People making a difference: Alberto Yanosky

Instead, they agreed to team up.

Guyra Paraguay has added five rangers to Defensores del Chaco and is trying to woo PhD candidates to the park's research station and build scientific interest in Chaco's ecosystem.

The challenges to Paraguay's parks are endless: Some do not even have proper boundaries. Yanosky is trying to create a fund in perpetuity for the parks and is experimenting with a carbon-credit program to halt deforestation that's happening just outside park boundaries.

Shared public-private management has been tried elsewhere, from Costa Rica to Bolivia, but it is still considered experimental.

"The vast majority of places recognized as protected areas are the responsibility of governments," says Jim Rieger, the director of conservation strategies of the Meso American and Caribbean region for The Nature Conservancy, and the former director of the Conservancy's Parks in Peril program. "Governments are not inclined to turn over parts of management to [NGOs], or don't have the opportunity, or it never crossed their minds."

But increasingly comanagement is being seen as an option. "In most Southern Hemisphere countries, governments don't have the resources to manage protected areas as effectively as they would like to," says John Burton, CEO of the World Land Trust.

Such arrangements can stir a nationalistic backlash, especially among those who look suspiciously at NGOs and their foreign funding. If anyone is poised to succeed, though, it is Yanosky, a man who has dedicated his career to the conservation of land in Paraguay, even though he is an Argentine. "I could do this in Singapore, France, or the US," he says about his work. "We only have one environment."

At age 23, with a biology degree in hand, Yanosky and his wife, also a scientist, moved to the Chaco region of Argentina (the region extends across parts of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina). For nearly a decade, they had to ride horses 30 miles to reach their home, a house without electricity where both of their daughters were born.

When it came time for the children to go to school, the couple decided to accept an offer in Paraguay. He became a founding member of Guyra Paraguay in 1997 and now serves as executive director. The group also works with soybean and rice producers to introduce more sustainable farming practices. And it owns and runs its own land reserves, where it first experimented with the shared management concept.

If the comanagement program in Paraguay's national parks works, Yanosky would like to see other conservation groups enter into agreements with national parks.

"We never get bored," he says. "I have been in this business for 23 years, and I feel it is just the beginning. There are so many things to do; so many opportunities."

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