FIELDS OF DREAMS // UCI Professor Lynn Carpenter tries
to coax life from wasted earth in the hillsides of
Costa Rica
DATE 09/25/94
NEWSPAPER THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
SECTION NEWS
EDITION MORNING
PAGE L01
STORY LENGTH 138 INCHES
HEADLINE FIELDS OF DREAMS // UCI Professor Lynn Carpenter tries
to coax life from wasted earth in the hillsides of
Costa Rica
BYLINE/CREDIT DAN FROOMKIN:The Orange County Register
SUBJECT TERMS OC:COLLEGES:FACULTY:TRIP:CENTRAL
AMERICA:RESEARCH:PLANTS:TREES:ENVIRONMENT:LAND:REPAIR:
AGRICULTURE
.
Lynn Carpenter vaults across a muddy drainage ditch, ducks between
two menacing strands of barbed wire and starts hacking through the
tangled rain forest with a gigantic machete.
Thwack, rustle, ching! The wiry 50-year-old University of
California, Irvine, ecology professor barely slows as she mows her
way through a living, dripping obstacle course of soaring palm
fronds, thorny red flowers and strangler fig vines.
The air, already thick with the loamy fragrance of jungle floor,
takes on a pungent tang as the broad green leaves of huge ginger
plants fall and spew sap under her big knife.
Finally, just as sweat starts to darken her blouse and collect
under the brim of her canvas safari hat, Carpenter reaches the base
of a towering tropical cedar.
She has found her elusive prey: Dirt. Black soil from the shadow
of an endangered giant of the jungle.
Dirt that could save the world.
Rain forests are home to half the earth's plant and animal
species -- critical defenses against global climate change,
irreplaceable purifiers of air and water. And they are dying.
Every year, millions of acres of lush jungles tumble and turn to
ash under the onslaught of humanity, wielding chain saws and
torches.
Yet as Carpenter breaks up clumps of soil matted by roots, she
is not thinking of death, but of life.
The dirt in her hands is teeming with fungi that she suspects
are essential to the survival of tiny native tree seedlings.
Those seedlings, if they grow tall and strong, could help
restore barren lands enough that farmers wouldn't have to advance
any further in their march of destruction.
So the dirt she is shoveling into a burlap bag could hold a key
to the continued existence of rain forests here in Southern Costa
Rica and across the globe.
A few miles away, down a twisty two-lane highway that snakes by
coffee farms and aqua-colored shacks, Carpenter has bought a plot
of ruined land and filled it with experiments that could help the
planet avoid environmental calamity.
Here, on the muddy slopes of her living laboratory, thousands of
native tree seedlings are sprouting into saplings, their survival
and growth rates determining which trial planting methods show
promise and which don't.
No one has ever done anything quite like this before. Within
the scientific community, testing native trees on degraded land is
literally exploring new ground. Trying to coax life from wasted
earth sounds so crazy that the farmers of the impoverished Coto
Brus region of Costa Rica call Carpenter " la gringa loca. "
Yet she has thrown herself into her project with such passion
that more than a dozen volunteers followed her down from California
this summer just to be a part of her ecological crusade.
Three years ago, Lynn Carpenter changed her life.
For two decades, she had studied hummingbird behavior, stalking
the diminutive birds to caves in the Peruvian mountains and
charting their territorial boundaries in the Sierra Nevada.
Painstakingly, she unlocked their secrets and explored their
relationships with the plants they pollinate.
But during a series of research trips to Costa Rica, Carpenter
became more and more troubled by what she saw:
Trees with wood the color of sunsets reduced to colossal
carcasses strapped to diesel-belching big rigs.
Once-pure streams and rivers fouled by runaway topsoil.
Cremated jungles.
The kind of science she was used to doing suddenly seemed almost
irrelevant, and much too slow.
