Green Phoenix: Restoring the Tropical Forests of Guanacaste, Costa Rica
Allen, a science writer at theSt. Louis Post-Dispatch, began traveling to Costa Rica in the mid-1980s, when a pair of visionary field biologists--the brilliant, tireless, and audacious scientist Daniel Janzen and the equally gifted but far more low-key Winnie Hallwachs--launched a revolution in tropical conservation by proposing methods of forest restoration. Transforming themselves into activists, they worked diligently with Costa Rican colleagues to acquire land for a national reserve where they could test their theories. The concept sounds simple, but, just as interference with one species in the wild sets up a dominion effect, the attempt to reach this goal generated a daunting matrix of financial, political, social, and scientific conflicts. As Janzen struggled against the media's insistence on deifying him, negotiated with landowners, faced adversity related to covert Iran-Contra activities, and conducted a gutsy fund-raising effort that involved "the biggest single commercial debt-for-nature exchange ever," the Guanacaste conservation area grew to embrace hundreds of square miles of now newly reforested land. Allen's brisk yet dramatic and informative account celebrates this hard-won triumph, a beacon in the storm of seemingly unsolvable environmental conundrums.Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.