A Lesson Plan for Costa Rican Forests : Teacher Guides Residents in Restoring Ecology Damaged by Humans

When Daniel Janzen set out to teach people to restore depleted tropical forests, he didn’t think he’d be a driving instructor.

“What I’m teaching is stuff that is a combination of academic things and what we regard as the ordinary things about running an ordinary life,” Janzen said during an interview in his University of Pennsylvania office amid tropical seed and fruit specimens, popcorn and cookies.

“You spend two hours in the afternoon talking about how to tell a beetle from a bug and then an hour and a half on driving lessons. You mix the biological aspects with the practical aspects.”

Janzen, 50, spends four months of the year teaching biology here and the rest in Costa Rica, guiding efforts to save its dwindling tropical dry forests. He also helped raise more than $24 million to buy 158 square miles of forests that in July were formally dedicated as Guanacaste National Park.

In October, 1988, Janzen began training Costa Ricans to survey the park’s plant and animal life and to teach others the techniques. There are 175 species of birds, 700 of plants, 3,140 of moths and butterflies and 13,000 of other insects, so the inventory alone will take about 10 years.

Janzen practices a new field called restoration ecology, which tries to return areas to their condition before they were damaged by humans. He hopes to raise $30 million for the National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica. Among the biggest contributors have been the Costa Rican and Swedish governments, the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia and the MacArthur Foundation, which honored him with one of its “genius awards” earlier this year.

The program does not use American volunteers, although some of Janzen’s students at Penn have asked if they could join. He refused, he said, because that would mean fewer Costa Ricans would be involved in the work.

“Costa Ricans develop a feeling of ownership. That’s the link you want. You want the members of the society to feel that the park is actually theirs, so that when it’s threatened, at some later time, they then feel the threat is a personal threat.”

The project got its start in 1985, when Costa Rican officials discovered that the Corcovado National Park was threatened by about 1,200 gold miners, who had caused widespread ecological damage. The officials asked Janzen to find out why the miners had breached the park’s traditionally respected boundaries. He discovered that the miners had moved their operations into the forests because they felt the land belonged to no one.

Janzen realized if the country’s resources were to be saved, Costa Ricans had to take pride in the forests. Since then, Costa Rica--about the size of West Virginia--has devoted more than a quarter of its area to natural parks, more than any of its Latin American neighbors.

Janzen, a Minnesota native, has spent more than 26 years in Costa Rica, drawn by its diverse plant and animal life. Helping to plan a national park, however, gave the field scientist a new challenge.

“As soon as you start planning a park and thinking about its biological properties, you immediately realize that the real challenge is not the biology, but the human administration,” he said. “You can’t just put an advertisement in the newspaper like you can here and out of the woodwork come 25 people who’ve already got master’s degrees in resource management.”

Janzen carefully describes his role as a guide. “My role is teaching particular courses and being somewhat of an adviser for some aspects of the administration of the park. I become part of the process of making decisions, but I don’t make decisions.”

Those decisions are made by Costa Ricans, who Janzen said are aware of the environmental impact their decisions could have, an awareness he attributes partly to the country’s size. Costa Ricans can’t escape the problems by moving, as Americans once did, he said.

Janzen credits Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez with encouraging the country to put one-fourth of its natural resources aside. “Costa Rica pretty much understands what they want to do. . . . They know what the recipe is.”