Repairing That Which They Destroyed : Ecology: Costa Rica colonists tore out the trees to put in farms. Now, a UCI professor and others reverse history.

The rain came. It hammered the earth and thrashed the trees, tunneled the soil and etched wrinkles in hands. And still the drops kept falling.

So wet was the immense emerald rain forest of the southern Costa Rican frontier that sometimes it seemed to an expatriate Southern Californian like Darryl Cole that there was no sun--only rain falling and dusk.

In the green darkness of smothering leaves, there was nothing--remembered Cole--more satisfying than taking an ax to free sunlight from the trees. Now, these are the giants that he seeks to preserve.

In the four decades since the first ax felled a tree in Coto Brus on Feb. 28, 1952, many of the settlers who participated in what was called “ La Conquista de la Selva “--the conquest of the jungle--have developed a special reverence for an old arch enemy.

Some seasoned pioneers have planted seeds of a new forest or joined the effort with UC Irvine Prof. Frances Lynn Carpenter, who is searching for new, rapid strategies to raise up a rain forest from battered lands on the edge of the frontier.

Carpenter says she has glimpsed signs of this changing attitude among local farmers, who are cautiously planting seedlings on portions of their land. The problem, she says, is that the strategies are often haphazard because there is little information about the fastest, sturdiest and most valuable trees to grow.

Several farmers have created their own tiny rain forest preserves, a patch of nostalgia to remember the land when it was covered with a canopy of trees inhabited by long-beaked toucans, wild pigs and jaguars.

Others just try to make sense of the destruction.

“We have acted upon scant knowledge,” Cole writes forlornly of the triumph over the rain forests. “The new pioneer is the researcher. He or she must deal with the burden which has been brought forward. For we have loved yet despoiled; labored yet destroyed; cherished yet all but lost a world which we must now seek to re-create and restore. This is the frontier.”

Coto Brus--a canton, or county, near the border of Panama--was the frontier, a land of instant history that took only 40 years for settlers to transform more than 25,000 acres of remote, mist-shadowed rain forest into a leading coffee-growing region of Costa Rica.

The early settlement was an island in a rain forest. To the east was Panama. To the north, the mountains of the Cordillera Talamanca. To the west, nothing but trees as far as the eye could linger. Within the first 20 years, almost 70% of the forest disappeared.

That history is memorialized in the town square of San Vito by a rusting, flaking jeep and a towering statue of a pioneer with machete clutched in his stone hand.

The jeep is the carcass of the first vehicle that the settlers used to wrest a road from the dense rain forests. The machete was the tool that was standard apparel for the waves of 20th Century frontiersmen who flocked there from northern Costa Rica, Yugoslavia, the United States and Italy.

Rapid development in the isolated region was spurred by a wealthy family from Northern Italy, who formed an Italian colonization society that signed a contract in 1951 to provide settlers for the Costa Rican government.

“We were the yeast that formed the bread,” insisted the founding patriarch of the colony, Vito Sansonetti, who in his 70s still speaks Spanish with a lilting Italian accent and savors his nickname, “Il Commandante. “

While a young naval officer, he had fallen in love with a Costa Rican woman while his Italian cruiser, “ Duque de Aosta, “ was docked in Panama. After their marriage, Sansonetti and his father--an admiral in the Italian navy--hatched a grand plan to create an Italian colony in Costa Rica with $4 million in funding raised by the sale of securities in Italy.

Eventually, the Sansonetti family would persuade 117 families to emigrate. Some of the settlers had worked on the Sansonetti’s Italian estate. Others were seeking adventure and money. And a few were fleeing political vengeance and assassination attempts for support of Italian fascism.

Even fewer were actually farmers with any agricultural training.

Today, many of the young men who battled the forest are pensioners with time to reflect about how it came to pass that the rain forest vanished before their lives. Often their children and grandchildren listen to the explanations in silence, interrupting only to observe: It was a different time.

Sansonetti, who still owns a finca , or farm, that he has planted with new pines, blames the rapid destruction on Costa Rican squatters, who followed the Italians to the settlement.

In turn, Francisco Cedeno, a Costa Rican pioneer who has maintained a rain forest preserve on his farm, blames the Italians for inexperience and lack of farming background.

Hernan Villalobos, the son of Costa Rican pioneers who is active in local farming and reforestation projects, simply blames old-fashioned hostility toward wild and hostile nature.

