By Jon Kohl and Rafael Manzanero

typical trail builder sharpens his axe, bounds out into the woods, and chops away a swath in the forest.  By the trailhead the builder then nails a sign to a tree declaring “welcome” and “Bienvenidos.” If the trail has even more budget, it might boast steps holding back soil sustaining many tourist feet, a boardwalk stretching across a perennially sticky mire, a series of information signs identifying this tree as an oak and that one as a cedar (format:  scientific name, range map, uses for humans) or even a written brochure expounding the same.  But the sophistication of most interpretive nature trails in Latin America rarely surpasses those basic elements.

            In most cases when the objective comprises recreation, little more need concern builders; but what happens if we were to add the objectives of turning a profit or contributing to conservation to this simple sylvan sojourn?

            The trail immediately becomes a small business and a conservation project.  These, in fact, are the objectives that RARE Center for Tropical Conservation builds into its trail methodology for Latin America.  RARE Center is an Arlington, Virginia-based international conservation organization that works with local people and other partners to help them use ecotourism to promote conservation of globally significant biodiversity in the developing tropics. This article speaks to the barriers and solutions RARE Center has encountered in the on-going development of its Nature Trail Development Program in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Conservation Goals

Unlike a winning lottery ticket or a 1999 dot-com, success in biodiversity conservation never results from mere luck.  Conservation projects must weave together many disciplinary strands of a complex society.  Sometimes even well intentioned conservation projects can make their target situations worse.  Some trails, when not sufficiently guarded, make life easier for hunters on patrol — or prisoners on the run.  Guides at Pico Bonito National Park in northern Honduras discovered that an escaped convict had camped out along a trail during his flight from authorities.

            But when done with care, a trail might contribute to conservation in several ways:

·        Through visitor entrance fees, a trail can generate funds to finance conservation.

·        Through a positive, interpretive visitor experience, visitors can make contributions (money, in-kind, or time) to conservation projects on site.

·        If they have a strong positive experience, visitors, especially local people, can politically support new regulations, sign petitions, attend public meetings or park events, write articles, speak favorably, put up park posters.

·        When local business develops around the flow of visitors going to a trail, owners could also realize more financial revenue and political support.

An able trail designer concerned about conservation combines these objectives in different ways depending on the threats to the site, management scheme, importance of the attraction, location, market, and other factors.  But to achieve this kind of conservation requires much more planning than drawing up a simple floor map and axing a few trees.  And when potential trail builders for the first time see all that RARE Center requires of its partners to achieve a profit-making conservation trail in order to win assistance, it can be astounding even frustrating.

Barriers to Profitable Trail Development

Getting to a profitable interpretive trail in the developing tropics — or probably anywhere — requires jumping quite a few barriers (see “Hurdles to Teaching Guides to Interpret Biodiversity Conservation” in July/August for discussion on other barriers such as education, culture, language, and methodology).  Each new goal beyond opening a forested path introduces a series of new challenges for a tropical trail.

Does the trail make “cents?”  Developing a business without a business perspective might be like designing churches without ever having gone to church.  However, not only do state- or NGO-run protected areas frequently not have needed business skills, but often mistrust business to manage a public good, fearing the profit motive can never lead to environmental protection. This attitude, common in Latin America, often keeps the business perspective off the trail.

            Every business must have the client in mind from the outset.  When the trail business does not, builders often locate their trails in places with poor access, little market, or around non-attractions.  One NGO on the coast of Mexico manages a site with some of the highest mangroves on the Pacific side of the Americas. Instead of locating its trail near this stunning attraction, however, it ended up near its research station surrounded by ordinary secondary forest, out of sight of the mangroves, and completely mosquito-ridden most of the year.  State-managed Arenal Volcano National Park in Costa Rica located its visitor center and trails so far off the beaten path that few people visit it, according to a prominent interpretive designer there.

            Often non-business people mix up the service with the attraction.  In Latin America, where attractive trail infrastructure is a novelty in many areas, it is easy for park managers to become so infatuated with their trails that they overlook the reason for building them:  to facilitate “access,” allowing the visitor to reach and experience the park’s natural attractions.

            People without a business perspective can not only forget the clients but very often the money as well.  Considering that many park managers may be accustomed to government funding or are used to the foundation hand-out system where the park does not earn the money, but receives it as a “gift,” a certain efficiency is lost.  In both cases, park administrators find themselves in the “use it or lose it” spending mode.  The risk of losing one’s own money, on the other hand, motivates solid financial management.

