BECOMING GREEN - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 183

They train easily. Today you never see them anywhere. So many were killed that now it's
illegal to capture them,” said Calvo. “It's also illegal to cut down the mangrove forests.”
That protection came only after years of a tug of war over what made the most sense to
improve Costa Rica's economy. At first, the monkeys and forests lost in Costa Rica's race
to improve livelihoods and figure out what kind of country it would become. After an early
spate of conservationism a new president changed course in the 1970s and 1980s and re-
moved several key regulations, opening the way for ranchers to buy up and clear land for
cattle. The ranchers had their eye on the growing appetite in the United States for beef:
Americans were consuming hamburgers at a remarkable rate. Fast food was no longer just
a convenience food but a staple. Costa Rican policy-makers and ranchers wanted to cash
in on the trend and export beef to the United States.
Chain saws and bulldozers cleared nearly one-third of the land for pastures in those two
decades, earning Costa Rica the distinction of having the highest rate of deforestation in
the Western Hemisphere. Beef became the country's major export: 36 million tons were
sold to the United States in 1985. The shift to intensive cattle ranching not only changed
the economy but the country's self-image as well, from a wilderness sanctuary to a home
of modern ranchers. The period became known as the “hamburgerization” of Costa Rica.
The conservationists didn't give up. They already had a solid foothold in the country
with the national park system Costa Rica created in 1960 patterned after that in the United
States. It was augmented by private reserves scattered around the country. At the beginning
these private tracts had been purchased by foreigners entranced by the country's beauty.
Among the pioneers in this movement was a group of American Quakers who left the Un-
ited States in 1951 in protest of their country's role in the Korean War. Pacifists, they im-
migrated to Costa Rica because it had abolished its army three years earlier. They bought
3,000 acres of cloud forest in the Tilarán Mountains of Costa Rica's north central high-
lands in the belief that the weather was ideal for dairy farming. They had cut down half
of the forests for pasture when they realized in horror that in doing so they had jeopard-
ized their water supply. So they left the other half of their land in wilderness: cooled by
mist and wind much of the year, the cloud forests were thick with foliage every shade of
green. Moss enveloped stones and dripped from branches. All of it was fed by cold streams
as clear as glass. They named it the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve.
Following the Costa Rican tradition, the Quakers invited scientists to do research at
the Cloud Forest Reserve. The scientists, in turn, spread the word about the beauty of the
area and soon tourists arrived. The first bed-and-breakfast inns opened in the early 1950s.
From this modest beginning Monteverde became one of the birthplaces of ecotourism
in Costa Rica. The reserve grew, through land leases for scientific research in the 1970s
and land purchases by American philanthropists for conservation purposes. Today it cov-
ers over 26,000 acres. Ecotourism grew along with it.