Planting Hope on Hispaniola

In a country whose national symbol could be a motorcycle with a blownout muffler, the Dominican Republic’s Armando Bermúdez National Park is an oasis of tranquility.

Not much has changed in the park since its founding over half a century ago by Rafael Trujillo, a dictator whose coldblooded rule lasted for more than 30 years. Punctuated by three 3,000-meter peaks (the Caribbean’s highest), draped in stands of Hispaniolan pine, and criss-crossed by streams and waterfalls, the park covers more than 1,000 square kilometers in the Cordillera Central, the central mountain range of the Dominican Republic. By one count, the uninhabited park receives only a few hundred paying visitors a year.

But although much has remained the same inside Armando Bermúdez, changes are taking place in the way people living outside the park—indeed, across the entire island— think about the environmental treasures it represents. It’s been a slow shift, arguably tracing its roots back to the 1970s when Joaquin Balaguer (Trujillo’s one-time protégé) set aside 10 percent of the country’s land area as parks or scientific reserves. Awareness is rising about crucial environmental themes like the roles healthy forests play in everything from agriculture to water purification.Dovetailing with this increasing awareness is the government’s growing desire to address some of the same issues. For evidence of this shift, look no further than the country’s new environment and natural resources secretariat, a far cry from Balaguer’s draconian anti-logging laws that were enforced by soldiers with machine guns. The spirit of the law is largely the same today (no cutting is allowed without a permit), but the agents charged with enforcing it now answer to the civilian bureaucracy.