A plait of three colors

President Vicente Fox of Mexico has launched a regional economic development program called the Puebla-Panama Plan. He has received encouragement from President George W. Bush; he has secured financial commitments from the Inter-American Development Bank; he has gained the approval of other governments in Mesoamerica. Implementation of the PPP is imminent.

Thus far, the PPP appears to emphasize massive investments in fundamental infrastructure, including highways and electric power grids, in several southern states of Mexico and all seven countries in Central America. The notion of an "industrial corridor" comes to my mind, reaching from the heart of Mexico all the way to Panama. If it had a color, it would be gray, I think; the color of asphalt.

Is that gray corridor a bad thing? I'm not an expert on macroeconomics, but I am an Eisenhower-era witness to the interstate highway system in the United States. Superhighways will probably be good for the Mesoamerican region, at least in terms of economic development and cultural integration.

But, there are two corridors already out there in Mesoamerica, two strands of other hues. To achieve the greatest measure of progress in the region, it is incumbent upon President Fox and his allies to bind these two corridors, to plait them, with the gray of the PPP, into a cord of greater strength.

One of these corridors is green. Since 1990, on behalf of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), I have worked on a biological corridor for Central America, a greenway, to contrast with the gray of the PPP.

At its inception, we called our corridor project the Paseo Pantera (Path of the Panther), after one of the great cats, the puma, which would need to move from park to park or country to country in Central America in order to find prey and mates; to find the wherewithal to survive. Our suggestion was to facilitate that movement with an international greenway or corridor system. For the sake of wildlife survival, the idea was to link together the remaining "fragmented" habitats in the contiguous countries of Central America and their neighboring states in Mexico.

With support from the U.S. Agency for International Development, we refined the concept of the corridor and aired it to audiences that grew in size and interest over a period of five years. Eventually, the seven countries of the region adopted the reasoning offered by the Paseo Pantera project. To implement it, they formulated a new project known as the Mesoamerican Biotic Corridor (MBC) and obtained funding from the Global Environmental Facility (of the United Nations Development Programme).

The geography of the MBC overlaps President Fox's Puebla-Panama Plan almost perfectly, and it predates the PPP by five years; ten, if you include the groundwork of the Paseo Pantera project. To a degree, the MBC has set a template, a planned landscape, upon which the PPP must fulfill itself.

So, what will happen? Will the PPP cast an asphalt blanket over the green of the biotic corridor? Will the trajectories of roads and high-tension wires, and the general sprawl of industry and tourist facilities, undo the still-tenuous accomplishments of the MBC?

There are those who think so. It is a conclusion that assumes that economic development and the conservation of ecological systems are incompatible goals.

I have a different outlook. If, as we hope, the Mesoamerican Biotic Corridor process can identify the crucial conservation land of the region, then, by default, that land which is not within the scope of the MBC might be suitable for development. And I am convinced that it should be developed in all haste, in order to employ people; in order to provide opportunity; in order to alleviate poverty. In order, paradoxically, to save the region from environmental catastrophe.

It is the impoverished status of the people in southern Mexico and much of Central America that makes progress with conservation, and, for that matter, the permanence of the biological corridor, so ... improbable. In the developing world, it is conservation and poverty that are incompatible, not conservation and development. If called upon, the conservationist can confront the maverick timber company or the menacing multinational oil company; but the conservationist cannot "confront" poverty. It's not an entity; it's a condition.

So, I view President Fox's proposal as potentially timely; potentially indispensable to the goal of conserving the biological heritage of Central America. And, I happen to be grimly confident that the industrial corridor, the PPP, cannot succeed in Central America without the conservation "services" provided by the Biotic Corridor. Desertification, for example, and hydroelectric production, one of the priority goals of the PPP, are pathetically contradictory.

I believe that the two corridors now being advanced in Middle America, the Mesoamerican Biotic Corridor and the Puebla-Panama Plan, one green, the other gray, can be mutually reinforcing. They are two fibers of individual importance to a needy land, but threads that would be proven far stronger, more vital, if woven together, rather than persisting alone.