by Heidi Bailey
In a small Costa Rican town, children are the beneficiaries of community development projects funded by tourism.
“Is green tourism possible?”
My husband asked me this question when I invited him to join me on an eco-tour of Costa Rica. The tour was an educational trip for students and small business owners with an interest in green tourism. My husband’s question referred to the three-hour drive to the airport, the flight from Washington D.C. to Costa Rica, and our travel in-country. The efforts made by our green accommodations would not reverse the effects of the fossil fuels we burned to get to these places.
I grappled with this question until day six of the tour, when I unexpectedly discovered my answer in the faces of a group of school children. In the town of La Gamba, the children were part of a community effort to interpret the culture of Costa Rica for visitors. That day, our tour group learned an important lesson from these little interpreters: Green tourism is as much about sustaining cultures as it is about sustaining the Earth.
The nine-day tour took place in July and August of 2005. The purpose of our trip to Costa Rica was to observe how a country that is experiencing a rapid growth in tourism is handling the pressures on both the natural and social environment.
Our group of eight toured various green lodging facilities that ranged from yurt-like tents to cabins to a plush bed and breakfast. We saw an impressive array of green technologies at each place we visited, such as a solar clothes dryer, water-powered generator, and recycled gray water system.
But our eco-tour also focused on another aspect of green tourism—the people. Costa Rica has developed a Certification for Sustainable Tourism program that consists of a scale of five levels of sustainability. One of the certification’s major criteria is that a tourism business must improve the quality of life in the local community. The project in La Gamba had earned a spot in our eco-tour for its level of achievement in this area.
On day five of the trip, our group arrived at the Esquinas Rainforest Lodge in Costa Rica’s remote southern zone. We stayed in a cluster of bungalows across the grounds from the main lodge. A pond lay between our rooms and the lodge, and a trail carefully skirted the water as if trying to avoid the caiman alligator that lurked there. We could sometimes see the gator’s eyes and nose poking out of the water, watching us disdainfully; it seemed to be daring an unsuspecting tourist to enter its domain.
The morning of our tour in La Gamba, we gathered at the main lodge. The open-air structure had a large roof thatched with 60,000 palm leaves. Exotic, brightly colored flowers grew right up to the railings that separated the human common area from the surrounding jungle. Costa Rica is warm year round, making walls an unneeded barrier to the natural world.
A serve-yourself bar and a scatter of chairs invited guests to relax. The night before, our group had sampled the bar’s offerings, jotting our choices down on a clipboard. The bar operated on the honor system. While we imbibed, a local guide taught us to craft grasshoppers out of palm fronds—a bit more challenging than the crosses I made on Palm Sunday as a child. Our little army of crooked insects awaited us there the following morning.
Across from the bar, a group of tables served as a dining area. We gathered there for a breakfast that consisted of beans and rice and the freshest pineapples and coconuts I had ever tasted. A mural on the wall separating us from the kitchen depicted brightly colored plants and trees, making the open room blend seamlessly with the surrounding jungle.
During breakfast, we met with Michael Schnitzler, a well-known violinist and founder of a nonprofit organization called Rainforests of the Austrians. He told us the story of how he became involved in protecting the Esquinas forest and the people who live there:
I came here as a tourist the first time in 1989 and fell in love with the country. I found that this whole forest, the Esquinas forest, which is about 140 square kilometers, was endangered by logging and was all in private hands. The government had declared this area a national park on paper, but only when each piece of property was bought and donated to the park system would it be a real park.
I was worried about this beautiful forest disappearing. It was the last unprotected lowland tropical rainforest on the whole coast of Central America, where primary rainforest leads right down to the coast. I talked to people from the National Park Service and they said, “What we really need is money to buy the property.” So I started the organization Rainforests of the Austrians and we started looking for donations.
To date, 70 percent of the land has been bought and donated to Piedras Blancas National Park.
