ANAI: idealism survives in the humid tropics - nonprofit Costa Rican environmental group

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1989 by Bill McLarney

MY ASSIGNMENT HERE is to pat ourselves on the back - to explain why ANAI, in contrast to so many of the small, idealistic nonprofits founded in the seventies, is a success" - and in a physically and economically difficult environment at that. Years of grant-proposal writing having deadened most of my natural feelings of modesty, I accept and will defend our nomination as a success, but in a manner somewhat more personal than we permit ourselves in proposals.

One thing we soft-pedal in proposals has to do with different kinds of success. If who you want to be is, say, Steve Jobs, then technical and organizational success may well go hand in hand with personal success of the kind my parents wished for me. But if your endeavor is idealistic, you'd best be prepared to live a little lower on the hog. In terms of salaries, benefits and job security any of us at ANAI could do as well dispensing rainforest beef at some fast-food franchise.

We don't mention that aspect in proposals because of what has become of many of our erstwhile cohorts from the seventies. They now wear neckties and sit in the comfortable offices of the organizations which receive our proposals. Nothing wrong with that - philanthropy, bureaucracy and for-profit business will be with us for some time yet, and often perform good works. But our friends who own multiple neckties sometimes get a wee bit defensive about their affluence and comfortable offices when reminded of how the muddy-boots set are remunerated.

Though we may not have foreseen it, those of us who pioneered the 'Alternatives Movement" in the seventies would come to a crossroads. One road led to bureaucracy - joining or evolving into a "big" organization capable of moving large amounts of money and people. The gratifications of this road are obvious. Less obvious is the apparently ineluctable law that large do-gooder organizations must spend a high percentage of their budgets on nonessential trim.

The bumpy road less taken, which should be posted "fanatics only," leads to a high level of economic efficiency within a deliberately limited area. If the high road may be likened to the R and D department of a large industry, the fanatics' road is like the inventor in the garage, hoping first that the gadget will work, second that it will be used, and finally that it will help him make a decent living.

ANAI has reached the second objective. Not only do our ideas - some of them, anyway - work, other people and organizations are beginning to borrow and adapt them, and we find ourselves being cited as among the few who are actually implementing sustainable development. "

Our agroforestry project, which has assisted some 1,500 farmers in Costa Rica's canton of Talamanca to plant some 2 million crop trees, is being emulated in other parts of Costa Rica, and in Honduras and Belize. Though none of us were trained as organizers, the fact that farmers in 25 communities have worked together voluntarily one day a week for over three years has brought students of community organization knocking on our door. Our land-titling project, already successful in accomplishing its stated goals, is beginning to be studied as one of the first efforts to link peasant land tenure and wildlands conservation. While sustainable development is all the rage these days, it is being realized that Talamanca is one of the few places where such seemingly disparate elements as a wildlife refuge and a marketing cooperative are being fused into a coherent whole, based on an idealistic vision of the future and a lot of hard work in the present.

None of this would have happened without the kind of fanaticism that perversely finds more pleasure rattling down the bumpy road with a toolkit behind the seat than in cruising the four-lane with a AAA card in one's pocket. I unblushingly credit myself as the first fanatic. The proper way to found an organization is to rent an office, hire some administrative help and then set up field projects. ANAI began with a swampy "farm" purchased for 471 dollars and a wild-cane shack with no floor.

MY FIRST CO-FANATIC was ANAI's neighbor Jeronimo Matute, prominently featured a few years back in CoEvolution Quarterly [#40, p. 641. As I wrote in the first ANAI Annual Report, "Whatever wild dream I could conjure up for our baby institute, Matute could produce a wilder one. Very few people would have been capable of sitting on a stump on a dirt floor, in a cloud of mosquitoes under a leaky roof, and expounding grandly on 'El Instituto' which our leaky edifice housed. I needed that oblivious-to-present- reality vision." Later, after we became able to pay Matute a modest salary, that salary was reduced rather drastically through a clerical error. We never heard about it from Matute. He simply assumed times were hard and we had cut wages across the board - and kept working as hard as ever.

Similarly, since Jim Lynch and Bob Mack came on as co-directors, they have never been unwilling to forego part of their salaries if necessary. More than once the ANAI office and experimental farm have run out of their pockets rather than from grants destined for such purposes. And their efforts never cease. I perversely cling to some elusive dream of a "normal" life. It may be that they do not; often their energy commitment is embarrassingly in excess of mine.