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Carlos Beita, Don Pablo’s 42-year-old nephew, had also watched the destruction. With 100 acres of farm and pasture, and 40 cows he knows by name, Carlos didn’t like the company’s growing power either—especially when it began cutting trees near rivers and clearing fields on the mountainsides where many springs are located. "When the company started planting up high, they closed a circle around the town, like a stranglehold," he tells me when I meet him at his farm one day.

Carlos is an unconventional farmer: He keeps part of his small plot wild—so thick with growth that El Pintado and his other cows won’t venture there. A few of his neighbors think he’s wasting good land, but he likes the quiet. "Sometimes I spend the whole day in here," he says. As he talks he machetes a path through the lush and canopied greenery, which contains the fecund magic of bobo birds, earthy odors, and wildly twisting vines. I have to step carefully to avoid the long lines of shimmering leaf bits, carried aloft by ants, which crisscross the forest floor. "It’s a place of peace for me," Carlos says as a black snake slithers by.

Pindeco’s bulldozing of the river was the last straw for Carlos, whose character seems as much a product of this land as the local flora. "I had to fight," he says. "They were taking away the water source for my cows!" He told Don Pablo about a local, small-scale farmers’ organization called Unaproa—a Spanish acronym for "the Union of Friends for the Protection of the Environment"—and suggested they ask the group for help.

Formed in 1995, Unaproa promotes organic agriculture, environmental awareness, and workers’ rights. Don Pablo and Carlos called one of its founders, Beltrán Vega, told him about the bulldozer incident, and invited him to come see for himself. Although Carlos and Vega later became friends, that first meeting did not go well.

"This guy shows up looking like some kind of explorer," says Carlos of Vega. "He has binoculars, two cameras, a compass, and an altimeter hanging around his neck. He’s weighted down with all this stuff. We give him a tour of the damage, and his altimeter keeps getting stuck. He’s tapping it and then shouting, ‘Here we are at four hundred meters. Write that down.’ We know he’s just trying to help, collecting evidence we can use with the company, but we didn’t think he was that smart. It was like he thought he was in a spy movie."

Vega laughs when reminded of that first encounter, then adds, "As farmers, we don’t have a lot of resources so we do what we can with what we have." The point of this kind of documentation, he says, is to hold the company accountable for its actions. "We’ve never wanted

Pindeco to go," says Vega. "But it needs to respect the land and the national laws."

Concerns about Pindeco’s practices had inspired Unaproa to cosponsor a forum with the company in 1997 to talk about how they could work together to protect the environment. "There are always two extremes," Pindeco’s then-director of operations, Felix González, stated at the forum’s opening. "One side does not want to kill a bird or cut a tree. The other side has a vision that is so short it doesn’t even know what the environment is. We are trying to reach a consensus here, between small farmers and large companies like Pindeco." Vega heard the encouraging words, but told me that González’s speech occurred at the same time Pindeco was expanding to the higher elevations. Words and deeds weren’t matching up.

Unaproa members, the Volcán farmers, and others began to strategize. At first the gatherings were large—up to 50 farmers and Pindeco workers. There were complaints about water and air contamination from Pindeco’s pesticide use, soil erosion, deforestation, labor and health violations, and water depletion. They wrote letters to the company, asking for a meeting to lay out their concerns. The company responded by sending letters to Don Pablo at his home, rather than to the group as a whole—now called Frente de Lucha Contra la Contaminación de Pindeco (The Front in the Struggle Against Pollution From Pindeco). These letters insisted that any disagreement be handled one-on-one between the company and Don Pablo, who was viewed by all as a kind of elder statesman. "But I wasn’t a lawyer," Don Pablo says. "I was someone who could see and understand the facts of cows and pigs. I knew it would have been a bad idea to negotiate on my own."

When Don Pablo refused to be lone negotiator, the company simply stopped responding to the group’s letters. And then attendance at Frente meetings began to drop off. Don Pablo’s son Alfonso left the group because his life was the church, and as it met in a gated residential compound owned by Pindeco, he didn’t want to jeopardize his membership. Others were frustrated by the group’s lack of organization and resources. The Frente didn’t even have enough money to feed people who came to the long meetings. Still others, who worked for Pindeco or had family members who did, began to worry about their jobs.

