There should be a sign posted along beaches of the world during a certain season: “WARNING: Enter water at your own risk”. I’m not speaking of extreme undertow or heavy shore-break. Not water quality, or red tide concerns. Nor warnings against poisonous jellyfish. These are all important water safety concerns, but I am referring to something else, something almost as dangerous. I am talking about the distinctly unique experience of...
We recently hosted a mobile workshop organized by CATIE (the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center) and Conservation International to train people in the planning and management of protected areas. The group spent two weeks visiting protected areas in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and learning how to best tackle the challenges of planning and managing protected areas in a changing world. Paso Pacifico Country Director Liza Gonzalez showed our...
In honor of Save the Frogs Day, we'd like to introduce some of the frogs who live in Paso del Istmo, Nicaragua. The poison dart frog (Dendrobates pumilio) is a resident of the eastern edge of the Paso del Istmo biological corridor where we are restoring habitat from cattle pasture to humid tropical forest. It is listed as near threatened by the IUCN. The red-eyed tree frog (Agalychnis callidryas), which...
Local artists, businesses, municipal government, and students celebrated Earth Day with us this week. During the ceremony the mayor of San Juan del Sur committed the municipality to planting 50,000 trees as a contribution to the Meso-American Biological Corridor.
La Prensa reports on our reforestation program in Paso del Istmo (in Spanish). Paso Pacifico's national director is quoted: Esto se ha hecho en sólo tres años, son 450 hectáreas las que ya están reforestadas y la meta es reforestar cinco mil hectáreas en toda la zona y lo más importante es que se están plantando árboles que son nativos de estas tierras. In just three years, Liza explains, we've...
Over at SeedMagazine.com, there's a great discussion of the need to align economic incentives and biological imperatives. Problems could be averted if species had a value that was neither zero nor infinity, and if there were incentives for people to engage in environmental stewardship before a species becomes endangered. ... We can also use market mechanisms to transfer the actual value of environmental assets to stakeholders in a local community....
La Prensa has published a piece on our sea kayak training program (in Spanish), designed to promote eco-tourism in San Juan del Sur and Ostional. The goal of this program is to train young people to become eco-tourism guides, taking advantage of their region's natural beauty (and the kayaks we've furnished with the help of USAID) to launch their own micro-businesses and educate people about the mangroves and coastal ecosystems...
We're pleased to see that a small tourism business is offering a special package for our harbor clean up! For $20, guests will be provided transportation between Managua and San Juan del Sur, where they'll be served lunch and be able to participate in the clean up activities. This is just the indicator of success we love to see! A for-profit business is recognizing the value of our conservation work,...
We're getting ready for our first-ever harbor clean up in San Juan del Sur. Along with the usual coastline clean-up crews, we'll be working with teams of boaters and divers to pull up, haul away, and inventory inorganic waste on the bottom of the bay (presumably mostly abandoned nets and traps). Wokring with the Municipality of San Juan del Sur, the Reef Foundation, and San Juan del Sur CANTUR, we'll...
Julie Martinez, our environmental education instructor, has been working with elementary school kids in the Rivas province of Nicaragua. The kids are learning about the ecology of tropical dry forests, and starting to address environmental problems in their own community.
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