BIODIVERSITY: Blazing Trails in Puerto Rico

Carmelo Ruiz

SAN JUAN, May 18 2005 (IPS) - Unique cooperation between civil society and government has resulted in a prize-winning effort to preserve biodiversity and water quality in Puerto Rico: the creation of a 62,050-acre nature preserve across the island's central mountain range.

That is a sizeable parcel of land on a small tropical island noted for the diversity of its plant and animal species. Created late last year, the nature corridor greatly increases the land area protected from urban sprawl, which local environmentalists, who spoke with IPS in advance of the International Day for Biological Diversity, May 22, said they consider a pressing problem in Puerto Rico today.

"If current urban growth trends continue, all the remaining green areas in Puerto Rico will become suburban within some 70 years", said Maria Juncos, who directs the Centre for Sustainable Development Studies of the Metropolitan University in San Juan.

The corridor is bigger than the 20 forests administered by the Puerto Rico government and it is also twice as big as the 28,000-acre El Yunque rainforest, administered by the U.S. Forest Service. The corridor helps preserve water quality since it includes the headwaters of rivers that provide the liquid to approximately half of Puerto Rico's four million inhabitants.

The prime mover behind this achievement is Casa Pueblo, a grassroots organisation that won the prestigious international Goldman Environmental Prize in 2002. With offices in a solar energy-powered house in the mountain town of Adjuntas, Casa Pueblo is an outgrowth of a successful decades-long struggle against strip mining.

The organisation earned much recognition during the civil disobedience campaign against the U.S. military presence on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, which began in 1999 and ended with the military's departure in 2003. Casa Pueblo not only provided assistance to protesters but also carried out on site scientific studies of the effect of military activities on the island's wildlife and agricultural biodiversity.

For Casa Pueblo, led by director Alexis Massol-Gonzalez, independence is very important. The organisation accepts neither corporate sponsorship nor government handouts. People from all over the island and from all professional backgrounds have contributed donations or labour to the group. But Casa Pueblo's main economic support is its own brand of coffee, called Madre Isla.

Winning the Goldman Environmental Prize was a total surprise for Casa Pueblo's staff and volunteers. ''I had never heard of the Goldman Prize, so I thought it was a joke'', recalled Massol-Gonzalez with a laugh. ''I told them that I don't work for money or awards, and they told me 'That's why you earned it'.''

No strip mines were ever dug in Puerto Rico. The opposition triumphed in 1996 and the land in Adjuntas set aside for the first mine was turned into El Bosque del Pueblo (The People's Forest), a community-run state forest that today forms part of the biodiversity corridor. Casa Pueblo manages the forest through a one-of-a-kind agreement with the Puerto Rico Department of Natural Resources.

The People's Forest is staffed mostly by Casa Pueblo volunteers, a diverse crew that includes everything from school teachers and students to poets and biologists. Their chores range from serving as tour guides to conducting biodiversity surveys.

Now with the creation of the biological corridor, Casa Pueblo's concepts of community participation and social responsibility can be put in practice on a grander scale. The organisation has set up in Adjuntas five water quality stations to monitor the waters of local creeks and brooks. Some of these feed into the Arecibo river, source of drinking water for 1.3 million people. These stations are managed jointly with local communities, residents of which take turns on duty.

Last year, one of these stations found high levels of animal fat in a creek. The source of the contamination was found to be a fast food restaurant that was dumping its garbage right into the creek. ''We referred the matter to the Puerto Rico Environmental Quality Board, which took less than a week to get the restaurant to stop its illegal dumping'', said University of Puerto Rico biologist Arturo Massol-Deya, who is Massol-Gonzalez's son and a Casa Pueblo volunteer.

Massol-Deya supervised the Casa Pueblo studies of Vieques, which to this day are the only peer-reviewed scientific studies of military pollution on that island.

Casa Pueblo also aims to introduce a new style of tourism into Puerto Rico. ''We are not going for the conventional model of elite tourism in which resources of natural beauty are privatised and enclosed, but a nature tourism based on participation and commitment'', said Massol-Gonzalez. This is already done in the People's Forest, where visitors are required first to attend a brief educational seminar on the forest's history and its cultural and ecological significance.

The Madre Isla coffee farm houses an ecotourism pilot project, which has been frequently used for educational activities. In 2004, the U.S.-based Smithsonian Institution and the Puerto Rico Department of Natural Resources got together there to jointly teach a course on management of natural protected areas. As part of the curriculum, students drafted a management plan for the Madre Isla farm.

"Casa Pueblo's initiative is extremely important because it protects ecologically sensitive areas that include the headwaters of some major rivers", Juncos said. "Puerto Rico has a very high population density, 426 persons per square kilometre, so an efficient use of our scarce land is very urgently needed."

''There is no room for pessimism or cynicism in Casa Pueblo'', said Massol-Gonzalez. ''We are people of hope, because through our activism we have learned that Puerto Rico's problems can be solved.'' (END/2005)

• Caribbean National Forest (El Yunque)
  
• Casa Pueblo
  
• Goldman Environmental Prize profile of Alexis Massol-Gonzalez and Casa Pueblo