Winning The Peace.(Cover Story: Who Is the Greenest of Them All?; SPECIAL REPORT)(Colombia)

Byline: Steven Ambrus

The war on drugs has helped preserve a vast wilderness.

Colombia ranks first in its income group, where China ranks last.

Colombia has always been proud of its immensely rich wildlife. The nation has the world's greatest number of bird species (1,885), the second highest number of amphibians (697) and the seventh largest area of tropical wilderness. On Earth Day, the government celebrated by beginning to create 11 new national parks and expanding protected areas to nearly 11.7 million hectares, or more than 10 percent of the country. "We are putting our soul into protecting our patrimony," says Environment Minister Juan Lozano.

Could this be the same Colombia that's been fighting a guerrilla war over the manufacture of illegal drugs? Paradoxically, the war has in some ways helped the green cause by scaring developers away from rural areas and making it easier to put aside land for wildlife. Yale and Columbia's Environmental Performance Index ranks Colombia ninth overall, with exceptional grades in biodiversity and habitat--a 75, compared with an average of 43 for the region and 54 for its income group.

What stands out in particular in the rankings is Colombia's score on the effectiveness of its conservation efforts (it gets a 94 out of 100, compared with 38 for its neighbors on average). This is clearly no country of paper parks, as recent initiatives show. Fending off pressure from developers to allow construction of a massive container port in the rain forests of the Pacific, the Ministry of the Environment began creating a national park in Malaga Bay, the world's most important breeding and calving ground for humpback whales. After naturalists recently discovered a new species of finch in the cloud forests, the bird got its own park in the Yariguies mountain range. Conservationists even won a new sanctuary for leatherback and hawksbill turtles.

Environment Minister Lozano, a former political adviser to the president, has pushed the environment to the forefront of the national agenda. Ambitious government programs promoting reforestation and ...