Environmental protection in Costa Rica

Costa Rica is a mixed bag when it comes to the environment.

They have one of the highest percentages per land mass of reserved forests in the world, and everywhere you go - outside of the cities - you see lots and lots of trees and forests - at least here in the western Central Valley where we have our lots.

That's what I love about Costa Rica: the green everywhere. We have a private forest next to us and all around this area are small and large forests with monkeys, toucans, hummingbirds, anteaters, and other wildlife.

On the other hand, many Ticos tend to throw trash everywhere (though this has improved over the past 10 years), and they use a very high volume of pesticides and herbicides. It pays to buy as much organic veges and fruit as you can find and afford.

Water is said to have a (relative) lot of arsenic in it and as mentioned all kinds of crap is dumped into the environment through less than perfect septic and drainage systems. While there may be laws in place, from what I see the Ticos and many expats as well do not abide by them because there is often no enforcement and it's cheaper not to do it "right" and "everyone else is doing it like this, why not us" kind of thinking.

What we do that's good for the environment is plant trees, bushes and flowers by the thousands. We've planted about 300 trees and bushes and grass in the past few months. We water them all by hand until the rains come.  Since I've owned this property we've probably planted over 1,000 trees. My neighbor says he can see the difference in the wildlife and birds that we now get. (He plants a lot of trees and bushes too!)

We are picking up 200 more bushes (hedge) this week and plan to buy and plant at least 100 more trees when the rains come, on 3 of our lots. We planted about 100 plants that butterflies and hummingbirds like last week.

We bury our food garbage in the orchard and we try not to buy too many plastic containers or throw-away paper though we're not as vigilant about this as we'd like to be.   We are working on using more glass and re-usable containers and less plastic. When we buy napkins and tp etc we at least buy the brown unbleached ones.

We stopped the caretaker from using Roundup when we bought the property and bought him a motorized "chopeador" (weed cutter) instead.