February 1998
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San Jose, Costa Rica - Ricardo Rodriguez sits at a picnic table inside the national park he manages and watches the blue Pacific pounding the sickle-shaped beach. Nearby, a white-faced monkey searches for food scraps, while an iguana lolls in the sun. Visitors awed by the natural beauty of Manuel Antonio National Park and Costa Rica's other spectacular wilderness areas don't understand how much trouble they're in. But Ricardo Rodriguez does.
"They knock on our door everyday and say, 'Hey guys, we need the money, because that's our land,'" he says.
Twenty-five years after Manuel Antonio was created, it is still only half paid for. Moreover, 17% of Costa Rica's national parks still belong to private landowners, who legally have the right to cut timber on their holdings, though few do.
"They try to tell us, 'We need land for our cattle. We're going to cut down the trees if you don't pay,'" Rodriguez says. "We say, 'Okay, we don't have money, we're looking for money. Take it easy.'"
Broken Promises
Internal economic problems and government indifference have put the parks in peril, say critics. Costa Rica's national debt is devouring 25 cents of every dollar in the treasury. And foreign donations have begun to dry up as international donors are taking their projects elsewhere. Interviews with more than two dozen conservationists, biologists, and government officials reveal serious concerns that this nation is not living up to its own environmental rhetoric--either in supporting its famous park system or in halting deforestation.
"The government talks a lot about protected areas, biodiversity, sustainable development, but the practice is not so good," says Mario Boza, considered the father of the Costa Rican park system after he helped create it in the 1970s.
"I think politicians have overestimated what we are doing in conservation," says Julio Calvo, director of the respected Tropical Science Center in San Jose. "It's true we're preserving natural forest, but it's also true that we have not been able to stop deforestation or the pollution of our rivers."
Even the nation's chief administrator of the protected- areas system complains that most of the time he feels like just another special interest begging for attention from the Costa Rican legislature.
"The politicians have recognized that national parks have attracted a lot of foreign currency because of ecotourism, and they use the environmental issue in every political campaign," says Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, who oversees the nation's 1.5 million acres of nature reserves. "But there is not the political will to really work to resolve our problems."
Conservationists inside Costa Rica say that the lack of funding for national parks has reached crisis levels.
"In some areas in those parks we find what we call empty forest," says Mario Boza. "You see the forest, but there are no animals. They were hunted. We cannot protect the area."
A few examples:
"In Tortuguero, maybe one percent of the coastline is guarded," says Leslie du Tout, a South African sea-turtle activist who lives in Costa Rica. "We walked about a mile and a half of the beach and found seven (endangered) leatherback (sea turtle) nests, and all of them had been robbed."
It's not that the parks cannot pay for themselves: they earned US$4 million last year in entrance and research fees. But Costa Rica's cash-poor central government has to raid these earnings in order to pay for other urgent national needs.
"There's not enough money for the roads, so the roads have potholes," says Amos Bien, director of the Association of Costa Rican Private Nature Preserves. "Everybody is protesting, so the government takes money from some things and puts it into potholes. The schools are having problems, so the government makes a big effort there. Then the hospitals are having problems. Well, some of the national parks haven't been paid for. You can pay for the parks, but you have to take it from something else. And it goes around and around and around."
Accomplishments
Costa Rica--a country smaller than West Virginia--has more bird species than the US and Canada combined. To its credit, this nation has taken advantage of this extraordinary biodiversity by creating one of the most extensive protected- areas systems in the world. Eleven percent of its territory has been set aside for national parks; that is the equivalent of the US declaring all of Texas and Oklahoma as nature preserves. Costa Rica accomplished this in the 1970s and 1980s, when coffee and cattle prices were good, international aid was generous, and the country could afford to buy up undeveloped wilderness.
The environmental record of a small Central American republic might not seem important, but Costa Rica is held to a higher standard. It is looked to as a model by the rest of Latin America. Its stable democracy, strong middle class, high literacy, and its brain trust of skilled biologists have earned it tens of millions of dollars in international environmental aid. If conservation is going to work anywhere, experts say, it is supposed to work in Costa Rica--which has dubbed itself a "laboratory for sustainable development."
"We've done, in a lot of ways, as much as we can," says Katrina Brandon, a conservation biologist at the University of Maryland and an expert on sustainable development in Central America. "What's required now is an extraordinary demonstration of political will. And unless that political will is forthcoming, then you're not going to get effective conservation in the country. People know what needs to be done, but it's just not happening."
Nature tourism has now become Costa Rica's richest industry, earning US$700 million last year, even surpassing bananas and coffee exports. Costa Rican conservationists hope the country realizes it will have to take better care of its renowned wilderness areas if it wants the tourists to keep coming.
Deforestation
Puerto Jimenez, Costa Rica - In the 12 years he has been crisscrossing the Osa Peninsula as an air-taxi pilot and environmentalist, Alvaro Ramirez has noticed a dramatic change in the densely forested hills below.
"Look!" he says, pointing to a brown stream bisecting the velvet green landscape. "This is one of the tributaries to the Rio Tigre. This road is where the tractor goes up to cut wood. See it? It's a new road. Look there, where they take out the wood. They're not supposed to cut there, it is too close to the river."
Through the windshield of his Cessna, we can see ahead of us the sumptuous forest canopy of Corcovado National Park, which is still protected from timber cutting. But directly below, loggers have been looting the forest reserve surrounding the park, which provides critical additional habitat.
