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by Balaguer, the army drove bulldozers through luxury houses built by wealthy Dominicans within Juan B. Pérez National Park. Balaguer banned the use of fire as an agricultural method, and even passed a law (which proved difficult to enforce) that every fence post should consist of live rooted trees rather than felled timber. As two sets of measures to undermine demand for Dominican tree products and to replace them with something else, he opened the market to wood imports from Chile, Honduras, and the U.S. (thereby eliminating most demand for Dominican timber in the country’s stores); and he reduced traditional charcoal production from trees (the curse of Haiti) by contracting for liquefied natural gas imports from Venezuela, building several terminals to import that gas, subsidizing the cost of gas to the public to outcompete charcoal, and calling for the distribution without cost of propane stoves and cylinders in order to encourage people to shift from charcoal. He greatly expanded the natural reserve system, declared the country’s first two coastal national parks, added two submerged banks in the ocean to Dominican territory as humpback whale sanctuaries, protected land within 20 yards of rivers and within 60 yards of the coast, protected wetlands, signed the Rio convention on the environment, and banned hunting for 10 years. He put pressure on industries to treat their wastes, launched with limited success some efforts to control air pollution, and slapped a big tax on mining companies. Among the many environmentally damaging proposals that he opposed or blocked were projects for a road to the port of Sanchez through a national park, a north-south road over the Central Cordillera, an international airport at Santiago, a super-port, and a dam at Madrigal. He refused to repair an existing road over the highlands, with the result that it became nearly unusable. In Santa Domingo he founded the Aquarium, the Botanical Garden, and the Natural History Museum and rebuilt the National Zoo, all of which have become major attractions.

As Balaguer’s final political act at the age of 94, he teamed up with President-elect Mejia to block President Fernández’s plan to reduce and weaken the natural reserve system. Balaguer and Mejia achieved that goal by a clever legislative maneuver in which they amended President Fernández’s proposal with a rider that converted the natural reserve system from one existing only by executive order (hence subject to alterations such as those proposed by Fernández), to one established instead by law, in the condition that it had existed in 1996 at the close of Balaguer’s last presidency and before Fernández’s maneuvers. Thus, Balaguer ended his political career by saving the reserve system to which he had devoted so much attention.

All of those actions by Balaguer climaxed the era of top-down environmental management in the Dominican Republic. In the same era, bottom-up efforts also resumed after vanishing under Trujillo. During the 1970s and 1980s scientists did much inventorying of the country’s coastal, marine, and terrestrial natural resources. As Dominicans slowly relearned the methods of private civic participation after decades without it under Trujillo, the 1980s saw the founding of many non-governmental organizations, including several dozen environmental organizations that have become increasingly effective. In contrast to the situation in many developing countries, where environmental efforts are mainly developed by affiliates of international environmental organizations, the bottom-up impetus in the Dominican Republic has come from local NGOs concerned with the environment. Along with universities and with the Dominican Academy of Sciences, these NGOs have now become the leaders of a homegrown Dominican environmental movement.

Why did Balaguer push such a broad range of measures on behalf of the environment? To many of us, it is difficult to reconcile that apparently strong and far-sighted commitment to the environment with his repellent qualities. For 31 years he served under dictator