Utilans and the Utilian Spiny-Tailed Iguana in Today's World

Where Development, Conservation and Tourism Intersect

Mark Gibson
The Nahual Foundation

On the Honduran island of Utila, natural resource conservation is becoming an important activity. Local business people, Western expatriates, and foreign tourists and travelers—who share a mere 42 square kilometers off Honduras’ Caribbean coast—are all part of a booming local tourist economy. The boom centers on scuba diving where islanders realize the symbolic and material capital of their natural marine environment. But the benefits and costs of the boom are unevenly spread and the island’s development is uncontrolled.
In 2006 I worked as a researcher for a nature documentary in Utila. I interviewed key players in the local tourism industry and learned about the real challenges in supporting environmental conservation with ecotourism-led growth in developing countries.

The Other “Side”
A 30 minute walk into the interior—away from the main strip housing the island’s dive shops—takes the intrepid traveler to the other “side” of Utila: the mangrove and hardwood forests now greatly threatened by the island community’s expansion and waste.

Just one of their inhabitants is the Utilian spiny-tailed iguana, or “Swamper,” a species found only in the 8 square kilometers of mangroves in Utila. Almost immediately after its rediscovery by German herpetologist Gunther Kohler in 1994, this black, tree-living iguana became the focus of international conservation efforts.

In the same year, Kohler set up the Utilian Iguana Conservation Project (CPUI) and by 1998 the project had received sufficient funding from the Frankfurt Zoological Society and Senckenberg Nature Research Society to establish the Iguana Breeding and Research Station.

After 12 years of conservation efforts, much has been done. The World Conservation Union now recognizes the spiny-tailed iguana as critically endangered in its Red List of Threatened Species; the iguana station is actively studying the animal’s ecology, capturing and incubating eggs for their better survival, and educating islanders in local schools; and the Honduran government has imposed a year-round hunting ban.

But all is still not well for the iguana.

Developing Conservation
Efforts to protect the spiny-tailed iguana reveal the difficulties of natural resource conservation in developing countries. Troubled by limited funds and restrictive budgeting laws, Utila’s local government is unable to fulfill its national government’s decision to ban the hunting of the iguana.

Aurel Heidelberg, the director of the Iguana Research and Breeding Station, suggests, “It would be relatively easy [to impose the ban]. You would need a park ranger. It is mainly a question of money to employ somebody.” But in Utila’s town hall, neither the money nor the legal possibility is there.

Mayor Alton Cooper explains, “We don’t have a large budget, and being able to allocate money from it for these environmental projects is difficult.” Given the laws surrounding municipal budgeting, the municipality is only allowed to spend a small percentage on protecting the island’s natural resources.

Mayor Cooper continues, “I can’t say, ‘No, we’re not going to go build a new dock at the keys, but get two extra guards to patrol the reef.’ Then I get fined.”

This problem of a limited and restricted budget even extends to the maintenance of the island’s security. Noticeably, a council of dive shops provides the funding for the tourist police that patrol Utila’s main streets.

Navigating Without a Chart
What also defeated the iguana station’s efforts is the island’s unplanned development, damaging and destroying large parts of the mangrove forests. “Development on the island has to be done more sensitively,” explains Heidelberg. “It is just going too fast.”

While Mayor Cooper does not agree the development has been too quick, he admits that there is a problem: there is no municipal plan for the island’s development. “There’s very little we can do as far as the environment until we have a plan,” Mayor Cooper notes. “We’re navigating without a chart.”

Thankfully, this is an area in which the municipality does have freedom to act. Mayor Cooper ex-pects to have a municipal plan for development created by November of this year.

Learning Is the Key
One point upon which the Utilian government and the Iguana Station do agree is that the key to protecting Utila’s environment is changing local perceptions of the environment.

Mayor Cooper explains that residents have become more environmentally conscious through dive tourism. “I can remember,” he says, “when it was common practice to go to the reef and remove the corral and use it as fill and when netting was common practice with fishermen. But through the influence of the tourist industry we’ve changed those practices.”

Likewise, the iguana station believes the best chance for protecting the spiny-tailed iguana is through creating awareness with its volunteers and programs in Utila’s three public schools.

“The traditional Utilian custom of cooking the iguana and the eggs is decreasing,” notes Heidelberg. “People raised here on the island are becoming more aware of environmental issues through their school programs and children.”

The Sustenance of Principles
Unfortunately, a possibility few want to discuss is that ecotourism-led growth in a developing country might better support environmental degradation, rather than conservation. For the more Utila becomes a tourist, and therefore, a global destination of foreign wealth, the more it becomes a home for poor Hondurans chasing the Utilian dream.

Heidelberg has found this the most difficult challenge to protecting the spiny-tailed iguana as well as many other animals and plants on the island. “They [the mainlanders] come here and don’t find a job. They are poor and have to survive. So they go into the forest to get food to eat or sell, and hunting this iguana species is very easy.”

The spiny-tailed iguana, threatened despite educational campaigns and endangered status.

And, as Utilian resident and fisherman Hale Deloy Whitefield suggests, the moral dilemma of choosing between hurting a poor Honduran and hunting an endangered iguana means that no action will be taken at all. “Nobody won’t do nothing about [the hunting]. It’s like hell to catch a man for wanting something to eat.”

Boom and Bust
The tourist boom in Utila has involved a new alignment of public and private resources around the issue of environmental conservation. In the face of ambitious proclamations about ecotourism’s generation of environmental benefits, I found through my ethnographic research a more complicated and uncertain connection. Local actors are part of a tricky balancing act between protecting natural resources and developing them, between ecological investments and social ills.

This is a common story. What is happening on this small island is part of a much larger picture of the often contentious meeting of economic development, environmental conservation and tourism seen around today’s world.

Mark Gibson graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2005 with a BA in international relations. In the following 15 months he worked and volunteered in a variety of positions and places throughout Central America.