Turtle nesting site threatened by TV show

Ah, that great oxymoron, "reality" TV. A Colombian knockoff of Survivor is setting up its stage, obstacle course, scaffolding for cameras and lights and other structures on Bluff Beach in Bocas Town, Bocas del Toro. The contrived competitions and televised treachery will be taking place for three months of the sea turtle nesting season, which began on that beach in March and will run through August.

Several species of turtles --- giant leatherbacks, hawksbill, loggerheads and greens --- nest on this beach. The Caracol TV Survivor imitation is taking about 200 meters of the area where turtles come ashore, and has interposed its structures between existing nests and the sea and waves of turtles who will be coming ashore and their nesting spots higher on the beach.

Assuming that this does not directly contribute to the extinction of one or more of the sea turtle species --- always an outside and not very knowable possibility --- the procedure here may be the most enduring environmental damage of them all. The beach is a municipal park and Caracol got its permit from Bocas Town mayor José Anderson (who says that all the proper environmental safeguards will be taken).

The National Environmental Authority (ANAM) claims that since it's a city park, it has no jurisdiction. Actually, by the letter of the law ANAM does have the power to determine what goes on on a beach, whether it's nationally or municipally owned, to the extent that wildlife may be affected. By disavowing authority in this case, ANAM is in effect abdicating one of its key duties under the law, the protection of Panama's wildlife.

Some of President Martinelli's campaign literature advocated the abolition of ANAM, but he retreated from that as soon as he was elected, because with a policy of that sort there would be no way that the US Congress would approve the US-Panama free trade pact. Instead, ANAM is routinely abandoning its environmental protection duties under various pretexts.

Bluff Beach, then, is the battleground between the sustainable tourism industry that brings people to see nesting turtles and the most inconsiderate kind of show business; between environmentalists who want strong protections for sea turtles, some species of which --- like the leatherback --- are endangered, and a right-wing government that considers the environmentalists to be a species of subversives; and between vastly different views of what Panama is and ought to be.

We see here, in a video taken by one of Bluff Beach's environmentally friendly businesses, a brief glimpse of what's at stake:

nature