Of course, any time land is incorporated into a protected area, a tricky situation arises. The local people no longer have access to lands they once depended on for survival. Schnitzler’s solution to this problem was to build the Esquinas lodge and provide employment to the people living at the edge of the park.
Eager to learn about the project firsthand, we made our way to the elementary school in La Gamba—a bright blue building with a few classrooms that opened onto a covered veranda.
We crowded into one of the rooms, where a dozen or so students sat at desks, each neatly dressed in a blue and white uniform. The children took turns standing to politely introduce themselves. “Me llamo…” They followed their introductions with a lively song, to which we responded with a badly sung rendition of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”
In La Gamba, conservation is a community effort that includes everyone, even the children.
Following the warm welcome, the children ushered us to the veranda, where the older students had paired up and formed a circle, ready to dance. The boys looked dapper in their cowboy hats, crisp white shirts, and red bolo ties. The girls held their long skirts up like the wings of butterflies and as the music started, they swirled the bright fabric about their feet.
The little dancers skipped and bowed, dipped and spun, expertly performing several traditional folk dances. During the last set, a small hand suddenly grabbed mine and I joined the dance. I was a poor substitute for the young boy’s usual partner, but I was delighted to be included.
The children seemed to stay cool and fresh in their costumes, though the day was hot. The Esquinas forest was the most humid place I had ever visited or even imagined. My hair has a bit of natural curl that typically gives it a nice wave; there, I looked like a 1980s rock star.
Thankfully, the children didn’t seem to mind my funny hair and two left feet. They smiled with genuine pleasure, bowed, and thanked us for our visit. It was time to move on, but our school day seemed much too short; we left wishing for just one more lesson.
We were in luck. Though the children needed to return to their studies, the community had more experiences planned for us. We happily spent our money on local crafts, chatted with an enterprising group of women who owned a shampoo business, savored a homemade pastry and a tomato/rice/cola concoction that resembled a smoothie, and shook hands with two national park rangers.
Our Costa Rican guide then introduced us to a couple of beady eyed, pointy nosed critters called pacas. “This is an animal that is endangered because it has been hunted for years,” she told us. “Hunters get about $10 per kilo for the meat. If they hunt twice a week, with two animals they make the salary of a month.”
One of these hunters had been Jose, the guide at Esquinas lodge who taught us how to make grasshoppers. Now instead of hunting the paca, he uses his knowledge to run a breeding program for the rodent-like animal.
The animals of Costa Rica are one of the reasons that so many people visit the country. Costa Rica boasts a whopping five percent of the Earth’s animal and plant species, yet it is no bigger than the state of West Virginia.
There is something primal about walking through the tangled jungles of Costa Rica, listening to the scream of howler monkeys, watching sloths dangle from the treetops, brushing past all of the unearthly looking vegetation. I half expected a vine to reach out and wrap around my legs or to see a Tyrannosaurus Rex come crashing through the undergrowth. Earlier in the trip, I had been quite disturbed to see crocodiles lounging downriver from where we had been rafting.
Ironically, the diversity of life that visitors come to see is being destroyed by rampant tourism development. Tourist favorites like monkeys and leatherback turtles have been particularly hard hit. In many areas, developers have taken advantage of Costa Rica’s limited zoning laws. Now raw sewage pours into the streams and oceans, trash lies uncollected in the streets, the turtles’ beaches are overrun, and fertilized runoff feeds algae that smother coral reefs.
The explosion of tourism seems to have caught the otherwise environmentally sensitive country off-guard. The government is suffering from its failure to have the necessary zoning laws and utility plans in place prior to this rapid period of growth.
Yet Costa Rica has been a model of success in other ways. More than a quarter of its lands are in protected areas and the majority of Costa Rica’s energy is generated by wind and hydropower. The environment minister recently pledged to make Costa Rica entirely carbon-neutral by reducing and offsetting greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, consumers must pay a water tax to subsidize landowners for preserving forest “factories” that supply fresh water and clean air.
