Costa Rica's Area de Conservación Guanacaste: A long march to survival through non-damaging biodevelopment

Abstract

A large conserved wildland that is developed for its biodiversity and ecosystem services in a non- damaging way is an anthroecosystem. For that matter, so is a large city with its agroscape and trade links. If a large wildland is to survive today, it must be conserved by an “ecosystem approach for sustainable use of biological diversity.” I view a conserved wildland as a somewhat disorderly garden that produces its crops in unconventional kinds of sacks and boxes. It is multi-cropped and multi- tasked, and has multi-users. And it requires the same intensity of care and thinking as does any highly successful agroscape or urban centre (Janzen 1998a, b, 1999a, b). Conservation into perpetuity demands the abandonment of models in which society is fenced out and the wildlandplaced in passive institutional custody. The Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica (http://www.acguanacaste.ac.cr) is such an ecosystem approach to the sustainable use of biological diversity and its resultant ecosystems. The ACG is one of 11 such conservation units at various stages of evolution in Costa Rica. Altogether they cover about 25% of the country and form the Sistema Nacional de Areas de Conservación (SINAC) (http://sinac.ns.minae.go.cr). In this essay on wildland management theory,