by Rod Hughes

Jaguar Cars and its parent company, Ford Motors, are donating $35,000 for environment projects in the Central American region. Jaguar is interested in the survival of the big cat after which the car is named and is offering $15,000 for projects to protect that endangered species. Only 50% of the graceful animals remain on the continent because of poaching and destruction of their environment in the past few years.

The Jaguar donation is aimed at Guetemala, Belize and Costa Rica where the big cats are endangered by illegal hunters after their beautiful pelts and by poaching of the wild pigs that constitute the jaguar’s prinicpal food. The vast majority of Costa Rica’s big cats live on the Osa Peninsula that sticks out into the Pacific Ocean from the country’s southern coast.

The Ford conservation prize of $20,000 is more general regarding environmental issues. Candidates must be registered by Nov. 30 at www.fondoja… or www.premios…

by Rod Hughes

Good evening, Welcome to Costa Rica. May we recommend the fish or seafood?

As the final article of a five-part series in the English-language newspaper, The Tico Times, on Costa Rica’s endangered commercial fishing industry, writer Dave Sherwood turned to the concerns of the consumer. He discovered that, despite pollution of offshore waters, the seafood that one eats here is safe.

This is despite what Sherwood calls “the country’s dirty little secret,” that 97% of greywater and sewage is wantonly dumped into rivers to be carried to the ocean. And perhaps why routinely the laboratory of the National Animal Heath Sergvice (SENASA) tests random samples of tuna and other offshore catches that find their way into markets and restaurants.

The lab claims this food is well within safe levels of contaminants. Migratory fish such as tuna, shark accumulate more mercury over time but even the big ones here are under international safety levels. Ditto for E. coli and other bacteria, mainly because the lab catches a developing problem before the catch reaches market.

Not willing to trust government bureaucracy to give them the straight story, the paper bought two fish at Puntarenas markets, one as ultra clean as the lab and the other at the scruffiest market reporters could find. The corvina and the snapper were tested the next day at a private lab. Both tested well below U.S. Food and Drug Administration standards for mercury, an element traces of which occurs in nature as well as in industrial pollution. (Pregnant women are advised to check with their doctors before eating the fruit of the seas.)

Experts warn that while the country’s shellfish appear generally safe, mussels and clams certain localized areas such as the mouth of the Tarcoles River have tested abnormally high in heavy metals.

Still, The Tico Times series noted that a lack of transparency in testing led to local shrimp fishermen being shut out of the lucrative European Union’s market. But that ban is due for review.

When one contrasts these findings with the recent recalls in the United States if various animal products mass produced in seemingly pristine conditions, Costa Rica appears in a favorable light. Bon apetite!

by Rod Hughes

“Well, didn’t it rain, chillun?” goes the old black spiritual song and Costa Ricans have good reason to sing it.

Torrential rainfall has driven 1,600 persons from their homes into emergency shelters, damaged or destroyed 2,000 houses, knocked out 22 bridges and badly damaged 27 roads in this country. And the bad news is that the rains will continue into mid-Novermber in a wet season longer and wetter than usual.

The Guanacaste province town of Filadelfia, one of the most frequently inundated towns in the country, is again flooded by the Tempisque River. When this happens, the townsfolk look out over the vast desolation of water and term it “Lake Tempisque.” But nine days of heavy rains have affected a dozen other population centers in Guanacaste’s lowlands. And on the Nicoya Peninsula where Filadelfia is located, almost all the area is lowland.

President Oscar Arias has promised to sign a decree to speed aid to those affected. But damage to crops and infastructure will take time and money to compensate for the losses. Guanacaste province is a major rice, fruit, vegetable and cattle producing region, vital to keep food prices stable. And other areas of the country are affected as well. The inland town of Atenas lost 15 of its inhabitants to a landlide that covered seven homes. Five of those, most certainly dead, have not been found and rescuers who finally gave up digging, fear that the bodies were carried into the Cacao River and swept away, never to be found. Some flooding has also hit the Central Valley population centers.

