Luis A. Vivanco: Green Encounters: Shaping and Contesting Environmentalism in Rural Costa Rica

Because my first visit to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve (MCFR) in Costa Rica took place before the ecotourist boom of the late 1980s, and because I return frequently, I like to pretend that I am not a Northern elitist bent on importing her vision of nature. I’ve had enough encounters with scorpions not to romanticize the tropics, although I continue to appreciate every sighting of a toucan or quetzal. My familiarity gives me license to lament every “improvement” to the MCFR facilities, including the everexpanding visitor center with its cheap tourist souvenirs and the cement-block tiles over trails that were once deep in foot-sucking mud. Catering to foreign ecotourists does have its comical side. One day, walking in my characteristically reverential mode along a misty trail, I paused to listen to a howler monkey whooping nearby. A minute later, the thundering primate was revealed to be a local (and very human) guide performing an impressive imitation. It was funny but sad, a vulgar encroachment on the pristine tropical cloud forest I felt privileged to have known. My introductory anecdotes would fit perfectly in Luis A. Vivanco’s critical and thought-provoking monograph, Green Encounters. Vivanco examines the paradoxical and contradictory effects of environmental activism, biodiversity conservation, and the movement to “save the rainforest” in a well-known Central American ecotourist community. He is particularly interested in how environmental movements shape people’s lives, identities and relationships in the region he calls “Monte Verde” (the two words referring to the wider zone beyond the region settled by North American expatriates over 50 years ago). In exemplifying the tensions inherent in how environmentalism has unfolded in this now-famous cloud forest, Vivanco argues that there is nothing essential about Costa Rican “nature” (in spite of the tag line for a tourist ad campaign that reads, “No artificial ingredients”). Nor is there anything inevitable about Costa Rican conservationism, he says, despite a publicity campaign that would have ecotourists think otherwise (p. 12). He argues, rather, that environmentalism and conservation are shaped by encounters between people who hold conflicting assumptions and expectations about their relationships to each other and to the environment in which they live. Vivanco might nod knowingly to see how I begin this review, because he is keenly aware of how people invoke “nature,” and their relationship to the MCFR specifically, to position themselves. To his credit, Vivanco conducted much of his ethnographic research among rural Costa Ricans rather than in the English-speaking North American segment of Monte Verde. This allowed him access to stories not often told in triumphalist media accounts of the Costa Rican cloud forest. He focuses on several frictional “encounters” over environmentalism (p. 17), paying special attention to dynamic processes of change and trying (sometimes with difficulty) to avoid making essentialist assumptions about environmentalists, rural farmers, Quakers, biologists, and others. Indeed, Vivanco’s attention to the tension generated when scientists, advocates of tourism and development, and members of rural communities encounter one another might have served as inspiration for Anna Tsing, whose recent book, Frictions, takes a similarly processual approach to analyzing the dynamic co-constitution of environmentalism and development. Green Encounters is organized into three parts, each of which examines a specific feature of environmentalism in the Monte Verde region: formal efforts to protect land Hum Ecol (2008) 36:611–612 DOI 10.1007/s10745-008-9181-6