SAVE THE (REST OF THE) PLANET! COSTA RICA IS SAVING ITSELF

It was dusk on my first night in the Costa Rican jungle, and outside my cabin I’m sure I heard every last insect in the country sounding off to signal bedtime. It was a pleasant mash-up of white noise, though it probably masked the treading of jaguars and who-knows-what-other rainforest creatures. There was barely a single candle’s worth of light in the room, which was open to the night through French doors and large, screenless windows, but I could see that two hammocks were strung across the veranda like a TV ad for a male performance enhancement product. The air was lush and sweet, and the bed was draped with a sheer netting like a curtain on a stage. This was among the most romantic places I had ever been, even though I was there by myself.

I was in the 8th grade when I first heard about all the precious rainforest that is burned away every day to clear places for cattle to graze so that more McDonald’s hamburgers can be made. And for 16 years I was a vegetarian as part of my personal stake in a better world. But the doomsday clichés never stop, and practically everything we can consume these days is the product of a massive greenwashing campaign to make us feel better. There is green gasoline, green junk food, and even green golf courses.

There are green countries, too, and highest on the list is Costa Rica. This is not by chance. It’s been part of the national consciousness—to do no harm—since 1948, when the government abolished its army and reinvested in culture, education and healthcare. But this requires an ongoing commitment, which was recently exemplified by the International Planet, People and Peace Conference. For the third year in a row, professionals in the tourism trade gathered—this time at Earth Universidad in Guácimo, Limón—to be impressed again by the beauty and importance Costa Rica’s rich variety of natural resources and biological marvels, and to discuss strategies for bringing more tourism operations into compliance with the best practices for sustaining them.

When I was presented with an opportunity to attend, the eighth-grade girl in me said yes, hardly believing she would finally be in the rainforest she had worried about for so long, that she would see for herself if there really is a place on Earth where people are doing more for the environment than replacing their detergent with baking soda. That’s how I ended up in the cabin.

Selva Bananito Lodge is a good example of conscious development, an off-the-grid ecotourism resort in the rain-and-cloud forest on the Atlantic side of Costa Rica. Like dozens of other ecotourism joints throughout the country, it’s run by an expatriate. Jürgen Stein—yes, he’s German—and his sister, Sofia, bring a nice Eurocharm to the place. But the principle reason people come to Selva Bananito is something different and deeper, something they lack back home—an ethos of environmentalism fully supported by the government. Staying there gave me the feeling I was doing something positive for the planet—or, at least, not doing anything negative.

As days passed, as I experienced this botanical wonderland, plus baby sloths, Tico culture and platefuls of frijoles y maduras, I understood why Costa Rica tops the Happy Planet Index. The country has all this and only uses its fair share of natural resources. Meanwhile, the Occupy Wall Street movement keeps pointing out that if everyone on Earth were to live the way we do in the United States, we would need four Earths to sustain us.

That is the concept behind places like Selva Bananito: to showcase a carbon-neutral existence where one’s trash, sewer and emissions leave no trace. A lofty ideal for sure, but there are numerous ways Stein has accomplished this at his resort, which butts up against one of many national parks—remote territories that remain largely unexplored.

For one, he lets the sounds of the forest lull his guests to sleep. The cabins have no amenities, such as a TV or a wet bar or even a light bright enough for reading, because the cabins have no electricity—just enough solar power to heat water for a shower and to power the faint LED lights on the walls. A place like this reminds me of a movie I saw once, in which the residents of a small Scottish town had absolutely no entertainment, and so there was lovemaking every night. A lofty ideal, for sure.

Costa Rica’s government long ago recognized that its best defense is to live very simply—“We don’t have anything but slingshots here,” Stein likes to say—and its most valuable resource is the appeal of its beauty to stressed-out Americans and Europeans tourists who want to flop all day in a hammock and eat by candlelight, but still feel as if they are having an experience. And from what I could tell, it isn’t just European and American transplants that are making good—and good-enough money—on the promise; the dozen or so business cards I collected on my trip were almost all from Costa Rican tour operators.

Although it is a small country, Costa Rica’s climate is quite complex—comprised of numerous “life zones,” many of which can be experienced in one day. That’s what I did. The tram I rode though primary and secondary growth rainforest at La Amistad International Peace Park coincided with a monsoon, and I was pelted by a pleasant rain as our guide pointed out a systematic hierarchy of trees, plants and vines and explained how each strata was home to a roster of birds, animals and insects. Costa Rica has more than 2,000 species of bromeliad, 1,239 species of butterflies and while Stein’s resort has earned a 5-leaf rating (eco-talk for 5 stars), guests must contend with many species of bats that fly up into the eaves.

There may be several Jürgen Steins too, the sort of people who might create a watershed protection program for the community and who tally up their estate’s emissions at the end of every year. Stein is eager to share his good works, even developing an environmental education program for local schoolchildren.

