How the Children’s Rainforest Came to Be

The story of the BEN (El Bosque Eterno de los Niños) has several chapters. The first chapter begins when a group of American Quakers immigrated to Costa Rica in 1951 looking for a peace-loving country to live in. They settled in a mountainous area and set aside 1,345 acres of forest never to be cut at the top of the mountains. They knew that the forest would protect the source of the water they would need for their farms. They gave this first Costa Rican reserve the name El Bosque Eterno, the Eternal Forest. They named their community Monteverde, (Green Mountain).

Chapter two begins with biologist George Powell coming to Monteverde to study the resplendent quetzal in the 1970s. He deemed this cloud forest so special he encouraged conservation organizations to protect more land in the area and the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve was eventually created. One of the Quakers, Wolf Guindon, played an important role in facilitating the land purchases which expanded the protected area.

Chapter three begins in the 1987 when Eha Kern and her young students in Fagervik, Sweden were learning about tropical rainforests. They were fascinated by the amazing array of wildlife, but concerned when every TV documentary they saw ended with horrid pictures of those same forests filled with the wildlife they had come to treasure being chopped and burned. They wanted to do something to help. An American botanist, Dr. Sharon Kinsman professor at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, was spending time in Sweden after studying the cloud forest ecosystem in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve. When Eha met Sharon, she invited her to come to her classroom to share with the children about the Costa Rican forest. Sharon’s photos sparked the children’s desire to help protect the rainforest. They began to raise money by putting on plays, having bunny-hopping contests, giving pony rides, selling home-baked goodies. They set a goal to save 25 acres, but they made more money than they expected.

Their enthusiasm grew and so did their fundraising ideas. A newspaper article was written about their efforts, then a television report was aired. As more kids heard about their plan, more schools began to contribute. That is how Barnens Regnskog (Children’s Rain Forest in Swedish) was born. The Swedish government matched funds raised by the children. In the first year they raised over $100,000.

Sharon helped arrange for threatened forest around Monteverde to be purchased through the Monteverde Conservation League. She also founded Children’s Rainforest USA to help kids in the United States protect the forest in Costa Rica. The idea swept the world. Students in the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Spain and Japan also created organizations to help. Eventually, children in 44 countries contributed.

By 1995 El Bosque Eterno de los Niños (Children’s Eternal Rainforest” in Spanish) commonly referred to as the BEN, protected 54,000 acres and had become the largest private reserve in Costa Rica. It was necessary to hire Forest Guards to protect the edges of the forest from poachers who would illegally enter the forest to hunt animals for meat and for their pelts, who would steal endangered orchids and colorful frogs and birds to sell to collectors for the illegal pet trade, or who would cut valuable endangered trees to sell, or even to clear land to plant crops inside the BEN. It was so difficult to protect such a large area, the Monteverde Conservation League decided not to buy any more land.

But there still is a need to add protected land to the BEN. Corridors need to be created so species can migrate down from the mountaintops in the BEN to the few remaining patches of forest below to find food at other seasons. So in 2002 the Monteverde Conservation League U.S., Inc (MCLUS) was founded to help raise money for additional land purchase, more guards, and environmental education. By 2008 MCLUS had raised over a half a million dollars. Much more needs to be done though. A group of enthusiastic caring students in Vermont began to raise money to buy nearby land to reforest. They call themselves the Change the World Kids.  Children around the world are beginning to write chapter four of this story.

Edmund Burke once said, “Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who does nothing
because he could only do a little.”   ETERNAL means forever. Will you help us keep
the “Eternal” in the Children’s Eternal Rainforest?