The forward-thinking president of Costa Rica Oscar Arias Sanchez has launched an international conservation effort that could help save 4% of the world’s biodiversity. Called the Peace With Nature Initiative, President Arias’s plan continues the visionary environmentalism Costa Rica began two decades ago.

Working with Dr. Dan Janzen, University of Pennsylvania biologist, in the 1990s the Costa Rican government began buying up private land to be permanently preserved. Today Costa Rica has put one-fourth of all the country’s land into national parks and green space. Dr. Janzen spearheaded the creation of the Area de Conservaction Guanacaste in northwestern Costa Rica rich with rain forests and wildlife. Those 163-000 hectares of preserved land support 4% of the Earth’s biodiversity.

The cost to ensure the survival of this vital biodiversity in the ACG is $500 million, meaning $1,000 can save one species of life. Peace With Nature will both acquire more sensitive lands in Costa Rica, and it will create an organization to permanently restore and manage the preserved land. Peter Wege and The Wege Foundation have become early supporters contributing $2 million.

President Arias said this when he launched the Peace With Nature Initiative:
To survive in the 21st Century, we need different ethics than in the past, need
to recognize our interdependency, understand that we are all responsible for
each other.

An earlier American conservationist and crusader for national parks said the same thing a century ago. John Muir wrote, “When you tug on one thing in nature, you find it is connected to everything else.”

In late July, 2008, The Wege Foundation invited friends from several West Michigan foundations to meet University of Pennsylvania professor Dr. Dan Janzen and his wife Dr. Winnie Hallwachs Janzen and learn about their conservation work in the Costa Rican rain forest. Since Peter Wege first met the Janzens in 1991, The Wege Foundation has supported their work buying private land to be permanently preserved. The two Dr. Janzens have worked closely with the Costa Rican government to help the Central American country become the global leader in conserved park land relative to its size.

From the first small purchases of land in the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste in 1991 through 2005, The Wege Foundation has been the single best supporter among 8,500 other donors. Collectively, these donors have expanded the ACG parcel by parcel so by 2005, the ACG had grown to 376,380 acres—equal to 2% of the entire country! The ACG is now regarded as the leading example of tropical forest restoration in the world.

The importance of preserving this particular land mass, and the topic of Dr. Janzen’s talk to the foundation members, is that the ACG contains 4% of the world’s biodiversity. It is also home to 235,000 species—as many species as exist in all of North America! The professor of biology at the U of P is now part of an international initiative to analyze the DNA of every living species. Mapping out the DNA enables the scientists to then bar code that species to be catalogued for future research.

Dr. Janzen foresees the time when all ten million species of life can be googled through bar coding. He is using his expertise to bar code insects, with butterflies his particular specialty. The University of Guelph in Canada is doing the same for birds. For instance, if Dr. Janzen sends a Costa Rican bird’s feather to the
bar-coding biologists at Guelph, they can check the DNA and identify the species.

“We need to change all human relationships with wild things,” Dan Janzen explained. If humans can’t name a living thing, the professor believes, we won’t care about whether it lives or dies. But naming each species through bar coding gives it an identity so people will want to preserve it. He told The Wege Foundation guests that this project he calls “bioliteracy” will elevate the human spirit. “By sustaining and restoring biodiversity, we will rediscover our own humanity.”

Humanity is pressed for time, according to Janzen, if we are going to save species from man’s careless extinction by bar coding each life form to be libraried. In 1963, not even 50 years ago, the Earth had 95% of the species known in 1600. By 2007, biologists could account for only 70% of those from 1600 still remaining.