With great sadness I learned today of the passing of my friend, mentor, former boss and co-founder of the modern Costa Rican National Park Service. Mario Boza passed away yesterday at the age of 79. He had been suffering from mouth cancer since late April. His death comes as a shock as only a few weeks ago he wrote to me and suggested that he was on the path, albeit a very slow path, to recovery. Cancer rarely presents a straightforward path to recovery and in Mario’s case it took a wrong turn last Monday.
I first met Mario in 1981. I was a young, altruistic, nature-loving Peace Corps Volunteer and Mario was an internationally recognised wildlands crusader who, with the late Alvaro Ugalde, had helped establish the Costa Rican National Park System in its present form. I couldn’t believe my luck that I would be working with Mario. For two and a half years, I sat in a cubicle outside his office in the Programa de Educación Ambiental of the Universidad Estatal a Distancia (the Environmental Education Program of the State Open University). Mario didn’t strike me as being an environmental super hero. He was always fidgeting with his coke-bottle glasses and gazing over their rims when he spoke to me. But under that modest façade he was indeed a man of steel and a man of action.
Mario loved visiting the national parks and would look for any excuse to take a few days to explore them. There were countless times when he would come to my desk and say ‘pack up your gear, we’re going to XYZ’. Away from the office, I got to know the real Mario and he became more of a friend to me than a boss. The university paid us per diem so we could stay at nice hotels near the parks we visited, but Mario always wanted to stay with the park guards in their modest shacks. We’d bring some fresh fruit and veggies and they’d share their meagre rice, beans and coffee with us. It was a big event for the park guards when ‘Don Mario’ would arrive. I could see how they revered him and could see that Mario treated those park guards as his personal heroes. Mario would attentively listen to their ideas on how to improve the management of the parks and to the park’s financial woes. And when the business ended, Mario would start telling jokes. He was a master at that and we’d always end the night with a laugh. Mario was happiest when we set out to explore the parks either on foot or horseback. We explored dry forests, cloud forests, volcanoes, islands, caves, turtle-nesting grounds on beaches and lowland rain forests. I was happiest as well on those trips.
Mario would return from our adventures in the parks and then start tapping into his international network of environmental crusaders to find solutions. Thanks to the awareness activities of Mario and Alvaro, Costa Rica was the darling of the international wildlands community in the 1980s. So many heads of international environmental funding agencies paraded into our office for a chance to meet Mario. And he’d speak to them over his coke-bottle glasses and after a short audience with him, they’d leave a check to fund one of his many projects.
Costa Rica now thrives from income from ecotourists. And each and every one of those tourists would be grateful that there were a few individuals like Mario Boza who had the foresight to protect the jewels of Costa Rica. Mario dedicated his entire life to ensure that our children … and his two children, Irene and Andres … will always have places where time stands still and the incredible biological diversity of our planet can be safeguarded, forever.
[Photo: On one of our many adventures … Mario (right) at the base of a giant Ceiba tree with fellow UNED colleague, Marco Vinicio Garcia, at Carara Biological Reserve, 1982]
Postscript
I publised an article in Biocenosis which examines Mario’s very close alliance with the United States Peace Corps. In the 1970s, Mario encouraged PCVs to come and help him build the national park system. They conducted biological inventories and created master plans. I was part of the second wave of PCVs who came in the early 1980s to help ‘sell’ the concept of wildlands protection to the Costa Rican public. At the time the popular belief was that forests were to be cleared to plant maize or raise cattle and marine turtles were to be captured and eaten. It was a hard sell. Mario and I decided we needed a proper photo library of the parks and environmental issues, so he and I travelled the country to document Costa Rica’s natural riches. My article reflects on those journeys I took with Mario and provides my observations of what a remarkable inspiration he was to the global environmental movement.