In Business, Creating Sustainable Enterprises & Communities

BRINGING GREEN BUSINESS TO COSTA RICA

In Business, November-December, 2004, Vol. 26, No. 6, p. 19

Educators and students travel to the Andamojo River watershed to help develop good models of human development that blend healthy communities, environmental restoration and fair return on investment.

Molly Farrell

A GROUP of university students are traveling from Vermont to Costa Rica this winter to come up with a plan to build up the local economy with sustainable businesses. Through a course titled “Ecological Restoration and Entrepreneurship in Costa Rica”, the students will look for ways to return the 200-square-kilometer Andamojo River watershed to its natural state through green businesses such as a native plants nursery and fresh water shrimp production facility.
Over the past 100 years, the area's economy has shifted from subsistence farming of corn and bean crops, to rice farming and cattle ranching, to mono-crop reforestation (planting one crop, mostly teak trees to “weed” out all other vegetation).
Most of the original tropical dry forests in the region were cleared to make land available for cattle ranching. “It was different before the cattle got there,” notes Will Raap, the designer of the course and one of its instructors. “The Andamojo River used to flow all year and now it only flows during the rainy season. The forest used to be alive with wildlife.” (See “Doing Business The 'Vermont Way' in July-August 2004 In Business for a profile on Will Raap and his Intervale Strategies.)
The area's economy has been gradually shifting to tourism and recreation, which is bringing new threats to the area's ecology. The first tourist hotel was built in the 1970s and several more have been built since. Foreign retirees and part-time residents have moved to the area to enjoy its clean beaches, national parks, volcanoes, hiking trails, native animals and plants. Locals now work in construction and hotels instead of on farms. Most of the food is imported from other parts of Costa Rica or other countries.
The types of businesses that could flourish in the Andamojo River watershed are limited by the climate. The area receives six feet of rain during six months of the year, from mid-May through mid-November, and no rain the rest of the year.

STUDENTS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Last January 2004, 30 students from the University of Vermont (UVM) went to the Guanacoste Province for a 16-day course titled “Ecological Design and Sustainable Development”. The students were tasked with recommending ways to develop Tierra Pacifica, a tropical 200-acre tract of land that borders the Andamojo River, into a vacation and residential development for tourists and Costa Ricans in an ecologically-responsible way. The property was formerly a cattle farm that had become degraded by cattle compacting the soil.
Before making their recommendations, the students were taught the principles of designing human settlements to conserve natural resources by Dr. John Todd, a research professor at the University of Vermont's School of Natural Resources (who cofounded the New Alchemy Institute), and the principles of ecological economics by Dr. Karel Samsom, professor of entrepreneurship at Nyenrode University in the Netherlands and the Bren School of Environmental Sciences at the University of California in Santa Barbara. They also met with Tierra Pacifica's developers and local community members to define the economic objectives, community needs and ecological issues that needed to be balanced while developing the land.
“We wanted to retain the beauty and functionality of the land,” says Raap, who is president of Gardener's Supply in Burlington, Vermont, a $60 million gardening and direct marketing business (www.gardeners.com). Raap is also the founder of the Intervale Foundation, a 17-year-old nonprofit organization focused on sustainable agriculture and community renewal (www.intervale.org). “We wanted to retain the existing diversified forest plus improve it by planting thousands more native trees, and growing monkey “highways” that will allow monkey troops to stay in the canopy as they cross roads. We wanted to create stormwater management catchments, landscaping, ponds and plantings that will retain almost all of the rain falling on the site, thus reducing erosion and increasing water absorption. We also wanted to protect and improve land use where the Tierra Pacifica property borders the river and the estuary into the Pacific Ocean.”
The students came from UVM's undergraduate and graduate environmental studies and business programs. “We tried to create a course that would interest, inform and inspire both environmental and business students,” explains Raap. “If we don't train environmentalists to understand business and vice versa, improving and protecting the environment will always be a marginalized thing.”

