Entrance to Tortuguero National Park

A recently released report from Georgia State University gives us yet another reason to protect the rainforest: parklands, it turns out, can also help with economic development.

Studying data from Costa Rica and Thailand, researchers concluded that national parks in developing countries can actually help to reduce poverty in the areas surrounding the preserves.

“The effect of national parks and reserves on their human neighbors is arguably the most controversial debate in conservation policy,” says the new study, “Protected areas reduced poverty in Costa Rica and Thailand” released in April 2010. The debate is especially heated in developing nations, where ecosytem preservation and economic development are often seen as at odds.

“Because ecosystem protection limits agricultural development and exploitation of natural resources,” says the report, “opposition to protected areas is frequently driven by the assumption that they impose large economic costs and thus exacerbate local poverty.”

And while the researchers found that people living near national parks were indeed on the whole poorer than the national average, careful analysis of census data revealed that the poverty wasn’t a result of land preservation, which in fact often “generates economic benefits by…promoting tourism and improving infrastructure in remote areas.”

In the graphic below (courtesy of the report), protected areas created before 1980 are in green (these were the areas that the report studied). The relative poverty levels throughout Costa Rica are shown, with pink being the richest and dark red the poorest. The diagram makes use of data from 1973; the report compared that to economic data from 2000.

Apart from the effect of protected areas on poverty, the map is interesting to me in that it shows where Costa Rica’s wealth is (or was) concentrated: in the Central Valley around the capital city of San Jose, which is to be expected, but also in pockets around the country, like near Palmar Norte and Palmar Sur (north of the Osa Peninsula), near Cuidad Neily and Paso Canoas (near the Panama border), around Liberia in Guanacaste, and along the Pacific Coast between Jaco and Dominical. I would imagine that an updated map would show even more wealth along Guanacaste’s “Gold Coast” – where in beach towns like Tamarindo and Playas del Coco development is moving along at breakneck speed.

Here are some maps of Costa Rica with cities and towns marked, if you want to compare them to the map below.

Green means protected parklands; light pink means wealth, dark red poverty.

See also:
Boom town greed and condo ghost towns in Playas del Coco

Photo: Matt Potemsky/Pretoma

A few weeks ago Tico environmental activist Randal Arauz was in San Francisco to claim a Goldman Foundation prize for his work to help stop shark finning in Costa Rica. The prize this year went to six environmental activists around the world; each recipient received US$150,000 to continue their grassroots efforts.

Shark finning is the practice of maiming and killing sharks for their fins, which often bring a very high price, especially in Asian markets, where Shark Fin Soup is considered a delicacy. In 2004, Costa Rica was the world’s third largest exporter of shark products, including 8,000 tons of fins.

Things have improved since 2004, but much work remains to be done. In his acceptance speech Arauz noted,

Sadly, shark finning is far from over. Global shark population declines are estimated at 90%, mostly due to shark finning. … More than 100 foreign longline shark finning vessels still operate illegally in private docks of Costa Rica. Recently, investigative journalists have exposed drug trafficking and indentured servitude alongside shark finning at these private docks, whose operators take advantage of lax customs enforcement.

So what’s next? What can we do? Read the rest of Arauz’s speech to find out.

Arauz is part of PRETOMA, a Costa Rican organization that works to protect the ocean’s resources, including sea turtles and sharks.

near Rincon de la Vieja in Guanacaste, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

Ray Beise of Pura Jungla sent me a link to a great interview with Daniel Janzen, the pioneering conservationist who helped create the 300,000-acre Area de Conservación Guanacaste and proved that denuded tropical forests can be brought back from the brink.

In Yale’s Environment 360 magazine, Janzen is interviewed by Caroline Fraser, author of Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution.

Now 71, Janzen is currently working on a hand-held barcorder device designed to quickly identify the world’s organisms (viruses, invertebrates, plants, animals, and birds) by their DNA. This iPhone-type scanner could, says one biologist, “do for biodiversity what the printing press did for literacy.”

Janzen has been one of my heroes since I read Green Phoenix: Restoring the Tropical Forests of Guanacaste, Costa Rica by William Allen. It’s a book about conservation that reads like a murder mystery, or rather a coming-into-being mystery, describing the hard-won rebirth of tapped-out pastureland and razed forests. It seems to be out of print (with an old copy going for $50 on Amazon), but you can probably get it at the library. You can also read large chunks of Green Phoenix on Google Books.

