This week I am in Costa Rica with various CI colleagues. We are taking part in a workshop and are lucky enough to be staying along a protected national rainforest. This protected land is part of a growing effort by the Costa Rican government to safeguard its most precious treasure: tropical rainforests.

As I walk through the dense jungle, I am wandering along narrow paths that are used by the various indigenous peoples who live nearby and consider this jungle their home. Although today is a rainy day and the rainforest (today very aptly named) is covered in a heavy fog, it’s difficult to adequately describe the beauty that surrounds me. It’s not hard to see why Costa Ricans are arguably considered the happiest people on the planet.

Often protecting these rainforests is seen simply as a way to lower climate change pollution—a carbon balancing act.  By putting a price tag on the forest, we hope to make the forests worth keeping. It’s an important argument, as these rainforests are critical to fighting global climate change as well as providing multiple secondary benefits such as medicines, food and fresh water.  It’s sad to think that we don’t just save these forests simply because we need their beauty—they enrich our lives by their existence alone.

I can’t say how many times I have talked to Americans from all walks of life who rave about a wonderful vacation they had in some country covered in rainforests.  They describe in detail the scents, the animals, the beauty—I wish we remembered this when protection of these forests by our leaders is being discussed and sometimes dismissed.  Maybe it’s time we work to save these rainforests just because it’s the right thing to do?

For its first major project, CI set out to protect 728,000 hectares (1.8 million acres) in and around La Amistad International Park on the border between Costa Rica and Panama. Partially funded by McDonald’s, this initiative emphasized local community participation in economic growth, seeking not only the conservation of biodiversity, but also the protection of the watersheds essential for Costa Rica’s hydroelectric development and other benefits to human well-being.

Today, CI has grown to include over 30 country field offices with over one thousand government, business and nonprofit partners worldwide. In the last five years alone, we have engaged countless communities in conservation efforts, discovered more than 400 species and helped increase global protected area coverage by 63.6 million hectares (nearly 250,000 square miles – an area the size of Texas).

As we reflect on how far we’ve come, CI is focused on the future. We will continue to work for the protection of the natural ecosystems which form the building blocks of all life on Earth so that humanity and all life can continue to thrive.

The former Minister of the Environment and Energy in his home country of Costa Rica, Rodriguez has been instrumental to regional conservation efforts for many years. He has helped pioneer the concept of payment for ecosystem services, a system that CI is now implementing with local communities in ecosystems around the globe.

The Rabinowitz-Kaplan prize was presented to Rodriguez by the Panthera Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to big cat conservation. Rodriguez’s Payments for Ecosystem Services in Costa Rica program has not only improved the lives of many rural people, but it has also resulted in the restoration and preservation of forests which provide crucial jaguar habitat.

A Nicaraguan development committee claims that 1,700 cubic meters (more than 5,577 cubic feet) per second of water flow – enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every second – was lost from the San Juan after Costa Rica diverted it sixty years ago toward their own Colorado River. The rerouting project is designed to restore this contested water flow.

Costa Rica, meanwhile, disagrees that Nicaragua has the right to dredge the river.

The debate reveals the centuries-old connection between resource use and international conflict, and the fight for access to fresh water serves as a prime example.

As the planet’s freshwater resources become more limited, conflict in water-stressed regions will increase as people argue over how the water should be divided.

CI recognizes that ecosystems ignore national boundaries; not only do they affect everyone living nearby (Nicaraguan or Costa Rican, in this case), but with today’s global connections and dependence, even distant ecosystems affect all of us. Cooperation and collaboration throughout the world is essential if we mean to protect these ecosystems and the invaluable human benefits they provide.

Discover CI’s international partnerships

Learn about the San Juan River project >>

I was 14 and in awe of the seafaring skills of my uncles Sal and Tony, but actually we’d ventured only a few miles into the Atlantic; you didn’t have to go far to catch Bluefin Tuna in the 1960s. I was wound with anticipation of a heavy fishing rod suddenly bending under the frightening power of a great fish. I was gazing with a child’s eyes into the infinity beneath us when suddenly a strange sea beast appeared at the surface about fifty yards off our stern. It was a creature so large the sea broke into whitecaps across its back. I was thinking it looked like a Volkswagen floating just under the surface, when it raised its unbelievably huge head, drank a deep breath of air, and withdrew. Thus ended my first awestruck encounter with the greatest turtle on Earth.

