of his time in an office in San Jos„, providing a business-oriented and long-term strategic planning vision to Barú's final transformation. Through in-depth research of conservation easements, carbon sequestration, limits of acceptable change management planning, and financial planning, Steve has lead the conversion of Barú into a wildlife refuge managed by a Costa Rican foundation that funds it through ecological tourism.

I visited Steve one day in his sanitary office, very far from Dominical's warm tropical forests. I ask him about his next move, once Barú comes under foundation control. "I want to take the Barú model, although not based so much on tourism, and apply it to other places in Costa Rica ... I get so excited about restoration."

GREEN PHOENIX

Steve's passion looms at the end of every one of my questions. "You want to see trees all of a sudden be tall," he tosses his arms in a semi-circle overhead. In the tropics things grow real fast.

He then reaches for the book Green Phoenix: Restoring the Tropical Forests of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. This book recounts the legendary work of Dr. Daniel Janzen, a self-declared and publicly confirmed conservation prophet. Janzen inspired many Costa Ricans in the creation of the Guanacaste Conservation Area, certainly the conservation world's equivalent of a creation story. Janzen also pioneered the first landscape restoration of forests in conservation history on the western coast of Costa Rica around Santa Rosa National Park.

Steve's story may some day be scribed in book form too. While Steve strives to promote new conservation strategies in Conservation's Holy Land, Jack's big picture is the establishment of a sustainable paradise in the Dominical region. But what about Juan?

Now, 45, looking like someone else's 35, he has become Barú's head guide and a conservation holy avenger. Aside from his rallying the Hacienda team under the banner of conservation, he has been an inspiration for the communities found in Jack's nascent Paradise. Without Juan, Jack is sure his dream would never have begun to materialize.

Hiking up the hill to the zip line in primary forest, Juan explains to me his source of power. His alcoholic ways have long since dried up. He is no longer an acolyte: Now he's a full-fledged forest devout. "The forest is my church. The trees are the walls of my church," he throws his hands in a large semi-circle above his hand. "The sky is the ceiling and the birds are the angels." His eyes burn the metaphor into my memory. "I can feel the soul of the forest."

Jon Kohl also wrote Nature Guides in Honduras and Honduras' Expatriates Bar & Grill: Fine Food, Cigars, and Environmental Espionage, one of our most popular features. Check out his website -- http://www.jonkohl.com.

Articles by Jack Ewing can be found online the Quepolandia website.