Costa Rica restored its ravaged land to health. The rich UK has no excuse for such complete failure
George Monbiot
Fri 21 Apr 2023 01.00 EDT
A tree nursery – part of the work of reforestation – in the Monteverde cloud forest in Costa Rica. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian
Why does a wealthy, powerful nation struggle so badly while a small, much poorer one succeeds?
One of the world’s greatest environmental heroes doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Though he has done more to protect the living planet than almost anyone alive, his name is scarcely known. It’s partly because he’s quiet and self-effacing and partly because of a general ignorance about Central America that so few of us have heard of Alvaro Umaña.
This might be about to change. He stars in a fascinating film, now released in the Netherlands and negotiating global sales, called Paved Paradise (disclosure: I was also interviewed). It’s the first feature-length documentary I’ve watched that engages intelligently with the most critical environmental issue: land use. By contrast with popular but misguided films such as Kiss the Ground or The Biggest Little Farm, it recognises that sprawling extractive land uses are a lethal threat to the living world. It makes the case that, unless we count the hectares and decide together how best they should be used, we will lose the struggle to defend the habitable planet.
Paved Paradise tells the story of the most remarkable ecological turnaround on Earth: the transformation of Costa Rica. From 1986 to 1990, Umaña was environment minister in Óscar Arias’s government. Arias received the Nobel peace prize for his regional diplomacy. But the equally astonishing environmental shift Umaña catalysed is less well known.
Until the Arias government took power, Costa Rica suffered one of the world’s worst deforestation rates: on one scientific assessment, its forest cover fell to just 24.4% of the country. Today, forests occupy 57%, which, Umaña tells me, is close to the maximum: some parts were never forested, while others are now occupied by productive farms and cities. While a small amount of illegal timber felling continues, Costa Rica is the only tropical country to have more or less stopped and then reversed deforestation. It now has one of the world’s highest percentages of protected areas. How did it happen?
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/21/costa-rica-uk-land
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