As an ecologist, Elier Tabilo Valdivieso knows that wetlands provide huge benefits to communities nearby, by protecting them from flooding and providing beautiful supplies of fish and fresh water. As an educator, however, he recognizes that convincing residents to truly appreciate their backyard bogs is tricky. A professor with the regional graduate-level program in wildlife management at Costa Rica's National university, Tabilo has developed a series of training programs designed to turn even the most eco-indifferent cattle rancher into a wetlands cheerleader.

San Miguelito is a small farming community near Lake Nicaragua. Working with Fundacion del Rio, a local conservation group, Tabilo and his graduate students led wetlands appreciation workshops for San Miguelito's teachers, community leaders, and farmers. Participants divided into groups to discuss threats to their wetlands, agree on their most serious environmental problems, and suggest solutions.

Villagers decided that their most pressing problems were deforestation, lack of environmental education, uncontrolled fires, and lawbreakers who intentionally damage wetlands and other natural resources. They elected to begin reforestation programs, prevent soil erosion, and protect native plants, wildlife, and the steams that feed San Miguelito's swamps.

Tabilo explains that the workshops combined biological information about wetlands' benefits with discussions about how teachers and farmers can convince their neighbors to protect natural resources. "The workshop's goals were to change attitudes and challenge residents to solve their own problems," he says

Using the same model, Tabilo has organized participatory workshops in wetlands communities near the Gulf of Fonseca in Honduras, along the Miskito Coast of Nicaragua, and in Sandy Bay, El Salvador.

According to Antonio Ruiz, director Fundacion del Rio in Nicaragua, his group's and Tabilo's efforts have encouraged a gradual but important change in attitude among residents of San Miguelito. "Not long ago, no one here talked about the environment, only about cattle," he recalls. "Now they understand and defend the environment." He offers this example: "Recently a local landowner hired hunters to kill a jaguar, a legally protected species, that had attacked his cattle. But community members reported him to the authorities."

In addition, not long after Tabilo's workshop, local teachers organized an Association of Ecological Educators in order to train their colleagues and share environmental education materials. Other villagers are working with another local group, called Jovenes Ambientalistas (Young Environmentalists) to establish a Center of Environmental Interpretation.

San Miguelito residents have also petitioned the International Convention on Wetlands to designate their wetlands as a Ramsar site, so named because the first international wetlands protection treaty was signs in Ramsar, Iran in 1971. The official designation would bring international prestige, recognition, and technical and financial assistance. Nicaragua has just one other Ramsar site: nearby Los Guatusos, Wildlife Refuge, which skirts the southern shores of Lake Nicaragua.