            When money comes with a price (such as loan interest or opportunity cost), a trail builder tries to predict how much she will have and how much things will cost.  She would be less likely, for instance, of building trail infrastructure for which she had insufficient resources to maintain, than if she had an idea of cash flow and knew how must could be invested in maintenance from month to month.  Consequently, parks across Latin America suffer degraded trail infrastructure and allot little or no budget for maintenance.  One park manager in Honduras found he had not enough foundation money to build the planned trail so instead of scaling it back he wanted to make the planks in the boardwalk thinner, halving the wood’s life-time from four years to two.

A businessperson thinks in terms of depreciation, investment, fixed costs, and deadlines; non-business people often think about taking photos, showing donors they spent the money, and eventually finishing up and inaugurating the trail. 

Interpretation:  not seeing the trees for the trail.  If a business perspective is an endangered species, then an interpretive perspective might be a creature like the Loch Ness Monster.  At least if a Latin American park desires to tap some business experience, it exists in universities, courses, consultants, books in Spanish, and businesspeople everywhere.  If park managers want to search for Nessie, they might read a little about her in Sam Ham’s Interpretación Ambiental (Spanish version of Environmental Interpretation) or NAI’s El Interprete— but in little else.

            Despite the lack of information, interpretation shares several points with the business world.  As any interpreter knows, no interpretive program exists without visitors and few visitors show up without marketing.  Interpretation is inherently product-based because it requires an audience that has free will to come and go, to pay or not to pay.  Interpretation and business both focus on an attraction (or the subject of interpretation).  Both also focus on the client’s interests, expectations, and needs.

            Where business no longer can help interpretation in Latin American parks is when interpretation follows cliché-driven rather than theme-driven tenets.  That is, a great many trails if they have any kind of information besides regulations and directions, fall into one of three cliché categories:  medicinal plants, trees and their uses, or other benefits to humans.

            Interpretation should also play a very important role in site selection.  When one enters the venture focusing on attraction and client and not on infrastructure, a park develops a trail with the best intentions of exploring the attraction.  Nevertheless, without an interpretive perspective, the builders do not ask the critical trail development questions:  What is the best way to interpret the resource-attraction?  What is the best way we can minimize visitor encounters and trail degradation?  What is the best way we keep the visitor experience diverse, changing, and stimulating?  Rather the questions too often are:  Can we get a boardwalk in there?  Can we build a bridge over this river?

            So the trail remains story-less, lifeless, without a sense of place.  Without knowing the site’s story from the beginning, the trail can never be designed to maximize it.  Even worse, developers often relegate interpretation to the end of the trail-building process.  Would an architect design a building and then ask what it is for?  Would a doctor treat a patient and then diagnose what the problem is?

            Thus, trail builders often do not see the trees for the trail.  If a manager sells himself on the idea of a boardwalk it does not matter which forest it goes through.   A nature trail in Guatemala was touted as a rainforest walk that brings visitors up to a small group of indigenous farming homes where they spend the night.  Although we walked through some rainforest along the trip, part way through the trail we stumbled into a massive opening, a depressingly fresh clear cut, with burnt trunks and eroded, rocky soil.  The scene provoked discussion among our group as to why the conservation NGO sited a trail through a carbonized part of the forest if the focus was wildlife.  We discussed the trail more than the resource we came to experience!

Managing a mini-park.  Some parks such as the Appalachian Trail in the US or the Inca Trail in Peru are parks unto themselves.  Thus it is not difficult to imagine a conservation trail as a mini-park with most of the challenges of managing a larger park.  A trail must have security, monitoring and impact mitigation, regulations, personnel and maintenance, interaction with stakeholders in surrounding communities, resource analysis, marketing, and of course have an effective visitor management and interpretation system, especially if they want to bankroll in those visitor contributions.  Both the business and interpretation perspectives require that the site be managed, adding yet another layer of difficulty on top of inexperienced park management realities throughout Latin America.

RARE Center Manual

To confront these deficiencies, RARE Center developed a step-by-step manual to create a profit-generating conservation trail, Trails that Make Dollars and Sense.  The manual describes the process in 10 chapters (see below).  The manual assumes that the would-be business-interpreters have a mid-level technical capability with support from a park or community group.  If the organization decides to take on the challenge of building a trail, RARE Center recommends that they will need one full-time person for up to a year.  Just to develop the proposal might require two months if they do the survey used to determine market demand, willingness to pay, and visitation projections. Thereafter, the manual explains how to calculate fixed and variable costs; choose a profit margin and break-even point; do financial projections, cash-flow analysis, marketing, branding, and other aspects of product development.

            The manual started out in English-speaking Caribbean islands where it met much success, even if at that time it did not focus on interpretation.  The star of the 10 trails developed is the state-run Des Cartier Trail on the island nation of Saint Lucia, which in its 60 months since opening has generated $1,320,00 for the local economy and $240,000 for the forestry department by attracting an average of 400 visitors a month.

