• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

		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

Page 3

Harvesting coffee, which is grown beneath the forest’s canopy, helps Merilyo Dominguez make a living while providing important habitat for birds and other animals. 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

One such collaboration is under way just 15 miles from Jiménez’s home on the mud flats. In the town of Samaná, the Conservancy provides support to a local partner to train fishermen to work as whale-watching guides.

Samaná once looked like the town of Sánchez, with wood and cinder-block shacks and open sewage canals. Today, it is a tourist hot spot, with cheerfully painted concrete houses and pricey hotels, thanks largely to the popularity of whale watching. Residents now have a stake in protecting the whales, whose population has rebounded in recent years.

Victor Hernández, a whale-watching captain in a crisp Ralph Lauren polo shirt, describes growing up with 15 siblings in a two-room thatched hut with an outhouse. “We had animals and fish, so we had enough to eat, but no money,” he says as he turns to keep a lookout for potential customers among the tourists strolling along the town’s gleaming new boardwalk.

Almost 22 years after he stopped fishing and began guiding tours, he has saved enough to build his family a five-bedroom “chalet,” the local term for the concrete houses that dot the coconut tree-covered hills. His two bathrooms are connected to a septic system, meaning he is not polluting the bay.

A second project involves Parque Nacional del Este, a coastal ecosystem on the country’s southeastern tip protected as a key nesting site for more than 100 species of birds and four species of sea turtles. The Conservancy is helping set up “no-take” seasons to reduce overfishing of snapper, grouper, conch and lobster.

Local groups are also working with communities to find alternatives to fishing, including training fishermen to work as tour guides or beekeepers within the forest (the bees increase tree pollination while producing profitable honey).

Farther up the river, in the mountains that feed Samaná Bay, conservation efforts are transforming communities.

In the farming village of Los Dajaos, gigantic raindrops pound the roof of the greenhouse where Fredy Moronta is tending tidy rows of strawberry plants and hydrangeas bursting with lacy blue and purple flowers. Outside, rivulets of water snake down steep hillsides blanketed in Hispaniolan pines. Children clutching umbrellas scamper along a muddy road that winds among pastel-colored concrete houses.

Not long ago, such an unseasonable downpour would have wreaked havoc on Moronta’s crops and triggered flooding, washing nutrients down the Yuna River to collect as sludge in Samaná Bay. But a lot can change in a decade.

Today, the farmers in this idyllic mountain community in the Dominican Republic’s central highlands no longer denude the hillsides to plant beans and graze cattle. Instead, they tend organic shade coffee beneath a canopy of flowering guama trees. They have built greenhouses on tiny parcels to cultivate strawberries and other profitable cold-weather crops, employing new technologies to more than triple their earnings. And they plant tayota, a nutritious wrinkly squash, on trellises forged from the branches of the fast-growing Acacia mangium tree.

After once clearing thousands of acres of habitat critical to preserving biodiversity and the island watershed, they have come to view the forest as a friend.

<< Previous |  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6   Next >>