Treehouse at Finca Bella Vista, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

Remember the old Saturday Night Live skit, ‘Quien es mas macho?’ The contestants included Jack Lord from Hawaii-5-0 and Ricardo Montalban, who consistently came out on top.

Here we have a variation on that theme, with all the Costa Rican treehouses I’ve visited vying for the honor of being treehouser than thou.

One thing I’ve noticed in my treehouse travels is that everyone has a different idea of what a treehouse should be.  Even the highest-ranking contestants–Finca Bella Vista, a sustainable treehouse community on the Southern Pacific coast, and Michael Cranford’s multi-level masterpiece on the Osa Peninsula–have philosophical differences about what constitutes a treehouse.

Cranford didn’t want to drill into the enormous Guanacaste tree that is now his home, so has his treetop home supported with wooden supports that go from the ground to the platforms that make up their home. Erica and Matt of Finca Bella Vista didn’t want support from the ground so brought in experts from the States to rig their treehouses without support from below.

Here’s a sampler of the treehouses I’ve seen on this trip, starting with the whimsical and working towards amazing feats of engineering and imagination.

1. The Treehouse Hotel in Arenal is fun but they’re not strictly treehouses—they’re cute little houselets up on stilts.

2. In Uvita, Tra McPeak from Memphis runs the Tucan Hotel, 100 meters east of the Costanera (the coast highway), a hostel with a restaurant, a pen full of rabbits, and high-speed wireless internet. They have a small wooden treehouse out front you can rent for $6/per person. The price includes hammocks but it’s extra for mattresses and bedding. Tra, who arrived in Costa Rica in 2006, says he built the treehouse for his kids but all the backpackers coming through wanted to sleep up there, so he now makes it available to guests.

Casa Arbol treehouse, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

3. Humbert deSilva from France and Lisa Brouillard from Quebec have been in Costa Rica for almost 20 years. They run a small bed and breakfast, Casa Arbol, not far from Chacarita, where you turn off to go to the Osa Peninsula. Their entire house is a work of art—Hugh made the cupboards and the bed stands and the bath that look like something out of ancient Rome, not to mention the small treehouse that guests can stay in if they like. He never knows how a project will turn out when he begins it. He kept showing me carvings and rooms and tilework and saying, ‘When I finished, I saw that it was a”….swan, or frog, or a meditation on humanity.

4. Finca Bella Vista : a treehouse community in the jungle

Eric and Matt Hogan of Finca Bella Vista

A few short years ago Erica and Matt Hogan were camped in the mud by the Bella Vista River, up a rocky road to a spread of gorgeous but undeveloped land in Costa Rica’s Zona Sur. They weren’t sure what exactly was going to get them out of the mud, but dreamed of building a kind of Ewok village where they’d live in the trees and get to their neighbors’ houses via zipline.

Most people would have let that rather whimsical dream sputter and die, but Erica and Matt nailed it down and created Finca Bella Vista, a sustainable treehouse community with 82 lots available for people who want to live off the grid and in the trees. They’ve strung 18 ziplines, which they use fir both transportation and fun, but eventually there will be 45.

Treehouse at Finca Bella Vista, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

We stayed in the first treehouse they built, and once I was 50 feet up in a structure cradled by three trees, listening to the roar of a nearby waterfall (visible from the top floor), I sighed and thought, This is it. This is the real thing.

5. At home in the trees: Michael Cranford’s treehouse on the Osa Peninsula

Michael Cranford and Rebecca Amelia were drinking margaritas in Boquete, Panama, talking about how as kids they’d retreat to the trees when they needed to get away. A few hours and numerous drinks later, they were sketching designs for a treehouse on napkins.

Michael Cranford's treehouse in Costa Rica; photo by Michael Cranford

Years later, the scrawled blueprints became reality when they hauled a few platforms built on the ground up into an enormous Guanacaste tree on their land on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica.

That was about a year ago, and Michael and Rebecca now live full-time in the trees, with Siete, a miniature husky, and Reina, an aging brindle boxer.

Breakfast nook in the treehouse; photo by Michael Cranford

The treehouse is a true home, with a spacious, fully-equipped kitchen, guest bedrooms, an office for each of them, and a master bedroom. Eighty percent of the wood used for the treehouse is downed hardwood from the jungle that is their backyard. They have internet and cable, flush toilets, and plenty of hot water in the shower.

They’ve seen a sloth right outside the kitchen, 3 kinds of monkeys—howlers, white face, and squirrel—come through regularly, and scarlet macaws hang out in the nearby branches.

