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A biology student learns that conservation
is as much a social science as a natural one
A scream shatters
the humid night. The chirping frogs and insects fall
silent. The sound, like a cat having its tail yanked off,
froze us in our tracks, half way across the 300-foot suspension
bridge connecting the two sides of La Selva Biological Station in
Costa Rica. One hundred feet below, rippled the
Puerto Viejo River. My friend, Eddie, grabbed the
flashlight from my hands and aimed it straight ahead. Two
orange globes hovered two feet above the bridge, glowing in the
darkness.
“What are those?” Eddie asks, straining to see.
I had no idea.
As the two fire balls move to within 30 feet, the flashlight
sketched out the profile of an animal and the globes no longer
float in air. They were eyes — the eyes of an animal
running down a rope bridge cable right at us. It is too
scared or too determined to turn back, and we were too shocked
to move. Suddenly the long-bodied, four-legged animal with
a reddish-orange coat jumps from the shadows into the light, ran
past us on the bouncing cable, and disappeared into the darkness.
Our encounter with a kinkajou took place in the middle of the
most developed part of La Selva. Eddie and I were in a
group of 15 Dartmouth biology students studying for two weeks of
a six-week tour of Costa Rica.
The La Selva property covers about 3,800 acres of Atlantic
lowland rainforest in northern Costa Rica; the station itself
takes up only three or four acres. On one side of the
bridge are two 20-person dormitories, a large dining hall, a
carpentry and machine shop, and a water tower. On the other
side sit a library, a conference building, a two-story general
laboratory, a modern chemical analysis lab, and multiple duplex
cabins for long-term researchers.
Strolling this checkerboard of trees and structures, I saw not
only kinkajous, but boa constrictors, parrots, giant bullet ants,
basilisk lizards, and agoutis. During his 13 years as
co-director of La Selva, says David Clark, he has never ceased to
be amazed that “all of our advanced technology is working
out here in the jungle with peccaries and great curassows
wandering around outside the windows.”
Ecology professors back at Dartmouth had taught us that islands
of habitat tend to lose much of their biodiversity: smaller
the island, more species lost. I wondered how a reserve
like La Selva avoids becoming such an island.
In 1968, the
Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) — now a consortium
of 52 universities and research institutions from the United
States, Costa Rica, and Puerto Rico — bought the 1,530-acre
farm called La Selva (“the forest”), from American
forester Leslie Holdridge. In those days, La Selva
exemplified conventional conservation: acquire land, lock it
away, and don’t worry about it.
La Selva was still been part of an unbroken forest, connected by
several square miles of trees to a large, 78,500-acre reserve to
the south called Braulio Carrillo. Within 10 years, poor
farmers suffering from displacement and land competition caused
by rapid population growth began to cut more and more land for
crops to feed their families. Their fires incinerated
hundreds of plant species and rove whatever wildlife was mobile
enough to escape into the waning woods. By the early
’80s, only a 33,750-acre, nine-mile-long neck of forest
connected La Selva to Braulio Carrillo. And the noose of
deforestation kept getting tighter, strangling wildlife habitat.
More than 75 percent of La Selva’s 412 species of birds
seasonally migrate into tracts of forest to the south; jaguars
need large territories to hunt; and some of the 460 species of
trees there require the southern forest as seed sources.
Threat of deforestation forced OTS to abandon its isolationist
attitude and adopt for goals: education, research,
strategic land preservation, and integration of preserved land
into local society.
Education and research are nearly inseparable. La
Sevla’s co-directors, David and Deborah Clark, explained,
“We’ve seen researchers arrive as OTS students, come
back to do Ph.D. research, and then send their own students
here.”
Take Gary Hartshorn, for example. Now a vice president of
World Wildlife Fund-US, he took an OTS forestry course at La
Selva in 1968 and returned to study a canopy tree, species Pentaclethra
macroloba. In the mid-’70s, Hartshorn said,
foresters from the World Bank, the US Agency for International
Development, and the Food and Agriculture Organization formed a
consensus that rainforests were ancient, stable, and too complex
to study. They recommended that rainforest be cut down and
replaced with monocultures in the form of plantations. “I
couldn’t swallow that.”
During his research into forest dynamics, Hartshorn discovered
that to sprout and grow, half of all rainforest trees species
require gaps caused by tree falls. Seeds are dispersed into
these gaps and grow rapidly in full sunlight, regenerating the
forest. Applying his discovery in the Palcazú Valley of
the Peruvian Amazon, Hartshorn developed a new forestry technique
called strip-clearcutting. The cut, only 100 to 130 feet
wide, “is really nothing more than an elongated gap. It
promotes fantastic forest regeneration.” The locals
sell the timber and in 30 years can cut the same plot again.
