It is still night, and in the jungle, this means: It is pitch black. But the observation tower, 35 meters high, just about towers over the canopy. From up there, the sky is visible, with a nuance of dark grey hinting at the morning to come. A howler monkey roars and barks; the animal is a harmless leaf-eater, it sounds like a Tyrannosaurus.
Darkness. Roaring, Silence. Roaring. Then it starts as if switched on, a crescendo begins, a whistling and trilling, a fluting, squeaking, and croaking. Each ray of the rising sun conducts new singers to the chorus of birds, frogs, and monkeys. A century concert. Forested mountains stretch to the horizon, a splendor of green. A keel-billed toucan zooms by.
One would like to stand here always, watching and listening. And be part of it.
Belize is a small, relatively unknown country in the Caribbean; until 1981, it was a British colony, a rarity in Spanish-dominated Central and South America. Largely unnoticed by the global public, it has transformed into an eco-wonderland. In Belize, one can marvel at what has been largely deforested, concreted over, parceled out, and straightened in most countries of the world: a completely intact nature. Those who wander through the jungle there experience how good – and right – it feels to be surrounded by such an abundance of life.
And how irretrievably Homo sapiens has become estranged from nature elsewhere, to what extent it has destroyed it, even though it cannot live without it, because it provides clean water, clean air, and fertile soils. It pollinates their apple trees, their rape, and their coffee, protecting them from flood and drought.
The loss of biodiversity is a catastrophe. Humans have set off the largest mass extinction since 65 million years ago. Species are disappearing at an unprecedented pace, at least ten to a hundred times faster than the average of the last ten million years, and the dying is accelerating further.
In the eco-paradise of Belize, one can learn how an entire country has dedicated itself to the protection of its nature. And that it is worthwhile. The beauty of the beaches and diving reefs attracts tourists, who in 2023 brought in a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product. With jaguar tourism, figures from Brazil show, up to 55 times more money can be made than the occasional attacks by the big cat on livestock cost.
But even in the sense of the British ecologist Andrew Balmford, biodiversity pays off. In 2021, he and his team compared the value of pristine nature at 62 locations worldwide with the yield humans could generate there. It turned out that the services of intact ecosystems, such as carbon storage or flood protection, usually produce a greater economic yield than forestry or agriculture. For instance, if Nepal were to convert its Shivapuri-Nagarjun National Park into agricultural land, the area could store 60 percent less carbon, and water quality would decrease by 88 percent—the researchers calculated a depreciation of the area by ten million euros per year. Even those who only look at dollars and cents, according to Balmford, can see that “preserving and restoring nature is generally the best basis for prosperity today.”
In Belize, you can meet people who understand why we need untamed life. Wild forest, vital reef. These are people who are fighting for it.
There’s Jacob Marlin, a wildlife researcher from the USA who has lived in the rainforest for 30 years, found “the mother of all cocoa” there, and possibly a new billion-dollar source for financing conservation. Belizean biologist Elma Kay, believe to be capable of reconciling warring parties with her angelic smile and persistence. The fisherman Jason Young, throws small lobsters and snails back into the water because taking young animals is not sustainable and therefore forbidden. The wealthy Danish-American entrepreneur couple who want to save tropical forests with sustainable agriculture.
Belize, slightly larger than Hesse, hosts more than 100 protected areas, making up nearly 40 percent of its land area and about 20 percent of its marine areas. Ornithologists count more than 600 bird species. The world’s second-largest barrier reef is located off Belize’s coast, with mangrove forests rooted in turquoise glittering water.
The country’s jungle is part of the Selva Maya, the ancient “Forest of the Maya,” which Belize shares today with Guatemala and Mexico. With more than ten million hectares, it is the second largest after the Amazon basin in America. There are 23 different ecosystems here, with correspondingly high biodiversity. Germany has invested around 30 million euros in projects over the past 13 years that aim to save this area for the future. 60 percent of Belize’s land area is covered in forest, as much as in Costa Rica.
In Belize, the forest also shelters the jaguar, which loves vast territories and is considered endangered because humans continually reduce and fragment these hunting grounds. The critically endangered Central American tapir with its wobbly snout, the likewise endangered Geoffroy’s spider monkey, and the Guatemalan howler monkey, one of the loudest land animals in the world.
“That is by far the best way to protect something: Own it!”
“The howler monkeys were hanging in the trees, watching me,” recounts Jacob Marlin, the wildlife researcher, a laid-back guy, 58, with a long ponytail, the classic hairstyle of biologists from his generation. It was 2015, on Christmas Day, when Marlin had finally managed to complete the construction of the observation tower in the jungle, after 16 years. Six tons of steel were used, shipped from Georgia in the USA, by flatbed and ship, and then hauled through the Bladen into the jungle. At the time, he chatted with the monkeys while working, the biologist says. “Kind of like: See, I am going to finish the tower after all.”
