Recounting Old Environmental Times

David: No, I’m not talking about spiking trees and putting rattlesnakes insides the truck cabs of loggers. I’m talking about the two week accounting of what happened during the first portion of the Environmental Science Concentration that Sarah then later joined as we went to the Osa Peninsula for some crazy wildlife adventures.

I know that this is extreme back logging of Costa Rica information but the experience was so unique and interesting that I thought it worth passing along, albeit a month late.
The three-week ESC experience is meant to challenge students in their global perspective of the Earth as God’s creation. Is the Earth just a resource to be used or is it intrinsically more than that? What role did God intend for us to have in the management and stewardship of creation? What problems are the tropical Americas facing in conservation and how is that affecting the lives of the people to whom this is home? And most importantly, what does all of this mean on a personal level for a rich North American, which we all are? The connections from our North American lifestyles to tropical ecological travesties are much tighter than most of us will ever know.

So where do you begin in providing an experience such as this—how about with sea turtles? We started our time at a beach town in the Guanacaste region called Ostional. This beach is one of 10 or so beaches in the world where a specific event called an “arribada”, or “arriving” occurs. The Pacific Olive Ridley, for some proposed scientific reasons, has developed a method of nesting that involves hundreds of thousands of females nesting on the same beach within a three day time span. The females all wait offshore until enough have gathered and then the arribada begins. For three days hundreds of thousands bombard the beach in hopes of laying a successful nest. The trick is that these sea turtle eggs are a prized delicacy. This is causing sea turtle conservation problems all over the world. It is illegal to collect sea turtle everywhere in the world except for Ostional, which is where we took the students. The government has an arrangement with a community cooperative that allows them to harvest a certain percentage of eggs every arribada. It is a controversial setup to some but in the end it is an attempt to meet in the middle of providing resources and conserving at the same time. The students stayed three nights with families from the cooperative and we had the opportunity to witness several Olive Ridleys nesting. It was not the arribada, but it was still impressive.

From there we spent a day having conversations and learning from the people at a non-governmental organization called Casa del Sol (House of the Sun). It is a community based organization that has a purpose of empowering women to cook with solar ovens, use local seeds and produce, and be educated in ways to cook healthy and environmentally responsibly. We also received a little lecture on potential woes of Costa Rica ratifying their part of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. They are worried about their crops and seeds being overrun by genetically modified seeds, which would be more readily introduced into Costa Rican agriculture and more than likely not monitored by multi-national agricultural businesses. These businesses would have the doors to Costa Rican soil opened up to them if CAFTA is passed.

We spent some time at the beautiful Arenal Volcano studying volcanology. The more impacting event here was a visit to a hot springs run entirely sustainably, called Ecotermales. This is a big deal because in that region there are many hot springs that cater to ecotourism and have gigantic environmental impacts to the local ecosystem. Ecotermales demonstrates responsible business practices by using a natural resource while not negatively impacting the land. The students were all fired up over this because it was so exciting to see that when creative ideas are put in place conservation of natural resources showing respect for God’s creation is indeed the most beneficial way for both the land and humans.

We then visited EARTH University on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. EARTH University is attended by agricultural students from all over Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Tuition is almost completely covered for most students and their education is founded on agricultural and environmental principals that they can take back to their homes and implement on a community level. Not only is its mission statement one of meeting the worlds’ needs by taking care of the earth, but also it is an impressively large campus that showcases how a university can be environmentally ethical when it comes to its operation of facilities.

Our last stop before heading back to QERC and then onto Campanario was La Selva research station. It is a place in dense tropical rainforest where some of the top tropical research goes on in the world. They have an impressive campus with fantastic facilities for researchers. It was a chance for the students to see a different model and approach to conservation so they could compare it to others they experienced.

The best thing is that throughout all of this the students were put in ecosystems that showcase the biological diversity of Costa Rica. They were being challenged in their environmental thinking while given a chance to just experience the magnificence of God’s creation. The combination of those two is something that we all need.