Word: costas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...international debts. Many countries are chopping down their forests for the sake of timber exports. In Central America forests are giving way to cattle ranches, which supply beef to American fast-food chains. The pressures on forests have led Janzen, who has spent 26 years struggling to save Costa Rica's woodlands, to conclude that "everything outside parks will be gone, and everything inside the parks is threatened...
Experience has shown the Third World that destruction of forests can have disastrous consequences. Forests are vital watersheds that absorb excess moisture and anchor topsoil. Deforestation contributed to the recent droughts in Africa and the devastating mud slides in Rio de Janeiro last year. In Costa Rica topsoil eroded from bald hills has greatly shortened the life of an expensive hydroelectric dam. Alvaro Umana, Costa Rica's Minister of Industry, Energy and Mines, estimated that the surrounding watershed might have been protected 20 years ago for a cost of $5 million. Now the government must reforest the watershed...
Throughout the developing nations there are encouraging stirrings of local environmental activity. In Malaysia blowgun-armed Penan tribesmen have joined forces with environmentalists in an effort to stop rampant logging. And in Brazil, which has some 500 conservation organizations, environmentalist Jose Pedro de Oliveira Costa organized a coalition of legislators, conservationists, industrialists and media barons to stir public support to preserve Brazil's remaining Atlantic forests. "The threats to the forests remain," said Costa, "but now at least there is a network in place to scream when a threat arises...
...survive to produce more money in the future. Another way to harvest cash from forests and other habitats is to set up tours and safaris to attract animal lovers and photography buffs. Long a moneymaker in Africa and the Galapagos Islands, this "ecotourism" is spreading to such places as Costa Rica...
When a fungal disease began ravaging Levy Bryant's four-hectare cacao farm a decade ago, the landowner could have done what other besieged farmers have | done. He might easily have picked up an ax and begun cutting down more tropical rain forest around his land on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast. He could have sold the timber from the tall laurel trees that shade the cacao bushes, then burned the dense virgin forest on the hill behind his farm. Then Bryant, like so many financially strapped small farmers in Latin America, could have sown pasture and sold the land...