In Search of the Golden Toad

In 1987, Costa Rican Giovanni Bello and other investigators counted more than 1,500 adult golden toads in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve. The next year, scientists and naturalist guides found just ten. In 1989, they found only one. Later that same year, there were two unconfirmed sightings of others. Since then no golden toads have been found. Many scientists concluded that the brilliant orange-colored toad, which was thought to exist only in Costa Rica's Monteverde Reserve, had become extinct. At the same time, scientists around the world began noticing a dramatic drop in numbers of other species of toads and frogs. There are many theories to explain why. Some speculate a connection with volcanic eruptions, the warming El Niño winds and currents, acid rain, depletion of the ozone layer, chemical pollution, habitat destruction, or disease caused by a lethal, single-celled protozoan. Others warn that frogs, like canaries carried down a coal mine shaft, are giving a biological signal that conditions for survival are horribly out of balance and catastrophe is close at hand. Most recently, a type of fungus, known as the chytrid fungus, has been found to be driving amphibian extinctions worldwide, including in Central America.

Bello and other Costa Rican naturalists continue to hope that the golden toads are simply in hiding, buried deep under the reserve's rich, moist biomass, and that one spring day they will again emerge, hopping from fern to vine to root. Such hopes may be maintained by the fact that another amphibian, the harlequin frog, had also disappeared in Costa Rica, but in 2003, a Yale scientist rediscovered it. Nowadays, visitors to Monteverde see the golden toad only on postcards and on the entrance sign to one of the reserve's most popular tourist lodges, El Sapo Dorado.

Researchers Chris Lupoli and Emy Rodriguez researched and updated this chapter.

In Monteverde, the disappearance of the golden toad has coincided with the phenomenal growth of tourism, in particular a relatively new "species" known as ecotourism. Although often equated with nature tourism, ecotourism, properly understood, goes further, striving to respect and benefit protected areas as well as the people living around or on these lands. The history of the golden toad and that of ecotourism are intertwined, and some speculate that an ecotourist (or perhaps a scientist) may have carried into Monteverde's rain forest an alien organism that caused a plague among the reserve's toad population. If true, it is ironic, since Monteverde scientists and residents have consciously used conservation grants and ecotourism profits to protect the habitat of the golden toad and other exotic, endangered species, including the Resplendent Quetzal, one of the world's most majestic birds. Monteverde's farming community and conservation organizations began buying and incorporating surrounding land so that by 2005, more than ten thousand hectares (some twenty-six thousand acres) had been incorporated into this privately owned park, which is managed by a nonprofit scientific organization. Initially, the reserve attracted only scientists, some students, visiting friends and family (known in tourism lingo as VFFs), and a trickle of hardy travelers. But beginning in the mid-1980s—on the eve of the golden toad's disappearance—the worldwide growth of ecotourism brought a flood of visitors and a tidal wave of change to this small community. Tourist numbers grew from just over 450 in 1974, to 3,100 in 1980, 17,500 in 1989, 50,000 in 1993, to about 200,000 by 2005. Most of Monteverde's hotels have been built since 1990, and ecotourism has surpassed dairy farming as the community's main source of income.

Around the world, ecotourism has been hailed as a panacea: a way to fund conservation and scientific research, protect fragile and pristine ecosystems, benefit rural communities, promote development in poor countries, enhance ecological and cultural sensitivity, instill environmental awareness and a social conscience in the travel industry, satisfy and educate the discriminating tourist, and, some claim, build world peace. Although "green" travel is being aggressively marketed as a win-win solution for the Third World, the environment, the tourist, and the travel industry, close examination shows a much more complex reality.

This book is about the search for ecotourism. Although nearly all countries in the world, including the United States, Canada, Germany, Australia, and other developed countries, are now engaged in ecotourism, perhaps its most exciting potential is in its use as a tool for economic development and environmental protection in developing countries. I lived in East Africa and Central America for nearly twenty years, first as a graduate student and then as a journalist covering liberation struggles, civil and cold war–inspired conflicts, natural and human-made disasters, popular protests, and a variety of economic development strategies spanning the political spectrum. Although tourism was only occasionally a central focus of my reporting, I was fascinated by its complexities and contradictions as they played out on the ground in East and southern Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

During my decades abroad I had found that for many economically poor countries with rich, unique, and largely unspoiled national parks and natural wonders, tourism offered a possible means for earning foreign exchange. But the infrastructure costs of conventional tourism are high, its adverse social effects are often great, and the economic benefits frequently meager, since most of the profits did not stay in the host countries. In the 1970s, I witnessed a lively and contentious political debate over tourism between socialist Tanzania and capitalist Kenya, which shared between them some of the world's finest game parks. By the early 1990s, these countries and the island of Zanzibar were all aggressively promoting nature tourism and ecotourism, with historically marginalized rural communities demanding a slice of the tourism pie. When I lived in Costa Rica during the 1980s, I saw the country transform itself from a low-key outpost for nature lovers into the most popular ecotourism destination in the Americas. Beginning in the 1990s, there were alarming reports that the Galapagos Islands—a unique ecosystem and one of the world's most fragile, often cited as the place where ecotourism began—was being permanently altered by an uncontrolled influx of tourists, immigrants, and commercial fishermen. And, during this same...