PARTNERSHIP: The Great Turtle Race at National Geographic

I never forgot my encounter with that astonishing beast. And so, not long ago, I decided to travel the world in pursuit of the biggest animal that a person can walk up to without being attacked: the leatherback turtle. I traveled from Nova Scotia to Georges Bank to the waters off the Carolinas, to the nesting beaches of Florida and the Caribbean. I ventured from Mexico to Costa Rica. I helped tag leatherbacks just off California, then went across the Pacific to New Guinea, where the “California” leatherbacks swam to nest, a migration that takes them over a year. They are true world travelers. My own global encounters make up my book, Voyage of the Turtle.

There exists a presence in the ocean, seldom glimpsed in waking hours, best envisioned in your dreams. While you drift in sleep, turtles ride the curve of the deep, seeking their inspiration from the sky. From tranquil tropic bays or nightmare maelstroms hissing foam, they come unseen to share our air. Each sharp exhalation affirms, “Life yet endures.” Each inhaled gasp vows, “Life will continue.” With each breath they declare to the stars and wild silence. By night and by light, sea turtles glide always, their parallel universe strangely alien, yet intertwining with ours.

– Excerpt from The Voyage of the Turtle, © 2006 Carl Safina, Henry Holt and Company

The leatherback turtle is the closest thing we have to a last-living dinosaur. But while its ancestors saw dinosaurs rule and fall, the leatherback survives to the present. It’s Earth’s last greatest monster reptile. Imagine an 800-pound turtle and you’ve just envisioned merely an average female leatherback. It’s a turtle that can weigh over a ton.

Everything about the leatherback is superlative: it’s the fastest-growing and heaviest reptile, the fastest-swimming turtle, the most widely distributed and highly migratory reptile, and the only one that could be called “warm-blooded.”

A turtle’s registered trademark, of course is their shell. But leatherbacks have, in a sense, no shell. Rather than a hard-bone carapace, the back forms over a mosaic of thousands of small, thin bones, overlain by a thick matrix of oily fat, fibrous tissue, and skin. Scratch it with your fingernail – it bleeds.

Ranging from the tropics to beyond the Arctic Circle, leatherbacks can maintain body temperature around 80º Fahrenheit (27º C) even in waters as cold as about 40º Fahrenheit (5º C).

Such temperatures would chill a human to death in minutes and kill other sea turtles. But leatherbacks generate heat, then conserve it through a combination of large body size, insulating tissue, and special heat-conserving circulatory plumbing.

Leatherbacks dive deeper than any air breathing animal – deeper than any whale. Emperor Penguins reach 1,500 feet, and several seals get to 3,000 feet (a kilometer). Sperm whales go as deep as 3,700 feet. Blowing past them all, the leatherback drills as deep as 3,900 feet (1.2 km).

At that depth, the pressure has gone from under 15 pounds per square inch at the surface, to about 1,800 p.s.i. – roughly 120 atmospheres. In such cold and dark, a human would implode like bubble-wrap. This deep squeeze may explain leatherbacks’ flexible shells – defense against cracking during the deepest dives. They can stay down over an hour. To do that, leatherbacks pre-dissolve their oxygen reserves right into their blood. They can actually load more oxygen into their blood than into their lungs.

Everything about the leatherback is astonishing. One of the most amazing things is that such ancient monsters actually remain in the world with us. They’ve survived millions of years, but they’ve never had it easy. And they still don’t.

After swimming the ocean for years, after migrations from one continent to another, females come ashore to continue the unbroken chain of leatherback being. Each female encounters a differing set of challenges every time she hits the beach. She may come where the beach is too steep; she may come on the wrong tide; she may arrive where the beach is too narrow; she may ascend to find a wrack-line obstructed with drift-logs and trash – or a man with a machete.

But so far, leatherbacks survive. And with a little help they will, for a long time to come.

Dr. Carl Safina brought ocean conservation into the environmental mainstream and is founding president of Blue Ocean Institute. His award-winning books include “Song for the Blue Ocean,” “Eye of the Albatross,” and “Voyage of the Turtle.” He’s been profiled by the New York Times, Nightline, and Bill Moyers, and his awards include a Pew Fellowship, Lannan Literary Award, John Burroughs Medal, and a MacArthur Prize, among others.

Costa Rica is a great success story, and Rodríguez has been one of the country’s most ardent proponents of environmental conservation. From Friedman:

Rodríguez … helped to pioneer the idea that in a country like Costa Rica, dependent on tourism and agriculture, the services provided by ecosystems were important drivers of growth and had to be paid for…. Costa Rica took the view that landowners who keep their forests intact and their rivers clean should be paid, because the forests maintained the watersheds and kept the rivers free of silt.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. What ecosystems give people has great value and we all have to recognize that value.

Check out some of the other places CI is working with local communities and governments, like South Africa and Nepal. Cookstove projects and organic farming are just a few ways local people are drawing importance benefits from their natural environment.