BECOMING GREEN - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 181

The volcanic mountain chains that rib the narrow country are home to multiple microcli-
mates and countless species of flora and fauna but not gold. So the land proved uninviting
to Spanish investors and entrepreneurs who preferred Nicaragua.
Eventually, in the mid nineteenth century, the colonialists cleared some land for coffee
plantations, and coffee beans became Costa Rica's chief cash crop. But much of the land
remained a wilderness. About the same time, European scientists started arriving, drawn
to Costa Rica by popular scientific books about the extraordinary diversity of species in the
small nation's jungles—then and now an extraordinary biodiversity that has become the
country's distinguishing attribute.
Among these foreigners were two German physicians who moved to Costa Rica to
practice medicine. Carl Hoffmann and Alexander von Frantzius were naturalists who had
watched the woods in their own country cut down for lumber and energy during the age of
industrialization. The two physicians spent their weekends hiking through the jungles of
Costa Rica and exploring its mountains. They collected specimens in a thorough, scientif-
ic fashion, helping raise awareness of the breadth of Costa Rica's wildlife. Dr. Frantzius
catalogued the country's mammals and Dr. Hoffmann did the first extensive study of the
country's bats. Their names live on in places like Cerro Frantzius and animals like Hoff-
mann's woodpecker.
Their greatest achievement, though, was teaching natural history to the young students
of Costa Rica, initiating the studies that eventually made Costa Rica the center of aca-
demic tropical research in Central America. Dr. Frantzius used the backroom of his phar-
macy as a classroom and laboratory, educating the country's first tropical biologists and
researchers. By teaching Costa Ricans the science of the forest, the two physicians and the
European and American scholars who followed them, taught them the value of the wil-
derness. This in turn reinforced Costa Ricans' resolve to reject blandishments in the early
twentieth century to clear-cut forests to create more plantations. Their answer was that the
forests were worth more standing than if they were cut down for lumber or cleared for cul-
tivation.
These foreign scientists in turn trained more and more Costa Ricans, who became
great naturalists themselves, until the country grew to become a center of the conservation
movement in the Western Hemisphere. Alberto Manuel Brenes Mora, one of the brightest
young Costa Rican naturalists trained in the early 1900s, was a pioneer in the study of the
country's 1,200 species of orchids.
By 1940 the country had created the University of Costa Rica from four schools of
higher learning. In the decades that followed, the university excelled in the study of trop-
ical rainforest preservation, and success followed success. The Organization of Americ-
an States established an institute for agricultural sciences in Costa Rica to teach wildlife
management and forest conservation. There, Leslie Holdridge, the pioneering ecologist,