The Road to Tortuguero Cheri A

The Road to Tortuguero Cheri A. Young, University of Denver Terry G. Nicholas, University of Denver David L. Corsun, University of Denver Daryl Loth, Casa Marbella Bed and Breakfast THE ROAD TO TORTUGUERO Everyone ought to see a turtle nesting. It is an impressive thing to see, the pilgrimage of a sea creature back to the land its ancestors left a hundred million years ago. The nesting rites begin, for the watcher, at least, when the turtle strands in the surf. That part is hard to watch, those minutes when she comes up with the breakers and stays there for a while, rising with a wave then bumping back softly on the sand, making up her mind. She blinks and peers, turns her nose down and presses it onto the wave-washed bottom, then looks up and all around and blinks some more. She is clearly making a decision. What her criteria are, nobody knows . The turtle is wild and skittish when she first touches shore, and even the light of a match struck far up the beach may send her back to the sea. —Archie Carr, The COPYWindward Road aryl Loth sat on the back porch of the eleven-room bed-and-breakfast that he and his wife operated in the remote village of Tortuguero, Costa Rica. All Daround, the rainforest was dense with the wildlife he loved. Twelve yards from his porch steps was the winding canal to Tortuguero, and fifty yards in front spread a wide black sand beach on the Atlantic Ocean. A biological tour guide, Loth made his living hosting and leading groups of tourists who made the arduous trek to the village to observe the giant sea turtles’ annual return to the beach to lay their eggs and hatch their young. In April 2007 Loth had to decide whether to support a proposal for a road to Tortuguero with widespread implications for his cherished village and its turtles. Though born in Canada, LothNOT had lived in Tortuguero for fifteen years, was mar- ried to a local woman, had two small children, spoke fluent Spanish, and was one of Tortuguero’s biggest supporters and advocates. Although some locals considered him an “outsider” and a “son-of-a-bitch, meddling foreigner” because, as Loth said, he did “not watch soccer, drink beer, or cheat on his wife,” he had helped build the high school and was now president of the Tortuguero Tour Guide Association (TGA) (see Exhibit 1 for a list of acronyms). DO Copyright © 2014 by the Case Research Journal and by Cheri A. Young, Terry G. Nicholas, David L. Corsun, and Daryl Loth. The Road to Tortuguero 75 Since 1994, the TGA, a self-organized group of local tour guides, had collected a fee of ¢200 (colones)—about forty U.S. cents—from each tourist taking a turtle tour. Under its self-imposed rules, the TGA decided (by a simple majority vote) every year how to spend the fees or whether to save the funds for future projects. Previous expen- ditures had gone to improving the water system, constructing a playground, building a house for the teachers, improving the elementary school, renovating the police sta- tion, and providing greater protection for the turtles by increasing paid patrols on the beaches and marking nesting sites. The TGA’s last expenditure in 2005 had gone to improve the high school. Such projects were needed given the Costa Rican government’s neglect of the village due to its small population and remote location. At their meeting in April 2007, the TGA membership planned to vote for one of three proposals for spending its current savings of $30,000, representing two years’ worth of fees. Proposal 1 was to bulldoze a dirt road providing overland access almost to the center of the village (the road would end at the edge of a river requiring a three-minute boat ride to the center of the village—see Figure 1). For almost two decades, the residents of Tortuguero had been debating whether or not to build a road to their village. In order to provide access to the village, the proposed road would have to traverse the protected zone. The village was accessible from the rest of the country by only two means. One required a bus ride on rugged roads followed by a 1½ hour journey in a shallow bottom thirty-two-seat open-sided boat through winding, jungle canals. The other required a twenty-five-minute flight from San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, aboard a seven or twelve-seat plane, followed by a ten-minute boat ride, a costly proposition available only to tourists as residents could not afford the fare. The estimated costs for Proposal 1 were $28,000 (the $2,000 balanceCOPY would be saved for next year’s projects). Figure 1: Proposed Route Map NOT DO Source: Case authors 76 Case Research Journalt7PMVNFt*TTVFt4VNNFS Proposal 2 was to relocate the boat launch at La Pavona, one kilometer upstream to the main navigable part of the river (which