Costa Rica designated BioGen by NRDC

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As written by Alexandra Marks of the Christian Science Monitor–

I’m currently sitting in the airport in Costa Rica, fresh from a yoga retreat and heading back home to Sheep Dog Hollow, the 100-year-old farmhouse we’re trying to renovate in as green a manner as is economically practical. (Think: from calming, tropical paradise to construction mayhem.)

I confess, I’m not quite ready yet to tackle the questions that I know are waiting for me – from timing on when we can start spraying our foam insulation to worries about our fast-draining checking account and whether we can really afford those $7-a-square-foot reclaimed wide board floors (that’s $7 a square foot not including installation or refinishing.

No, in my mind I’m still hearing the gentle roar of the ocean waves, the morning’s orchestral array of bird songs, and the rustling of palm fronds in the wind.

And so, since I won’t get to Sheep Dog to check on progress and attack some of those questions until Wednesday, I thought I’d just take a moment to reflect on how lovely it is to spend time in a genuine “BioGem.”

Yes, Costa Rica is the first country in the world to be designated a BioGem by the Natural Resources Defense Council. The reason for the designation, says the NRDC, is the government’s commitment to “becoming the world’s first carbon-neutral nation by 2021.”

For years, it’s also pushed sustainability and eco-tourism and expanded its natural parks to preserve its biodiversity. To say nothing of the fact that Costa Rica one of the hemisphere’s oldest, most stable democracies, which ranks pretty high in the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals and the UN’s Human Development Index.

Yes, it’s an extraordinary place.

When you arrive, you experience it in subtle ways. The people have gentleness about them, or, as they say in Spanish, are they are “mui amable” – very amiable. The food you buy in the supermarkets, such as the tomatoes, have that sweet, home-grown taste that here in the States you can only get from a home garden.

And then, of course, there’s the pure air and the abundance of birds, iguanas, and little lizards you frequently see lazing in the sun. Yeah, there’s heat and dust – as well as pollution in the big cities – but compared to the other Latin American countries I’ve visited, it’s a veritable ecological Eden.

But there’s another reason the NRDC designated Costa Rica a BioGem: Because it’s potentially threatened. As the website Earth Explore notes:

Pressures to open coastlines to oil and gas exploration and drilling, and exploit virgin rainforest for timber and mining are ramping up. All too easily, this small nation could be directed down the path seen so often in the tropics; of slash and burn and quick profit.

To help the country stay on its current ecological path, the NRDC is “working with the Energy and Environment Ministry to identify measures to help the country meet its [goal to be carbon neutral.

The NRDC also just signed an agreement with the national electric utility, Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad, on energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. In collaboration with other Latin American environment agencies, it’s also launched “a rainforest rejuvenation project to plant 30,000 trees to restore a natural rainforest.”

So, as I head back home from that tropical ecological paradise, my Sheep Dog Hollow worries and questions have been put into a new perspective.

Yes, this green renovation is costing us more in the short term – in cash and headaches – but I again realize that if I can do a little bit now to help future generations enjoy the natural beauties of our country as I just have enjoyed Costa Rica’s, I know it’s worth the cost.

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Brazil gets the Olympics – but what does it mean for biodiversity?

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Note:  Our blog’s contest, for a chance to win photographs of Brazil, starts November 15th.

You don’t normally associate biodiversity and conservation with cities, but Rio de Janeiro is an exception. Its extraordinary topography means steep hill slopes and mountainsides are still forested: not the least of the issues associated with the growth of favelas, Rio’s hillside slums, is that their expansion corrodes this green mantle.

Rio’s forests are a remnant of the Atlantic Forest that once covered most of coastal Brazil and stretched as far inland as Paraguay. Only 7 percent is left, making it much more threatened than the Amazon and even more biodiverse, since the surviving fragments act as refuge areas for species that once had much wider ranges. This makes what survives of the Atlantic Forest extraordinarily important. One of Latin America‘s oldest national parks, Tijuca National Forest, sits entirely within the city’s boundaries, a natural treasure greater than any of its beaches. What does the Olympics mean to all this? In short, a mixed bag.

There will be big environmental benefits. The thing that first strikes visitors arriving at Rio’s international airport, after the dilapidation of the airport itself, is the stench when you step outside the terminal. This toxic olfactory cocktail comes from the chemical plants and oil refineries that line Guanabara Bay, together with the sewage produced by the 5 million inhabitants of the Zona Norte, where tourists never go but half of Rio’s population lives. Gagging on your way into town is an appropriate introduction to the contradictions produced by our glamorous international profile.

With the eyes – and, more to the point, the noses – of the world upon us, something will finally be done: serious sewage treatment and pollution control is coming. Maybe by 2016, for the first time in generations, it will even be possible to swim in the bay. One shudders to think what will happen to the yachting crews otherwise.

But beyond the bay, things are more ambiguous. The coming construction boom will provide alternative employment to the young men in the favelas who would otherwise move into our biggest growth industry after oil: narcotrafico. This boom will tamp down violence from criminals and the police (there’s a big overlap between the two). The easy headlines about the risks posed by violence in Rio are misleading: nobody, from the drug lords down, has any interest in choking off the multidimensional bonanza the Olympics promises to be.

