This week, we stayed at three different sites: the La Foresta Nature Resort, the Osa Piro Research Station, and the Las Cruces Research Station. There were a couple main events at each place that caused a lot of reflection between a few of us in the class, so I’ll be focusing on these events and the discussions we had in this blog.
La Foresta: Wealth and Climate Change
Halfway through our program, after leaving Rancho Margot, we arrived in Quepos to stay at La Foresta Nature Resort. To set up our experience, when looking at their website, the hotel is called a “beautiful tropical retreat,” and as you keep reading, you notice a majority of the website is in English; there is some Spanish at the end, but it’s only in the “contacts” section with the English translation coming first. This gives an idea of who the location is marketed for: tourists from the Global North.
This visit mostly seemed to be a relaxing stop for the class, but this quickly changed on our last night there when the hotel saw the biggest storm yet, according to the hotel owners. A seemingly common storm became severe enough for a few inches of water to accumulate on the sidewalk; Kemal’s and my room received an inch or two of water during the storm, soaking a lot of our clothes and causing us to move rooms.
While this seemed like a major inconvenience for us, we realized quickly how much worse this might’ve been without the precautions already taken by the hotel, and how it might be for communities without the same adaptations and safer location that this hotel had, a hotel geared toward wealthy tourists. The next morning is when we heard that a lot of the local community was worried about their houses further down the hill from the hotel, possibly a higher risk location in the case of floods. This brings up the point of wealth and climate change, and overall disproportionate impacts of the crisis on the Global South compared to the Global North. According to the BBC, “disruptive events tend to hit the poorest first and hardest” (Paddison 2021). When looking at this in our experience, we could see clearly how wealthy tourists extracting enjoyment out of Global South countries also have the privilege to avoid the effects that local communities can’t, calling into question the morality of tourism and conservation programs in other countries. A larger scale view of this shows that much of the Global North is driving this crisis, which is where a large amount of tourists are from. According to the BBC, “developing country participants [in the COP26 conference] say climate impacts on their countries are more severe than on the richer nations” (McGrath, 2022). In the same article, a representative of “a Costa Rican environmental group” said “‘we are already living with loss and damages for the last 25 years’” (McGrath, 2022). It was especially interesting reading this perspective from a Costa Rican organization given that we rarely received this perspective and the information it provided, despite traveling in the country for 3 weeks. So from an overall analysis of our experiences and readings during this program, it seems like tourism and research in the Global South from the Global North, whether it’s called ecotourism or biological research for the health of the countries being visited, doesn’t seem to do much to support the nations hit the hardest, while these same systems allow knowledge and enjoyment to be extracted out of those nations.
Piro: Responsibility
One of our experiences at Piro highlights how responsibility is unfairly put onto the Global South by the Global North, which we’ve already seen is hit hardest by the effects of climate change. Although the experience of seeing the Pacific Ocean from Piro was the best part of the trip, the examples of how responsibility is shifted unjustly stuck with me the most.
To begin with, Dr. Libby provided some context on this topic with the discussion of Common but Differentiated Responsibility. This relates to the fact that all nations have a common goal of slowing climate change, but the contributions to the causes of the crisis are not even across all nations. For example, the United States is responsible for about a quarter of all historic carbon dioxide emissions (Ritchie, 2019), highlighting the large responsibility that the United States had in addressing climate change. Another layer when looking at the per capita release of greenhouse gases is that much of the Global North, which has a greater share of historic carbon emissions in comparison to the Global South, has a higher per capita rate of carbon emissions as well. When comparing the per capita emissions from the United States and Costa Rica on the IEA website, the United States has a per capita emission rate almost nine times higher than Costa Rica (“Countries and Regions,” 2022). This discussion of historical responsibility is one that I’ve rarely heard when studying environmental science, bringing up concerns of how social factors don’t seem to be considered fairly when discussing climate change.
(Ritchie, 2019)
Highlighting this overlook of social factors was the presentation on sea turtle conservation from a visitor from the Global North. After going through the biology of sea turtles and differences between each species, the presenter spent a large portion of the presentation discussing their efforts to prevent poaching, usually through tactics to scare poachers. When looking into the causes of poaching, one source states that in Costa Rica, “when the COVID-19 pandemic hit,… unemployment… skyrocketed to more than 24 percent, and rates of poaching climbed with it” (Villegas, 2021). This is an indication that one source of poaching is for income, especially when income sources are unavailable for a community. However, when asked about the causes of poaching, the presenter made statements such as how people poach since it’s supposedly easier than getting a job, and other factors unrelated to poverty and a lack of jobs in communities where poaching is present. Furthermore, when asked how many programs are present to replace the income lost from poaching, the presenter said there weren’t many.
