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The Rainmaker Foundation comprises a group of people in the San Francisco Bay Area who heard about a planet that needed to be saved and decided that they and their friends could do it, beginning with a small rain forest in Central America.
But what The Rainmaker Foundation really is, is a zero-overhead foundation committed to helping Professor Janzen get the word out, so he can buy every inch of rain forest he thinks needs to be saved.
Our goal is to raise the $6,500,000 required to buy the remaining land required to complete the Guanacaste Preserve, and to make it self-sufficient.
We're doing this for four reasons: So that our children and their children can visit it. So that we can save species precious to our planet. To preserve a place where we can discover new medicines. And to create a model for land preservation by enlarging this United Nations World Heritage Site.
The good news is, the land we want to buy is inexpensive now, and available now.
The better news is, the people selling it would rather sell it to us than to agribusiness.
The Guanacaste Conservation Area Preserve, on the west coast of Costa Rica, comprises three national parks, two wildlife refuges, a forest reserve, and all the private land that our foundation can buy to add to it.
The Guanacaste Conservation Area Preserve was begun in 1971 and was finalized as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO on December 2, 1999.
Today this preserve covers 323,600 acres, which represent about two percent of Costa Rica, or approximately the size of the greater San Francisco Bay Area.
Professor Dan Janzen, the University of Pennsylvania biologist who helped create the Guancacaste Conservation Area Preserve in Costa Rica.
Because Nobel did not create a prize for ecology, the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences invented one so they could give Dan Janzen the first. It's called the Crafoord Prize in Coevolutionary Ecology.
In addition, he won the Kyoto Prize in biological sciences from the Inamori Foundation, Kyoto, Japan-the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
He donated every penny of his $100,000 Crafoord and $400,000 Kyoto prizes to establish the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund to buy rain forest land to add to the Guanacaste Conservation Area. Forever.
He is also the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship genius award.
Global warming is likely to result in massive extinction of tropical biodiversity. The only large areas of this biodiversity that will survive are in large topographically and ecologically diverse national parks and conservation areas. This conservation area is the finest in Central America.
As global warming comes on us, only two kinds of national parks are going to do well. First, those with cool mountain slopes up which the organisms can creep as the lowlands heat up. The Rincon Rain forest has precisely this kind of slope (see the photographs).
Second, those with a dry forest side and a rain forest side. As warming comes on, the dry forest gets hotter and drier, and its organisms creep into the rain forest for refuge.
The Rincon Rain forest is adjacent to the wettest portion of the preserve, and serves as a major part of the wet forest refuge for the two-thirds of the western portion of the preserve that is dry forest (this is why it is called the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund).
However, about 30 percent of the biodiversity of the preserve lives in the Rincon Rain forest (about 90,000 species, many more than exist in the entire State of California). This piece of land, 31 small, abandoned, and largely forested farms adjacent to the preserve, is a crucial part of the equation, and therefore must be purchased and added to the preserve.
If the Rincon Rain forest is purchased and added to the preserve, its ability to conserve its 235,000 species (as many species as occur in all of the United States and Canada) will be very substantially enhanced.
Professor Janzen established a zero-overhead foundation to provide the most efficient method of directly purchasing land for the preserve. It is called the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund, a nonprofit 501.c.3 foundation registered in the state of California. This fund was formally recognized by the IRS on November 24, 1998, with IRS number 94-3280315 and DLN number 17053142018008 (contact person, D. A. Downing, 1-877-829-5500).
Its purpose, as stated in its approved IRS application, is as follows: "To constitute an endowment fund to support some of the operations and development expenses of the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste in northwestern Costa Rica, a 120,000 hectare conserved wildland (in U.S. terminology, roughly equivalent to a large national park). The Fund will attempt to raise further funds for its growth in addition to growth through investment of its funds. This will be done through grant applications to philanthropic foundations and governments, and petitions to individuals for support."
Write a tax-deductible check to "The Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund" or just "GFDCF".
Mail it to:
Professor Dan Janzen
University of Pennsylvania
Department of Biology
415 South University Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19104