And therein lies a problem: after having been stable for 20 years, the city’s population is likely to jump again as the boom attracts migrants from all over Brazil, which means expanding favelas and more human pressure on that precious Atlantic Forest.

This will be most acute in the southern beachside neighborhoods of Barra, Recreio and Vargem Grande, which were booming for years even before the Olympics. Many of the new sporting facilities in Rio’s bid, including the Olympic village, will be built here. As recently as the 1970s this area was still largely undeveloped, the stupendous beach of Barra fringing an unspoiled expanse of mangroves, coves and headlands ending in Barra da Sepetiba, a scalloped and shifting promontory of dunes and beaches pointing 12 miles into the Atlantic and the glorious (now rapidly overdeveloping) coastline south of Rio.

This oasis of nature so close to a megacity couldn’t last. From the late 1970s, a gigantic real estate boom saw Barra transformed into a depressingly Americanized complex of malls, highways, condominiums and apartment blocks. As the only reasonably flat area with land available anywhere in the city, it was inevitable this area would be earmarked for Olympic development, but the key issue is what impact this will have on the coast’s surprisingly strong zoning and development controls.

Rio’s governments, appalling as they often are, occasionally get some things spectacularly right – the 40 percent drop in driving deaths since a well-enforced ban on alcohol and driving began last year is a current example. In the late 1990s, in the nick of time, a municipal park called Prainha put the coast immediately south of the real estate boom off limits to developers, preserving the two stunning beaches of Prainha and Grumari and linking them up to the still pristine coastline around and including Barra da Sepetiba, long preserved by the Brazilian Navy, to whom the promontory belongs. Ironically, a few months before the success of the Olympic bid, the developers had managed to get the zoning laws in Prainha relaxed. Now, with blood already in the water, the level of development is about to spiral. It could well spiral out of control – and if it does, the last piece of properly preserved coastline within the city’s boundaries will go.

Those of us who know and love Rio feel torn. On the one hand, there’s no denying this is a great city with a great talent for spectacle, and it has all the potential to stage a great world event like the Olympics, perhaps more memorably than has ever been done before. But Rio is a memorable place in other, less positive ways. Many local politicians would shock even Tony Soprano, and their corruption and incompetence has mismanaged the city into the ground. Many of its well-known problems are directly traceable to the city’s dreadful politics. With Brazil’s international image on the line, the federal government may have to step in.

The stakes for Rio’s environment are even higher. An image taking a hit is, in the final analysis, a trivial thing – but once a coast or a forest goes, it almost never comes back. Fingers crossed.

Full disclosure – I was asked to participate in our Brazil contest by the public relations firm for the Brazilian Tourism Board.  No compensation was made to me.

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Eco Tourism comes to Bolivia

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Bolivia is a country that has a special place in my heart.  (And so does Christi Sue Penland, a girl I dated from Bolivia).   The country, especially the capital city, La Paz, is just a trip.  Almost 13,000 feet above sea level, high in the Andes, most people don’t have the constitution to do well (at first) in the capitol.  Not much grows, and everything, from houseflies to airplanes, have difficulty in the high high altitude.

Can such a place be ideal for eco-tourism?  When travelers think of ecotourism destinations, places like Costa Rica or Belize come to mind, but not Bolivia. However, This is about to change because the indigenous people known as the Tacanas, of Bolivia’s Amazon region, are banking on ecotourism as an alternative way to make a living.

Located at the banks of the Beni River in the village of San Miguel del Bala, the Tacanas, about 5,000 in population throughout the area, built an eco-lodge that includes seven cabins, made of local materials including dry palm leaves and native wood. The cabins are scattered throughout the area, providing privacy inside the rainforest. The remote lodging is accessible by way of a 40-minute boat ride from the small town of Rurrenbaque in Northern Bolivia.

While at the lodge, guests can go trek through different trails that lead out from the lodge. These excursions teach visitors about ancient hunting techniques, and medicinal plants found in the rainforest. Guests can also visit a salitral cave where wildlife roam freely or a natural pool and waterfall. After a long day of hiking the forest, guests enjoy local cuisine such as grilled fish wrapped in the leaves of the dunucuabi plant. Visitors can also visit with one of the Tacana families in one of their houses made of palm leaves and bamboo.

According to the Latin American Herald Tribune the 45 Tacana families that live in San Miguel de Bala are primarily fishermen and farmers. The community’s leader, Biter Supa, told the Tribune that lack of electricity and health care are the Tacana’s main problems. But, that they do have potable water and a local school which the roughly 60 children living in the village attend.

Near the lodge is Madidi National Park, consisting of 4.5 million acres of land located between the northeastern area of La Paz province and on the border of Peru. The park is one of the largest biodiversity regions in the world and is home to 1,000 animal species including jaguar, spectacled bear, tapir, and capybara. It’s also home to approximately 6,000 varieties of plants.

Some of the park has been designated as Tierras Comunitarias de Origen (TCOs), by the government, which can be described as similar to the Native American reservations throughout the U.S. The area is set-aside for the indigenous communities to continue their traditions and to have a permanent home in the region.

According to Nicolas Janco, with the Mashaquipe tourist agency who spoke with the Latin American Herald Tribune,  “Tourism is an engine that is helping us greatly to improve our quality of life. Especially for the Tacana.”  He is currently lobbying the Bolivian government to promote the indigenous-populated rainforest area as a tourist destination.

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