            Recently the manual has been translated to Spanish, the interpretation bolstered, and has moved to the mainland where right now pilot trails are under development in Honduras and Mexico.  RARE chose to write the manual in the first place out of a very strong need in the tropics for such material on trail design and to bolster conservation benefits of ecotourism.  The need burned even more for such materials in Spanish.  While RARE intends eventually to post the manual to its web site, it realizes that to carry out the development of just such a trail requires more than a financial commitment (typically ranging from $10-30,000), but a strong institutional commitment, a somewhat new set of skills, and a business and interpretation perspective. 

            In only a few cases does an organization have sufficient institutional maturity to use the manual correctly without technical assistance.  So that manuals are not simply downloaded and added to an organization’s collection of books in early retirement, RARE Center will be developing its own capacity to offer technical assistance to sites that most support RARE’s strategic objectives.  A number of lessons learned include:

1.  Start interpretation much earlier in the process.

2.  Review site selection with the implementing organization to avoid the placement of trails next to research stations, for example (that organization was using RARE’s pilot manual at the time).

3.  Obtain money from loans in place of grant money to produce more complete proposals.

4.  Have organizations articulate conservation and business strategies in a project profile, even before they write a large proposal.

            With such lessons the manual started down a trail toward becoming a full program, not just a stand-alone guide.  Currently RARE staff follows a 22-step process starting from initial partner selection, to writing a two-page project profile, to writing a full proposal, to several rounds of revision, to signing a memorandum of understanding, to developing a business and marketing plan, to on-going monitoring, and finally, with some luck, to declaring the trail a success.  This system tries to weed out the axe-happy from the conservation savvy. 

            RARE has begun a more intensive effort to offer technical assistance through a proposal review, site visits, and remote technical advising from up to three different staff people specializing in different aspects of trail design (administration, business development, and interpretation).

            But the evolution does not stop there.  RARE also has a suite of other ecotourism interventions that include bilingual nature guide training (see “Hurdles to Teaching Guides to Interpret Biodiversity Conservation” in the Jul/Aug 2001 issue of Legacy), ecotourism extensionist training, public use planning in protected areas (watch for upcoming article in Legacy), enterprise development, and conservation education.  When trails are combined with these different elements, the effect could be synergistic.  Imagine the following combinations:

·        Trails with trained bilingual nature guides

·        Trails with ecotourism extensionists who work with local communities to develop small touristic service providers around the trail site

·        A public use plan in a park that strategically determines the best location and moment in the park’s strategic plan to develop the trail

·        A trail that uses conservation education to promote and motivate the surrounding population about the trail’s main interpretive message

·        A trail that becomes a segment of a multi-national itinerary that is then sold to tourists in other countries

RARE Center Trails Program of the Future

Some say that when visitors walk, money can talk.  While RARE’s Spanish trail program is still in its pilot phase, its own trail to the future has been marked out.  RARE searches for trails that attract visitors whose obligatory and voluntary contributions support the trail site’s conservation.  Trails will increasingly become incorporated into larger ecotourism development packages and not be developed in isolation.  Builders must use interpretation at the outset to guide construction rather than try to plug it into the end of process.  Monitoring will become a must rather than a luxury and a strong business and marketing plan will become critical for selecting successful proposals.

            RARE Center is currently embarking on a project with UNESCO and UNEP to link ecotourism with biodiversity conservation in six World Heritage sites in Mesoamerica and Indonesia.  Under these conditions both business and interpretation can be linked to convert a positive visitor experience into dollars and interpretive sense that pay the dividends of globally important biodiversity conservation.

For More Information

RARE Center for Tropical Conservation.  2000.  Trails that Make Dollars and Sense. 

Trapp, Suzanne, Ron Zimmerman, and Michael Gross.  1992.  Signs, Trails, and Wayside Exhibits:  Connecting People with Places.  Stevens Point:  University of Wisconsin.

Jon Kohl, Assistant Director for Public Use Planning at RARE Center for Tropical Conservation, was program manager for the first Honduras Nature Guide Training Program in 1997, part of the rewrite team for the Spanish version of the trails manual Trails that Make Dollars and Sense, and co-author of the Nature Guide Training manual Interpreting for Conservation.

Rafael Manzanero, Assistant Director for Conservation Education and Trails at RARE Center for Tropical Conservation, has been directing the trails program for the past two years.  Before RARE, he was a conservation officer with the Belize Department of Forestry.  He is currently monitoring the development of three nature trails in Mesoamerica.  Although the trails manual is not currently available for general distribution, for further information visit www.rarecenter.org, or direct correspondence to rmanzanero@ rarecenter.org.

National Association for Interpretation