Sweet waist of America - national parks in Central America

Sierra, Jan-Feb, 1993 by Mary Jo McConahay

Late one afternoon I go with Juan Marco in his pickup to visit the park's western entrance. It would have taken us a day or two to walk there, but by using public dirt roads outside park boundaries we make the trip in an hour. While he attends to other business I walk into the park, spying a few huts deep among the trees.

This is where Catarina Jimenez and the squatter families live in distrust of the very idea of the park, an attitude born of years of government neglect. It's a place where a little effort at environmental education might go a long way. After all, residents like Jimenez often have a pride in the wild area as strong in its way as that of Alvarez: the first thing the Jimenez family wants to show me is the beauty of the rushing, sparkling river that runs by their house. Nevertheless, the rocks on its edge make good washboards, and the flow is fast enough to rinse out the soap well. Jimenez' husband goes off to work his cornfield inside the park boundaries.

"Does he use fertilizer?"

"Of course. How else would anything grow on soil so thin?"

When locals use the word "park," it is clear they imagine an urban green space with paved walks and kiosks. "It's wonderful to see people coming to visit, but when they ask us where the park is, we have to tell them 'You're already in it!"' says Dora Fuentes, Jimenez' mother--who believes it shouldn't be that way. "I wish they'd let us set up a little food stand on the road," the neighbors say.

Environmental education is widespread in urban areas, where people are more likely to be literate, or at least watch television. It is promoted by hundreds of grassroots conservation organizations, and by governments themselves. In the countryside, however, where the parks are, the message is slow to arrive. That is what makes the person-to-person work of Hector Gonzalez and activists like him so important. Traditional rural residents who are willing, sometimes aching, to be part of a wider world might be among the park-makers' best allies--but what conservationists know must be shared with them.

"If they would let us stay, just in this tail-end of the park, we could contribute by picking up trash from the road," volunteers Catarina Jimenez. What would she do with it? "We'd just throw it over there in the ravine, out of sight."

WHEN DARK FALLS at Tortuguero, on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast, the turtles begin to come up from the deep, riding the surf, then make their way slowly but resolutely across the beach to the line where green plants meet the sand. At only one place on the 22-mile-long nesting ground is there light from an old generator, some faint music from a thatch "disco," and the general store that boasts the town's only telephone. The rest of the beach is dark, especially when clouds move across the rising full moon.

Until the 1950s, residents might have worked as turtle-turners, one for every mile of beach, paid to turn the animals onto their backs, then tie logs like buoys to their flippers and float them helplessly out to collection barges that sailed up from the port of Limon. Today, 95 percent of Tortuguero's population of 500 depend on tourism or on providing services for naturalists. It is close to the park-makers' ideal of symbiosis between protected areas and the surrounding communities.