Greenfake // Costa Rica

Greenfake

REWILDERS MISSION // CHAPTER 12 // COSTA RICA

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Raaak! – A shrill call cuts through the green above our heads. Aak, raaak! We look up to see two multicoloured sparkles emerging from the boscage.

Ecstasy. If we didn’t know better, we might have thought they were just two more tropical birds with their sumptuous plumage. But no, there is nothing ordinary about these birds.

What we have just spotted are two of the last free-flying great green macaws on the planet.

We came to Costa Rica with a clear objective: regaining hope.

Both Eva and I were beginning to recognize, not without some concern, that the chronicles of our expeditions were narrated in gloomy prose, full of terms such as overexploitation, depletion, extinction and collapse.

Feeling like scaremongers of the apocalypse, we feared no longer just for the reader’s mood, but for our own. Our motivation to move forward, facing uncomfortable truths, was beginning to crumble.

Decades of travelling in search of the planet’s natural wonders, yet the only stories we could articulate are grim tales of ravaged paradises and exterminated wildlife?

Could we really not find a single positive story to tell?

With that premise in mind, we decided to set out on a tour through an inspiring nation. A country in which to lift our spirits and recount a tale whose ending, for a change, would be a happy one.

And the near extinction and subsequent recovery of the great green macaw (Ara ambiguus) in the Caribbean slopes of Costa Rica couldn’t sound like a better opening.

“… the chronicles of our expeditions were narrated in gloomy prose…”

“… in this idyllic setting, there is a discordant note…”

Aak, raak! The birds watch us confidently from their high perch. In two weeks they have become used to us, our tent, tripod and telescope.

We, too, have become accustomed to them. Their squawks belong to the soundscape of this jungle as much as the roar of the water to a torrent flowing again after decades of drought.

But even in this idyllic setting, there is a discordant note: the hordes of tourists who invade the reserve every afternoon. Their presence disturbs us greatly, although we still cannot pinpoint exactly why.

From the reserve we head North, continuing a slow journey that will take us through the entire country.

Region after region, we dedicate a year to the search for those initiatives that make Costa Rica the world emblem of ecology.

But we can’t find them. What we observe instead are heavily fragmented, eroded, polluted and, above all, privatized landscapes.

At first, we wonder how animals survive in these territories divided by concertinas and barbed wire. Later, we learn the answer: they don’t. The wildlife, with which the country boasts is confined in that celebrated constellation of monetized reserves that abound throughout the national geography.

“Region after region, we dedicate a year to the search…”

“… we realise that our joyous plot has been broken…”

Sooner rather than later, we realise that our joyous plot has been broken to pieces.

The fragments of hope that remain get smaller and smaller, and over time we lose them. Some are burned in forest fires or swept away by some of the most polluted rivers we have ever seen. Others rot under tons of waste or disappear among kilometres of pineapple, coffee and palm monocultures.

And when we do find a little bit of positivism in the remote jungles, it vanishes when poachers tell us all about their hunting of endangered species, unpunished thanks to the corruption of forest rangers.

One day, parts of the stronghold of the great green macaws we explored long ago, a protected habitat, are being clear-cut for construction work.

With the news in the national media, the authorities scramble to, first, deny the facts and then, declare it legal.

Investigations follow. A public prosecutor on the case calls it an ecocide orchestrated for private profit in the millions, with “nature” tourism and foreign buyers as the main sources of income for the murky investment.

The park ranks are found to be accomplices, then the Ministry of Environment, and finally the president of the republic himself.

Those activists who dare to speak out receive death threats.

“… activists who dare to speak out receive death threats.”

Costa Rica has fallen victim to its own successes. Once a beacon of hope, the country has left the path of green and ethical policies that settled its global reputation.

Long gone are the days when environmental protection was the objective and a profitable economy was the means. Now the objective has become the maximization of profit, and the means turns out to be the environment.

Great income led to greater greed and nature was no more seen as an entity with rights. Extractivist projects previously rejected by the country like mining, oil and gas exploration, bottom trawling fishing, etc. were sown again in a land ranked first worldwide for its intensive agrochemical use.

Today, ecotourism promotion schemes feel like a greenfake. A strategy, nonetheless, destined to prosper. For in a dying world, international tourists are willing to shell out increasingly higher sums of money to access private reserves where they can observe the last macaws, the last jaguars, the last sloths…

Meanwhile, those same reserves, their associated hotels, restaurants and transportation, continue compromising the climate, habitats and species they claim to protect.

It is the business of extinction and Costa Rica has advantageously positioned itself.