Environment: Growing a Forest From Scratch

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Daniel Janzen, 47, is a tenured professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania, but for the past 14 years his home has been a rented, tin-roofed cabin in an isolated Central American wilderness. The location, Santa Rosa National Park on Costa Rica's Pacific coast, is ideal for his favorite pursuits: rambling across abandoned pasture, collecting seeds and caterpillars, weighing and identifying trapped mice, netting insects by night -- work he calls "muddy-your-boots biology." Janzen, in fact, spends so little time in Philadelphia that he maintains no residence there. He prefers to sleep on a cot in his university office.

Since last year, however, the ascetically inclined scientist has had to put away his muddy boots and pursue a very different kind of fieldwork in big-city hotels and on the lecture circuit. The reason: in collaboration with the Nature Conservancy International, he is attempting to raise $11.8 million for an unprecedented ecological experiment. Janzen plans to use the money to buy 158 sq. mi. of Costa Rican terrain surrounding Santa Rosa and re-create a virtually extinct ecosystem known as tropical dry forest. He has already named the proposed refuge Guanacaste National Park.

Janzen has so far collected $1.3 million from such contributors as the MacArthur and W. Alton Jones foundations and is now negotiating to buy 15.4 sq. mi. of land -- a mosaic of 20- to 50-acre farms, grasslands and plots of forest -- from farmers and cattlemen. He offers the going rate of $200 to $300 a hectare (2.5 acres). With crops and cattle returning marginal profits in Costa Rica, and interest rates exceeding 20%, he has met with little resistance and hopes to purchase the remaining land by February 1988. Environmentalists are cheering him on. "We as conservationists in Latin America have traditionally (preserved) pristine or virgin areas," says Curtis Freese, the World Wildlife Fund's director of Latin American and Caribbean programs. "Janzen is saying that we can look at largely degraded lands and restore them to natural or close to natural ecosystems."

Tropical dry forests differ from rain forests in that their precipitation is seasonal. During the rainy period, the landscape is verdant, but during the five to six months of the year that are rainless (early December to mid-May in Costa Rica), many trees lose their leaves. Unlike the temperate zone's deciduous hardwood forests, however, they do not become fully dormant. Instead, the bare trees flower and bear fruit, which nourishes a variety of mammals and insects. Centuries ago, such vegetation covered 60% of the forest regions of Latin America, India, Southeast Asia, Africa and northern Australia. On the west coast of Central America alone, 98% has been chopped down or burned. Says Janzen: "Tropical dry forest is where what you call endangered is dead, and what you call safe is endangered. They have become the breadbaskets of the tropics."