Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [219]
The country’s natural reserve system of protected areas directly addresses all of these threats except for population growth and consumer impact. The system is a comprehensive one that consists of 74 reserves of various types (national parks, protected marine reserves, and so on) and covers a third of the country’s land area. That is an impressive achievement for a densely populated small and poor country whose per-capita income is only one-tenth that of the United States. Equally impressive is that that reserve system was not urged and designed by international environmental organizations but by Dominican NGOs. In my discussions at three of these Dominican organizations—the Academy of Sciences in Santo Domingo, the Fundación Moscoso Puello, and the Santo Domingo branch of The Nature Conservancy (the latter unique among my Dominican contacts in being affiliated with an international organization rather than purely local)—without exception every staff member whom I met was a Dominican. That situation contrasts with the situation to which I have become accustomed in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, and other developing countries, where scientists from overseas hold key positions and also serve as visiting consultants.
What about the future of the Dominican Republic? Will the reserve system survive under the pressures that it faces? Is there hope for the country?
On these questions I again encountered divergence of opinion among even my Dominican friends. Reasons for environmental pessimism begin with the fact that the reserve system is no longer backed by the iron fist of Joaquín Balaguer. It is underfunded, underpoliced, and has been only weakly supported by recent presidents, some of whom have tried to trim its area or even to sell it. The universities are staffed by few well-trained scientists, so that they in turn cannot educate a cadre of well-trained students. The government provides negligible support for scientific studies. Some of my friends were concerned that the Dominican reserves are turning into parks that exist more on paper than in reality.
On the other hand, a major reason for environmental optimism is the country’s growing, well-organized, bottom-up environmental movement that is almost unprecedented in the developing world. It is willing and able to challenge the government; some of my friends in the NGOs were sent to jail for those challenges but won their release and resumed their challenges. The Dominican environmental movement is as determined and effective as in any other country with which I am familiar. Thus, as elsewhere in the world, I see in the Dominican Republic what one friend described as “an exponentially accelerating horse race of unpredictable outcome” between destructive and constructive forces. Both the threats to the environment, and the environmental movement opposing those threats, are gathering strength in the Dominican Republic, and we cannot foresee which will eventually prevail.
Similarly, the prospects of the country’s economy and society arouse divergence of opinion. Five of my Dominican friends are now deeply pessimistic, virtually without hope. They feel especially discouraged by the weakness and corruptness of recent governments seemingly interested only in helping the ruling politicians and their friends, and by recent severe setbacks to the Dominican economy. Those setbacks include the virtually complete collapse of the formerly dominant sugar export market, the devaluation of the currency, increasing competition from other countries with lower labor costs for producing free trade zone export products, the collapses of two major banks, and government overborrowing and overspending. Consumerist aspirations are rampant and beyond levels that the country could support. In the opinion of my most pessimistic friends, the Dominican Republic is slipping downhill in the direction of Haiti’s grinding desperation, but it is slipping more rapidly than Haiti did: the descent into economic decline that stretched over a century