involved building a bridge and short road) to make access to the village more convenient by avoiding the shallow parts of the canal during the dry season. Estimated costs for this project were $15,000. The remaining money would be used to bring medical staff to the village an additional two days per month. Proposal 3 was to save the money and consider spending it next year. The three proposals were going to be put up for a vote by members of the TGA that evening in April 2007. Like many in the community, Loth was conflicted about which proposal he thought the TGA should support. However, now the time had come for him to make a decision regarding the road to Tortuguero, a decision that would likely impact his life and all those living there, including the turtles that annually nested on Tortuguero’s beaches. 5PSUVHVFSP -BOEPG5VSUMFT Tortuguero, which meant “region or land of turtles” in Spanish, was located on a spit of land between a canal and the Atlantic Ocean, twenty-six miles south of the Nicaraguan border, within the province of Limón and canton of Pococí. Costa Rica was divided into seven provinces; the provinces were divided into 81 cantons; and the cantons were divided into 473 districts (see 'JHVSF). The canton of Pococí had six districts, including the district that was home to the village of Tortuguero. However, districts did not have their own local government. Figure 2: Provinces of Costa Rica and Cantons of Limón ProvinceCOPY NOT Reprinted from Wikimedia Commons by Golbez, 2006, and Marco Munoz, 2006, respectively. Reprinted with permission. Tortuguero comprised approximately two square kilometers and was home to 1,000 residents occupying a hodgepodge of approximately 200 one- and two-story clapboard houses andDO shacks, thirty businesses, and fifteen public buildings (see&YIJCJU for pictures of houses, stores, and the beach). The village and the thirteen square kilometers surrounding it were collectively known as Tortuguero. Loth had been drawn to the small community’s native beauty and lush wildlife that included fifty-seven species of amphibians, 111 species of reptiles, 300 species of birds, and sixty species of mammals. The Road to Tortuguero 77 With daily average temperatures of 79°F, a humidity level of 90 percent, and an annual average rainfall of more than 200 inches, Tortuguero was Loth’s Shangri-La. Tortuguero was surrounded by protected areas with a national park to the south, a wildlife refuge to the north, and a protected zone to the west that linked the refuge and the park and essentially cut off the village from the rest of Costa Rica (see Figure ). With no car traffic or motorized vehicles of any sort, villagers and tourists walked along scattered muddy foot paths through unkempt grass. Tortuguero was the most important nesting site for green sea turtles in the Western Hemisphere. Turtle tourism was the sole basis of the village economy. Almost 95 percent of village families had at least one member employed in the tourism sector. Figure 3: Tortuguero COPY NOT DOReprinted from http://casamarbella.tripod.com/id6.html. Reprinted with permission. 78 Case Research Journalt7PMVNFt*TTVFt4VNNFS TURTLES AND TOURISM By the early 1960s, the population of green sea turtles was dangerously close to extinc- tion in Tortuguero and the rest of the world. In Tortuguero, the turtles had traditionally been hunted by the Caribbean communities for meat, fat, and eggs. Practically every female green sea turtle arriving to the beach up to this time was either slaughtered by locals for consumption or exported by local businessmen for the production of turtle soup (see&YIJCJU for a timeline of critical events in the development of Tortuguero). The plight of the green sea turtles in Tortuguero drew the attention of biologist Dr. Archie Carr, a lifelong student of sea turtles, from the University of Florida. He worked with the Costa Rican government to establish Tortuguero as a sanctuary and national park where the endangered turtles could nest undisturbed. His non-profit Sea Turtle Conservancy (STC) sought to “ensure the survival of sea turtles within the Wider Caribbean basin and Atlantic through research, education, training, advocacy and the protection of the natural habitats upon which they depend.”1 In 1963, the first executive decree regulating the hunting of sea turtles and the collection of their eggs was signed into law in Costa Rica. The decree prohibited the capture of marine turtles on the beach and up to one kilometer out into the sea from high tide. In 1971, Carr and the STC began working to promote ecotourism,2, 3 hiring residents to walk the beach and count turtle tracks to help protect the sea turtles, providing a desperately needed source of employment.

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