Notes From the Osa
Costa Rica's Dedication to Green
by Kate Kalmbach

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Costa Rica - To anyone who has seen the Corcovado poster board advertisements celebrating the Osa peninsula as "the most biologically intense place on earth," recent changes in the area might come as a bit of a surprise.

Almost a decade ago, I remember riding my horse through the footpaths on an eight hour excursion from the nearest town of Sierpe into Drake Bay where my family lived. The path was narrow, sometimes masked with forest growth. We came upon no other people until the town of Drake. The earth was musty with decaying foliage; the air cool and wet in the shade. The soil was dark, covered with wet leaves and fallen branches. Birds called to each other, macaws flew in groups and pairs high above the highest tree tops cawing to each other and toucans made their awkward, heavy-beaked flight between trees.

We rode across Rancho Quemado, a disappearing section of rain forest between three national parks, Piedras Blancas, Darien and Corcovado. Rancho Quemado, along with most of the Osa Peninsula, has been recognized as "one of the last stands of virgin, equatorial rainforests in Central America." (TT, Jan. 29, 1999). Once cut, the animals within the parks will have no way of migrating across the large sections of burnt orange clay- the only thing left behind by the loggers.

This year I rode in a boat down the muddy Sierpe river on a return trip to Drake Bay. The loggers have wired cables from bank to bank to lug their trees across the river. A trench has been cut into the side banks, loose tractor tires criss-cross each other from hundreds of trips back and forth with their precious cargo. Heat rises from the ground in shimmering moist waves, heat once absorbed into the shade of ancient trees. These trees are older than the loggers, older than the roads to the rivers, older than the machines working against them - the laws of men and government allowing their extraction. The history and life contained therein is being destroyed in the name of the new most precious commodity of our world: money.

For those who live in the area, the effects of the rapid deforestation of the Osa Peninsula are immediately obvious. Barren red clay bakes in the equatorial heat of the sun. Rivers run muddy red with eroded soils. This residue stretches at least a half mile from the coast; a distinct line marks the separation. Remnants of century old trees, branches and sawed up logs, lay scattered across the land like so many forgotten corpses of a disappearing era. Crucial rain forest surrounding Corcovado National Park, area supposedly marked as a buffer zone to the biodiversity within the park, is being recklessly torn apart by loggers with over 260 planes de manejo, legal logging permits granted by the government providing the right to cut up to 18,000 trees.

These permits are, in theory, legally required to provide background information about the area: proximity to rivers, land slope, tree width, areas of heavy logging nearby- before any logging is done. This information should then be used to determine whether trees can safely and without consequence be removed from the land. Not only has the government shown little regard for crucial areas of rain forest, but in deciding whether or not to cut trees they rely on studies by loggers rather than those by biologists and field experts. The effect is disastrous; rivers are destroyed as the land- without tree roots to hold it down- tumbles into the rushing waters. Entire ecosystems are annihilated in a single episode of mass destruction.

The land upon which rain forests grow has proven to be of no agricultural value whatsoever. Brazilian farming plans in the Amazon tested it time and again, each time failing to produce agriculturally. A 1985 Field Study of Costa Rican resources noted: "General unsuitability for agriculture or pasture has not slowed deforestation on steep slopes with high rainfall and low soil fertility" (28). Once the forest is cut, the precious top-soil of decaying matter will erode within a single rainy season, soon leaving only the packed red clay that is hidden by the richness of the ecosystem within the rainforest. Yet the government insists on providing residents with the planes de manejos, logging permits, necessary to cut hundreds of thousands of trees each year. MINAE, the federal agency that oversees natural resources, energy, and park services in charge of managing and conserving Costa Rican resources, claims that selling trees is sometimes the only option in areas of low economic output.

Minister of the Environment (MINAE), Elizabeth Odio holds that the people in the area, most of whom hold no legal title to the land, must be taken into account. (TT, Jan. 29, 1999). The idea that these people must sell their land to survive is short-sighted. Odio ignores the fact that most of the people in the Osa rely on the revenue produced by ecotourism either directly or indirectly. The tourism industry has been the biggest producer of foreign income for Costa Rica, leading the country's economy until recently. Obviously, ecotourism on the Osa Peninsula would plummet without the rain forest.

While the use of wood might be necessary to farmers and the clearing of trees for a homestead might be acceptable, the slaughter of hundreds of acres of virgin rain forest in exchange for a lump of green from the logging industry paid to a man with squatters rights is an atrocity from which the so-called conservationist Costa Rican government turns a winking eye.

