An environmentalist raises the Red Frog issue!

This month's Bocas Breeze features a lead article about the disappearance of the red frogs. While not directly attacking the project itself for their demise, the author, an admitted enviromentalist, did make the assertion that man and nature can not live together.

"While at the time the cause of the declines was a mystery, we now know that many of these disappearances can be attributed to a fungal disease called chytridiomycosis, which has been spreading eastward across Panama from Costa Rica since the late 1980s. While the disease has been directly responsible for the rapid die-offs of many species, new scientific studies have shown that the disease preys more intensely on frogs that are already undergoing some form of environmental stress. For example, frogs in poor-quality habitat or highly fragmented areas show signs of stress long before the disease takes hold. And when these stressed-out frogs do become infected, they seldom recover," says the author.

Not to let her assertions go unchallenged, I responded with a letter to the editor and stated, "It seems like there is always some nature lover or environmentalist who sees humans apart from nature and not a part of it. I think you will find that the red frogs will be on Bastimentos long after most of us are gone… for one reason… Nature finds a way.

"Let me tell you a story about the water fowl we have in our area of Northern California. Environmentalists were so concerned about over development of this area that they feared the water birds would be wiped out. So in order to have man and nature co-exist peacefully, they set aside thousands of acres of wetlands as “open space” that could never be touched. What happened? These birds can often be seen feeding in the tall grass and shrubs alongside our highways and over passes. Perhaps they never got the memo which said we had preserved the wetlands for them!

"Near our house in Mill Valley there are coyotes running wild down the street along with deer, raccoons and the occasional silver fox. Of course, when our house was built, it was feared it would wipe out all the wildlife. Apparently not."

I alerted Scott Harris to the article to which he responded, "Our PR person in Bocas, Michelle Slough, will be writing a retraction but my initial response is this:

"Our whole property only accounts for 9% of the island and when done, our build out will only be on 3% of the island – not 8% as they falsely claim. Our principal build out so far has been on CATTLE FARMS where Red Frogs weren’t living anyway.

"Of course, there will still be some small areas affected, [but] they will be moved before any construction takes place. And next build out area is in the teak areas, not the jungle. In our EIS, we have been required to have many “thoroughfares” or passages for ALL the fauna.

"I wish this person would really do her research on the EIS provisions before making bad assumptions about our intentions and the project. And the study of Red Frogs was made by senior scientists over the course of several months. No telling how long or how scientific her study was or what her credentials really are besides being a frog lover. We are frog lovers too."

So are we. I guess we're just stressing them out!