TIERRA PACIFICA PROJECT
Their connection to Tierra Pacifica was Tom Peifer, founder and director of the El Centro Verde Agroecology Institute(www.elcentroverde.com) in Rio Andamojo, a 10-year-old educational and demonstration organization that promotes environmental restoration, sustainable agriculture and forestry in the Rio Andamojo watershed. Peifer describes himself as the first “gringo” in Costa Rica to be elected to a local water commission. Raap met Peifer at a permaculture study course in Guatamala in the late 1980s. Peifer told Raap about the proposed Tierra Pacifica development.
During the course, students developed a draft “green map” (see www.greenmap.org) of the Rio Andamojo watershed that identified distinctive environmental, cultural and tourism assets in the region. “The next course will develop this map into a strategy for identifying restoration for the watershed,” says Raap.
Raap says the course was successful on many fronts. The students developed several business plans, including one for a conservation nursery. “The owner of the land, Matt Hayden agreed to use 70 to 80 percent of the ideas generated by the course, including land development, engineering, road design, water treatment, reforestation, and farming to create more sustainability,” notes Raap. As a result of the course, the developers of Tierra Pacifica agreed to cut down only one percent of the trees on the property. “Tierra Pacifica will be the first large residential development in Central America to capture and reuse rainwater, have an on-site conservation nursery for forest and wetlands restoration, and support local food production through a community organic farm,” he says.
El Centro enlisted Michael Ogden to work on the Tierra Pacifica development. Ogden is president of Natural Systems International (www.nsi-inc.com), an environmental engineering firm in Santa Fe, New Mexico that specializes in designing constructed wetlands for stormwater management and wastewater treatment. Ogden spent three days redesigning the watershed and advising on wastewater treatment for Tierra Pacifica. El Centro Verde has been implementing Ogden's designs and advising on the nursery and reforestation plans for the development.
Raap was so impressed with the owners' willingness to accept the students' recommendations, that he became a minority owner in Tierra Pacifica in March 2004, two months after the first course ended. “I've been interested in, connected to, and lived in eco developments my entire professional life, including Village Homes in Davis, California; the Findhorn Eco-Village in Scotland, and the Intervale, South Village, and Ten Stones in Vermont,” he says. “We need good models of human development that blend healthy communities, environmental restoration and fair return on investment.”

THE SECOND COURSE
A second group of students will go to Costa Rica in early January 2005 for a follow-up course, also offered through UVM. This next group of students faces a much more daunting task: to come up with a restoration and reforestation plan for the entire Rio Andamojo watershed (an area approximately 250 times larger than Tierra Pacifica). “One outcome of the first course was that we determined that an economic development strategy was needed for the whole watershed,” says Raap. “In the second course, the students will design a multiyear program to restore the watershed using business as the underpinning for long-term sustainability.”
They will be led by a team of experts from the U.S. Europe and Costa Rica including Raap, Todd, Peifer and Samsom from the first course. Other instructors will include Steve Apfelbaum, Dr. Olman Segura Bonilla; Dr. Robert Costanza; Susan Lehnhardt; Dr. Alberto Morera; Nancy Jack Todd and Marjan van den Belt. Apfelbaum is a senior ecologist with the Ecological Society of America, a research consultant with Applied Ecological Services, Inc., and a specialist in reclamation. Dr. Bonilla is general director of the National University's International Center for Political Economy and Sustainable Development (CINPE) in Costa Rica. Dr. Costanza is Director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.
Lehnhardt is a staff ecologist for Applied Ecological Services. Her research has included vegetation monitoring studies, land cover classification and mapping, ecosystem health assessment, restoration and management planning, and wetland delineation in North and South America. Dr. Morera is operations manager for Purdive Forestal, a large reforestation project in Guanacaste using natural regeneration and selective plantings.
El Centro Verde will again play a large role in the course. “This organization's knowledge of the local communities and environment allows quick access to and assessment of local conditions and needs,” adds Raap.
Raap is sensitive to feelings the locals in Rio Andamojo might have about outsiders coming in to plan their future. “The only way I feel confident that the people there don't resent us coming down is because Tom (Peifer) has been down there for several years and has earned their respect by working the work and living the life,” says Raap. “Otherwise there is a great risk of being viewed as white upper-class people telling them how to do things.”

BLENDING ECOLOGY, ECONOMY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE
During the first days of the course, the students will be brought up to speed on the area's ecology, economy and social structure. They will meet with local Costa Rican water experts, officials, landowners and community leaders to get their recommendations on the state of the watershed, the pace of degradation and effective strategies to improve on it. The students will then be divided into separate environmental and business tracks. Teams of professors will teach each track, and the two tracks will meet daily as a whole to integrate their curricula. Their days will be composed of lectures as well as
visits to cattle farms, reforestation projects and local businesses.
They will evaluate a number of solutions appropriate to the dryland tropics including multistory agroforestry (a method of forest management where other products such as fruit, vegetables, mushrooms and flowers are grown in addition to wood); plant-based strategies to buffer the effects of local climatic extremes; native plant and seed conservation, propagation and planting; and ecological management of storm water and waste water. The students will add their restoration and economic development plans to the Rio Andamojo Green Map (RAGM) developed for the first UVM course.
During the last two days of the course, students will develop a long-term strategy to restore the Rio Andamojo watershed and protect the area as it transitions to a tourism-based economy. The strategy will include land use plans, ecological protection plans, national and regional policy proposals, methods of keeping locals involved, and an enterprise-based economic development plan to promote and support the restoration effort. For example, says Raap, “As a result of this next course, a 30-acre section of Tierra Pacifica that was a lowland cattle pasture on the edge of the river will hopefully be transitioned into an organic farming incubator with the first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm in Latin America,” says Raap.

THE THIRD COURSE
A third course titled “Ecological Design for Resort and Residential Development” is planned for April 2005. The students will learn about the new approach to “green” settlement design and infrastructure advocated by the instructors for the course, Michael Ogden of Natural Systems International, Randall Arendt, author of Conservation Design for Subdivisions, and Bill Reed, a LEED certifier and green building expert.

For more information about the courses and their economic development goals, e-mail Raap at willr@gardeners.com.