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		Nature Conservancy Magazine: Summer 2006 Nature Conservancy Magazine Waiting for the Sky Poverty, Conservation   Audio chat Full Circle Nature Stories Podcast Nature Landmarks Nature Books Nature Travel Nature Preserves Subscribe Previous Issues

The Poverty / Conservation Equation

Deforestation in the Dominican Republic’s highlands has washed topsoil into Samaná Bay, choking the banks with mud and degrading one of the most important estuaries in the Caribbean. Photo © Carolyn Drake “As I sleep, the bees are working for me,” says Rafael Severino, who gave up fishing for more lucrative work as a beekeeper near the Dominican Republic’s Parque Nacional del Este. Photo © Carolyn Drake Framing the Debate Does Conservation Matter to the Poor? by Jeffrey Sachs Is Poverty Relevant to Conservation? by M.A. Sanjayan Can We Conserve Ecosystems by Fighting Poverty? by Gregory Mock

In countries like the Dominican Republic, conservationists can’t afford to look past poverty.

By Marion Lloyd / Photographs by Carolyn Drake

Ramón Antonio Jiménez, a veteran fisherman with sinewy muscles and feet like waterlogged boards, tilts his plastic bucket to show the result of four hard hours at sea: one pound of shrimp. Five years ago, he says, he could have caught 300 pounds in the same amount of time.

Jiménez lives in the town of Sánchez at the mouth of the Dominican Republic’s Samaná Bay, the largest estuary in the Caribbean and the most important sanctuary for humpback whales from the North Atlantic. This fragile ecosystem accounts for 40 percent of fish caught in the country. But deforestation in the highlands upriver has washed tons of topsoil and silt into the bay.

“Every day, it’s worse,” he says, standing despondently among his barefoot children at the back of his two-room cinder-block shack, which opens onto stinking mud flats strewn with garbage. Since few in the town can afford a septic system, outhouses drain directly into the estuary.

Just a decade ago, the water lapped at Jiménez’s back yard, and he cast his lines close to shore. Now, he and other fishermen have to drag their wooden boats across 200 yards of mud. And they often have to sail 40 miles out into the bay or beyond to catch a dwindling number of shrimp and fish.

Many fishermen admit to flouting a government ban on net fishing, a practice that further endangers marine life by snaring the immature fish along with the mature ones. The fishermen say they have no other choice.

“They want us to help preserve, but they haven’t had an idea of how to help our children,” says Carmen Ramírez, Jiménez’s 27-year-old wife, who is pregnant with her fifth child. “We need work. If not, this is what we have to do.” The Jiménez family is not alone, by any stretch. With nearly 3 billion people around the world living on the equivalent of $2 a day or less, each day millions of people are forced to make decisions to damage their environment in order to feed themselves and their families.

“You can’t overlook that poverty has a lot to do with environmental degradation,” says Nestor Sánchez, a sociologist who directs The Nature Conservancy’s external affairs work in the Dominican Republic. “It’s not that a poor person has a natural tendency to degrade the environment. It’s that he needs the environment to survive.”

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