"I wasn't satisfied with my work, and at the same time I just
saw all this terrible deforestation under my nose. And it just hit
me in the face," she says. "It was like, `Wake up! Wake up!' "
So in 1992, she drew $20,000 from her savings account, bought a
63-acre farm in Costa Rica's southern highlands, threw off the
shackles of pure research and began looking for practical ways to
help protect what's left of the rain forests.
"I just felt there's got to be a way to accomplish something
quickly that would be useful," she says.
Mornings find Carpenter striding effortlessly up and down the
steep slopes of the field where her first major experiment was
planted a year ago.
A long blade of African grass between her teeth, she wears her
jungle uniform: the safari hat, the machete strapped around her
waist, the silk sleeveless blouse, long olive-drab pants and a
purple day pack.
To the untrained eye, her farm is beautiful. It looks like a
ragged emerald carpet, amazingly green except where the red soil
strikes a dramatic contrast with the lush tall grasses.
Her new tin-roofed house is perched at the peak of the farm's
highest hill, and to the south, a patch of forest is thick with
ferns and vines.
To those who know better, however, the red soil is horribly
poor in nutrients and should lie hidden under a rich, organic black
mantle instead of being exposed by erosion and the stomping of
cattle.
The grasses are invaders from Africa, of little value. And the
forest is a mere newcomer, a tangle of weeds and bad woods that
bears no resemblance to the cathedrallike canopies of the ancient
primary jungle.
Carpenter's land is, in fact, the most ravaged in the area,
destroyed in near-record time by a particularly reckless farmer who
killed his coffee plants with an overdose of herbicide, then let
the cattle loose to finish the job.
For that reason the local Ticos -- as Costa Ricans are called --
have given it a special name: "La finca fea . " The ugly farm.
But to Carpenter, "the ugly farm" is just perfect.
She is focusing her research on restoring land that is on the
brink of abandonment. Working on a farm that is still producing
well would be pointless.
"I'm looking 10 or 20 years in the future, so I needed some land
as bad as the rest will be in 10 or 20 years," she says.
At the beginning of the century, the world's tropical rain forests
covered an area about twice the size of the continental United
States. But today almost one entire United States' worth is gone --
with more disappearing at the rate of one California every two
years.
Costa Rica's forests in particular have been victims of a
rapacious attack. Just 40 years ago, most of the country -- about
the size of San Bernardino County -- was covered in thick, canopied
jungle. Now, about 80 percent of the primary forest is gone, much
of it under cultivation or under concrete.
The destruction of forests in Costa Rica and many other
tropical countries is driven largely by farmers' need for land.
As the roads spread out into the countryside, farmers settle
along them, cutting down valuable hardwoods to sell to lumber
mills, then burning what's left.
Crops grow well at first, but soon erosion and overfarming
conspire to rob the land of its fertility. The farmers grow coffee
and bananas while they can, then raise cattle. But within about 40
years, the land is exhausted.
Once crops no longer grow and the weeds aren't even good for
cows to eat, the farmers move on, leaving their useless land
behind. They stake out more virgin rain forest, burn it down and
start over again.
Carpenter teaches ecology classes at UCI during the school year,
but now spends summers on the farm in Costa Rica, trying to figure
out how to reverse that last part of the cycle.
The answer, she thinks, may lie not just in replanting native
trees, but in commingling them with crops that will give farmers a
living while the trees grow to maturity.
What makes her experiments exciting, however, is also what makes
them so challenging.
"Nobody knows anything about the native trees," Carpenter says.
"Not even the basics, not even when seeds are available or how they
germinate."
And no one has ever experimented with crops to figure out which
ones will grow well among trees, so she has had to start from
scratch there, as well.
Some scientists have explored reforesting in large plantations,
but none has approached the issue from the perspectives of both the
scientist and the farmer, or "campesino ."
Trying to think like a campesino , Carpenter concentrates on
common-sense solutions that don't require huge sacrifices or
investments by small landowners.
"He's not going to be able to baby his trees," she says.
