Once upon a time, the Dominican Republic’s Parque Nacional del Este was the poster child for Parks in Peril, a joint program of the Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Agency for International Development to support land-preservation efforts in the Caribbean and Latin America. Today, though, the park has become a symbol of the difficulties such efforts have encountered in keeping development and other competing land-use interests at bay. At Parque Nacional del Este, as elsewhere, conservationists must constantly ask the question: How much preservation is enough? Can fishing, boating, tourism, and other economically important industries share space with endangered species and delicate habitat? Environmentalists say si, but only with serious checks on the rapid pace of development in the region.