They rent the place out occasionally—check their web site.

“I learned more about myself working with this tree,” says Michael, “than I have through any other life experience.”

Michael is a painter as well as an architect and visionary. “I moved down [to Costa Rica in 1998] to become an artist,” he says. He sold his painting contracting business in Colorado Springs, and gave himself “a window of 3-4 years to paint.” He painted 6 days a week.

That’s his goal this year, too—to do nothing but paint.  He created the painting below before he created his actual treehouse.

Image from the movie "Avatar"

Giant Studios, creators of Avatar (a film released on December 18th), have come forward with the final infusion of funds needed for a reforestation project in Costa Rica

Avatar, directed by James Cameron, stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang.  Set in the year 2154 on Pandora, a fictional inhabited Earth-like moon, the film portrays the mining of Pandora’s precious minerals. A race of humanoids indigenous to the moon, based in a settlement called Hometree, resist the human mining project, which threatens the Pandoran ecosystem.

More trees mean more monkeys; photo of baby howler monkey by Dan Wilson, co-founder of La Reserva in Costa Rica

It seems fitting that the creators of a film that explores the exploitation of ecosystems would fund “Connecting Forest Islands in Costa Rica,” a project of the Lake Arenal-area La Reserva Forest Foundation.

Giant Studies named their donation “Project Hometree.”

A leatherback turtle; photo: scienceblogs.com

There was a great article in the New York Times in November about the plight of sea turtles in Costa Rica, home to some of their favorite nesting beaches.

I was recently in Tamarindo, a town just south of Playa Grande and its Las Baulas National Park (a baul is a leatherback turtle, which can be the size of a compact car).

In years past hundreds of leatherbacks came to lay their eggs in the sands of Playa Grande. The Times article says that just 32 leatherbacks were seen on the beach last year. And this year, locals told me, only a handful of turtles have been seen. The park’s ranger station had been shut down and, according to Alvaro Fonseco (quoted in the Times), Playa Grande is no longer being promoted as a place for tourists to see leatherbacks.

Five or six years ago I was part of a midnight turtle tour at Playa Grande, where a ranger led a small group of us, lighting our way with a masked flashlight (light disorients the turtles) to where a few leatherbacks were digging holes in the sand and dropping in their large, white flexible-skinned eggs. At that time, there were almost always a few turtles laying eggs each night. Now there have been only a few spotted this entire season.

Playa Grande and Las Baulas is close to Tamarindo, a burgeoning town where massive condo developments sit cheek by jowl with funky surfer hangouts. There’s been a recent moratorium on certain kinds of highrise building, but some projects seem exempt from the new rules, and enough got in under the wire that development is now encroaching on turtle territory.

And even the national park, already encroached upon, is under further threat. President Oscar Arias has floated a proposal that would protect the first 55 yards from the high tide mark but allow limited development on the next 80 yards. Critics say this would have the effect of making the area not so much a national park as just another zone for development, albeit with stricter rules for where lights can shine.

Expat Stephen Duplantier, a resident of San Ramon, and Alvaro Ugalde, former environment minister of Costa Rica, have put together an excellent online book about the current leatherback turtle situation in Costa Rica.

Many things threaten sea turtle survival, including development and its attendant lights, which can disorient the creatures and cause them to either not come to the beach to lay their eggs or to return to the water without having laid them. Drift net fishing (where there’s a lot of bycatch, or unintended catch, including turtles) is another culprit, as is climate change. Turtles can die in the hotter, more acidic seas caused by global warming, eggs on beaches are washed away by higher tides from more violent storms before they can hatch, and warmer sand can cause more females than males to be born, upsetting the gender balance of the turtle population.

When turtles lay eggs, the gender is not yet determined. Warmer temperatures produce more female eggs.

Playa Junqillal, where olive ridley turtles nest

South of Tamarindo is nearly-deserted Playa Junquillal, a favored nesting spot for Olive Ridley turtles. Even there, turtles are in trouble. Markers placed at the high tide mark are now often completely underwater, verifying that the seas, at least here, are indeed rising. Turtle eggs get washed away, eaten by predators, heated up to femalehood, or literally boiled by hot sands. A local crew of young people are paid $2/hour to collect the eggs and keep them safe in a hatchery kept at 85 degrees farenheit, which yields both male and female hatchlings.

