It is exhilarating to visit the Quetzal Educational Research Center (QERC) because I feel my heart “strangely warmed,” to hear all the lectures and interesting topics they are learning. I pour over the books in the library, too, several different “ology” sections, journals of research, field guides to animal identification – and my favorite, the sections on culture, history, environmental stewardship, and the “care of creation.” Here, actually situated in a tropical cloud forest, these books and topics light a fire of intrigue and curiosity in my heart. Because here, you walk outside and see the birds and plants on the pages of the book, you smell the loamy earth, you experience them. Nothing is a more persuasive argument to me of the need for conservation and care of creation – even reverence – than experiencing the incredible lush eco-smorgasborg of Costa Rican cloud forests. The scientific research only makes it that much more sensational.
When I hear visiting scientists or students talk about species we see I feel like I am a kid making peanut butter and jelly in the kitchen of Chef Ramsey, making macaroni and cheese in a world-famous Italian restaurant. Yet, I am the resident chef… it’s just so humbling that I get to live in this incredible country, this ecological paradise, yet I know and “appreciate” so little, scientifically, about the incredible biological treasures I am seeing.
Coming to QERC restores my soul.
The issues in the city take a steady toll on it.
If technology is so robust and versatile, and can penetrate with a relatively small footprint into places like this, why do so few people actually use or work from contexts like this? If I truly work remotely, why can’t I do it from here?
Why am I so blessed? Every evening I watch a spectacular explosion of color over the western horizon as the sun sets over the mountains. I walk to work in the morning listening to the twirling trills of the Ygirro (clay pigeon), the country’s national bird, and the “Cristo Vive” bird. I see several varieties of tanagers, I even saw a blue morpho butterfly once. I’ve seen howler monkeys from the road (outside the city), as well as a quetzal from the road up at QERC, a sloth in the mountains around San Jose, and a kinkajou from the porch of my hostel. Those all in close proximity to places where humans live and travel – that’s not even mentioning when you hike into the holy of holies, deep into the jungle where there areno roads, no electricity, and few people.
Whether you leave the beaten path or not, Costa Rica has guarded its non-human nature and allowed it to live side-by-side, and sometimes “inside,” where the people are. This is a good thing. I say this coming off the wake of a semester class on environmental anthropology, which, to say the least, is not as optomistic about the relationship of humans to the environment. In fact, for my final projects I covered two sides of the coin in Costa Rica – ecotourism and conservation, which I just described, and the destructive results of increased human traffic and consumption – ie, pollution and deforestation.
I’ll sum up the two reports with an interesting story. While staying at QERC I bought a T-shirt at the gift shop with the silhouette of a quetzal on it. It is not a cheap shirt, as t-shirts go ($20). On the sleeve it boasts that it was made from completely eco-friendly textiles and 0% sweatshop labor. It’s one of my favorite shirts.
I wore it one night when I went to spend the night with one of my favorite families in the La Carpio slum. (I get tired of describing the place as a “slum,” but I will use the word again just as a description of the living standard there). Anyway, while playing “landa” (tag) with the kids in their “yard” (the street) someone grabbed at me and tore a hole in my favorite quetzal shirt. The family was mortified and replaced it immediately with an Abercrombie and Fitch shirt, which has symbolically become another favorite shirt of mine. It fits me perfectly, and is a more discrete, hidden symbol of my concern for social issues.
The point of the story is this – as much as I love the experiences, the restoration, and the beauty of places like the Savegre Valley that strive to balance humans and nature, that reality as a utopian cocoon of conservation is a myth that gets torn straight through the moment you visit a place like La Carpio. Costa Rica claims both the cleanest and most polluted river in Central America. The cleanest flows through the Savegre Valley. The most polluted is fed by several upstream rivers that eventually merge into one – two of these rivers flow straight through the heart of San Jose, untreated, and encircle La Carpio at the end of their route before merging and dumping, untreated, into the ocean. The far end of La Carpio was chosen as an “Environmental Technology Park” (a garbage dump), which gets 1500 tons of the city’s garbage every day (I find out later that people outside these areas actually believe they are “parks”, because when they are filled up they are disguised as lush green hills). This – the material result of urban concentration and overconsumption – is geographically located in the exact same location as the sociological result of greed, prejudice, and stigmitization, where what is “poor,” “illegal,” “foreign,” and “undesirable” to Costa Rica’s national image is swept into.
Sounds quite bleak, as I write about it, but the other side of the coin is this – spending time in La Carpio, with families and kids, is a restorative process as well. The violence and symptoms of social inequity are separated from the home by a thin panel of corregated steel. And, to be fair, the comforts of the hotels in the Savegre Valley are separated from the cold, damp earthiness and complete dependance on survival agriculture by a few flimsy powerlines, a road that sometimes gets buried in landslides or washes out, and a few precarious and invisible economic ties with the city. The reason I am writing this right now is because last night the entire valley lost power and it hasn’t come back on yet. Sort of a forced “Earth Hour.”
So, in each respective world – be it QERC or La Carpio, each comes with its moments of satisfaction and times of difficulty. It’s moving between the two that really gets to you. It’s the contrast between the two that really makes you ask questions. If their fates are linked, why do things look so drastically different? What things are happening from on the big-picture scale that make one side get the goods, and the other side get all the trash? And, I limit my philosophizing to Costa Rica… but do you see this happening where you live? Sometimes these things are best seen by foreign eyes… try seeing things as an outsider, a foreigner for a day, and see “the world behind the Matrix” 🙂