Just as deforestation isn’t simply cutting down trees, reforestation isn’t as simple as just planting trees: You have to put the forest back. Finca Leola has a phrase that we think captures the heart of reforestation: “It isn’t reforestation unless the end result is a forest.” Plantations have their purpose, but in them we are raising a crop, not producing a forest. There is good that comes from growing trees anywhere and in any amount, but it doesn’t necessarily recreate a forest.

The key characteristic of a forest is diversity, not only of trees but of other plants and of animals, birds, and insects. A forest is a community, and although the community needs to be productive to survive, the goal is an ongoing community, not what it can produce.

Forests have another characteristic that is hard to achieve: They are large. It requires lots of land and lots of time to build a forest.

Here in Costa Rica, many of the trees that are part of a mature forest will not grow well (or sometimes not at all) without shade. What that means is that you cannot directly plant a mature or climax rainforest. Nature does it in stages, and we have to do the same.

Nature follows predictable patterns when regrowing a forest after having lost it to farming, timber harvesting, or fire. This process is called forest succession. In an abandoned field, succession of plant species goes from short-lived species to larger species that shade out the short-lived species. Shrubs appear next, and after that, tree seedlings start to rise above the shrubs. 

The earliest tree species are sometimes called pioneer species and have relatively softer wood and a relatively shorter life span. Since they grow faster than seedlings of harder trees, in nature, almost pure stands of pioneer species rise up on abandoned farmland. They decrease the amount of light reaching the ground and use large quantities of water from the soil, changing the environment beneath them so that it is impossible for most of their seedlings to grow in the shade of the mature trees. Thus, shade-tolerant harder species begin to grow under them. The pioneer species dies naturally or becomes subject to attack by insects or disease, and with them out of the canopy, the harder species grow both in height and diameter. Because most of those harder species are able to regenerate in their own shade, the forest continues to mature and to reseed itself.

We mimic and accelerate forest succession by planting seedlings of pioneer species in fields and keeping the undergrowth away from them for the first few years. This has to be paid for somehow, and our way is to gradually harvest the wood from the pioneer species instead of letting it fall prey to disease or die of old age. As we do this, we fill the spaces with seedlings of harder species that will become the base of the climax forest. Since we also prune the pioneer species to produce long, straight logs, the value of the wood greatly exceeds the costs of caring for the trees, and the money from its sale is used to buy land, seedlings, and labor to start a forest in the next field.