Mexico Asks for US Work Visas in Exchange for Climate Action

Climate blackmail, what’s not to like? Here’s a story about the real environmental threat.

One charming day in my early middle youth, as the consequence of certain unforeseen choices, chances, and circumstances, I found myself in a lovely town in the interior of Costa Rica. The town was near a National Park. Some friends and I were having a bite of food in the little restaurant attached to the one gas station in town … or more precisely, in the gas station/restaurant that comprised the entire town.

While we were sitting and eating, a totally clapped-out pickup truck came down the road that led from the National Park back to San José, the capital city. He pulled up to get some gas. His truck said “Leña” on the side, “Firewood”. The back of the truck was filled way over the brim with tree branches and trunks of all kinds, mostly of a smaller size, but lots of them. A single rope over the top gave the load a precarious air of semi-stability.

The driver came into the restaurant. He had the global standard poor man’s uniform—the cheapest stuff, factory seconds, and used clothing that is imported by the 100 kg bale in every poor country, and resold by some local merchant at usurious markups. Poorly made jeans. Used t-shirts. Plus the usual sandals and sombrero.

Me, I’m eternally curious about what people do to earn their supper. So I started talking to him in Spanish about his load of firewood and the firewood business.

He said that many people in Costa Rica cooked with wood. He’d started his own business. He had an axe, no chain saw. The truck belonged to his father-in-law, paid for at so much per mile that he drove it. It wasn’t much of a living, but he got by.

Now, I grew up on a cattle ranch surrounded by forest and we heated with wood. Like most ranchers, we always cut our own firewood. And as a young man, I’d made money myself cutting firewood, putting a cord of it into a pickup truck, and selling it as five quarter-cords to the over-educated and under-experienced professors and professionals in Berkeley who couldn’t tell a loose stack from a tight stack.

As a result, I know the ways of the ax and the wedge, of felling and cutting and splitting, limbing and barking, and hauling the final product to market and selling it. So I had plenty to talk to him about. We discussed the ins and outs of how firewood was priced in Costa Rica, who his customers were, and the like. We talked about the fact that firewood was getting harder to find, and how these days he had to drive too far, it was cutting into his income.

Then, after kind of a delicate dance around the subject, I asked him where he’d cut his load of wood.

Now, I knew that’s kind of like asking a fisherman where the good fishing holes are, or asking a hunter where the big bull elk hang out. It’s not a topic you open the conversation with, and most of the time you don’t touch on it at all. But I figured it was clear to him that I wanted to know in the spirit of knowledge and appreciation, and that I wasn’t a threat to his rice bowl.

So when I asked where he cut his wood, “¿Donde corte la leña?”, he answered frankly.

“Oh”, he said, “lo corto en el Parque Nacionál.”

“In the National Park?”, I said.

“Si, señor”

“¿Porque?”, I asked, “Why?”

He explained that most other places there was little firewood to be found.

I asked politely whether he knew that cutting firewood in the National Park might possibly be, well, you know … illegal and all … not to mention destructive to the environment …
“Oh, si,” he said, “no es legal”.

He thought about that for a minute, and said in essence “I feel very bad about that, I know it’s wrong, but when my children are hungry, what can I do?”

I had no answer for him. It merely confirmed what I’d seen in my travels to all of the continents. This is the ugly underside of environmentalism, the unpleasant truth, which is:

The biggest threat to the environment is poverty.

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