Introduction to Costa Rica

Introduction to Costa Rica

Author: Gilad James, PhD

Publisher: Gilad James Mystery School

Published:

Total Pages: 85

ISBN-13: 3760376916

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Costa Rica is a country located in Central America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the southeast, the Pacific Ocean to the west, and the Caribbean Sea to the east. It covers an area of 51,100 square kilometers with a population of around 5 million people. The country is known for its natural beauty, biodiversity, and progressive policies towards conservation and sustainability. Costa Rica is famous for its environmental conservation efforts and its significant share of the global biodiversity. The country is comprised of various types of ecosystems, including tropical and cloud forests, mangroves, wetlands, and marine areas, making it a popular destination for tourists and nature enthusiasts. The country's economy is mainly driven by agriculture, particularly coffee and banana production, as well as tourism, technology services, and manufacturing. Despite being a developing country, Costa Rica has a high standard of living, a strong focus on education, healthcare, and social welfare, and it is considered one of the happiest countries in the world.


Costa Rican Natural History

Costa Rican Natural History

Author: Daniel H. Janzen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-12-14

Total Pages: 829

ISBN-13: 022616120X

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This volume is a synthesis of existing knowledge about the flora and fauna of Costa Rica. The major portion of the book consists of detailed accounts of agricultural species, vegetation, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds, and insects. "This is an extraordinary, virtually unique work. . . . The tremendous amount of original, previously unpublished, firsthand information is remarkable."—Peter H. Raven, Director, Missouri Botanical Garden "An essential resource for anyone interested in tropical biology. . . . It can be used both as an encyclopedia—a source of facts on specific organisms—and as a source of ideas and generalizations about tropical ecology."—Alan P. Smith, Ecology


The Ecolaboratory

The Ecolaboratory

Author: Robert Fletcher

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 081654011X

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Despite its tiny size and seeming marginality to world affairs, the Central American republic of Costa Rica has long been considered an important site for experimentation in cutting-edge environmental policy. From protected area management to ecotourism to payment for environmental services (PES) and beyond, for the past half-century the country has successfully positioned itself at the forefront of novel trends in environmental governance and sustainable development. Yet the increasingly urgent dilemma of how to achieve equitable economic development in a world of ecosystem decline and climate change presents new challenges, testing Costa Rica’s ability to remain a leader in innovative environmental governance. This book explores these challenges, how Costa Rica is responding to them, and the lessons this holds for current and future trends regarding environmental governance and sustainable development. It provides the first comprehensive assessment of successes and challenges as they play out in a variety of sectors, including agricultural development, biodiversity conservation, water management, resource extraction, and climate change policy. By framing Costa Rica as an “ecolaboratory,” the contributors in this volume examine the lessons learned and offer a path for the future of sustainable development research and policy in Central America and beyond.


Introduction to Costa Rica

Introduction to Costa Rica

Author: Gilad James, PhD

Publisher: Gilad James Mystery School

Published:

Total Pages: 85

ISBN-13: 7640500249

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Costa Rica is a country located in Central America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the southeast, the Pacific Ocean to the west, and the Caribbean Sea to the east. It covers an area of 51,100 square kilometers with a population of around 5 million people. The country is known for its natural beauty, biodiversity, and progressive policies towards conservation and sustainability. Costa Rica is famous for its environmental conservation efforts and its significant share of the global biodiversity. The country is comprised of various types of ecosystems, including tropical and cloud forests, mangroves, wetlands, and marine areas, making it a popular destination for tourists and nature enthusiasts. The country's economy is mainly driven by agriculture, particularly coffee and banana production, as well as tourism, technology services, and manufacturing. Despite being a developing country, Costa Rica has a high standard of living, a strong focus on education, healthcare, and social welfare, and it is considered one of the happiest countries in the world.


The Costa Rica Reader

The Costa Rica Reader

Author: Steven Palmer

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0822382814

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Long characterized as an exceptional country within Latin America, Costa Rica has been hailed as a democratic oasis in a continent scorched by dictatorship and revolution; the ecological mecca of a biosphere laid waste by deforestation and urban blight; and an egalitarian, middle-class society blissfully immune to the violent class and racial conflicts that have haunted the region. Arguing that conceptions of Costa Rica as a happy anomaly downplay its rich heritage and diverse population, The Costa Rica Reader brings together texts and artwork that reveal the complexity of the country’s past and present. It characterizes Costa Rica as a site of alternatives and possibilities that undermine stereotypes about the region’s history and challenge the idea that current dilemmas facing Latin America are inevitable or insoluble. This essential introduction to Costa Rica includes more than fifty texts related to the country’s history, culture, politics, and natural environment. Most of these newspaper accounts, histories, petitions, memoirs, poems, and essays are written by Costa Ricans. Many appear here in English for the first time. The authors are men and women, young and old, scholars, farmers, workers, and activists. The Costa Rica Reader presents a panoply of voices: eloquent working-class raconteurs from San José’s poorest barrios, English-speaking Afro-Antilleans of the Limón province, Nicaraguan immigrants, factory workers, dissident members of the intelligentsia, and indigenous people struggling to preserve their culture. With more than forty images, the collection showcases sculptures, photographs, maps, cartoons, and fliers. From the time before the arrival of the Spanish, through the rise of the coffee plantations and the Civil War of 1948, up to participation in today’s globalized world, Costa Rica’s remarkable history comes alive. The Costa Rica Reader is a necessary resource for scholars, students, and travelers alike.