Marlin strides quickly along a path through the rainforest, past the tower, wanting to show off his chocolate laboratory, yet another one of his projects here in the jungle. It all began in 1986 during his first trip to Belize. “It was a wonderland for me,” he says, “I wanted to participate in protecting the forest.”
Marlin stayed; in 1995, he founded the Belize Foundation for Research and Environmental Education (BFree), a foundation for research and environmental education, and leased 470 hectares of tropical forest from a Belizean farmer who initially wanted to establish a banana plantation there. Since then, BFree has dedicated itself to conservation, including the research and breeding of the Hicatee, a species of turtle that is overhunted and therefore endangered.
BFree funds itself with field internships and rainforest excursions for students, researchers, and ecotourists. What serves today as the cafeteria on the BFree premises was once the little schoolhouse for Marlin’s three children, whom he and his then-wife raised in the jungle.
Today, a night in Marlin’s forest costs about 150 US dollars, including full board and transfer on the bed of his pickup truck. BFree has 21 employees, including Marlin’s partner; his children are grown and live in the USA.
Marlin says, “I love being here.” No day is like another. Sometimes, it’s all full of bugs, “they get tangled in your hair, land in your food, suddenly they’re gone, and everywhere frogs are hopping around, which in turn attract snakes or owls.” By now, the banana farmer has sold him the forest. “That is by far the best way to protect something,” says Marlin: “Own it!”
The story of how Jacob Marlin managed to secure a million US dollars for a piece of rainforest sounds adventurous, and if what he recounts happened as told, he and his biologist friends in the USA might have found a completely new way of financing conservation. It’s not just about a million here and there, but about gigantic sums: “We’re talking about billions of dollars,” says Marlin.
He means the volume of accumulated fines from chemical or oil companies and other environmental polluters that they must pay to the US government when they are sued for environmental destruction. The often spectacularly high sums must then be used for the restoration of rivers, soils, wells, marshes, or forests contaminated with toxic waste.
Marlin tells how his small conservation organization in Belize managed to get a share of the restitution from an environmental offender in the US. Birds were the vehicle. “Many people in the US don’t realize it, but migratory birds spend most of the year here, in the South.” Indeed, an estimated one billion birds winter in the Maya forest. So, if bird populations in Florida suffer from the consequences of habitat contamination, it makes sense for the perpetrator to compensate for the damage by supporting their winter quarters in Belize.
Marlin laughs. “Isn’t it incredible how a terrible thing suddenly turns into something good?”
The BFree man squats down in front of a small tree, the first in a long row standing at the feet of tall jungle trees, in the shade. He pushes aside the leaves. There, close to the trunk, elongated yellow fruits with a pinkish hue grow: “Wild cacao,” says Marlin.
The conservationist only discovered a peculiarity of his jungle beans late: underneath their husk, they are snow-white instead of violet. He sent a sample to an international consortium, which blind-tasted the chocolate derived from it. The testers were apparently delighted; even an untrained palate tastes the spicy aroma.
Marlin had the plant’s genome examined. “At some point, I received a letter saying something like: Congratulations, your cocoa is the only pure Criollo.” Marlin says he still rejoices about it: “That’s the mother of all cocoa!” Not only is Criollo considered perhaps the noblest cocoa variety, but it is also one of two original forms – an ancient Maya treasure.
With chocolatiers as partners, BFree is currently testing the US market for its wild chocolate. Even the most expensive variant of the 50-gram bars sold well, says Marlin, for 45 dollars. “The jungle is full of secrets – and treasures we don’t yet know.”
The jungle pays for itself
Elma Kay knows this well. The 48-year-old biologist, with dark, smooth hair and a smile on her lips, often speaks timeless phrases like: “The forest is our livelihood.” Or: “We must bring all stakeholders together.” As if she were just a kind forest educator. But one should not underestimate Kay: This woman, raised in a remote Belizean village without electricity and higher education, has become a figurehead of conservation in her country through excellence, scholarships, and via a US university.
“Dr. Kay,” reverently calls the ranger who opens the gate at the south gate to the Maya forest for her tour today: she wants to show the “Big Tree,” the mahogany tree that survived the British timber hunger. As the director of the research institute she founded at the University of Belize, Kay was part of an alliance that, three years ago, was able to purchase a large piece of the Selva Maya in the northwest of the country from a US forest investor – before expansion-hungry farmers did.