In the town of Parrita, near Puntarenas, residents returned to shovel mud out of their homes but the National Emergency Commission has warned that the river waters may rise again. Three emegency shelters remain open there.

Even travel and tourism have been affected with 29 flights from and to Juan Santamaría International Airport near the capital cancelled by fog and heavy rains between Sunday and Tuesday.

by Rod Hughes

It’s a dirty business but someone has to do it. The Sitca S.A. company will treat garbage from the Carbbean port city of Limon plus the towns of Siquirres, Guacimo and Matina, sorting out the organic stuff for processing into gas fuel for home use, recycling the rest and leaving only 30% to place in a landfill.

For the municipalities, it’s a dream plan if it works the way it is presented—the company will actually pay $2 per ton to the municipalities that currently have to shell out $13 per ton to landfills. The only requisite for the towns is that the municipal governments must sign a $20-year contract.

Sitca will install four processing plants at a million dollars each. They will accept commercial waste but it must be non-toxic. For Limon, it will be a way out of a difficult situation where, in the past, residents have been stuck with the 1,600 tons of refuse generated monthly with nowhere to put it. Although the landfills are currently functioning they do have a limited life and are difficult to keep from contaminating the environment, including the precious water table.

The town of Santa Cruz in Guanacaste province is also seeking a solution to trucking its refuse to the nearby town of Filadelfia. They are planning to reopen their landfull on a limited basis, in two “compartments” they hope will provide a relief to the dent that truck fuel makes in their budgets, but the solution is nowhere as elegant as that provided by Sitca.

by Rod Hughes

UPDATE: As of 8 p.m. Friday, eight more bodies have been uncovered by rescue workers, bringing the confirmed death toll of the avalanche to 10 with at least five more persons missing.

Atenas–An avalanche of rock and mud buried seven homes in Bajo Cacao in the San Isidro district of this town northwest of the capital during the early morning hours yesterday. As of this writing, two persons are known dead and 13 are missing as rescue crews and neighbors dig frantically through the accumulation of debris that once was part of a hillside.

Heavy rains signalling the end of the rainy season–wetter than normal–also flooded homes throughout the Central Valley this week, as rivers left their beds and flowed into surrounding neighorhoods. But this morning, the attention of the country is focused on the rescue attempt.

Shortly after 1:50 a.m. yesterday, a neighbor gave the alarm that “a tragedy of great proportions” had occurred. Other neighbors heard the thunder of the slide and struggled through a torrential cloudburst to the scene in pitch blackness. One of them, Freddy Artavia, told the newspaper La Nacion, “The rocks and trees didn’t let us pass. It was very dark and we couldn’t see a thing. It was raining a lot.”

By 9:05 yesterday morning, the first victim’s body was found, that of 25-year-old Jeffry Aguero. By 1:10 in the afternoon, Red Cross workers found Arquimides Aviles, 40, an employee of a nearby chicken ranch. Red Cross rescue crewman Randal Viquez of nearby Atenas arrived shortly after 2 a.m. and described utter confusion and screaming.

One of the first things Aguero did was to rescue a child of about seven whose feet were trapped by the slide. He was immediately taken to an improvised medical facility in the Fatima community center.

As often happens during disasters, there were miraculous escapes. Isabel Sandi was carried 100 yards by the slide but managed to extricate herself from the ruins with only a glass cut on her hand. “My husband had more injuries than I. It was dark and we didn’t know where we were,” she said.

The avalanche, 200 yards wide, left a path of devastation 400 yards long down the hillside, reaching the bank of the Cacao River before it stopped with parts of three autos showing through the debris. But the seven missing homes were not the only casualties. The Red Cross felt it prudent to evacuate 22 other homes in stricken Bajo Cacao as well as 40 more in the La Mandarina housing development.

Meanwhile, more than 785 homes have been damaged by flooding on the Pacific slope and 235 persons are in emergecy shelters. Especially hard hit was the Puntarenas province town of Parrita.