This was a huge concern for a few of us listening, especially with how visitors from the Global North are impacting an income source for some in the Global South in the name of conservation without a feasible alternative in place. The poaching of sea turtles needs to be limited or stopped, but not without the consideration of the local communities where poaching is most prevalent, and when this is excluded, it seems to come from a lack of understanding of the social effects of conservation practices; in this case, the researcher didn’t seem to understand the causes of poaching in the communities where they were limiting poaching. There were other concerning aspects of the presentation, such as practices of talking to local communities about their footprint. Coming from visitors from the Global North, where historic emissions are highest and per capita footprints are significantly higher than in Costa Rica, it seems difficult to justify the judgment and push to change practices in the Global South when the Global North has driven this crisis. McGrath points out criticisms of the statements from Global North countries about carbon emissions, quoting one organization by saying “‘it’s not the US that’s ‘cooked.’ They’re doing the cooking’” in response to John Kerry saying “the world was ‘cooked’ if carbon emissions weren’t cut rapidly” (McGrath, 2022). Statements and practices generalizing the responsibility of the climate crisis equally to all nations and changing behavior in the Global South, which has contributed least to the crisis, without pushing for greater change in the Global North brings up concerns for me of how conservation and environmentalism might be inherently exclusive and discriminatory to the Global South.
Las Cruces: Challenging Conservation
Our last stop of the week was at Las Cruces Research Station, which showed how difficult it is to actually challenge the inherent discrimination in conservation.
The factor that kicked off this conversation was a reading about the effects of each degree of warming compared to preindustrial levels. While the main goal of the book, which was to show how dangerous this crisis is, was achieved, it also reiterated to me and other students of color just how heavily environmentalism doesn’t seem to include sensitivity to marginalized communities. The main statements that highlighted this were “few people in today’s India give much of a damn about global warming,” and “glorious it may be for the new millionaires who cruise through the glittering canyons of Shanghai and Beijing, flaunting their new prosperity with celebrity-style conspicuous consumption” (Lynas, 2007). However, without a similar criticism to the lack of urgency seen in the US or other large historic contributors to the crisis, or an acknowledgment of the exploitation through colonization and globalization that many countries of the Global South have faced, or without a focus on the disproportionate historic emissions from the Global North, it’s hard to feel welcome in the field of conservation. What’s worse is that, in my classes of majority white students, no one else even seems to notice these issues with how climate change is discussed. Every once in a while, we get lucky and have other students of color to discuss our thoughts with and realize how harmful the language is in these readings, but even when these concerns are brought up in class, I’ve almost always felt dismissed. There are statements such as “we didn’t notice that problem,” or “keep these conversations going!” but when we don’t see any concrete changes when bringing these conversations up, there seems to be no point in doing so in the future.
From my experiences in environmental science, there has constantly been a lack of acknowledgement of different responsibilities when addressing the climate crisis, and instead there are harmful redirects at marginalized communities or the Global South. The only students who seem to call out these attacks are from the communities being attacked. When the language and practices surrounding conservation are harmful to marginalized communities, and when these communities leave conversations about the problems in conservation feeling defeated, it’s hard to see how to continue in the field of conservation when a lot of what is taught and written isn’t sensitive to marginalized communities. It’s easy to see a lack of environmental justice coming from this field, without unfair stress being put on nations that have already been exploited through colonization and globalization and that have contributed the least to the crisis.
Works cited
“Countries and Regions.” IEA, 2022.
Lynas, Mark. Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Fourth Estate, 2007.
McGrath, Matt. “Climate change: Rich nations accused of ‘betrayal’ at Bonn talks.” BBC, 16 Jun. 2022.
Paddison, Laura. “How the rich are driving climate change.” BBC, 27 Oct. 2021.
Ritchie, Hannah. “Who has contributed most to global CO2 emissions?” Our World in Data, 1 Oct. 2019.
Villegas, Alexander. “The Pandemic Poaching Pandemic.” Hakai Magazine, 21 Jul. 2021.
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