And drawing on her years as a basic scientist, she has designed
her experiments with enough controls and repetition that her
meticulously recorded results will hold up under the scrutiny of
the scientific community.
The first major experiment occupies much of a 12-acre
bowl-shaped natural amphitheater, for which her house provides box
seats. There, more than 4,000 saplings are planted at nine-foot
intervals, some alone, others intermixed with a variety of beans
and fruits.
All the trees in this experiment are of a variety called
Amarillon, a favorite among the locals for its tall, straight
trunk, huge cup-shaped canopy and yellow wood with red highlights.
Raised from seeds that Carpenter and her chief farmhand
collected from trees that towered up to 200 feet over their heads,
and germinated in black-soiled seedbeds, the saplings are now as
much as a foot tall.
"It's a perfect wood, and they're just really beautiful young
trees," Carpenter says.
She and her volunteers are collecting data on the trees, seeing
how many die and which ones grow taller or sprout more leaves. And
she is already spotting signs that some planting methods are
helping the saplings to survive while others may actually be
hurting them.
"I'm so excited," she says. "Sometimes I can hardly sleep at
night."
Many of the volunteers joining Carpenter in the damp Costa Rica
rainy season are UCI undergraduates, entranced by her passionate
lectures and thrilled to be part of her unfurling dream.
"I think in 10 years, it's going to be really important to the
people around here, and that's why I came," says Kristin Timmins,
24, a senior biology major.
Timmins and another student are testing water quality to measure
erosional runoff. Others are helping in the nursery or looking for
natural ways to keep the voracious tropical pests away from
Carpenter's plantings.
For Raffi Hovsepian, 21, one of two undergraduates poking
through bird droppings as part of a study of seed dispersal,
deforestation's most alarming effect would be the extinction of
plant species that could be harvested to save human lives.
"We still don't know what kind of medicines we could receive
from all these plants," says Hovsepian, a premed student. "I think
everyone should know more about this stuff."
Andrew Peloso, a Newport Beach film producer helping Carpenter
keep track of her finances, is captivated not only by the idea of
restoring the land but by the idea that the methods to do so could
end up being highly marketable.
"Conservation economics," Peloso calls it. "I'm business-minded."
For now, however, the farm is anything but a big-budget
operation. In stark contrast to the way most university research
projects are funded, Carpenter is paying for almost everything --
the farm, the farmhouse, her truck, the wages of her workers and
food -- out of her own savings, or with plastic.
"I have never, ever been in a financial condition like this,"
Carpenter says. "I'm maxed out on all three of my credit cards."
Perched two-thirds of a mile above sea level, overlooking the
lowlands of Costa Rica, northern Panama and the Pacific,
Carpenter's farm is a world away from the smoggy freeways and
concrete office buildings of Irvine.
The nearest town is San Vito, a village of 10,000 that is a
serpentine 20-minute drive from the farm.
And everywhere along the road from the farm to San Vito, locals
are used to seeing the nutty gringa careening along in her
bright-red pickup.
"Everyone knows about this farm and that I'm crazy," says
Carpenter. "Or they think I'm so rich that I can waste my money on
a crazy venture."
Many of the locals say they don't quite understand what
Carpenter is up to.
"I know there are gringos on the farm and I like to see that
people work hard," says Margarita Sanchez, who runs a tiny grocery
store, or pulperia , near the farm and is renting a room to one of
Carpenter's undergraduate volunteers. "But I don't know anything
about what they're doing."
On many of her errands, Carpenter takes along Eduver Sandi, 29,
a local farmer's son who is her chief farmhand and lives with his
family in Carpenter's house.
Sandi admits that he is one of the few locals, at least so far,
to appreciate Carpenter's work.
"To most of the people in the area, it's a poco loco, " Sandi
explains in Spanish. "To others, it's completely loco ."