The loggers have control of the government and have molded the laws to their liking. Three years ago a change in the law was made giving farmers with no legal title to land the right to apply for logging permits. Grassroots groups and conservationist politicians have fought the law since its 1996 passage, and only within the last months have they succeeded in the quiet retraction of this monstrosity. The logging industry has nonetheless been successful in side-stepping bans, increasing cutting to then extract the trees after the bans or cease-cuts (mandatory through the rainy season beginning in June) which do not include removing trees already felled.

Check-points are few and far between. The forestry engineers in charge of ensuring the legality of the logging permits are overwhelmed by too many, too often. All across the country the slow and heavy churning of eighteen-wheelers cannot be ignored, each loaded high with only the thickest base of magnificent, ancient trees. The rest, smaller specimens, branches and vines, ferns, whole ecosystems that exist in a single tree and nowhere else, are left to wash down the nearest river or be baked in the eternal tropical sun.

Yet the same government that concedes to the rape of the country's most precious resources is all about heralding a reputation of conservationism. Costa Rica has been an example to the international community with the highest ratio of land under protection by the national park service. Roughly one-third of the remaining rainforest is protected under Costa Rica's national parks system. The remaining forests are under Forest Reserve laws which say the area is "to provide wood, water, wildlife or forage on a sustained yield basis; and to provide areas for recreation in a manner that corresponds to the economic, social and cultural necessities of the general public." The government has advertised globally the sale of carbon bonds to more industrial countries in exchange for money to protect the rain forests. They have drafted incentive plans for squatters sitting on virgin forests, incentives which encourage planting tree farms after the cutting of the virgin rainforest - in exchange for money.

Despite the fact that ecotourism is a leading economic booster in the country, they have built roads leading up to the national parks, Corcovado in particular. Development up to the national park border lines are common-place and create island habitats for neotropical mammals. The money for these roads is taken out of the pockets of the tourism industry but used only by loggers.

One day I watched the entrance to the Corcovado-Drake road. Truck after loaded, eighteen-wheeler truck churned their way through dirt and dust, spouting purple-black diesel fumes into the surrounding foliage. Not a single passenger vehicle emerged.

It is difficult to fight a battle that will not be acknowledged. As we gathered to discuss Fundacion Corcovado, and options for saving the Osa, only twelve of us sat huddled over maps showing the areas of heavy logging in the Osa. The map indicated the great extent to which planes de manejos ignored or failed to take into account crucial factors such as existing rivers, land slope, neighboring logging areas, biological corridors.

In the thick jungle howler monkeys grunted, goading us into action and adding a very real sense of urgency to the situation. Cecilia Solano from Cecropia Foundation, the Costa Rican offspring of Woody Harrelson's Oasis Preserve International, brought us up to date on the topic of legal logging in the area. She emphasized in particular the government's efforts to push Costa Rica into the industrial future, a plan that would destroy all facades of environmentalism and includes no measures to protect the valuable resources contained in the rain forest. Jorge Lobos, a resident biologist of the University of Costa Rica, explained the importance of the remaining rain forest in Rancho Quemado in terms of the biological highway, or "corredor biologico" as he called it, that is in the beginning stages of planning throughout Central America. "It is the last remaining section of virgin rain forest outside of Corcovado," he said. The corridor would link North America to South America by way of a strip of virgin rain forest throughout and would in theory protect the migrating routes of land mammals and birds thus preventing island habitats and ensuring the continuation of endangered species by preventing closed gene pools.

Fundacion Corcovado's mission is to stop the cutting of neotropical rainforest by logging companies. This goal is difficult to achieve without the support of the government, hence the foundation is devoted to buying land for private reserves in the area as this seems to be the only solution to the heavy deforestation which is legal and acceptable in a country with deep roots in the logging industry and a government devoted to cutting the vital lifeline to the future that exists in tourism. Fundation Corcovado has started by policing legal logging permits and lobbying politicians in Costa Rica and the international

Costa Rica has the potential to preserve the pristine corners of the Osa Peninsula but the old battle continues between short-term economic gratification and long-term sustainability.

Many of the readers of the Planeta website have spent time and money in Costa Rica on the travel vacations. As a partner in Costa Rica sustainable resourse -- ecotourism -- you have a voice in keeping Costa Rica green. Your choice in choosing where to go and how you travel is a sign of a new value system that places planetary green over monetary green.

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