Protecting Panama; the land made famous by Noriega needs to protect its rainforests - Manuel Antonio Noriega

E: The Environmental Magazine, August, 1994 by Will Nixon

In the United States, the rainforest has become a floral fantasy land, decorating shampoo bottles and candy boxes, selling T-shirts and deodorant sticks on TV commercials, inspiring bad Hollywood movies, and growing in planter pots in offices everywhere. The zoo in hot, tropical Denver, Colorado has even built a $10 million rainforest exhibit under two glass pyramids that draws crowds like tourists to Eden. But in Panama City, where the rainforest starts right in town, the mass mind drifts to other lands. The local buses are carnivals of paint with red lipstick sides, hippie hieroglyphic bumpers, and back doors air brushed with soap opera stars. Above the front windshield appears a panorama of each bus's vision of Shangri La. It's never a rainforest. It's a New England farm in autumn, a Rocky Mountain beyond a bubbling brook, a Swiss castle pillowed with snow. Panama may be a remarkable biological linchpin between the American continents with more than 900 species of birds and over 1,200 species of trees, but the wealthy Panamanians would rather vacation at the beach. And the poor are slashing and burning the forests in order to plant crops to survive.

Research scientists have explored Panama for years. They first arrived early in the century to fight yellow fever and malaria so the U.S. could finish the Panama Canal in 1914. This new waterway across the rolling hills drastically altered the geography, creating Lake Gatun, which has the sprawling shape of a runover starfish, but it also made a de facto ecological reserve out of the U.S. military land along the canal zone. In 1924, the Smithsonian Institution opened a research station--really a wooden house on stilts--on an island in the lake, and major discoveries about the tropics have been coming out of Panama ever since. In recent years nearby Costa Rica has drawn most of the conservation press, but Georgina de Alba of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute insists, "Our researchers would say Panama is better."

The slender isthmus lets marine researchers commute easily between the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean to study quite different coral reefs, and the rainforests are much more accessible than in other tropical countries. The Smithsonian's most intriguing experiment, a giant construction crane that drops scientists in a gondola into the thick of a rainforest canopy, stands right in Panama City. But the Smithsonian has kept a low profile, unlike its Costa Rican rivals, because of politics. During the U.S. invasion to oust Noriega, two researchers were actually kidnapped for a day. "We have managed to stay here under difficult situations because we haven't meddled in Panamanian affairs," de Alba says. "It's a difficult role. A lot of conservation is political."

In 1985, Juan Carlos Navarro, a 23-year-old from the wealthy class returned home with a Harvard MBA and founded the Association for the Conservation of Nature (ANCON) with several friends and computers. They were starting from scratch, especially by U.S. standards, since few Panamanians birdwatch, backpack, or pursue any of the other outdoor hobbies that have spawned so many conservation activists here.

But since the Noriega crisis, when ANCON starved financially and had to fire half of its staff, the group has taken off, growing from a budget of $1 million in 1991 to $9 million in 1994. It now taps an international network of wildlife conservation groups and imports the techniques of U.S. environmentalism, from an "adopt-a-hectare" fundraising campaign, to creating a network of 2,000 volunteers for beach cleanups and other activities, to "cinema verite"-like TV commercials of illegal logging. ("They will find one good mahogany tree every few miles," says Marco Gandasequi of ANCON, "and they will bulldoze everything in their way to get to it.") The group has filed the first environmental lawsuit against the government and established the first private nature preserve on the southeastern coast of the country.

ANCON has now become an established word in the Panamanian vocabulary, Gandasequi reports. What it means remains a little murkier in the public mind. His father, also named Marco Gandasequi, one of the leading political analysts in the country, says, "If we were at zero 10 years ago, we are at one now. But that was an extraordinary step. Maybe from one to 10 will be easier." In last May's presidential elections, however, the environment was not even an issue, even though Panama faces changes that may alter its landscape forever. By the year 2000, all of the U.S. military land in the canal zone will revert to Panamanian control. As real estate, it's worth $30 billion in a country with a $5 billion gross domestic product. But as nature it's relatively pristine, aside from areas littered with ordnance from old war games, and it's valuable as a watershed that keeps the canal flowing clean. Panama has already created two national parks around the Rio Chagres river that feeds the canal, and conservationists would like to see much more of the zone protected as parkland. But to the national commission overseeing the transfer of the bases, the real estate value may count more.