Sandi, however, says he is taken with Carpenter's vision and
proud to be a part of her work. And he thinks interest will grow in
the area over time.
"It's important for everybody," he says. "For the country, for
the area, for the future. For our dreams. Everything."
One day, as Sandi leads Carpenter to a mature Amarillon on his
father's farm to dig up dirt, he pauses midway, leans on his shovel
and casts his dark eyes on a valley now terraced with coffee plants.
"I remember when all of this part was forest," he says. "My
father used to come here and hunt. Back then, there were wild pigs
and tapirs. And there was a type of bromeliad that had long leaves,
with rose colors.
"I was maybe 7 or 8 years old, I remember, when they came and
cut the forest down, and I would pick up the bromeliads and sell
them to the Wilson Botanical Garden."
"Que facil la vida ," he says. How simple life was.
He looks out on the ravaged land.
"Ay ay ay ," he says.
Sunny during the morning, the farm gets socked in almost every
afternoon by clouds that tumble down the valleys and turn the sky
gray.
Soon afterward come torrential rains, sending sheets of water
crashing to the ground with thunderous noise.
So in the afternoons, the focal point of the farm shifts from
the fields to the house on the hill, a big but simple structure
with high ceilings and a traditional dark-red concrete floor.
One side of the house is home to the gringos : Carpenter and
visitors such as Peloso, the Newport Beach accountant who produces
horror movies and dreams of harvesting money as well as trees.
The other side of the house is for Sandi, his wife, Yoli, and
their 5-year-old, Steven.
But the high-ceilinged room in the middle is common ground, and
during the rain it takes on a quirky and high-spirited air, like an
international youth hostel, with the residents gladly sharing space
with whoever was nearby when the heavens opened.
Undergraduates, their muddy boots left outside the door, pad
around sock-footed. Little Steven sings Spanish-language Pizza Hut
jingles at the top of his lungs.
Volunteer Peggy Laughlin, 40, a bilingual sixth-grade teacher
from Northern California, tells anybody who will listen about her
great love for dung beetles. She spends her off hours picking
through cow patties in search of the surprisingly colorful little
creatures, which she plans to smuggle home for her collection.
There is much jockeying for the one bathroom and much joking
around the dinner table, where meals are served semi-commune style.
"Fling me a tortilla," Carpenter shouts through a mouthful of
rice and beans, her giant green pet parakeet, Pablo, sitting on her
shoulder and taking swipes at her amethyst earrings.
Everything is a mix of Spanish and English. Carpenter spoke
barely a word of Spanish when she first started looking for a farm
in 1991. "We couldn't speak to each other except in sign language,"
she says. But now she is almost fluent, and the other gringos try
to keep up.
One afternoon, she leads the group in poking bilingual fun at
Peloso, coming up with Spanish words that rhyme with his name.
"Peloso, el oso mas hermoso, perezoso y goloso, " is what they
end up with, in a group sing-along. Peloso, the most beautiful,
lazy and sweet-toothed bear.
Time blurs on la finca fea , where the work doesn't stop for the
weekends. But every so often, Carpenter makes everybody take a
break, and she leads them down to a secret place at the edge of her
property.
There, the tiny Rio Cantarrana -- River of Singing Frogs, which
feeds into Carpenter's lake -- comes crashing down the hillside,
creating two breathtaking waterfalls that cascade into natural
swimming grottos.
For a few hours Ticos and gringos alike scream with joy, splash
each other, dive, swim and let the cascading water bounce off sore
shoulders and weary arms.
Carpenter seems to love the waterfall most of all.
"This is when I can celebrate," she says. "You feel like you're
really alive -- Yes! I'm alive! I'm a living organism!"
Down by the little lake at the base of the amphitheater, in her
quiet tree nursery, Carpenter is preparing to test her theory about
fungi.
She suspects that organisms called mychorrizal fungi are a
critical part of what ecologists call the "soil community" for
certain rain-forest trees.
