Estimated Prophet.

A bottom line for Mother Nature? Absolutely, says a renegade biologist. BY KATHERINE ELLISON * LA CRUZ, COSTA RICA 

WITH FORESTS AROUND THE WORLD UNDER increasing threat from timber companies, farms, squatters and urban sprawl, hanging on to wilderness has become a pricey luxury. But what if that luxury could pay for itself?

University of Pennsylvania biologist Dan Janzen is convinced it can. His testing ground for a host of revenue-producing schemes, from eco-tourism to paid pollination services, has been the arid northwest Costa Rican province of Guanacaste. From the town of La Cruz during the past 15 years, he and his wife, scientist Winnie Hallwachs, along with a team of Costa Rican collaborators, have worked to create the Area de Conservation Guanacaste, home to one of the few remnants of the dry tropical forest that once reached from Mazatlan, Mexico, to the Panama Canal.

Thanks largely to Janzen's dogged diplomacy as an unofficial, unpaid champion of the area--plus more than US$30 million in government and international donor funds--the Guanacaste land and marine reserve now extends about 1,520 square kilometers. But Janzen has even grander goals. He wants to return vast areas of the acquired land--most of it degraded pastures--to the original biodiversity-rich forests. In the process, he hopes to change the way people think about wild places.

Janzen champions a "use-it-or-lose it" approach to nature. He says the secret to making conservation work is financial revenue, a notion that repels some environmentalists. "I would describe it as use it and lose it," says John Terborgh, co-director of the Center for Tropical Conservation in Durham, North Carolina. Terborgh worries that many so-called sustainable projects actually do great damage. But adherents of Janzen's view counter that, saying efforts to save nature on purely moral or aesthetic grounds have failed.

"Attempts to conserve biodiversity for its own sake just make local society mad," shouts the 62-year-old, bushy-bearded scientist, as his Toyota 4X4 barrels along a dirt road on a two-day tour of the reserve. Along the way, he points out rainforests, cloud forests, rivers, Pacific Ocean beaches and three towering volcanoes, all the while explaining strategies for preserving the hardwon tropical domain. "You've got to invest in nature," he insists, "Use it and think of it as an asset producing goods and services for the country, rather than as a frontier to exploit and destroy." At home. Janzen, winner of the 1984 Crafoord Prize, the so-called Nobel Prize of ecology, spends half of each year in Costa Rica, where he has worked almost continuously for the past 37 years. He and Hallwachs make their home in a small, converted storage room in the conservation area, sharing their quarters with four species of rodents, two bats and their pet porcupine, Espinita. They combine conservation work with other scientific p ursuits, such as cataloguing the reserve's thousands of caterpillar species.

Costa Rica was a natural choice to host their projects. Over the past 30 years, the West Virginia-sized country has become a global showcase of environmental innovation. The government's goal is to preserve at least 25% of the country as wilderness within 11 designated conservation areas. It has paid landowners to protect forests on their properties, and Costa Rica is among the few countries, along with Sweden, Norway and Denmark, that has placed an environmental tax on fossil fuels.

In Guanacaste, Janzen's green schemes include well-tested revenue-producing approaches such as developing eco-tourism and charging visiting scientists room and board while they study the area's biodiversity. He has also tested more novel plans, among them involvement in the burgeoning pollution credit business, a product of the international climate change negotiations launched in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997.

Drafters of the Kyoto Protocol envisioned offsets as a way to lower the price of reducing fossil fuel emissions. For example, energy firms could get credit for investing in forests, which absorb carbon dioxide as they grow. U.S., European and Japanese companies have already invested more than $75 million in forestry-based carbon projects, mostly in Brazil and Bolivia, even though there is no guarantee they'll eventually get credits. The Bush administration recently said the United States would not sign the Kyoto accord, but participating corporate officials say they expect some kind of laws regulating emissions in the future. In the meantime, they're gaining valuable early experience, as well as public relations points. In the late 1990s, Janzen, on behalf of the Costa Rican government, tried to sell Guanacaste's carbon credits to New Jersey-based General Public Utilities, but the two sides failed to agree on a price.

In a more controversial experiment, Janzen has been talking with government officials about a plan to charge tens of thousands of local consumers for the water-generation services provided by the cloud forests along the Guanacaste area's three volcanoes--even though private use of water is still extremely cheap, or even free in Costa Rica. The plan is under serious consideration by the government.

New ground. By far Janzea's most audacious scheme, however, was a business contract that won him rave reviews from international development experts before it went down in flames last year. The scheme involved an innovative 20-year deal with Del Oro, an environmentally minded orange juice processing company neighboring the conservation area. Under the contract, Del Oro agreed to hand over a parcel of land valued at $480,000 in return for receipt of forest-generated water, natural pollination and pest control by birds and bugs residing in the Guanacaste forests. Janzen also promised that the conservation area would biodegrade 1,000 truckloads of Del Oro's excess orange pulp each year.

Janzen had discovered that placing the palp on the dry, depleted land bought for forest restoration efficiently killed stubborn pasture grasses and nourished the soil. Del Oro's management was thrilled with the arrangement, since it could dispose of its pulp without having to build a costly, and polluting, processing plant. Instead, insects and bacteria would do the job. Problems arose, however, after a competing orange juice firm, TicoFrut, complained that Del Oro had created a garbage dump in a national park. Following months of controversy, the government cancelled the contract in August 1999.

Despite the setback, Janzen is optimistic. He hopes to develop other revenue-generating deals--including a plan to tap local reserves of geothermal energy--after further negotiations with the government.

In and around the conservation area, which employs 107 local residents as caretakers, teachers, firefighters, administrative officials and researchers' assistants, there are lots of people rooting for Janzen.

"I'm proud to work here," said Lucia Rios, 30, who has a sixth-grade education yet was recently able to pay for her own house after working for eight years collecting caterpillars as part of a U.S. National Science Foundation research project. "We used to kill caterpillars when we found them," she says, "but now I think they're beautiful."