Nurturing eco-tourism in the Dominican Republic

MICHES, Dominican Republic — From a development perspective, this Caribbean town has a few problems.

It is 60 miles from the nearest airport, a three-hour drive on roads so bad the trip can be nauseating. Electricity is erratic, drinking water is contaminated, the beach in town is littered with trash and nearby rivers are either clogged with an invasive weed or plagued by silty agricultural runoff that threatens the fish on offshore reefs.

But to a team of conservation biologists and other researchers from Columbia University who began working here in 2007, the town of Miches in the impoverished Dominican Republic has great potential. They see tourists camping in platform tents, like those in St. John, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. They see hikers in its lush green hills, people riding horseback on pristine beaches outside of town and others heading out to sea to watch whales, dolphins or manatees. They imagine the town's half-derelict waterfront plaza lined with locally owned restaurants serving locally caught fish.

To accomplish these visions, the researchers, from the Center for Environment, Economy and Society, at Columbia, have begun a sweeping effort to identify and repair problems in the town and region and to capitalize on their assets. They have recruited fishermen volunteers to count marine mammals, assess the health of coral reefs and measure the effect of invasive water plants. With townspeople, they are devising projects to improve sanitation. And they are working with farmers and fishermen to determine fair compensation for people who contribute to better offshore-water quality by keeping their cattle away from inland streams.

The goal is a tourism economy, but not typically Caribbean all-inclusive "high volume, low cost, keep churning the people through" tourism, said Donald Melnick, a conservation biologist who is co-director of the Columbia center.

Melnick said participants envisioned small-scale, low-impact eco-tourism that would sustain the environment rather than degrade it. And, as much as possible, the environment will stay in local hands.

When he first met with community leaders, Melnick said on a recent visit here, they pointed to places like Bavaro, a town 60 miles to the east, where a building boom is under way, fueled by the success of the nearby Punta Cana resort and largely financed by foreigners.

"They said, 'Look, we are poor, we don't have very much, but we have Miches,' " Melnick recalled. " 'But with all this development going on in the Dominican Republic, if you come back in 10 years, we will still be poor, but Miches will not be ours.' "

That is what the project intends to prevent.

Unlike the Punta Cana resort, built on land that was more or less pristine when developers acquired it, Miches (pronounced MEE-chis) was settled hundreds of years ago and is home to about 9,000 people, with 11,000 more or so in the region.

"You have a whole city there, a pretty good footprint of people, impact on the landscape in terms of agriculture and fishing," said Jake Kheel, environmental director for Grupo Puntacana, which operates the Punta Cana resort. "It's going to add some challenges."

In a way, the project began in 2001, when the United Nations adopted targets, known as the Millennium Development Goals, for reducing poverty, disease and other problems. Melnick had a central role in the United Nations' work on environmental sustainability, and the Dominican Republic was one of its "pilot countries."

John Gagain, the American-born head of the Dominican Republic's commission on sustainable development, said that President Leonel Fernandez Reyna had decided to focus the country's efforts on "a place that is poor but with incredible potential." Fernandez invited Melnick to test his ideas in Miches, and the Columbia group began work here.

Melnick said the success of the project would depend in large part on the degree to which actions were not created by theorists a thousand miles away but rather based on "a model worked out here," with the agreement of national and local leaders.

Such a consensus is not always easy to achieve.

Melnick said it was crucial to find an approach that would be "acceptable to fishermen, government agencies and science."

"We can make it work," he added.

Melnick acknowledged, though, that he had "grossly underestimated" the time the Miches project would take. What he originally thought of as a three-to-five-year project will take a decade or more.

Gagain and Melnick said it remained to be seen whether the people of Miches would continue to resist the lure of all-inclusive resort-style development, pressure they expect to increase as the economic downturn eases.

"When you spend so much time poor and without any hope and any education and right next door is Punta Cana — they say, 'Why not us?' " Gagain said. "They need at least a foot on the ladder of development."