And, if that were not enough, the national Weather Institute says the torrential downpours may not be nearly over, with a low pressure area in the Caribbean moving in Costa Rica’s direction. The country’s topography is so narrow that a low pressure zone close in on the east inevitably sucks in wet air from the Pacific, bringing rains.

by Rod Hughes

The Costa Rican government has confiscated 32 farms along the Pacific coast in order to protect leathback turtles, the largest and most endangered of all turtle species.The farms will be added to the Las Baulas Marine Park, a strip of national park hugging the coastline along the northern section of the Nicoya Peninsula.

This is the most important area where turtles come ashore to lay and bury their eggs in the sandy beaches. Of eight extant species of turtles, six lay their eggs on Costa Rican beaches. Las Baulas (the Spanish name for the leatherback) Marine Park was established in 1991 protects nesting areas along Ventanas and Grande beaches as well as Tamrindo and San F¨rancisco estuaries and their mangrove swamps and Capitán and Verde islands. The majority of land originally envisioned for the park is in private hands

The government fears development may cause irreperable damage to the seagoing animals. Turtles nest at night and lights and noise disorient the turtles with the danger that the animals may abandon the beach and never return. Overdevelopment has already caused this on some Mexican beaches, notes Sergio Aráuz of the Marine Turtle Restoration Program. He fears that the construction of summer homes and hotels may be the last nail in the coffin of the leatherback as a species.

Development, if it is to happen, can be done in moderation and with care. Las Tortugas Hotel on Playa Grande, for example, was constructed decades ago with the welfare of the nesting turtles foremost. The hotel is set back from the nesting beach and its lights minimal and shielded from the beach. But the situation is delicate; one home with bright lights shining toward the beach and with loud music and wild parties during nesting season can drive away the scarce animals permanently.

But even more, unwise development can wreck mangrove areas that are immeasureably rich in all manner of wildlife.

Expropriation can take one or two years more. Property owners have a right to three separate evaluations by idfferent experts. The government says the going price is $800 per square meter but at least one owner told the daily La Nación that that price is far lower than it should be. “We’re indignant!” Ana Catalina Facio told the newspaper. “Residents already have light and noise control to not effect the turtles, This expropriation is unnecessary.”

by Rod Hughes

If President Oscar Arias is really serious about his zero carbon emission campaign, he is going to have to direct his Environment Minister’s attention to the country’s chief energy producer, ICE, a government monopoly. The president’s announced goal is to reduce petroleum consumption while increasing the carbon dioxide consuming forest areas.

ICE’s purchase of diesel and bunker oil rose a stunning 66% over the first nine months of this year comparing with the same period last year. As the English=language weekly The Tico Times has reported in past issues, although a chain of presidents have giving lip service to alternate means of producing electricity for the burgeoning energy demands in this country, ICE has been back-sliding every year.

Not only is this trend ecologically unwise, it is economically indefensible as well. the announcement was made today that, although gasoline prices well drop slightly soon, the price of diesel is going up.

According to the National Refinery, RECOPE, (another government monopoly) ICE bought 185 million liters of diesel this year, 54 million more than last year. And the power provider cannot plead low water levels in its reservoirs as it did at the end of the dry season. Fuel oil for thermic generators swallowed 7.9 million liters of fuel oil as opposed to only 4.8 million last year.

Of course, the demand for fuel has risen across the board. RECOPE reports that gasoline consumption has risen 5% so far this year. This is for moving the nation’s 531,000 cars and taxis registered with the National Insurance Institute (INS, still another government monopoly,)

The bottom line economically is this: RECOPE has bought $998 million in petroleum so far this year.

The only bright light in this tunnel of petroleum dependency is that ICE has announced that the rationing that plagued the country at the end of the last dry season will not be repeated in 2008, thanks to the wetter than average rainy season just now winding down and due to more petroleum-guzzling electrical generators in which ICE has invested.

by Rod Hughes

SANTA CRUZ, GUANACASTE–A leatherback turtle, one-and-a-half meters long, swam ashore Sept. 15 to lay her eggs on Junquillal Beach a full month before the average season starts. Usually, the season begins in the middle of October and ends in March of the following year. Last year for example, it began Oct. 17.

