This research will examine the book A Place in the Rain Forest: Settling the Costa Rican Frontier, by Darryl Cole-Christensen. The research will set forth the pattern of organization of the book and then discuss the means by which the author develops his argument that the shape of modern Latin America and Costa Rica in particular, in both the industrialized sector and the natural setting, owes much to the values of indus rialization and exploitation of natural resources of the area.
Structure of the Book. A Place in the Rain Forest is organized in the form of a personal memoir, or more exactly a series of personal and family memories of specific incidents at Finca Loma Linda, the family's large farm in Costa Rica, over the years. Each narrative includes at its end a discussion of the difference between how Cole-Christensen felt at the time of the incident and in retrospect, from the perspective of the more ecologically and socially informed 1990s. The common thread running through each chapter is the history of the farm, purchased by the father of Cole-Christensen in the mid-1950s and settled by the family more or less in the manner of frontier experience.
But the change in that history, which is really a change in the viewpoint of Cole-Christensen as family and farm historian, is informed by enlargement of the ecology-related knowledge base from which the farm's owners drew. Problems that were encountered by the Coles in developing the farm and making it a sustaining enterprise are explained in terms of the enlarged knowledge base.
Sources and Viewpoint. The direct experience of the frontier itself--desolate, isolated, sometimes dangerous, and always separated from the mainstream of modern conveniences--is central to the book. In the introductory section, Cole-Christensen explains that those who have historically functioned as frontier folk do not perceive their experience as a project of despoiling the environment or manipul...