Fire and Rain

It's no myth, though, this country that is trying to live the "clean and green" ideal. It's not the USA or one of the industrialized "first world" countries but a small Central American country called Costa Rica.

My husband and I toured Costa Rica the last week of October -- celebrating our 25th year of marriage with the honeymoon we never had. This is how two chubby, out-of-shape "desk jockeys" ended up on a mini-adventure with live volcanos and rain forests in a place where a premium is put on the study of ecology and wildscaping.

Costa Rica (in many ways) sounds almost good to be true. It's a warm country, since it lies about 10 degrees north of the equator, parked right between Panama and Nicaragua. It's had a stable democratic government ever since 1948 and, incredibly, has no army. There's few very wealthy people -- but few very poor people. Schools are subsidized up through the university levels and there's a 94% literacy rate for the whole country.

But the biggest surprise is the committment to preserving the land and restoring much of it to its original state. While the rest of the world was chopping down forests and strip mining land in the late 1950's, the Costa Rican government was promoting conservation. Only 76% of the land is farmland or towns. The rest of the country consists of national parks and private wildlife reserves; reserves that generate a lot of income both from tourist dollars and from providing pollution credits to sell to the rest of the world.

The locals often refer to their rain forests as "the lungs of the world", pointing out that the rainforest plants are good at removing pollutants and oxygenating the air. Our lungs, used to the Dallas atmosphere, could tell the difference -- Costa Rica's air was much cleaner than the stuff we usually breathe. As a pollution control powerhouse, the rainforest is unparallelled An acre of trees here in this fertile land produces four times as much oxygen as an acre of trees in Germany.

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