There's no escaping the bugs in a house with no walls; photo by Erin Van Rheenen

Imagine a house up in the trees, open to the elements, with a view of a pristine stretch of Costa Rican beach. It’s Paul and Jeanne Pidcock’s house, on the Pura Jungla eco-reserve, where Ray Beise took a dried-up cow pasture and lovingly reforested it into something lush and beautiful. He sells lots to like-minded people who agree to abide by the eco-friendly rules of the realm.

Sound good? Well, yes and no. In theory, the idea of no walls (and of course, no windows, and no screens) sounds pretty cool. You are one with the toucans and the monkeys.

And, it turns out, an army of insects.

Things got ugly at dusk. It wasn’t so bad if you sat in the dark and listened to the wind. But if you turned on a light—to cook, to read, or to write, you were mobbed by flying insects, from no-see-ums to oh-my-god-did-you-see- that?

Where in Costa Rica might there be screened windows? Photo by Erin Van Rheenen

Leaf-green grasshoppers as long as my finger seemed especially friendly. They alighted on my book page, on my computer screen, and on the map I was studying to figure out the fastest road out of here. One crawled inside the bedside lamp I’d brought to the kitchen table (the lighting was dismal, probably because lights only attract bugs). The lamp was sideways so I couldn’t see the hopper’s body, but its long front feelers undulated out of the fixture as if the light itself had become insect-like.

When I conceded defeat and got up from my chair, I saw that I had sat on one of the poor little buggers.

“Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered,” he says, speaking of boom time greed in Coco.

Boom time became bust time a few years ago. Bruce Hammond of Better Homes Realty in Playas del Coco said that as far as he could see, the downturn here started in July of 2008 but by October of that year it was like “someone hit the ‘off’ switch.” Almost $3 billion of planned development was put on hold.

But back in the days of sky’s-the-limit condo flipping there were realtors, says Rick, who pulled some pretty hoggish stunts. Like selling a piece of property they knew didn’t have access to water and never would, not once but multiple times, as each new buyer discovered that he could build his dream home but his dream faucets would always be dry.

“We’re in a desert here,” said Rick. “The problem is water.” I’ve been hearing that sentiment everywhere I go in Costa Rica, from the ‘cielo roto’ (broken sky) valleys where it rains almost all the time, to the dry Guanacaste coast, even hotter and drier since swaths of the coastal dry forests have been cut down.

Another trick he saw was that a realtor would sell a local property for, say, $200,000, get a $50,000 deposit, use that $50,000 to buy the property from the Tico owners, then pocket the remaining $150,000.

These are not local Tico realtors, but foreigners with the imprimatur of multinational realty companies on their business cards. (I learned that you pay maybe $25,000 for a franchise and that you get pretty much nothing but the name).

Many condo projects in Costa Rica ground to a halt when the world economy took a nosedive

Playas del Coco has dozens of condo projects that started up years ago and now languish half-completed, rebar ladders rusting and cement foundations crumbling before they’re even built on. One huge construction crane visible in a development up the hill hasn’t moved, say the locals, for at least a year.

Many condos were sold in pre-construction, and some of those condos still haven’t been built. I met an African-American man from Louisiana (I comment on his race because most U.S. expats I meet are white) in line at the ATM.

“Do you live here?” I asked.

“For better or worse,” he said, “I guess I do. Or I’m trying.”

He’d bought a pre-construction condo from Mapache and, four years later, it still wasn’t built. I don’t think Mapache is the only developer not delivering. The building of these mammoth complexes goes in phases, with continued construction funded by condo sales. When the world economic downturn put a huge dent in sales, much construction ground to a halt.

We talked to a Tica who ran a bar in Paraiso (near Playa Negra) who said many of the locals are out of work because all the developments that were employing them as builders or watchmen or cooks for the workers are ‘parado’ – stopped.

Like they say, when the United States sneezes, Costa Rica gets pneumonia.

If you want to look for a silver lining, it might be that in this climate it’s a buyer’s market. But as always, buyer beware.

Photos by David Webster Smith

Margarita Ponce Ortiz, member of the women's orchid-growing collective in Quebrada Grande

Through Curubanda Lodge’s ’social tourism’ program, I could have met up with the proprietors of many small, locally-owned businesses in the hill country of Guanacaste, including a bakery in Dos Rios and a small cheese producer in El Consuelo that makes everything by hand and recycles all that they can, including using the pig dung in biodigestors to make methane gas for cooking.

