Thought Question: If you had a team of volunteers for one day, what project would you ask them to help with? Max Tattenbach was a college student in the mid 2000s when he fell in love with surfing at Costa Rica’s Playa Hermosa beach along the Pacific Ocean coast. His girlfriend at the time did not surf. Instead, she liked to read books while he rode the waves. The problem is, there was no shade at the beach and she didn’t want to bake in the scorching sun all day. Tattenbach then learned that Costa Rica’s coastline used to be lined with trees and other wildlife. Cattle farming was the main culprit of the deforestation that had occurred in prior decades. He became determined to restore it to its original state. So in 2009, after graduation, Tattenbach founded Costas Verdes. It's an ambitious project to plant trees all along the Costa Rican coast. Since then, the group has added more than 100,000 native trees across 34 beaches in the Central American nation. The survival rate for the trees is about 40%. Yet the effort has restored much of the native wildlife. It's also added leafy shade for beachgoers and trail walkers. To plant the trees, Tattenbach called upon friends and park rangers. They launched a tree nursery in the beach town of Nosara. School-age children, local residents, and even tourists pitched in to help. The beaches now feature thousands of trees. They include tropical almond trees, madero negro, and frangipani (akin to shrubs). They line the trails along the beaches. And they provide not just shade to beachgoers, but a thriving ecosystem for wildlife. The goal now is to plant at least 300,000 trees along 100 beaches, Costa Verdes’ executive director, Gerardo Bolaños, told The Guardian. “Our success story in Guiones shows the world that bringing back a coastal forest ecosystem in such devastated land is possible,” Bolaños said. “But it can only be done together as one.” Photo of Costa Rica’s Playa Hermosa beach from Wikimedia Commons.