Costa Rican Ecosystems

Costa Rican Ecosystems

Author: Maarten Kappelle

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 798

ISBN-13: 022627893X

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In 1502, Christopher Columbus named Costa Rica, and while gold and silver never materialized to justify the moniker of rich coast in purely economic terms, scientists and ecotravelers alike have long appreciated its incredible wealth. Wealth in Costa Rica is best measured by its biodiversityhome to a dizzying number of plants and animals, many endemic, it s a country that has long encouraged and welcomed researchers from the world over, and is exemplary in the creation and commitment to indigenous conservation and management programs. Costa Rica is considered to have the best preserved natural resources in Latin America. Approximately nine percent (about 1,000,000 acres) of Costa Rica has been protected in 15 national parks, and a comparable amount of land is protected as wildlife refuges, forest reserves or Indian reservations. This long-awaited synthesis of Costa Rican ecosystems is an authoritative presentation of the paleoecology, biogeography, structure, conservation, and sustainable use of Costa Rica s ecosystems. It systematically covers the entire range of Costa Rica s natural and managed, terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems, including its island systems (Cocos Islands), the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and shores (coasts, coral reefs, mangrove forests), its lowlands (dry, season and wet forests), its highlands (the northern volcanoes and southern Talamanca s), and its estuaries, rivers, lakes, swamps and bogs. The volume s integrated, comprehensive format will be welcomed by tropical and temperate biologists alike, by biogeographers, plant and animal ecologists, marine biologists, conservation biologists, foresters, policy-makers and all scientists, natural history specialists and all with an interest in Costa Rica s ecosystems."


The Saints of Progress

The Saints of Progress

Author: Carmen Kordick

Publisher: University Alabama Press

Published: 2019-01-29

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0817320024

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A reshaping of traditional understandings of Costa Rica and its national identity The Saints of Progress: A History of Coffee, Migration, and Costa Rican National Identity chronicles the development of the Tarrazú Valley, a historically remote—although internationally celebrated—coffee-growing region. Carmen Kordick’s work traces the development of this region from the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twenty-first century to consider the nation-building process from the margins, while also questioning traditional scholarly works that have reproduced, rather than deconstructed, Costa Rica’s exceptionalist national mythology, which hail Costa Rica as Central America’s “white,” democratic, nonviolent, and egalitarian republic. In this compelling political, economic, and lived history, Kordick suggests that Costa Rica’s exceptionalist and egalitarian mythology emerged during the Cold War, as revolution, civil war, military dictatorship, and state violence plagued much of Central America. From the vantage point of Costa Rica’s premier coffee-producing region, she examines local, national, and transnational processes. This deeply textured narrative details the inauguration of coffee capitalism, which heightened existing class divisions; a successful armed revolt against the national government, which forged the current political regime; and the onset of massive out-migration to the United States. Kordick’s research incorporates more than one hundred oral histories and thousands of archival sources gathered in both Costa Rica and the United States to produce a human history of Costa Rica’s past. Her work on the recent past profiles the experiences of migrants in the United States, mostly in New Jersey, where many undocumented Costa Ricans find low-paid work in the restaurant and landscaping sectors. The result is a fine-grained examination of Tarrazú’s development from the 1820s to the present that reshapes traditional understandings of Costa Rica and its national past.


The Mammals of Costa Rica

The Mammals of Costa Rica

Author: Mark Wainwright

Publisher: Comstock Publishing Associates

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13:

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"First published 2002 as The natural history of Costa Rican mammals by Zona Tropical"--T.p. verso.


The History of Costa Rica

The History of Costa Rica

Author: Monica A. Rankin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2012-05-03

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0313379459

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Concise yet thorough, this engaging book provides an overview of the unique history of an increasingly important Central American nation. The History of Costa Rica provides a thorough, straightforward narrative of a Central American country that has become increasingly more visible since the end of the 20th century. Written for students and the general reader, this book covers the nation from its pre-Colombian origins to the present day. This chronologically organized volume documents the area's earliest inhabitants, then moves on through the colonial period, the process of nation-state formation in the 19th century, the volatile period of liberal reform, and the era of civil war and its aftermath. More recent times are also explored, including the role of Costa Rica in the Cold War, the peace process of the 1980s, and the development of the strong tourism industry that flourishes today. Among the prominent themes running through the book are the unique historical development of the country, the importance of its democratic tradition, and Costa Rica's role in a global context.