Amarillon seedlings, for instance, appear to be unable to get
nutrients out of even rich soil if the fungi aren't present. And in
severely degraded pastures, the fungi seem to have washed away with
the topsoil.
That theory has led her into the forests to dig up the dirt
around mature trees and prompted her to instruct her farmhands to
put a pinch under the roots of the seedlings they transplant.
In fact, Carpenter imagines Costa Rican farmers one day
sprinkling rain-forest dirt onto their degraded pastures and
perhaps, in that way, making the land hospitable again for the
seeds of the giant trees that belong there.
But now, to scientifically examine just how critical the
fungus's role really is, she is embarking on an experiment that
tests seedlings with and without fungal "inoculations."
To isolate the effect of the inoculation, she wants to conduct
the test with three different kinds of soil: nutrient-poor soil
from near her house that she suspects lacks the fungus; fertilized
black nursery soil that may or may not have it; and dirt fresh from
the virgin rain forest, where it is plentiful.
"This is a very preliminary but very exciting test," she says.
As with most of the experiments Carpenter conducts in her new
role as an applied scientist, there are a lot of variables.
In order to protect the scientific integrity of the experiments,
however, she tries to make sure that conditions and testing methods
are repeated as exactly as possible from one experiment to the next.
But even that isn't easy. And sometimes it doesn't happen.
Just as she is about to begin the fungus experiment, Carpenter
chats with two of her farmhands and discovers, to her horror, that
they have changed the way they prepared the soil and transplanted
the seedlings this year.
Because so many seedlings died last year, they did what farmers
in the area typically do: they added a combination
herbicide/insecticide to the germination beds and the potting soil.
They also changed the way they inoculated the transplanted
seedlings. At first they forgot to put the fungus in at all, then
when they remembered, they started putting the fungus in along the
sides of the plants, instead of under the roots.
The news makes Carpenter reel.
It means that the fungi, if they weren't killed by the
chemicals, might not be reaching the seedlings' taproots, resulting
in stunted growth.
Suddenly, experiments she planned to repeat from a year ago can
no longer can be compared.
And her fungi experiment won't work anymore. The nursery dirt is
no longer the rich medium she had thought it was, but quite
possibly poisonous.
"Damn it!" she says, sitting down heavily on a pile of sand,
picking at it and letting grains run through her fingers.
"Why didn't they just do the same thing that we did last year?
Why?"
She stalks off to find Sandi, who is in charge of the farm when
she is in California.
Sandi explains that he thought the herbicide would help and that
he didn't realize the inoculation method was so different.
Carpenter responds firmly. "What we need to do is begin with new
ones, exactly like last year," she says.
But her anger soon gives way to thoughts about how to salvage
things.
"In some ways, it's a disaster," she tells Sandi in Spanish.
"But we can learn something else."
The fact that the chemical the farmhands used is popular with
the local farmers gives Carpenter an idea: Why not do an experiment
to determine if, in fact, farmers are routinely killing the very
fungus they may need for some plants?
Later on, she worries that she has been too tough on Sandi.
"He's supersmart, he works his butt off, and now he's going to
feel terrible," she says. So she goes up to him again.
"It's a problem," she says. "But what we're going to do now is
study the effects of the change."
"Eso, " she says, "es como se hace la sciencia ."
This is how science happens.
At nighttime, the pace at la finca fea slows quickly.
Moths with green behinds and red backs gather at the window of
the house and flutter around the bare bulbs under its eaves.
The clouds are only ribbons of gray against a star-saturated sky.
And outside the house, the air is full of sounds: the lows of
cattle in the distance, the chirps of crickets, the growls of frogs
down at the little lake -- and the chatter of hope coming from
around the big table.
The stakes are high, the challenge enormous, but Carpenter and
her volunteers share a feeling of certainty that something can be
done.
"I know there's an answer," Carpenter says. "I know it. I mean,
it's just not reasonable to me that there's not an answer."