“Only the Rivers Do Not Come Back”: Conservation Displacement and Rural Responses in Costa Rica

Abstract Costa Rica’s environmental regime is world renowned, and since the mid-twentieth century, the country has protected its inestimable natural resources via land conservation expropriation. Through conservation Costa Rica ended the historical plague of deforestation, and its national parks and nature reserves buttress an ecotourism industry that is an important source of foreign revenue. But with every act of conservation, a human toll was also paid. As rural lands became protected areas, rural people lost access to places they depended on for survival. They hence became “victims” or, to some, “enemies” of conservation, and in nearly every setting, they resisted by carrying out land invasions; squatting; unauthorized ranching, farming, and mining; and even environmental banditry (as with the burning of La Casona in Santa Rosa National Park in 2001). Focusing on a handful of celebrated cases of land conservation, this analysis demonstrates how the creation of natural havens such as Corcovado National Park in 1975 displaced rural people and the various ways those people responded.