The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa Rica

Abstract

The history of conservation in Latin America offers insights into the dramatic environmental transformations the region has undergone, particularly in the twentieth century. Sterling Evans’s Green Republic explores the history of conservation in Costa Rica, with an emphasis on environmental policy. While journalists, policymakers, and others have pointed to Costa Rica as a model of conservation policy, Evans questions whether it is appropriate to call Costa Rica a “green republic.” Using a wide range of sources, including interviews, archives, and newspapers, Evans paints a complex and nuanced picture of how conservation emerged in twentieth-century Costa Rica.Costa Rica’s exemplary and well-publicized conservation projects have emerged as a response to an equally dramatic but less well-known process of environmental destruction. Between 1950 and 1990, Costa Rica lost 65 percent of its forest cover. The causes of this deforestation included the expansion of export agriculture (particularly bananas and coffee), cattle ranching, and forestry. Government programs to distribute land to landless peasants (precaristas) also inadvertently promoted forest destruction. Evans argues that Costa Rica, like many other countries in Latin America, has faced an “agricultural dilemma” in which policymakers try to balance the drive for agricultural development with the need for environmental conservation.Part 1, “Costa Rica’s History of Conservation,” traces the emergence of conservation policy in Costa Rica as a response to this agricultural dilemma. Until the 1950s, most conservation policy in Costa Rica was ad hoc. The government created a few national parks, and some wildlife conservation agencies. Several conservation laws had been decreed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they were never adequately enforced. Evans argues that the key turning point in Costa Rica’s conservation policy was the Ley Forestal of 1969. The law did not improve the problem of deforestation overnight—indeed, some of Costa Rica’s worst deforestation happened after the law had passed—but it did provide the basis for later conservationist action.The centerpiece of Costa Rica’s official conservation programs was its system of national parks. This system was the brainchild of Mario Boza, an energetic Costa Rican naturalist who worked for the government. Boza began building the system of national parks during the 1960s and 1970s, with the political backing of international conservation groups and influential Costa Ricans such as Karen Olsen de Figueres, the wife of the president. His projects bore fruit, and conservation efforts in Costa Rica continued unabated even through the economic crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Government agencies became more entrepreneurial, soliciting funding from international organizations such as the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Federation. In the late 1980s, the national park system underwent a “philosophical change in strategy,” that emphasized incorporating national parks and preserves into the nation’s larger socioeconomic context. Once again, Costa Rica’s fiscal problems were turned into a conservation oppor tunity, through the “debt for nature swap” programs that allowed Costa Rica to write off parts of its foreign debt in return for placing more lands under conservation.The chapters of part 2, “Building a Green Republic,” explore other forces that promoted conservation in Costa Rica. Environmental education at all levels has contributed to forming a rudimentary environmental ethic in Costa Rica, although Evans questions how deeply rooted it is. Costa Rican and foreign non-governmental organizations have played an increasingly important role in promoting conservation through research, training, grassroots activism, and legislation. Ecotourism took off during the 1980s and 1990s, bringing the hoped-for economic boom to Costa Rica. But it has become such a success that it threatens to harm the very flora and fauna that attract the visitors in the first place. Costa Ricans have also organized a national institute for biodiversity (InBio), to do a survey of Costa Rica’s biological resources.While Costa Rica is not the “ecotopia” that many people claim, Evans argues that it has enjoyed a number of short-term conservation successes. This lucid and thoughtful work will be useful to historians and policymakers, and as a textbook for graduate and undergraduate courses on agriculture, development, and conservation in Latin America.