Pressure to ease up on the company was intense. Friendship alone held together the core group from Volcán, which now numbered three: Don Pablo, Carlos Beita, and Eladio Castro. "We were like little ants," says Carlos. "We couldn’t bite the train but we sure could bite the train driver and give him an allergy." The men, now in alliance with Unaproa and another environmental group based in San José, continued to be an irritant.

While local concerns went unanswered, Del Monte Fresh Produce initiated a campaign that would eventually gain Pindeco environmental certification from the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, in Geneva, Switzerland. Gaining an ISO 14001 series certificate is seen by some as a green seal of approval.

In fact, there are companies in the United States that won’t do business with suppliers that aren’t ISO 14001 certified. The problem with the program is that it is voluntary, with standards established by ISO’s industry membership. To gain certification, Pindeco, for example, set its own goals and did its own environmental self-evaluation, then hired its own auditor to check its compliance. No independent analysis was required.

Nikki Thanos, a journalist who studied Pindeco’s operations during research for her upcoming book Trouble in Paradise: Globalization and the Environment in Latin America, says that Pindeco made some positive changes. "ISO has been a powerful management tool for some companies. In Pindeco’s case, it helped them implement useful environmental education for workers, and improved health and safety standards." But, she adds, "ISO is green the way an apple is: on the outside. It does not address fundamental environmental issues, like mono-agriculture. If you drive down the Inter-American Highway all you see for miles and miles are pineapples. That is simply not a sustainable agricultural practice." Nevertheless, Pindeco was awarded ISO 14001 certification in 1999.

"Who the heck gives out this ISO?" asks Carlos Beita. "If we knew we’d write them a letter and tell them what we see here." We are walking his land again, and he’s getting worked up. He’s watched too much of what he loves, especially in the hills above Volcán, which house the river’s sources, plowed under for pineapple plantations. When I ask him whether Pindeco can ever be a good neighbor, he has a fast response. "I don’t think so. The Gold pineapple has had an incredible success in the market, so Pindeco is caught in a tunnel. It has to move forward and produce and produce."

Eladio Castro isn’t quite so quick to judge. "I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t say, ‘Look at the Maura,’" he replies, referring to a local river. "It’s been damaged and deforested, sometimes by us. But we have learned. Maybe the company can, too." Costa Rica’s environmental court has helped with remedial education. While the Volcán farmers continued to agitate, the environmental ministry continued to investigate, sending forest engineers and biologists to check for damage to the area around Volcán. Last year, the court reached an agreement with the company. While refusing to admit fault, Pindeco agreed to "restore the environment affected, and to pay compensation for the environmental damage of protected areas near creeks." It would reforest land around several streams, restore three damaged springs, and use alternative techniques to control erosion. "Given the need to reduce soil erosion, and given the effects that deforestation has had on the water supply in the region," the document says, "the restoration. . . should start immediately."

Don Pablo is happy with the court ruling. "But so far," he says, "I haven’t seen any real changes." One thing has changed, however. Don Pablo is ready to speak to the company on behalf of Volcán. He has been in endless meetings and workshops with farmers and environmentalists; he’s learned about stewardship and the rights of his community. "I’m ready," he says. "I have a little schooling. I’m no longer mute." The problem now may not be one of will but of language. The two sides use utterly different metaphors to describe what’s most important to them: One side speaks of seasons and the next generation, the other of quarterly reports; one side of the lungs and blood of a village, the other of efficient quality-management systems and bottom lines. "The company doesn’t think about the future," says Don Pablo. "It has worked by picking what is good from the broth and leaving the bones. If reforesting starts now, in twenty-five years my grandsons will begin to see results.

If something isn’t done about water depletion, and especially the plantings in the mountains above us, in twenty years the Volcán River will be dry."

Before I left for Costa Rica, I bought a Del Monte Gold, skinned its prickly bark, cored its hard center, and ate it with my fingers. Like most Americans, I have become accustomed to enjoying exotic fruits and vegetables grown year-round in places like Volcán. The sweetness of the pineapple stung my lips and tongue; it was the best I’d ever had.

Marilyn Berlin Snell is Sierra’s writer/editor.

Click here for a Spanish translation of this article.