Product Description

Can we prevent the destruction of the world's tropical forests? In the fire-scarred hills of Costa Rica, award-winning science writer William Allen found a remarkable answer: we can not only prevent their destruction--we can bring them back to their former glory.
In Green Phoenix, Allen tells the gripping story of a large group of Costa Rican and American scientists and volunteers who set out to save the tropical forests in the northwestern section of the country. It was an area badly damaged by the fires of ranchers and small farmers; in many places a few strands of forest strung across a charred landscape. Despite the widely held belief that tropical forests, once lost, are lost forever, the team led by the dynamic Daniel Janzen from the University of Pennsylvania moved relentlessly ahead, taking a broad array of political, ecological, and social steps necessary for restoration. They began with 39 square miles and, by 2000, they had stitched together and revived some 463 square miles of land and another 290 of marine area. Today this region is known as the Guanacaste Conservation Area, a fabulously rich landscape of dry forest, cloud forest, and rain forest that gives life to some 235,000 species of plants and animals. It may be the greatest environmental success of our time, a prime example of how extensive devastation can be halted and reversed.
This is an inspiring story, and in recounting it, Allen writes with vivid power. He creates lasting images of pristine beaches and dense forest and captures the heroics and skill of the scientific teams, especially the larger-than-life personality of the maverick ecologist Daniel Janzen. It is a book everyone concerned about the environment will want to own.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #596661 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 344 pages

From Booklist
Allen, a science writer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, began traveling to Costa Rica in the mid-1980s, when a pair of visionary field biologists--the brilliant, tireless, and audacious scientist Daniel Janzen and the equally gifted but far more low-key Winnie Hallwachs--launched a revolution in tropical conservation by proposing methods of forest restoration. Transforming themselves into activists, they worked diligently with Costa Rican colleagues to acquire land for a national reserve where they could test their theories. The concept sounds simple, but, just as interference with one species in the wild sets up a dominion effect, the attempt to reach this goal generated a daunting matrix of financial, political, social, and scientific conflicts. As Janzen struggled against the media's insistence on deifying him, negotiated with landowners, faced adversity related to covert Iran-Contra activities, and conducted a gutsy fund-raising effort that involved "the biggest single commercial debt-for-nature exchange ever," the Guanacaste conservation area grew to embrace hundreds of square miles of now newly reforested land. Allen's brisk yet dramatic and informative account celebrates this hard-won triumph, a beacon in the storm of seemingly unsolvable environmental conundrums. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"The book is a paradigm of how one man can make such a difference through dedication and perseverance ..."--Biologist
"This is a remarkable story of a valuable ecosystem rising from its own ashes-a hopeful story for our time."--Wildlife Activist

From the Back Cover
"Green Phoenix did not, as did its namesake, rise anew from the ashes unaided. Rather, those present at the resurrection were a remarkable collection of dedicated people whose individual personalities and talents combined in a synergy akin to a life force that breathed renewed life into Green Phoenix. This is a well-told story of a remarkable achievement of sheer will and caring-and faith-carried out across cultural boundaries that cries out for emulation."
-Jack Ward Thomas, Ph.D.,
Boone and Crockett Professor of Wildlife Conservation, University of Montana, Chief Emeritus, U.S. Forest Service

"This book is a wonderful read in all the usual senses-it has a unique setting, a strong and complicated hero, plenty of tension and drama. But even more, it is wonderful because it shows that not all is lost in the struggle for wildness, because it shows that nature still retains vigor enough to snap back if given half a chance."
-Bill McKibben,
author of "Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously"

"Green Phoenix is the inspiring inside story of science, people, politics and money behind one of the most innovative and influential conservation projects ever undertaken-an audacious attempt to 'help Nature heal'-on an unprecedented scale. The result was the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste World Heritage Site-and a host of important lessons for anyone interested in the conserving the Earth's most diverse ecosystems."
-Professor Peter R. Crane FRS,
Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

"One of the most extraordinary experiments in how to preserve and restore a tropical area has been developed in Costa Rica's Guanacaste Province. In lucid prose, Bill Allen tells the most important lessons for community development elsewhere."
-Dr. Peter H. Raven,
Director, Missouri Botanical Garden

"An outstanding book about an outstanding scientist-and an exceptional enviornmentalist and visionary. Dan Janzen not only wants to protect tropical forests against waves of destruction, he wants to push back the tide itself. But then, one of the benefits of being a giant is that you can see what others don't even know about."
-Professor Noman Myers,
Oxford University

Customer Reviews

Hope for the forest, the people, and biodiversity
I have the greatest respect and admiration for Dan Janzen and have supported the Rincon Rainforest project before seeing this book. This book is a good explanation for why the Guanacaste Conservation Area (GCA) in Costa Rica may be the key to all successful tropical forest conservation projects.

The author relates the detail of conservation work to restore overgrazed, eroded land and land filled with difficult to eradicate foreign weeds back to the point of reforestation with all the original species from microbes, insects, up to birds and mammals. It is encouraging to see that despite the difficulty of this work that they are achieving success and that model of success may help other tropical conservation projects.

The book also describes the life work of one of the most important conservation biologist of all time and all of those who have been pushed, coereced, reluctantly persuaded and inspired to do this most significant project. If you are discouraged in any way about the fate of the diverse tropical forests you should read this book. It truely is an inspiration.

Good case study of an important conservation project
Without duplicating the book description, I'll just explain why I would recommend this book to anyone interested in conservation.

Although the creation of Guanacaste Conservation Area -- which combines pre-existing national parks and added land between and around them, along with a marine sector -- is unique in representing the world's only large-scale tropical forest restoration project, the story illustrates elements common to nature conservation projects in general. These include the importance of understanding the local ecology (in this case, especially forest succession and the necessity of controlling fires); political aspects, both local and national (Costa Rican president, parks service, etc.); how money is raised and land purchased or otherwise secured; and ways of involving people from the local area in conservation and the importance of that.

I have just returned from Guanacaste and was impressed by the program that trains local people as "parataxonomists" to help with the huge task of identifying and cataloguing the area's many species. Another program gives instruction on natural history to children in local schools. The result has been an important cultural shift toward appreciating nature and the many benefits it provides.

The writing is sometimes long-winded and ponderous, but the careful recounting of details was worthwhile, and the integration of interesting snippets of tropical biology and anectodes of the people involved made it an enjoyable read.

Of particular interest as well was the recounting of the reaction to the revolutionary suggestion that tropical forest can indeed be restored on land taken out of agriculture, an assertion that initially met with skepticism and alarm from conservation organizations, as it conflicted with the conservation message that a tropical forest, once cut down, can "never" regenerate.

In this end, this is a great and stirring conservation success story. The book illustrates how much hard work that entailed on the part of many dedicated people.

RE-CREATION
Author William Allen takes you to a world you have truly never seen: to the remarkable life that teems in the forests, far beyond Costa Rica's cities and towns. A powerful saga of courage, leadership and stewardship, this epic tale of a hardy (and sometimes foolhardy) group of scientists who feel compelled to fight the destruction a fragile community reads like a swashbuckling romance with Mother Earth! Another book I enjoyed immensely along with this one before visiting the country, was the history "Costa Rica The Last Country The Gods Made." It came out almost exactly ten years before this one and has an elegant literary flair, providing a very satsifying blend of scholarship and imagination.