Green awakening in a poor country.

• Author: Youth, Howard
• Position: Honduras

Despite its slash-and-burn farming, rapid population growth, and sluggish economy, Honduras may be forging a home-grown social contract to save its forests.

Juan Carlos Carrasco expertly paddles his kayak between the intertwined prop roots of 20-foot-tall red mangroves, silently gliding through a rare slice of Central America - 11,300 hectares of flooded forest, wetland, and beach known as Punta Izopo National Park. The park is home to such threatened animals as jaguars, manatees, and crocodiles, and Carrasco oversees it - alone. He is solely responsible for defending the property from poachers, from farmers hoping to clear some land, and from people who want to treat the park as a dump site. There's a local palm oil plant, for instance, that sometimes dumps chemicals in the park's core zone.

Carrasco works for an NGO called PROLANSATE, and divides his time between patrolling the park and doing office work in the nearby Atlantic coast town of Tela. (See map, page 32.) Though the Honduran forest service, COHDEFOR, has jurisdiction over Punta Izopo and the country's other protected areas, the agency is cash-poor and relies upon local NGOs to staff many parks. Carrasco hopes one day to have park guards, a community relations person, and more boats for patrolling the watery refuge. But that may not happen anytime soon: PROLANSATE's humble $100,000 budget, provided in pieces by various international organizations and the Honduran government, is already spread thin between 23 employees and four large parks. Yet despite the difficulties, Carrasco smiles and says "I believe the future of this park is bright."

It's not hard to understand Carrasco's optimism: eight years ago, the park and his NGO employer didn't even exist. In Honduras, environmental issues command more government and press attention these days than ever before. The government has adopted a number of promising conservation laws and is open to outside assistance. Honduran NGOs are varied and enthusiastic. Some observers think the country is poised to become one of Central America's conservation leaders.

But watching Honduras develop its conservation strategies is like watching a performer on a tight-rope. Honduras is one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere; it is heavily dependent on foreign aid; its population is growing rapidly, and its extraordinary wilderness areas are coming under increasing pressure from poor farmers and rich landowners alike. Many Hondurans share Carrasco's optimism. But one need only look to the country's best known archaeological site, Copan, for a hint of a less happy ending. Many experts believe the Mayan culture that built the great ceremonial center collapsed in large measure because of overpopulation, forest loss, and soil depletion.

The Honduran balancing act has much to tell us, not just about the fate of its own natural areas, but about the realpolitik of conservation in many of the world's relatively small and valuable places - places like Costa Rica, Belize, and the Caribbean island nation of Dominica. There are analogues outside the region too, such as Bhutan in the Himalayas and Botswana in southern Africa. Like Honduras, all of these countries have substantial tracts of highly valuable wildlife habitat remaining in them. All have a recent history untroubled by war. All have relatively new environmental movements, bolstered by governments that are, in varying degrees, credibly committed to preserving their natural wealth. And all of them are facing the same kinds of pressures that are building in Honduras.

Honduras is Central America's second-largest country (after Nicaragua) and like the rest of the region it is a crossroads for northern and southern wildlife. Within its borders live typically North American species such as Steller's jays and northern raccoons, as well as tropical creatures like howler monkeys and quetzals, the resplendent birds revered in pre-Columbian Mayan culture. Cecropia trees poke out of pine forests. Alders and firs, reminiscent of Canadian landscapes, grow upslope from stands of tropical genera, like Podocarpus, a mainstay of tropical foresters, and Ceiba, which includes the kapok tree, one of the tallest species in Amazonia.

Honduras far surpasses temperate-zone norms in terms of species diversity - as forested tropical countries usually do. The country has 2.7 times more native mammals than occur in the U.S. state of Tennessee, which is roughly the same size. Its native bird count is 93 percent that of the entire United States, which is 83 times as large. It has as many amphibians as Japan, nearly 30 percent more freshwater fish than the United Kingdom and about as many flowering plants as Spain - countries that are respectively three, two, and four-and-a-half times its size. At least 23 of its vertebrates occur nowhere else.

In a tropical context, Honduran nature looks more modest, at least when compared with such mega-diversity countries as Brazil, Indonesia, or Colombia. (Colombia, for example, has about 1,800 [TABULAR DATA OMITTED] bird species, 360 mammals, and at least 330 endemics.) Even within its own region, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and Guatemala have more species. (See table below.) But Honduras has some of the healthiest surviving habitat in the region. For example, jaguars and Baird's tapirs, which are rare or extinct in many parts of Central America, continue to thrive in Honduras' trackless mountain forests.

In Honduras, a wide range of habitats occur in close proximity, depending upon variations in elevation and rainfall. Moisture from the Caribbean douses the lowland rainforests on the North Coast. Some mountains are topped with cloud forests, which are bathed in perpetual rain and fog. The cloud forests drain the moisture from the skies, creating pockets of semi-desert in the valleys below. Elsewhere, especially along the coast, there are expanses of swamp forest and mangrove stands, which provide critical fish and bird habitat. Much of the heart of the country is dry, hilly, and covered in tall pines, reminiscent of the ponderosa pine forests of the western United States.

This natural bounty is threatened as Honduras draws heavily upon its natural resources to feed a sputtering economy. Only about one-quarter of this rugged country is arable, and virtually all the best farmland is already in use. More than half of rural Hondurans remain landless, and many roam into hilly forests to scratch out an existence on poor, highly erosive soil. Slash-and-burn agriculture is standard procedure for most subsistence farmers. Established fields may be burned again, to control pests and create charred mulch for plantings. The fires often burn out of control, engulfing surrounding forests. In the spring of 1998, for example, El Nino cut the rainy season short by one month. Forest fires, many started by farmers, raged from Honduras to Mexico; smoke drifted as far north as Wisconsin.

Commercial logging...