Costa Rica may or may not have "invented ecotourism" as some claim, but it is currently taking the knocks. Tourists are blamed for descending by the bus loads onto trails in fragile rain and cloud forests; for raising prices with their incautious spending; for requiring paved roads and refrigeration--all unnatural to the purists.

Oh come on! Tourism has passed bananas and coffee as Costa Rica's number one source of national income. And it isn't the Elderhostel crowd that is cutting down the old growth forest or profiting from the illegal drug trade with Colombia.

Costa Rica deserves its eco-superlatives: 9000 species of plants; 800 species of ferns; more than 1400 identified species of orchids (the national flower); 5000 species of grasshoppers, more than 300 species of hummingbirds; 10 percent of all known butterflies‹the list goes on.

So does the list of endangered and threatened species including all orchids, cacti, tree ferns and many palms in addition to large numbers of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. E. O. Wilson, Harvard's Pulitzer Prize winning biologist, has called our period a "spasm of mass extinction." Tourism may have helped slow it down.

While a million tourists heading into the back country every year have unquestionably driven jaguars and tapirs further into the forest, there's a flip side. The first National Park was only established in 1969, but there are now 20 parks and eight biological reserves. Along with other types of protected areas, public and private, they now cover nearly 27 percent of Costa Rica. Admittedly, the government was convinced less by environmental epiphanies than the persuasive argument that such action would increase the number of visitors.

Costa Rica is almost without parallel in its attraction for eco-tourists. Though only the size of Scotland, it has 12 distinct ecological zones containing five percent of all the known species on earth plus rain forests, cloud forests, islands, nine active volcanoes and beaches on two oceans. As the link between Nicaragua and Panama, it forms part of the chain that connects two continents.

National Park Manuel Antonio, smallest park in the system, has pristine beaches, a network of jungle paths and has become so popular that the number of visitors has been limited to a maximum of 600 per weekday and 800 Saturdays and Sundays. Yet nearby in the coastal city of Quepos, the beaches are polluted and trash floats in open gutters along downtown streets. A Quepos city tour takes visitors to the "American Sector" where the guide points out the charmless ranch-style homes of United Fruit executives who departed with the company in 1985. Putting a new spin on the agribusiness that gave the name "Banana Republic" its most negative connotations, the smiling guide says United Fruit "started tourism in Costa Rica" when U.S. managers "invited their friends to visit."

Today U.S.-owned chain hotels are being accused of the same profit-skimming "Yankee Imperialism" of United Fruit. Critics point to shantytowns housing resort help and low pay for maids and kitchen workers. Yet the better-paid hotel jobs---bartenders, headwaiters, gift shop managers, for example---are also held by Costa Ricans, and top management positions are increasing. Costa Ricans with degrees in environmental sciences from any of the four universities staff the tourism business as well as the government bureaus. On Cruise West's eco-sensitive ship Pacific Explorer (see Cruise Between the Seas), the captain, officers, naturalists, engineers and crew were Costa Ricans.

As for entrepreneurs in adventure tourism there's good news (small business successes) and bad. Operators using unsafe equipment are a serious problem so visitors should check out every potentially dangerous activity from white water-rafting expeditions to aerial rides above the canopy. Use only purveyors with official operating permits issued by the Ministry of Health.

While environmentalism and conservation are positive words and literacy is said to be 93 percent (highest in Central America), environmental education still has a way to go. Centuries of slash-and-burn habits are not unlearned in a decade, and squatters with chain saws have had to be forcibly evicted from the parks. Deforestation, not tourism, is the major destroyer of habitat as well as primary cause of soil erosion and flooding, but the idea that only cleared land is good land dies hard.

The Institut Nacional de Biodiversidad is at the fore in establishing protected wildlands and increasing knowledge about existing patterns and searching for "sustainable and rational uses of such biodiversity." Funding from U.S. companies (Merck and others) supports INBio work to protect rain forest and train Costa Ricans to make detailed inventories of species, a daunting task considering the numbers involved.

In February, 2004, the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape Initiative consolidating a marine protected area that stretches from Costa Rica to Ecuador was announced at the opening of the 24th annual meeting of the International Sea Turtle Society in San Jose, Costa Rica. The Initiative is part of a $15-million agreement between the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, the United Nations Foundation and Conservation International with contributions from the environment conservation wing of the California-based Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation. Marine conservation has lagged behind terrestrial with the result that 90 percent of large predatory fish populations have disappeared, and the leatherback turtle has declined by 97 percent in the last two decades.

At home, the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT) is pressuring tourism sector businesses to achieve and adhere to a sustainable model of natural, cultural and social resource management one step at a time. The Certification in Sustainable Tourism Program (CST) identifies five levels of achievement leading to full accreditation as a socially and environmentally conscious provider.

Give a little of the credit to the eco-tourists too.

Go to ECOTRAVEL in Africa & Europe
Go to ECOTRAVEL in the United Kingdom & Ireland
Go to ECOTRAVEL in the United States
Go to ECOTRAVEL in the Western Hemisphere

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