Among other visionaries I met were Teresa and Glenn Jampol, New Yorkers who moved to Costa Rica many years ago when they bought an organic coffee plantation and built a boutique hotel in the cloud forest overlooking San Jose. To increase their cash flow—and thus become more sustainable—they combined the inn with the plantation. Now Finca Rosa Blanca is sort of the Napa Valley of Costa Rica, offering coffee tastings along with possible sightings of rare quetzal, tapir and peccaries.

Then there was Stephen Brooks, a 30-something American environmental revolutionary, a permaculturist who owns a sustainable farm in the rainforest right on the Atlantic coast. “Our mission is quality of life. And we get to design our quality of life,” said Brooks. “The way we design affects everything.”

Although Brooks eats sliced bananas on his cinnamon Life cereal every morning, he will tell you that even Costa Ricans spray their bananas with chemicals to make them aesthetically pleasing to North Americans. The admission taints my view a little, until he showed us dozens of slides of tropical fruits he grows on his farm—mangosteen and carambola and guanabana, peanut butter fruit and stinky fruit and dragon’s eye.

Brooks, who used to drive a bus powered by vegetable oil, bought his 30-acre farm for $38,000 in the mid-nineties after a visit to Costa Rica inspired him to call his parents and yell at them for raising him on fast food and video games. He founded an educational tour operation in Puerto Viejo and started bringing down high school kids and other groups, and he exhibited solutions—among them, a bicycle-powered laundry machine. Naturally, the house and outlying structures are made from fallen trees, and everything is run on solar energy.

Brooks and his wife, an herbalist, live in search of answers to the question of how we can use less energy—less physical energy and less mental energy, and less of the planet’s energy. One answer was to turn an area of swampland into useable farmland by dredging the earth into islands, an ingenious and backbreaking pursuit, but one that eventually helps to maximize hammock time. “Instead of basing the economy around a gold course, why not base it around food?” Brooks said. “If you’re not on the edge, you’re taking up too much room.”

Costa Rica gets taken for granted not only for its conservation policies, but also for its perfect surf, its zipline thrills, its Disney-like joy rides through the rainforest canopy, and its 12,000 species of plants. But the country has fought hard to keep its vision of—okay I’ll say it—Utopia. When naïve Americans visualize chunks of rainforest being preserved by somebody for all eternity, they are thinking of Costa Rica, but it’s an extreme challenge to maintain territory that is safe refuge for howler monkeys, toucans and the mythical, adorable sloths. We don’t have rainforests in our country, so we can shout all we want about saving them, and feel good about ourselves for doing so, but the combined protests among us are hardly a whisper in the grand scheme of things.

Still, Costa Rica wants to be the first carbon-neutral country in the world, and is hoping a domino effect will bring more change globally. But aside from visiting far flung places on Earth that require you use a compost toilet, Americans are far from giving up anything beyond plastic grocery bags to live their daily lives like that. Earth Universidad trains Americans and others from 25 countries in how to transform society by becoming leaders for sustainable development, and we can only hope that one of these students ends up with a nameplate in the White House.

It’s ridiculous that climate change is still up for debate, but you can win an argument by explaining why rainforests are so important. According to the conservation website Mongabay.com: “Rainforests help stabilize the world’s climate by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Scientists have shown that excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human activities is contributing to climate change. Therefore, living rainforests have an important role in mitigating climate change, but when rainforests are chopped down and burned, the carbon stored in their wood and leaves is released into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change.”

Somewhere there are partisans arguing that this is bunk, and rainforests are nothing more than dense and infested weeds to be bulldozed, and damn the howler monkeys for all that horrible squawking. But Brooks and Stein are paid a stipend by the government for every hectare of forest that remains under their protection. And though it’s not compulsory to have one, the tourism board offers 135 certification programs internationally in the hope that other countries will protect their wild places.

This month there is a cover story in Travel & Leisure about the wild side of the Oso Peninsula on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, and it surely appeals to the droves of Americans for whom traveling is not what they do, it’s who they are. Generally, the magazine commands a high-income readership, among them el mochilero millonario—the multimillionaire backpacker who will pay for the opportunity to take a guided tour deep into wilderness. That’s who is climbing Mt. Everest. To travel, to know a place intimately, represents this demographic’s purpose in life. So it’s the one percent of Americans who are most likely to partake in climate-conscious travel, and isn’t that ironic?

By the way, there are 838 species of birds in Costa Rica, but just 641 in California, according to the California Birds records committee. Birds in particular are an indicator of a healthy environment, as are the country’s 440 species of reptiles and amphibians. If you’re lucky, you might encounter a Jesus Christ lizard that walks on water, but it’s not going to save the planet, either.

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