There is hope in the tourism arena as well. Though slow to respond, the government has started to impose building restrictions and to address the problems of fecal contamination along popular beaches. In addition, the World Wildlife Fund recently reported a record birthrate of leatherback turtles due to local patrols that protect nesting areas.
And many places, like Esquinas Rainforest Lodge, strive to balance the natural and social environment with the needs of visitors. All of the lodge’s proceeds are invested into the community for projects such as small business development, medical facilities, and education. The lodge’s website states, “The ultimate goal is to prove that a small, ecologically safe nature lodge can generate enough income to raise the living standard of a whole community of 70 families.”
The day’s lessons hit home when we ended our visit to La Gamba by touring a newly constructed home. The little red house only needed a few finishing touches before its family could move in. This was a tangible example of how tourism revenue was raising the standard of living in the community. A young girl with big brown eyes rushed out of a small wooden shack next door and beamed at us proudly—this was going to be her new home.
Many of La Gamba’s residents are children. Everything we had seen—the nonprofit lodge, the schoolhouse, the craft and shampoo sales, the preservation of the land and its diverse species—benefited the children.
A member of our tour group later wrote to me, “I realized I was seeing those kids as they would probably be as adults—the rabble-rousers, the thinkers, the entertainers. I was impressed with their curiosity, obedience to gentle instruction, and what seemed like genuine camaraderie with strangers. Also, the fun they had while singing and dancing. I can’t help but think that close family ties and small community cohesion had a lot to do with it.”
I thought about how often I walk into a visitor center in the U.S. and find exhibits on sustainability side-by-side with imported souvenirs and snacks. I believe that we can learn a lesson from La Gamba. Each time an interpretive site stocks its shelves, the children that call the area home should be considered. Does the site give local families a reason to embrace cultural traditions and protect the natural environment? Does it help tourists notice and seek out sustainable experiences?
If we wanted to entirely eliminate our negative impacts on the Earth, we would probably just stay home. But it is in our nature to want to see new places and meet new people. And such experiences can help us to live more gently by showing us the people, places, and life that make the Earth worth caring for.
To me, green tourism is about staying away from resource-intensive resorts, shunning familiar chains, and getting out and experiencing what the community has to offer. In turn, as a tourist, I hope that I can help the local people find value in protecting the natural environment and their cultural traditions. In this sense, green tourism is a very real possibility.
I once heard someone say, “A child is the only language that we all have in common.” In La Gamba, conservation is a community effort that includes everyone, even the littlest children. Tourism encourages the town’s residents to preserve the land and their customs and to share their culture with visitors.
My brief interaction with the children of La Gamba made a lasting impression on me. This journey allowed me to finally answer my husband’s question honestly:
Yes – green tourism is possible.
For More Information
Certification for Sustainable Tourism www.turismo-sostenible.co.cr/EN /home.shtml
Esquinas Rainforest Lodge www.esquinaslodge.com /home.html
Rainforests of the Austrians www.regenwald.at/de/home.html
Costa Rica National Parks www.costarica-nationalparks.com
Heidi Bailey, Certified Interpretive Guide, is a volunteer interpretive specialist at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. Contact her at geointerpretation@yahoo.com.
Dan Shilling worked at the Arizona Humanities Council from 1984 until 2003, the last 14 years as director. He guided Arizona’s early research on heritage tourism, editing three publications and earning several awards, including the Arizona Office of Tourism “Person of the Year Award” and the Museum Association of Arizona “Distinguished Service Award.” Dan recently directed a three-year project on place-based tourism, resulting in the book Civic Tourism. He teaches a seminar at Arizona State University (ASU) on sustainability, and he recently received an ASU fellowship to research the connections between Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic and sustainability.
“Of all the things that confuse human beings, perhaps nothing trips us up so much as what it means for something to be simple or complex.”
