Creating 'escape routes' for wildlife

Biological corridors, such as one planned from Panama to Mexico, would let species migrate to safer climates as global warming heats up their old habitats.

from the June 21, 2007 edition

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Making people part of the solution

But people often live where conservationists would like to put corridors, leaving two options: Remove the people and return the land to nature; or leave the people and work with them to make the land able to serve as a corridor.

Governments and conservation organizations usually don't have the money to buy land outright. And many think that removing people from the land creates a new set of problems. Landless people who are poor and desperate are much more likely to hunt and harvest in a destructive way, leading to more environmental degradation.

"Conservation is not only a technical or political process," says Bernal Herrera, science director of The Nature Conservancy's Costa Rica program, "but also a social process. You have to provide an alternative."

Conservationists working in southwestern Costa Rica hope to connect the country's largest national park, La Amistad, which sits on the central mountain chain and extends into neighboring Panama, with a lowland jungle on the Pacific coast called Osa. If the areas are connected, it would represent a significant link in the greater Meso-American Biological Corridor.

Rather than buying land and removing people, they've opted to promote organic coffee-growing methods along La Amistad's western flank. Coffee plants need shade, which means keeping trees – and wildlife habitat – throughout the plantation. And if the coffee is grown without pesticides, the plantations will also host many other plants, which in turn support a whole range of species. Many animals needing to shift their range in response to a changing climate could move through the area.

José Antonio Vargas Monge, president of ASOPROLA, an association of organic coffee growers in the area, has a lot to say about the joys and difficulties of his work. As he talks, his calloused hands move quickly over the coffee bushes, pruning green waxy leaves he calls hojas falsas – "false leaves."

Coffee plantations that switch to organic methods take three years to adjust, he says. Accustomed to direct application of fertilizer, the plants' root systems are not as extensive as they should be and must expand. The harvest inevitably declines. Unable to make the transition, some plants die. Many farmers despair and return to their old methods, which involve herbicides and pesticides.

But if the farmer can persevere through those initial years, the benefits are manifold, says Don Antonio, as his colleagues call him. The farmers and their families no longer expose themselves to pesticides. And although the organic plants produce fewer beans, they fetch more on the market. He pulls back the black, rotting leaf litter beneath a guava tree exposing coffee bush roots just beneath the surface. "It turns into something beautiful," he says.

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