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C osta Rican author Anacristina Rossi has been at the forefront of environmental battles in her country since 1991. She first became widely known for her efforts to save the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge on the Costa Rican Caribbean coast, which was threatened by development and by the greed of corrupted government officials and foreign investors. She documented the ecological disaster and the politics that surrounded it in her testimonial novel La Loca de Gandoca [The Crazy Woman of Gandoca] (not yet translated into English) published in 1992. The publication of the novel created a national outcry in Costa Rica, which led to the halting of all large-scale tourist projects within the wildlife refuge, saving it from destruction. One year later, she was in the middle of another battle; this one was to stop the building of a bypass around San José, which would have destroyed much of the natural and cultural surroundings of the city, especially its dense woods and its web of old colonial towns. To show the irregularities of the bypass project and to prompt citizens' response, she published her short story "Pasión Vial" (recently translated as "Highway Passion" by Terry Martin) along with other stories in a collection titled Situaciones Conyugales [Conjugal Situations] in 1993."Pasión Vial" is an incisive critique of Costa Rican society, particularly the patriarchal attitudes based on the domination of nature and women. The story's cultural critique happens at various levels: On one, it is a criticism of neoliberalism, specifically, its related ideas of development and progress, goals that (male) politicians and bureaucrats want to achieve at all costs, even if they imply the destruction of ecosystems or cultural symbols of the traditional Costa Rican identity. On a deeper level, it is a critique of patriarchal attitudes that put down the discourse by women and the discourse about the environment. The story shows that female and environmental discourses are not taken seriously or are seen as forces to be restrained or silenced. The masculine and economic discourses, on the other hand, are privileged over those of women and nature. Using generous doses of humor and irony, "Pasión Vial" also deplores the loss of cultural authenticity of many Costa Ricans due to their imitation of cultural models from the United States.The following is an excerpt of an interview that I conducted with the author in the summer of 1998 in the Hague, the Netherlands, where she now resides 1 . In it, Rossi shares details about the facts on which the story is based, her motivations for its writing, and her opinions about some of the story's themes, such as the relationship between women and nature and their relationship with the social institution of marriage.