When the Osa Peninsula was ostensibly first “settled” in the late nineteenth century, how could today’s peninsular forefathers have foreseen the twists and turns of the society they were founding?

Initially a strictly agrarian society with livestock at the forefront of the peninsular economy, the Osa Peninsula experienced a long period in which cattle was king. Bananas, beans, corn, and rice followed in the first wave of economic growth. In 1939, however, with clouds of a distant but strangely omnipresent war obscuring a global sky, the second stage of the peninsula’s economic development was ushered in at Carate of all places. A gold mining company brought in and began to operate a dredge for the mining of offshore beach sands in the rough Pacific surf and the extraction of the rich deposits of gold they carried. At the time, it was one of only two such operations in the entire world, the other being located off the Gold Coast of Sierra Leone. The Carate operation succumbed not for the lack of the precious metal, ironically, but for the clamp-down on the essentials of a gold-mining operation, coincidentally the same basic needs as those of the war machine: steel, diesel, oil, expertise, and manpower. After the war, however, gold fever gradually permeated the peninsula, building to the roaring crescendo of the gold rush that stampeded across the peninsula in 1980s. At that time there were major companies extracting gold in both the Tigre and Carate River watershed and independent operators from Violines Island through Rancho Quemado all the way to Rio Nuevo with untold illegal hand-miners working tunnels in the Park. With the barring of Corcovado Park from commercial gold extraction, the early nineties saw the last of the commercial mining companies, Mudesa, S.A., close its operations in the Agujas and Oro rivers, leaving the peninsula’s economy yawning and gaping for the next thrust.

Eco-Tourism began to blossom almost simultaneous to the decay of the gold industry. Timber extraction—long on the rise—expanded at the same time as displaced gold miners moved into other livelihoods, and the felling of timber and the promotion of tourism have struggled against each other ever since to dominate the regional economy. Today, unquestionably, tourism is king, and the pace of development both peninsula-wide and within the peninsular capital of Puerto Jiménez in particular.

To a casual bystander, it has become clear that the rise of tourism has not been a steady rise, but rather one that has grown at a rate in recent years at least that is closer to exponential than linear. The closest analogy that I have stumbled upon to describe the pace of growth in Puerto Jiménez was, ironically, presented to me for the first time in a graduate level course in environmental microbiology, describing the growth stages of aerobic bacteria in the presence of a finite food source. The classic model is shown in the accompanying graph, which shows five stages of growth: 1) lag phase, as the bacteria develop the enzymes to digest the sugstrate; 2) logarithmic growth, as the organisms consume the food source; 3) logarithmic decline as food sources dwindle; 4) static phase as organisms run out of food and develop the enzymes necessary to cannibalize itself; 5) autodigestion as the bacteria consume one another, resulting in the eventual death of the colony.

growth, as the organisms consume the food source; 3) logarithmic decline as food sources dwindle; 4) static phase as organisms run out of food and develop the enzymes necessary to cannibalize itself; 5) autodigestion as the bacteria consume one another, resulting in the eventual death of the colony.

I think that the Puerto Jiménez logarithmic growth phase began approximately three years ago upon the startup of Crocodile Bay Lodge, the large-scale sport-fishing operation located between Puerto Jimenez and Pueblo Viejo.

If the growth of bacteria and the growth of a tourism-based economy can be accurately compared, then the experiences of bacteria can be used to anticipate what will become of our own economy without the studious intervention of land-use planners, community and municipal governments, and the citizens of the Osa themselves. For years we have all heard the term “sustainable development,” and for many of us it has been difficult concretizing this term in the context of our quotidian lives and our individual plans for making our own lives better through the tapping of resources available to us, in this case the natural splendor of our environment and the large number of foreign visitors that it draws. Clearly, if we as a society allow our economy to proceed in exponential growth until the limit of the ecosystem, businesses will be reduced to infighting in years ahead and cannibalizing one another for survival. In the process, our sustaining life force—the forest and sea—will lose its pristine attractiveness. If we wait to take action until our ecosystem has been over-run by the rapacity and ambition of its developers, then our bountiful tourists will abandon us and seek other corners of the world where the magic remains in place. In that dog-eat-dog scenario, it may be too late to hope for a fourth economic miracle to forestall the poverty that may await the denizens of this majestic and enchanting peninsula.

To illustrate what I call the exponential growth phase of the peninsula’s third boom phase, I present a map of Puerto Jimenez with all of the changes that have occurred over the past two years. These include: 1) new businesses; 2) new construction; 3) major remodeling efforts; and 4) changes of ownership and management. In reviewing the vast number of business changes registered in the past two years, it is important to keep in mind that growth peninsula-wide has been at the same fevered pitch. While urban development has had deleterious consequences as a result of increases in the volume of wastewater and solid waste, it is important to remember that peninsular development carries even more serious implications to natural ecosystems, including the clearing of forest for home sites and access roads, the increase in erosion and the sedimentation of our rivers, estuaries, and seas, the depletion of water from the surface environment to provide water for drinking, irrigation, and pools, and the drastic consequences of both increasing agrochemical usage and increasing industrial waste from the processing of palm oil.

For ideas on how you can contribute to the debate surrounding sustainable development, keep close tabs on the Environmental section of El Sol de Osa, where this very issue will remain a predominant theme.