Education and research offer little conservation value as long as
wild lands continue to grow more scare. The size of West
Virginia, Costa Rica loses roughly 100,000 acres of primary
forest every year, 4 percent of all its remaining forest and four
times the percentage lost in Brazil. Only 30 percent of the
country’s original forests remain.
The great irony of Costa Rica is that while the country has one
of the highest deforestation rates in the world, it also has the
largest park system formally protecting some f 12 percent of its
land area. During our tour, we visited several parks,
ranging from dry tropical forests on the Pacific coast, to cloud
forests in the central mountains, to humid tropical rainforests
on the wild Osa Peninsula. These reserves harbor many
species, but much of the forest edges are exposed to Costa
Rica’s burgeoning population and deforestation continues.
In 1981, Don Stone, of the North American Office of OTS at Duke
University, and others had been talking about enlarging La Selva
for research purposes. Word leaked out to their neighbor, a
Señor Vargas, who decided to press La Selva to buy his adjacent
property. He figured a chainsaw would get the
scientists’ attention, and he was right. Stone and
peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and
then-president of OTS, led a campaign to raise $300,000 to
purchase Vargas’s 1,580 acres. At that point we were
either going to be a preserve surrounded by pasture or increase
our size. It changed the whole approach OTS had to
take,” admitted Stone.
Strategic preservation could not stop there. A number of
small additions around the periphery of La Selva did not ensure a
healthy influx of wildlife from Braulio Carrillo in the south.
The nine-mile neck of forest that connected La Seval to Braulio
Carrillo, called the Zona Protectora, had to be acquired. (“Protected
zone” status means the government freezes any further
changes in land use, through local owners retain land title.)
OTS eventually purchased the Zona Protectora, helped transform
the forest reserve into the Braulio Carrillo National Park, added
the Zona Protectora to the park, and then campaigned to turn the
park into a United Nations World Biosphere Reserve.
Hungry people, however, can’t always respect park boundaries
as laid down in pen and ink and stored in a file cabinet;
sometimes colonists, ranchers, and plantation workers are forced
to encroach upon a park. Hartshorn, who knows La Selva as
well as anyone, offered a humbling prediction. “There
are some 10,000 families of colonists in an arc going two-thirds
the way around La Selva and on 50,000 hectares of land. If
La Selva doesn’t deliver useful outreach [to them] —
whether tree seedlings, environmental education, or community
services — the reserve won’t survive into the next
century.”
When I first arrived at La Selva, I never realized that
conservation was as much a social science as a natural one.
Stone explained, “When you try to set aside land and
it’s not actively grazed or put to some apparent economic
use, if the people don’t perceive this as something of
value, then the lands become colonized or expropriated. If
you don’t have the people’s confidence, and you have
economic depression, which most tropical American countries have,
then you stand a good chance of losing your property.”
To meet these challenges, the Clarks train young people from
nearby Puerto Viejo as paid nature guides to teach values of the
rainforest to foreign visitors. La Selva also offers
environmental education programs, including public seminars, open
houses, classes, and tours that reach hundreds of schoolchildren,
parents, and teachers in adjacent communities. The Clarks
consider neighborly accord the best investment for Braulio
Carrillo National Park. Researchers working on a recent
arthropod survey hired five Costa Ricans as technicians and
assistants. A project called TRIALS works with local
farmers to establish small-scale plantations to test the most
promising native, commercial trees species for reforesting
degraded land.
Because of its efforts, OTS has developed a good working
relationship with the government of Costa Rica. In 1986,
OTS was invited to advise the Ministry of Natural Resources,
Energy, and Mines on the national park system. Oscar Arias,
former President of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize recipient,
remarked, “As a Costa Rican, I am very satisfied and
grateful for the interest shown by OTS over the last few years in
trying to support our efforts in environmental policies.”
Like La Selva, the science of conservation has changed and
matured over the years. Neither one can exist in a vacuum.
Succeeding generations of conservationists, indeed everyone on
Earth, must learn that environmentalism isn’t simply a
movement, that it must become a way of life. Otherwise, the
marvelous diversity of wildlife and wild habitats will disappear
forever.
Jon Kohl graduated from Dartmouth College in 1992 and is working with the National Zoo of Costa Rica.