The hilltops are checkered with clear-cuts that look like soccer fields; from them lead logging roads and "trails," as Ramirez calls them. We turn around and head for the airstrip in the trading center of Puerto Jimenez. Ramirez stares ahead, a look of resignation on his face. "They are clear-cutting the watersheds," he says.
The Osa Peninsula is one of the largest expanses of lowland tropical forest left in Central America. Jutting off the Pacific Coast just above Panama, the Osa is Costa Rica's poorest, most remote--and in biological terms--its wildest province. Down here, jaguars still come out on the beach to hunt. Scarlet macaws and toucans are as common as sparrows. It is home to the world's largest pit viper, the bushmaster-- an eight-foot monster they call "matabuey," ox killer in Spanish. And on the Osa, the forest canopy rises taller than anywhere else in Costa Rica owing to the abundant rainfall.
Consumers certainly benefit from the giant hardwoods waiting their turn at the sawmill. In the hands of artisans, they become doors, credenzas, banisters, and floorboards. But environmentalists on the Osa rarely see the end product. They see what is left behind.
"We are standing right here by the banks of this river right now looking at the erosion, this water is chocolate brown," says a Greenpeace activist named Joel Stewart, who lives on the Osa when he is not at sea working as captain of the organization's ship, the Rainbow Warrior. He is looking at a muddy torrent that drains an upland region that has been heavily logged recently.
"One thing that bothers me a lot is the last coral reef in the Golfo Dulce region," says Stewart, referring to the body of water that separates the Osa Peninsula from the mainland. "It is dying because of the sedimentation. You go out and dive on this reef and it is covered with silt, which is choking it to death. Other reefs around the gulf have already died because of sedimentation."
Stewart says Costa Rica is hypocritical if it continues to promote itself internationally as an environmental haven, yet it is "only going to preserve what is in the parks as a type of biological zoo and allow everything else to be cut."
When the contralto whine of the chain saw starts to echo in the rain forests of Costa Rica, conservationists have learned to fear the worst. Over the past three decades, this country had the foresight to protect large tracts of wilderness by creating a system of nature preserves that comprise 11% of the national territory.
Yet while conservationists were setting aside some forestland, cattle ranchers were mowing it down elsewhere, giving Costa Rica one of the highest rates of deforestation in the Americas. Here, as elsewhere in the region, government policies rewarded landowners for converting forest into what was considered "productive" land--namely, cattle ranches. Today, almost all the virgin forest outside national parks is gone, or going fast.
"Even though there are not enough park guards, we can guarantee there is no logging in national parks," says Carlos Herrera, who headed the park service in 1994. "But the rest of the land is simply not protected. It is in danger."
Environmental Law
A new forestry law passed last year by the Costa Rican parliament includes innovative economic incentives for landowners to preserve these fast-disappearing woodlands. But another section of the same law--reportedly crafted by the timber industry--encourages deforestation.
"Unfortunately, we have a new forestry law that does not benefit us. On the contrary, it has made the problem worse," says Cecelia Solano of the Association for the Defense of Natural Resources of the Osa. "The new law has been a disgrace for this country, for the forests, and for those of us responsible for conserving for the next generation."
Under the old law, landowners had to request timber- cutting permits from federal forestry engineers in San Jose. But the procedure was slow and riddled with corruption. To decentralize the permit process, lawmakers took away the federal authority, and split it between the municipalities and private forestry engineers. Critics say the result has been chaos: the municipalities are handing out permits, though they have no experience in forest management, and the private foresters, known in Spanish as "regentes," are just as corrupt as the federal foresters were.
A former national park guard, who requested his name not be used, has come to a riverbank deep in the Osa, to show what he considers proof of how regentes abuse their authority.
"In the Osa, the permits appear to be legal. But they are done under the table," he says. "We are standing within 10 meters of the Rio Tigre, where it is illegal to cut trees, and we can see the stumps of a Guanacaste tree and a Guallabon tree that have been cut. These regentes sell these management plans for sausage (Costa Rican slang for bribes), and they allow the illegal extraction of wood."
The government acknowledges the new forestry law has caused problems. Environmental Minister Rene Castro says his office has filed charges against several private foresters and complained to the national forestry college about others.
"We know there are abuses and we have sent the accused regentes to the tribunals," he says, in an interview in his office in San Jose. "But part of the complaints about illegal tree felling is simply ignorance. There will always be trucks carrying logs out of the Osa, because some have permits. There is a mixture of valid and invalid complaints."
While the government defends itself and environmentalists fume, small landowners in the Osa applaud the new rules, which have made it easier for them to cut and sell timber.
"There is a lot of poverty. Old friends I grew up with have left their farms because they couldn't make it, because of conservation," says Freddy Gonzalez, who lives near the community of Rio Nuevo, in the heart of the Osa Peninsula. "We have to sell a little wood to survive. Let me tell you something, mister. The monkeys can eat fruit, but human beings cannot. We have more needs."
The situation has quieted for the moment on the Osa Peninsula. In late August, as public outcry and international attention intensified, Environment Minister Rene Castro imposed a temporary timber-cutting ban in the Osa and created a commission to investigate reports of illegal logging. Environmentalists have cautiously praised the moratorium, although they are worried what will happen when it expires.
Meanwhile, concerned residents near other Costa Rican forests being ravaged by loggers have reportedly asked the government to extend the timber ban to their regions as well.
The author, based in Austin, Texas, is a correspondent for National Public Radio in the United States. He can be reached via email
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