Sweet waist of America - national parks in Central America

Sierra, Jan-Feb, 1993 by Mary Jo McConahay

In the first light of day the mist has already broken above the tallest trees. A spider monkey 30 feet up reaches from the branches of a stately owala to grasp the feathery tips of another tree, stretching her thin body across the airy abyss to make a bridge for her baby, who scrambles across to safety and disappears into the green. Small, ruby-red poison-dart frogs move like animated jewels, carrying tadpoles on their backs up the trunks of flowering almendro and gavilan to deposit them in the brief watery pools of a thousand bromeliads. White antheriums turn their slender heads in every direction under an open sky. Butterflies, some like fluttering orange squash blossoms and others transparent as glass, gently cut the warming air, while perched high above the trail a pair of toucans soberly turn their heads side to side, bright, hard yellows catching the earliest sun.

For the moment, the poor and war-crippled communities of Central America seem remote from this patch of government-protected rainforest along Costa Rica's Sarapiqui River. An hour after dawn, however, a pesticide-spraying plane is already droning by on its daily run to the new banana fields nearby. The reality confronting park-makers in Central America is never very far away.

The Sarapiqui is one place Jim Barborak especially wanted me to see. I met Barborak--a 16-year Costa Rica resident, consultant to Wildlife Conservation International, former Ohio fur trapper turned professor and mud-booted trainer of park managers from throughout the hemisphere-- early in my travels among Central America's national parks. He told me many things that would resonate in the following months. One especially: in Central America, there's more to making a park than putting a fence around the forest.

Here, people are most concerned with local issues, such as the need for farmland, or for developing resources to pay national debts. "North American environmentalists tend to be strident and to talk about future generations," said Barborak. "When you live in a crisis mode, you don't have the time to think that far ahead."

Other conditions conspire to focus Central American environmentalists on the present. In El Salvador and Guatemala, where everyday violence is a fact of life, rangers and conservation officials have been threatened with death for crossing hunting or lumber interests. Not one source I talked to in Guatemala would allow me to use his name-no one wanted "a high profile." In late September, ecologist Marco Vinicio Cerezo narrowly survived an ambush by gunmen outside the head-quarters of the environmental organization he directs, an attack Cerezo attributes to "someone who does not understand that our work is conserving nature and creating parks."

The region's model for that work is Costa Rica, which abolished its army 40 years ago and has no death squads. "Here we don't have to be afraid of being killed because we're conservationists," says biologist Hector Gonzalez. That's the good news. But to an increasing degree, Costa Rica does share its neighbors' dilemmas: national debt and poverty, and the short-term answers brewed to address them.

Gonzalez lives in La Selva, a privately run forest reserve and jungle research station in the Sarapiqui region that, like other protected areas, is threatened by rampant development on its borders. One afternoon we ride out of La Selva in his jeep, along roads still under construction between new banana plantations, passing trucks loaded with huge, polished river boulders quarried for roadbed. The usually upbeat Gonzalez is grouchy about the "stolen" boulders. "We are traveling on the bottom of the Sarapiqui," he says. "Can you hear the rapids under the tires?"

Gonzalez has been a conservationist for 15 years, ever since, as a high-school activist, he helped rally opposition to a proposed oil pipeline through a tropical forest. (He won that one.) He sees lots of room in Costa Rica for people to join the environmental movement, but fears that "apathy is taking over while politicians talk about 'our wonderful natural resources."'

On either side of the road .we're on, those resources are being razed by U.S., Venezuelan, British, and Colombian banana companies to make way for new fields and pre-fab bungalows for their workers. Ironically, the settlements bear the names of endangered trees such as cocohalo and nogal. Everything is so new here that sometimes when we stop to ask directions, workers cannot answer the question, "Where are We now?"

Two years ago this was rainforest. Today 17,000 acres of uniform gray-green banana plantations drain fumigation residues into rivers that continue on through supposedly protected rainforest. (The rivers also carry the stray plastic bags from among the millions used to protect the hanging fruit. Sometimes the banana bags float all the way down to Tortuguero National Park on the coast, where they are swallowed by leatherback turtles that fatally mistake them for jellyfish.) Banana plantations are projected to cover some 60,000 acres here by 1995.