Green Phoenix: Restoring the Tropical Forests of Guanacaste, Costa Rica

I have the greatest respect and admiration for Dan Janzen and have supported the Rincon Rainforest project before seeing this book. This book is a good explanation for why the Guanacaste Conservation Area (GCA) in Costa Rica may be the key to all successful tropical forest conservation projects. The author relates the detail of conservation work to restore overgrazed, eroded land and land filled with difficult to eradicate foreign weeds back to the point of reforestation with all the original species from microbes, insects, up to birds and mammals. It is encouraging to see that despite the difficulty of this work that they are achieving success and that model of success may help other tropical conservation projects. The book also describes the life work of one of the most important conservation biologist of all time and all of those who have been pushed, coereced, reluctantly persuaded and inspired to do this most significant project. If you are discouraged in any way about the fate of the diverse tropical forests you should read this book. It truely is an inspiration.

Without duplicating the book description, I'll just explain why I would recommend this book to anyone interested in conservation. Although the creation of Guanacaste Conservation Area -- which combines pre-existing national parks and added land between and around them, along with a marine sector -- is unique in representing the world's only large-scale tropical forest restoration project, the story illustrates elements common to nature conservation projects in general. These include the importance of understanding the local ecology (in this case, especially forest succession and the necessity of controlling fires); political aspects, both local and national (Costa Rican president, parks service, etc.); how money is raised and land purchased or otherwise secured; and ways of involving people from the local area in conservation and the importance of that. I have just returned from Guanacaste and was impressed by the program that trains local people as "parataxonomists" to help with the huge task of identifying and cataloguing the area's many species. Another program gives instruction on natural history to children in local schools. The result has been an important cultural shift toward appreciating nature and the many benefits it provides. The writing is sometimes long-winded and ponderous, but the careful recounting of details was worthwhile, and the integration of interesting snippets of tropical biology and anectodes of the people involved made it an enjoyable read. Of particular interest as well was the recounting of the reaction to the revolutionary suggestion that tropical forest can indeed be restored on land taken out of agriculture, an assertion that initially met with skepticism and alarm from conservation organizations, as it conflicted with the conservation message that a tropical forest, once cut down, can "never" regenerate. In this end, this is a great and stirring conservation success story. The book illustrates how much hard work that entailed on the part of many dedicated people.

How often have you've heard the tales of gloom and doom regarding the deforestation of the tropics? Undoubtedly, the numbers are grim and the outlook for many forests is not good. This is why this story, wonderfully told by William Allen, a science writer at the ST. LOUIS DISPATCH, is particularly refreshing and guardedly optimistic. Allen craftily weaves anecdote with history, real people with events to present a story that tells how a relatively small park in NW Costa Rica (Guanacaste National Park) developed into the Guanacaste Conservation Area, some 10 times larger than its original size. But the story is not limited to the success in creating a larger park. Rather, the author depicts the efforts of a determined group of Costa Rican and foreign scientists (led by Daniel Janzen) as they attempt to reverse the effects of deforestation and actually bring a substantial area back to some semblance of its original state. The story delves quite a bit into Janzen's personality and raises the issue of a foreigner's role in a project such as this. Would it succeed without him? Just what would it take to restore non-virgin forest? Is this an idea that might work elsewhere? Just a few of the intriguing questions dealt with in this book. I particularly enjoyed the beginning of each chapter, where the author introduces an anecdote upon which the rest of chapter usually builds. The anecdotal information is highly entertaining of itself, and when used as metafor, it is easier to remember the larger points made. If you're into eco-whatever, this is great stuff...paul e.