A Place in the Rain Forest

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 enterpr

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tends to focus more on looking at the negative consequences to the land of human intervention, particularly intervention undertaken without a great deal of forethought. But A Place in the Rain Forest is less a story about the practical aspects of settling the farm than about the emergence of "contemporary values" regarding environmental protection. It is a story about a change from the limited frontier vision of success against the land to the vision of the long-term consequences of that success. Geographic Content. Cole-Christensen describes the venue of Finca Loma Linda, in Coto Brus, as a highland rain forest. The way geography determined the pattern of experience for the settlers who arrived there in the 1950s was that, despite some apparent success at clearing land of rain forest vegetation and planting crops in the fields, the farms yielded little harvest. Inability of settlers to import heavy agricultural equipment meant that they were often forced to use machetes and sticks to clear such land as they could; much of it was composed of steep mountains. But more central to their lack of commercial success was the inaccessibility of markets (explained by lack of transportation) and the failure of American farming methods in th
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1606
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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