A trench has been cut into the side banks, loose tractor tires criss-cross each other from hundreds of trips back and forth with their precious cargo. Heat rises from the ground in shimmering moist waves, heat once absorbed into the shade of ancient trees. These trees are older than the loggers, older than the roads to the rivers, older than the machines working against them - the laws of men and government allowing their extraction. For those who live in the area, the effects of the rapid deforestation of the Osa Peninsula are immediately obvious. Barren red clay bakes in the equatorial heat of the sun.
Rivers run muddy red with eroded soils.
Remnants of century old trees, branches and sawed up logs, lay scattered across the land like so many forgotten corpses of a disappearing era. Crucial rain forest surrounding Corcovado National Park, area supposedly marked as a buffer zone to the biodiversity within the park, is being recklessly torn apart by loggers with over 260 planes de manejo, legal logging permits granted by the government providing the right to cut up to 18,000 trees. This information should then be used to determine whether trees can safely and without consequence be removed from the land. Not only has the government shown little regard for crucial areas of rain forest, but in deciding whether or not to cut trees they rely on studies by loggers rather than those by biologists and field experts. Entire ecosystems are annihilated in a single episode of mass destruction.