I visited a women’s cooperative in Quebrada Grande that raises orchids and ornamental plants for sales. The cooperative—the Asociacion de Mujeres Activas de Quebrada Grande (The Active Women’s Association of Quebrada Grande) and spoke with sisters Margarita Ponce Ortiz and Mayra Ponce Ortiz. They showed me around the small but impressive vivero (nursery), where they grow orchids (though they say it’s a little too warm there for that ‘crop’), flowering plants, and even reina de la noche (brugmansia) —with its long, fragrant bell-shaped flowers that supposedly have hallucinogenic properties.

A woman's cooperative nursery in Guanacaste

The cooperative began two and a half years ago when the amas de casa (housewives) of this poor town were looking for a way to make a little extra money and to feel util (useful). Quebrada Grande is on a sliver a land between two national parks, and there isn’t much work to be had here. The majority of the people don’t have much education, so their options are even slimmer.

The women took a course with INA (a government agency that provides job training), who came to Quebrada Grande to teach them how to grow and care for plants.

They started with 40 cooperative members, Margarita told me, but are down to 12, because people want fast money, and the nursery is a slow-growing business that requires patience and dedication.

“The men all say women can’t stick with anything, and we want to show them wrong,” said Margarita.

“But right now we’re having trouble because we don’t have a market for our plants. We take them to ferias (farmer’s markets), but we pay so much for transport that we hardly make any profit.” She looked out over the rows of plants. “We’re thinking of building a web page.”

Wilbirth told me on the way back from the visit to the nursery that Curubanda Lodge was also planning a major upgrade to its web site. I told him that most people I know planned trips by doing research on the web, so that was probably time and money well spent.  But the women’s nursery—I’m not sure how they would benefit from a web page.

Vamos a ver. We’ll see.

Curubanda Lodge in the Guanacaste hill country

Curubanda Lodge is a small ecotourism lodge in the heart of a working farm—Finca Nueva Zealandia–in the Costa Rican highlands. Its four modest but comfortable guest rooms are within spitting distance of the farm’s dairy, chickens wind their way through the gardens, and on your way back to your room you might have to push through the cows waiting to be milked.

Curubanda Lodge in Guanacaste is also a working dairy.

The Nueva Zealandia farm and dairy has been in the Brizuela family since 1930. At that time, there were few roads, and the family would take milk and cheese by oxcart to Quebrada Grande (often shown as Garcia Flamenco), a small town 13 km away, to trade for staples like rice and beans.

The 100-hectare farm stayed pretty much the same, says Wilberth Brizuela Chavarria, 34, from 1930 to 1980, with successive generations working the dairy and in the fields. The area was high and green enough for dairy cattle, but they also kept chickens and pigs.

In 1980, the government was offering nearby land at a very good price if the buyers would agree to help reforest the area (which had been cleared for farms and pastures) so that there might be a biological corridor between the two volcanoes and the two national parks. The Brizuela family bought up land around the original farm and increased their holdings to 350 hectares.

Another big change for the family farm came in 2000, when Wilbirth finished his business degree at Universidad Latina in Santa Cruz (on the Nicoya Peninsula). The price of milk is notoriously volatile, and Wilbirth came home with big ideas about how the family could diversify and not rely solely on the dairy.

A non-paying guest at Curubanda Lodge

Soon after 2000, the farm began its transformation from working farm to working farm that welcomes guests. They built four guest rooms (the best is on the second floor, with a deck, an amazing view, and a bathtub big enough for two). They built a large restaurant, created trails for walking and for horseback riding, landscaped the grounds so that part of it looks more like a hotel than a farm, and are in the process of relocating the dairy barn so it’s not within smelling distance of the guest rooms. (Right now it’s quite close, but the smell isn’t unpleasant, just earthy.)

Agro-Eco-Tourism, complete with mud wallows

Wilberth calls the new project agro-eco-tourism. “It’s a radical change for us,” he says, and indeed it seems as if they are working out some kinks. The guest rooms could use screens on the windows and the water pressure means that the impressive tub takes over an hour to fill up. Guests are fed extremely well but there are no choices—you eat what they’re cooking, and many meals have rice and French fries on the same plate. A friend who came up to watch the sunset drove into a huge swampy hole in the driveway that  was hard to see in the dark and the rain, and upon later inspection that was just one of many tire-swallowing holes. In the Costa Rican manner, Wilbirth smiled and shrugged, as if to say, Who’d be dumb enough to drive into those holes?