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I don’t know the answers to these questions about Balaguer. Part of our problem in understanding him may be our own unrealistic expectations. We may subconsciously expect people to be homogeneously “good” or “bad,” as if there were a single quality of virtue that should shine through every aspect of a person’s behavior. If we find people virtuous or admirable in one respect, it troubles us to find them not so in another respect. It is difficult for us to acknowledge that people are not consistent, but are instead mosaics of traits formed by different sets of experiences that often do not correlate with each other.

We may also be troubled that, if we really acknowledge Balaguer as an environmentalist, his evil traits would unfairly tarnish environmentalism. Yet, as one friend said to me, “Adolf Hitler loved dogs and brushed his teeth, but that doesn’t mean that we should hate dogs and stop brushing our teeth.” I also have to reflect on my own experiences while working in Indonesia from 1979 to 1996 under its military dictatorship. I loathed and feared that dictatorship because of its policies, and also for personal reasons: especially because of the things that it did to many of my New Guinea friends, and because of its soldiers almost killing me. I was therefore surprised to find that that dictatorship set up a comprehensive and effective national park system in Indonesian New Guinea. I arrived in Indonesian New Guinea after years of experience in the democracy of Papua New Guinea, and I expected to find environmental policies much more advanced under the virtuous democracy than under the evil dictatorship. Instead, I had to acknowledge that the reverse was true.

None of the Dominicans to whom I talked claimed to understand Balaguer. In referring to him, they used phrases such as “full of paradoxes,” “controversial,” and “enigmatic.” One person applied to Balaguer the phrase that Winston Churchill used to describe Russia: “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” The struggle to understand Balaguer reminds me that history, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

In light of that history of environmental impacts in the Dominican Republic, what is the current status of the country’s environmental problems, and of its natural reserve system? The major problems fall into eight of the list of 12 categories of environmental problems that will be summarized in Chapter 16: problems involving forests, marine resources, soil, water, toxic substances, alien species, population growth, and population impact.

Deforestation of the pine forests became locally heavy under Trujillo, and then rampant in the five years immediately following his assassination. Balaguer’s ban on logging was relaxed under some other recent presidents. The exodus of Dominicans from rural areas to the cities and overseas has decreased pressure on the forests, but deforestation is continuing especially near the Haitian border, where desperate Haitians cross the border from their almost completely deforested country in order to fell trees for making charcoal and for clearing land to farm as squatters on the Dominican side. In the year 2000, the enforcement of forest protection reverted from the armed forces to the Ministry of the Environment, which is weaker and lacks the necessary funds, so that forest protection is now less effective than it was from 1967 to 2000.

Along most of the Republic’s coastline, marine habitats and coral reefs have been heavily damaged and overfished.

Soil loss by erosion on deforested land has been massive. There is concern about that erosion leading to sediment buildup in the reservoirs behind the dams used to generate the country’s hydroelectric power. Salinization has developed in some irrigated areas, such as at the Barahona Sugar Plantation.

Water quality in the country’s rivers is now very poor because of sediment buildup from erosion, as