Week of April 8th

The Monteverde region of Costa Rica has an elevation of 1000 meters to 1800 meters. Most of today’s preserve is situated on the Caribbean side of the continental divide. Its history begins in 1952, with the settlement of Quaker from the United States. They were a small community who kept themselves largely isolated from the local Costa Ricans. While the region itself is in fact, not very good for any kind of development due to the poor soil quality and swampy terrain that bred biting flies on the cows, milk production was successful under the Quakers. However, the roads from Monteverde to San Jose were of poor quality and transporting milk would be costly, so the Quakers shifted their production to cheese. They hired locals to work in the factory and Monteverde cheese became a high quality product throughout Costa Rica.

In 1971 a small forest preserve was established in the region. Two reasons for this were: the discovery of an endemic species of Golden Toad that exists in the elven forests of +1600 meters (this species was one of the first species to become extinct during the amphibian collapse in the 1980s) and 2. The discovery by George Powell on the importance of maintaining migratory sites for seasonal birds. Maintaining this preserve allowed birds to migrate from the Guanacaste lowlands to the mountains.

During the late 1970s to 1986 deforestation reached a high point in this region; in the Penas Blancas Valley squatters, poachers, and illegal farmers were prevalent in this region and tourism was not. In 1987 Sharon Kinsman of the USA meets with the Associacion Conservacion Monteverde(ACM). She was representing Swedish school children who had been to her talks on the forest and were working to raise money to buy the land. A hectare is 100 by 100 meters and costed 100$ during this period. The land was not worth much to begin with. The school children raised 2 million dollars over four years. With additional contributions and the “debt-for-nature” program the Monteverde Conservation League (a different organization from ACM) developed the BEN which encompasses 22500 hectares of old growth and secondary forest. This land is in addition to the original Monteverde Preserve and other pieces of private protected land.
The goals of BEN are: 1. Environmental Education with an emphasis on grade school and local communities
2. Restoration of degraded land
3. Protection of existing land (poachers and illegal timber remain a threat)
4. Ecological Research of this forest type

My professor Mauricio was in fact a resident of Monteverde once and a board member of the MCL. This is where he learned that even a success story such as this one is complete with drama, lack of understanding of local opinions, and poor management of money and manpower resources. He uses his experiences as lessons for us today.