“We hope for an egg-laying season more abundant than in recent years,” said scientists of the World Wildlife Fund. The leatherback is one of the most endangered species in the world—91,000 were counted laying eggs in 1980 and only a thousand last year. Scientists in Costa Rica as well as throughout the world have been alarmed at the declining numbers coming ashore.

But scientists are even more encouraged that the turtles come earlier, in cooler weather–beach sand termparture determines the sex of most of the baby turtles born in the shallow nests. If the season is late, temperatures of more than 30 degrees Celsus can “cook” the soft-shelled eggs hard. None of the eggs hatch, then.

At Junquillal, a squad of eight young men, nicknamed the “Baula Boys,” protected the nests from marauding dogs–and poachers. Although it is prohibited to harvest more than a small percentage of the eggs, they are still consumed, mostly in cantinas, for their mythical virllity-instilling powers.

by Rod Hughes

Archaeologists are urging immediate action to save Guayabo National Monument, the pre-Columbian archaeological site most emblematic of Costa Rica’s pre-colonial era.

Peruvian experts, well qualified because of their work preserving the beautiful Inca sites in their home country, were called in because of severe erosion damage of the stonework. They recommend a million dollar investment if the site is not to be immediately ruined.

Not only drainage is needed. One of the site’s worst enemies is the industrious ant. The tropics boast of industrial-strength ant colonies fully capable of undermining stone walls that have stood for centuries. Even armadillos, those cute but not-too-cuddly forest critters, dig under the stones in search of grubs ro eat, further disrupting the walls.The Peruvians say stonework is in imminent danger of collapse and recommend declaring a national emergency.

Minister of Culture Maria Elena Carballo is more measured about the situation, calling for the pooling of forces by such institutions as the National Museum, the National University at Heredia, University of Costa Rica and the Ministry of Environment and Energy. But she agrees that it will have to be soon if the site is to be saved.

Another reform the experts recommend is putting the site under the protection of an archaeologist, not a park guard as is currently the case. Finally, a call was issued to establish a museum at the site where indigenous pieces of pottery and other artifacts may be displayed in their natural setting.

by Rod Hughes
The message is clear behind biologist Ana Fonseca’s analyses of the effects of global warming on Costa Rica, one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world:
Come visit before most of it disappears.
The University of Costa Rica scientist calculates that over the next 90 years, 160,000 species of plants and animals will go extinct, including (divers take note) 50% to 82% of the coral reefs. The country has already experienced, since the 1980s, the disappearance of exotic species of frogs from the high mountains here, some of them to be found nowhere else in the world. That was even before projections by scientists that the temperature may rise 3 degrees Celsus in the next nine decades, raising the ocean levels three feet.
While amphibians such as frogs are notoriously temperature-sensitive, one does not think of reptiles as being so delicate. But some of them cannot reproduce if the temperature rises above a certain level, Fonseca reveals. And the reefs are home to certain algae that enable the little coral creatures to breathe and live. Without coral, whose colorful exoskeletons constitute havens for hundreds of fish species, valuable barriers to hurricanes disappear. If the present temperature of 28 degrees Celsus rises another degree, the seas turn acidic and those algae are gone and so are the reefs, says Fonseca.
Carlos Drews of the World Nature Fund’s marine program notes that the case of the reptiles is unique during global warming. If the nest temperature rises above 29.4 degrees turtles will produce only females and crocodiles only males, hardly a formula to propagate the species. Bit it is worse if the nest temperature rises to 30 degrees: the eggs grow hard and will not hatch.
In the cloud-shrouded mountains of Monteverde, a nature-lover’s paradise, the Golden Toad and Harlequin Frog have already succumbed to a fungus previously unknown because the plague could not previously survive the cool temperatures of the cloud forest. UCR scientists say 21 species of amphibians are already gone forever. And temperature increases will disrupt the natural cycle of flowers, trees and other plant life with untold damage to the 167 species of birds resident in the country.
On local Pacific beaches, the leatherback turtle population has already diminished 90% in the past 60 years.
Nor will human beings be unaffected. Tropical diseases such as dengue can be expected to rise.