Agriculture is perhaps the greatest threat to the Belizean forest. In the southern part of the country, where it covers three-quarters of the Maya Mountains, according to a study, banana, citrus, and other plantations could have displaced more than four percent of the forest between 2016 and 2026.
The new eco-landowners now own almost 100,000 hectares, more than the area of Rügen. The area serves as a corridor for the tapir, the jaguar, or the also endangered white-lipped peccary, a relative of wild pigs. Anyone looking at a satellite map of Belize and Guatemala immediately sees why this northern connection to the Selva Maya is needed: there is no longer one in the south. West of the border is all barren – Guatemala. In the east, it’s green – Belize.
“It’s about much more,” says Kay. “We humans need the Maya forest!” It protects three watersheds; the river systems provide a third of Belize’s drinking water and a quarter of what farmers need for irrigation.
The Maya forest reserve cost more than $76 million – a sum that environmentalists cannot necessarily afford. But Belizean beer magnate Michael Bowen, who already owns a good chunk of forest on-site, brought friends from the US into the picture, with strong connections to the Nature Conservancy (TNC), one of the largest conservation organizations in the world. In the end, they devised a financing model that Elma Kay calls “a milestone and a model for other countries.”
The idea: The jungle pays for itself. It will grow and expand over the next three decades – and in doing so, it will sequester vast amounts of carbon. This way, the forest practically generates its own CO₂ certificates. These, in turn, can be lucratively sold on the world market, thus servicing the loan that TNC has taken out to cover half of the purchase price for the piece of the Belizean Selva Maya. The other half was raised through donations. “We hope,” calculates Kay, who now manages the Belize Maya Forest Trust and thus the forest, “that in the end, we will reach nearly 30 million tons of CO₂ equivalents.”
Elma Kay has reached her goal; she stands at the foot of a giant mahogany tree in the old Maya forest, its trunk more than three meters thick, surrounded by dense rainforest, slender acacias and figs, vines, philodendrons. “There are hardly any old mahogany trees left here,” says Kay. “It was the favorite wood of the British.” Mahogany trees are so endangered that their wood can only be traded with special permission, just like that of rosewood, which is very popular among the Chinese.
Since the turn of the millennium, Belize has lost about eight percent of its forest. “And the pressure is increasing,” says Kay, “farmers want more land for corn, sugarcane, soybeans.”
At last count, 21 jaguars roamed Kay’s Maya forest, which is densely covered with 400 wildlife cameras from researchers at Virginia Tech University; they can distinguish individual big cats by their spots. And because agriculture is encroaching into the forest everywhere, Elma Kay has teamed up with allies from several Belizean environmental organizations to piece together a corridor of forest and savannah at least five kilometers wide between North and South Belize and protect it. “At the moment, we are working to persuade the government to build suitable wildlife crossings over the road,” says Kay.
From the outset, environmental protection in Belize has been closely linked to politics. It began with two women, Lydia Waight and Alice Craig, and a case of nepotism, unusually with a commendable outcome: Both are sisters of the country’s first Prime Minister, George Price. Belize, just released into independence, was still searching for its new role without the British. It so happened that the two women were passionate birdwatchers, and not only that: They were among the founding members of the Audubon Society in Belize, a branch of the same club in the USA, with Lydia married to the chairman.
Thus, the sisters managed to instill environmental protection into the nation’s cradle. Two months after independence, the first laws on protected areas were enacted, which were soon designated. And to this day, environmentalists enjoy a freedom unlike anywhere else in the world: The model is called “co-management” and means that NGOs are largely allowed to monitor the areas entrusted to them by the government on their own.
This extends to sovereign tasks. For example, rangers of the marine conservation NGO Turneffe Atoll Sustainability Association (TASA) are authorized to arrest fishermen caught with prohibited catches on board, such as undersized specimens of the overfished queen conch or Caribbean spiny lobster. Or animals that are currently protected. Imagine, Nabu employees arresting German eco-offenders while walking in the forest.
We don’t benefit ourselves if we catch too many lobsters.
Jason Young, a fisherman for 30 years and in the third generation, likes the TASA people. “They’re my best friends,” he jokes. “They drive away the competition that doesn’t follow the rules.”
Young stands in the “Baby J,” his small white boat anchored in the water off a mangrove island. At the bottom, in four meters of depth, glimmers a narrow box – the lobster trap. Young’s nephews, young men, jump into the water armed with a looped pole. It’s quick: pole into the box, loop around a lobster tail, and zip, it tightens. In the end, 22 of the reddish-brown, spotted Caribbean spiny lobsters wriggle in a tub on the “Baby J.”
