The Green Advantage

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IT'S HARD TO KEEP A GOOD TREE DOWN

Here's an update on the Spanish cedar situation. For those reading about it for the first time, last year the variety was attacked by an insect called the shoot borer, actually a butterfly larva that hatches from eggs laid in the tips of new trees and starts munching away. None of the plantations in Costa Rica have been able to solve the problem completely. For those of our tree owners who owned Spanish cedar in their mixed plantings, we gave them additional trees to offset the reduced value of their cedar. Well, now that the cedar is big enough, it is recovering...and those lucky enough to have the mixed trees will have the added value of the recovered cedar.

We reported in the Summer 2004 newsletter that the mahogany had no shoot-borer damage. It began to see some damage after that newsletter was released, but it is doing fine now as well. The photos show the new, healthy growth coming out of the damaged area. Its growth is superior to last year's. I guess we shouldn't have been surprised by this, since in our part of Costa Rica, even the fence posts take root and grow into trees.

11,000 TREES PLANTED THIS YEAR The 2004 planting included 8,000 teak and 3,000 mixed native species. The month-old trees are growing vigorously. With this planting, about one-third of the land owned by Finca Leola has been reforested. The streams adjacent to the year-old sections of trees have improved remarkably. Before, the erosion from the fields was making the streams very muddy.  Now, even during the rainy season, the waters run clear. Since some of the water going into the river is now clear, it is looking cleaner, too. It's gratifying to see so quickly the results of reclaiming the deforested land. Here's how the finca looks now. That's Amy and Hector on horseback, and the bare area of ground in the foreground of the last photo is where one of this year's seedlings is planted.

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WATCH THIS SPACE for news of the United States printing of Monkeys Are Made of Chocolate, a book previously published in Costa Rica. Amy has had the pleasure of copyediting the updated US version, and we will let you know when it comes out. The book is as intriguing as its title, being a collection of essays on Costa Rica from the vantage point of Jack Ewing, who bought a cattle and rice farm and over a period of about 30 years allowed most of it to return to jungle. One of the chapters in the book is the article Jack wrote for this website, titled "Deforestation, Reforestation, and Regeneration." In it, you'll see aerial then-and-now photos of his land, which is now a nationally recognized nature preserve and one of the main tourist attractions of Costa Rica.

While driving out in the country after dark recently, we were stuck behind a slow-moving vehicle for a while, a logging truck loaded with logs approximately 4 to 5 feet (1 meter or more) in diameter and 40 feet long. After following for a few minutes, Fred commented, "You know why he's out at night? Those logs were probably harvested illegally."Not having a cell phone yet because we just moved to Costa Rica, we looked for a license plate number to take down and report later, only to realize that there was no license plate on the back of the truck. When we were able to pass, we saw that there wasn't one on the front, either.Looking at those logs, it was easy to visualize what a magnificent tree that must have been. It appeared as though one tree filled the entire truck.

To protect against poachers, the biggest thing is to constantly have people patrolling the property. Poachers are generally former loggers, who used to make their living felling rainforest trees, and who are seeing the profession disappear that they learned from their fathers and grandfathers. They are opportunistic thieves rather than career criminals, and there are plenty of foreigners who buy land and never come to live in the country, much less on or even near their tract of trees. So all you have to do is make it obvious that you have a working farm and that there is somebody always on the property. It just takes too much heavy equipment to steal a full-grown tree to sneak in and out quickly. Every day on our farm, someone is trimming the low branches off the bigger trees, weeding around the small ones, tending the crops that grow in between trees, moving cattle from place to place to prevent overgrazing in the areas where they keep the grass down so we can plant trees there next year…and so on. So our answer to how to guard against tree poachers is, in a word, agroforestry. Our manager also rides the fences on horseback every few days. And by the way, odds are good that the owner of the tree on that truck asked the poacher to come “steal” the tree while he kept everybody out of the area. Very tempting when one tree brings in up to a year’s wages. Costa Rica as a nation is one of the most progressive in the world on ecological practices, with laws against cutting any tree even on one’s own property unless a forestry engineer has approved it for harvest. For example, it is never permitted to remove a tree within 15 meters (about 16 yards) of any waterway.

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MORE TO READ:

If you haven't read the story of how and why we started our reforestation project and began helping people invest in tropical hardwoods, see our article on www.ecoworld.com. There's a new Life in the Campo story about the afternoon we spent watching paint dry — honest, we really did that.