Our fireside chat with Don Carlos revealed many issues with oak-forest conservation. Firstly, it is not valued for what it is, rather for what it provides. Illegal hunting and cattle pasture make it a tough place to keep together. The research station of Don Carlos has been struggling to maintain itself for some time. There are simply less researchers and hikers at his site. In fact, he prefers not to have many Costa Ricans at his site because of an environmentally unfriendly attitude present in the Costa Rican culture.

My question that came up at a later discussion what whether we needed trails into the forest at all. Do conservationalists need to be allowed to see the forest they are spending money to protect? I argued that people should not feel they are entitled to accessing any ecosystem. They should feel obligated to protect any endangered forest, even though they may never see it for themselves.

Take the National Forests of the U.S. I own them. I pay for them, yet I may never see the national forests in North Carolina in my lifetime but I expect tax payer money is invest in maintenance and balancing “no man’s lands” with regions that permit cattle grazing or logging. If the American people were truly given free access to public lands, the lands, in my opinion, would all be harvested by the Ammon Bundys for cattle, mining, and logging.

I would much prefer that a self-sustaining land be left to itself without human interaction, to have watersheds as it needs or annual forest fires as it needs.