By Alvaro Ugalde
This month we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of Costa Rica’s first two national parks, Santa Rosa and Poás, which were established in 1971. I was one of the Park Service’s two original employees, and during my four decades of work on behalf of our natural heritage, I’ve become closely acquainted with one very important and unrelenting truth that applies to our ecosystems. Expressed in Latin as ex nihilo nihil fit, this universal tenet tells us that, “Nothing comes from nothing.”
Thus, whatever human wealth we’ve built here on earth implies a reduction of another kind of wealth that we don’t usually account for in our financial statements: our natural capital. Without fail, at the absolute beginning of a supply chain and at several points further along it, we clear forests, change the atmosphere, pollute or divert rivers, and end non-human life in order to facilitate a certain type of lifestyle for ourselves. This isn’t meant to sound reproachful; it’s just a fact. We should always remember that in order to have something, we must diminish something else: ex nihilo nihil fit.
In the 1940s, 75 percent of Costa Rican territory was covered with untouched forests. That same decade ushered in new national policies, including the elimination of the army and more capital investment in education, health and other social welfare programs.
Today, in terms measured by several conventional indicators, Costa Rica is considered a model for developing nations. Because nothing comes from nothing, a considerable amount of the country’s forests and other natural capital was processed into pasturelands, schools, hospitals, infrastructure and services. More Costa Ricans were born.
And now we have our shoes. We also have our cars, highways, airports and many other goods and services. But much of the country’s recent economic growth may not have occurred if it hadn’t been for a strong conservation effort started in the 70s.
Costa Rica’s national parks and other protected areas not only help protect more than 4 percent of the earth’s biodiversity, but they also played a pivotal role in restoring forest cover back to nearly half of Costa Rica’s land area. These parks also set the stage for what is today perhaps our top moneymaker: the tourism industry. It turned out to be an excellent investment in our natural capital.
The national parks system, together with other lands protected by local communities, non-profit organizations and private individuals, have helped maintain vital services the planet provides us – services we notoriously take for granted, such as the provision of drinking water, soil erosion control, flood mitigation, carbon sinking and climate moderation.
Costa Rica’s conservation movement is a good example of how humans have slowed the rate at which natural capital is converted into “processed” capital, thus striking a better balance between industrial development and the protection of the resources that make that type of economic growth even possible – not to mention sustainable – over time.
But this balance remains precarious at best, both in Costa Rica and the rest of the world.
Although now retired from the Parks Service, I still dedicate a considerable amount of time to making sure that what was started several decades ago with Poás National Park continues today with the relatively younger parks, including the Juan Castro Blanco National Water Park. Established in 1992, the Juan Castro Blanco National Water Park (Parque Nacional del Agua Juan Castro Blanco) encompasses a 14,000-hectare area east of Ciudad Quesada. The park’s tropical cloud forests act as a sponge, soaking up 560 cubic-kilometers of rain and other precipitation every year. This is later released as drinking water for tens of thousands of local residents. It’s also the water used to generate an important part of Costa Rica’s hydro-electricity. The words “del agua” were added to the park’s name by legislative decree in 2003 in recognition of its importance as a water resource for neighboring communities.
However, the National Water Park’s lands are still largely in private hands. The Costa Rican government needs to figure out a way to buy this land. Local communities are taking action, including more than 60,000 households that voluntarily adopted an electricity rate increase to help generate funds for the park. But given the magnitude of the challenge, much more help is needed. I invite readers who are convinced of this urgent task to join the Nectandra Institute, www.nectandra.org, a non-profit organization I co-founded, to support the communities working to protect Juan Castro Blanco Water National Park and the watersheds that originate inside it.
At age 24, Alvaro Ugalde became Costa Rica’s first park superintendent, serving at Santa Rosa National Park and Poás National Park. He was director of the Costa Rican National Park Service from 1974-1986, and again from 1991-1993.
