Hacienda Curu's harmonious plan.

• Author: Tyson, Peter
• Position: Privately-owned ranch in northwestern Costa Rica

SUSTAINABLE LIVING, that much-ballyhooed term for using and preserving resources, is like an M. C. Escher drawing: It looks impressive on paper, but good luck trying to get it to work in reality. One place where it has worked remarkably well is on a privately owned ranch in northwestern Costa Rica called Hacienda Curu.

Curu is a model for sustainable living on a local scale. It features a pastiche of family-run operations that are often seen as mutually exclusive: a cattle ranch and a primary tropical forest; a scientific research base and ecotourist lodge; a fruit plantation and fledgling conservation center. All thrive at once on just over four thousand acres of land on the southern tip of the Nicoya Peninsula. What's more, these operations exist in harmony with a national wildlife refuge found at the very heart of the hacienda.

This harmony is apparent as soon as one drives through Curu's front gate. Ahead is a verdant valley, flanked by ridges covered in tropical dry forest. The serpentine Curu River, hidden beneath a blanket of moist evergreen forest, winds along the base of the valley. On each side of the river lies a patchwork quilt of cattle pastures and plantations of mango, banana, guanabana, coconut, citrus, and teak. The road ends at a crescent beach overlooking the Gulf of Nicoya. Here are found the main house and tourist lodge as well as the 210-acre Refugio Nacional de Vida Silvestre Curu.

Curu's success lies with its owners, the Schutt-Valle family. When Dona Julietta Schutt-Valle's German-born husband died in 1981, she had to make a choice: sell the hacienda they had bought together in the 1930s and return to her relatives in San Jose, or try to run it...