Guardian · 7 hours ago

From Barren Shores to Green oases: How a Surfer Looking for Shade Ended up Transforming Costa Rica’s Coastline | Costa...

What begins as a surfer's promise to his girlfriend - that he would reforest a shadeless beach so she could enjoy sitting on it - has grown into one of Central America's most quietly remarkable conservation stories. Max Tattenbach's Costas Verdes has now planted more than 100,000 native trees across 34 Pacific coastline beaches, coaxing back howler monkeys and variegated squirrels to land that cattle farming had stripped bare over decades. The transformation is visible in a single pair of photographs that executive director Gerardo Bolaños keeps at the nursery: dry brown grass where a forest now stands. What the story reveals is something easy to overlook in large-scale environmental work - that restoration rarely begins with a grand vision, but with something personal and local and almost embarrassingly modest. "Our success story in Guiones shows the world that bringing back a coastal forest ecosystem in such devastated land is possible," says Bolaños, "but it can only be done together as one."