“The traps are rarely this full,” says Young, pleased. He then measures the smaller ones with a caliper; one proves to be too young: its shell is shorter than eight centimeters – he tosses it back into the sea. “It’s better in the long run,” says Young. “We don’t benefit ourselves if we catch too many lobsters.”
Young is a camp fisherman, which means he has a small base in the south of the atoll on one of the more than 150 small mangrove islands of the atoll: a pier for landing the catch, a colorful sign on the beach, “Tula’s Camp,” named after Young’s father, who built the station. Two wooden houses on stilts for overnight stays, a shed, space for processing the catch. “We spend three to seven days here, then it’s back home.”
Have there been more lobsters in the ten years since TASA rangers patrol the atoll with fast boats? “Not really,” says Jason Young. And the fishermen are divided, he estimates; half of them do not adhere to the closed seasons and catch sizes.
Caribbean spiny lobster tails sell for $60 per pound in the US. And a pound of the Queen conch – it lives in a pink iridescent shell popular with tourists – costs nearly $30 in Florida. TASA fights against market temptation with technology: a sensitive radar, drones, and a camera that can zoom in on ships from almost three kilometers away.
The TASA marine protectors and the Audubon Society, like other NGOs, benefit from a “Debt for Nature Swap” negotiated two years ago: a trade, essentially a forgiveness of Belize’s national debt, in exchange for the commitment to conservation. TNC, once again the large American conservation NGO, along with the US Development Bank and Credit Suisse, ensure that Belize’s debts get a fancy new packaging and are presented as “Blue Bonds,” suggesting that purchasing them saves the ocean. This makes the heavily indebted country attractive to investors again: the Blue Bonds are less risky for investors than regular government bonds and attractive for Belize: the difference from the original debt amount is what Belize essentially gets forgiven. This results in $180 million – and this sum Belize must spend on conservation over the next 20 years.
$100 million for a farm
“We want to create a new narrative,” says Cabot. She stands on the balcony of their farm’s guesthouse, her hair white-blond, wiry, and sun-tanned – she turns 70 this year, while her husband approaches 80. Cabot looks out over the fields to their private rainforest. “Agriculture and environmental conservation depend on each other,” she says. “We need pollinators, birds, predators, clean water, clean air!”
It started in 2019, and it’s fitting for Belize that Henry Canton, the partner of the entrepreneurial couple, also comes from the Price political family again; Canton is the nephew of the first Prime Minister. The idea behind the Silk Grass Farms: a organic farm that generates enough money to protect the rainforest that covers 90 percent of the 10,000-hectare property. Rangers need to be paid, fire protection, research projects.
On the farm, passion fruit and lemongrass grow, Mexican sunflowers for the bees, and 2500 vanilla plants in a greenhouse specifically designed for them, streams flow through the green hills, ponds store water for dry days.
Experiments are being conducted with crop rotations, biochar from coconut shells, nitrogen-fixing plants that are supposed to replace fertilizers, and plenty of new ideas for tropical organic farming. The profit should not come from fatter coconut or pineapple harvests, but from products made from them. For this purpose, a factory is being set up on the farm premises for cooking, juicing, fermenting, and micro-filtering. The commonplace fruit from the fields is upgraded to something precious, for which customers are expected to pay a good amount of money.
Currently, the new manufacturers are experimenting with cold-pressed coconut oil and juices without additives. The watermelon goes into the machine with its peel. This makes the juice taste more interesting than the sweet broth from just the flesh and is probably healthier, but also a bit bitter.
Cabot and Kjellerup have invested more than $100 million in the Silk Grass Farms, they say. “This is the mother of all impactful investments,” says Cabot, laughing her American laugh, broad and loud. She comes from old East Coast money; her ancestors were entrepreneurs and patrons. Together with Kjellerup, she founded and operated a shoe factory in the USA until 2018, Dansko. The company filled a market niche: comfortable clogs for people who stand for long periods, farmers, caregivers. “Silk Grass Farms is supposed to be our grand finale as entrepreneurs,” says Mandy Cabot.
The Cabot-Kjellerups, the Kays, the Youngs, and the Marlins on this strip of land won’t be able to stop the mass extinction of species, the rise in world population, the exploitation, poisoning, and plastic pollution of nature. But they are also not discouraged by all the bad news; instead, they counteract the drama of species death with their projects. Creatively and effectively, they make the world, at least in Belize, a better place. They have turned the small country into a laboratory for sophisticatedly financed nature conservation. And a pilgrimage site for people who have forgotten what it feels like to be a part of what keeps us alive: a primal force of nature full of poetry and magic.