“People ask now why we took down the trees,” Villalobos said. “We didn’t know what else to do. There were no controls and there was almost a competition among the men about who could cut down the trees the fastest. I remember how it used to make my mother really nervous when they were cutting them down. My brother was smaller and so she would take him and hug him while they were working. You could feel the trees shaking the earth as they fell.”

When Villalobos was a child, nature was a force to conquer. The primeval forest was a sinister and mysterious place that harbored danger in the slithering form of snakes and the buzz of exotic insects. Young girls were warned they could be assaulted by monkeys if they strayed into the forest. Jaguars lurked in shadows.

And so, the frontiersmen challenged the forest with military-like precision. Sansonetti’s 8-millimeter home movies of the expedition portray pioneers charging through the forest in a convoy of WWII vintage Jeeps with flags whipping in the wind. An Italian priest offers a blessing for their adventure.

Fear wasn’t the only motive for the destruction of the forest. Government policies encouraged the clearing of the land for agriculture. Population pressures pushed squatters into virgin territory. Most of the rain forest in Costa Rica was not cut for timber production, but to make way for coffee plantations, farms and cattle pastures.

The timber markets were inaccessible to the settlers because the major road was often muddy and impassable during the storms that annually pelted the land with more than 130 inches of rain. Pioneers like Cole--who migrated at age 20 from Oceanside to Costa Rica--helped clear the darkness of the forest, leaving the huge trunks to rot where they fell because they were worthless or too waterlogged to burn.

“For the men, the forest was something to conquer,” said Cole, 60, who lives in a two-story frame farmhouse with a sweeping view of a private rain forest preserve set aside on his farm. A small strip of carefully manicured grass separates the shiny black rocking chairs on the wide porch from the edge of the forest.

“It was an opportunity to go out and to take tools in hand and do something,” Cole said. “There were a few settlers who would look at it as an adventure, but it also embodied something else. It was an obstacle, a proving ground, a place where each settler could prove his worth. The forest was strong, something to overcome.”

Those historic attitudes--that a wild and savage land full of untapped wealth was waiting to be tapped--has evolved as the forest has dwindled in Coto Brus.

Many people are trying cautiously on their own to plant more trees, but there isn’t widespread knowledge about what are the best strategies. Currently, the rate of reforestation in Costa Rica amounts to about 40,000 acres annually, according to Enrique Barrau, an agricultural expert with U.S. Aid for International Development. He expects the figures could increase even more if export restrictions were removed on Costa Rican timber, raising the value of growing trees.

Several university studies have tracked the progress of the colony, including one that examined the attitudes of first generation colonists and their children. The first generation settlers regretted the destruction of the forest, according to a study by Miguel Alexiades, but largely because they considered nature a commodity. Rising timber prices meant their capital had been wasted.

In contrast, according to the study, the second generation of colonists who were largely professionals in fields of law, agronomy and medicine were more aware of conservation and bemoaned the destruction of the forest.

Carlo Sansonetti--a biologist and Catholic priest who is the nephew of the Italian colony’s founder--has purchased a 175-acre farm in the village of El Ceibo where he is launching a program to rehabilitate young men with drug addictions. Part of that rehabilitation also involves restoring the land. The men are expected to help with reforestation experiments.

But conservation is not the exclusive preserve of the second generation.

Cole has torn out the coffee plants on his farm and freed his lands for scientific research. He is now working with scientists from Cornell University and the University of Costa Rica, who have created experimental plots to test soil treatments and trees that can nourish the soil.

He is also assisting Carpenter, who is trying to raise a new rain forest from 63 acres in degraded pastureland south of Coto Brus. She is also examining the attitudes and practices that led to the deforestation and deterioration of her own land.

Her search has taken her to the hardware store of a local businessman who vaguely remembers the cutting of the forest 40 years ago to a farmhand who recalls the herbicides that ruined a coffee plantation that dotted her land.

She has also interviewed farmers like Miguel Sandi, a Costa Rican whose life has been dramatically affected by the changing views of the forest.

His farm and apple orchards lie deep in the interior of an international forest preserve that straddles the Panamanian and Costa Rican border. He established title to the land as a squatter, clearing the trees to prove his claim. He still carries a bullet in his pale leg--a constant reminder of ancient squabbles over the land.

Recently, his wife was home alone in the house when an expedition from Canada, the United States and Europe came visiting to inquire about buying the farm that he had cultivated for more than 40 years.

They wanted the land, Sandi said, to restore that section of the park to pristine condition.

“I will go,” he said, “but only if they can pay me for all the years of my struggle.”