As I am home again from Costa Rica and as I am sitting in my bed, writing this blog post far too close to its deadline, I can’t help but wonder what was the point of it all. I went and came back and now, sitting here in my sealed off house without a sign of insect life in my room, it feels like I’ve gone back to square one. Like the entire trip was just a fever dream of new experiences, friends, sounds, sights, smells, and I am sat here trying to make sense of it all. Change is a fickle thing. I have physically changed locations, moving from hereto Costa Rica for three weeks, sure, but it goes deeper than that. The unpredictability of change is something that we humans constantly try to control by exerting more and more predictability especially on the natural world. We dam rivers, seed rain with silver to drop their rains where we want, create unchanging paths through the forest, and snap nature into place for us to view with our own discretion in zoos, museums, and personal insect specimen boards. And through this trip I have seen so many examples of how humans have made nature more predictable for a variety of purposes. From La Selva and Palo Verde constructing paths and light traps and piers to better access nature for study, to Tortuguero almost inviting monkeys into their space and marketing them as part of the experience, to Lomas del Volcan abolishing nature almost completely, reducing it to a garden of artificial, unchanging biodiversity, wherever humans go, we bring our own unchanging microclimate.
Ironically enough, by spreading so far and ensuring comfort wherever we go, this worldwide culture of human comfort has ensured our fate will be one of uncontrollable change. Climate change. We use energy to affix nature. Nature will fight and crawl and hide to stay in its constantly adapting and changing state, so to overpower it we exert just as much energy as it does to fight us. If it is too hot, we spend energy to cool it down, if our carefully placed gardens are attacked, we fight back with pesticides manufactured with help from fossil fuels, if we cannot access somewhere, yes we can, it just depends how much energy we want to exert getting there. And with this consumption, we have inundated the atmosphere with CO2, and the climate will change, and all we can do is hope that the change will be mitigatable, since we cannot stop it.
This is all very interesting since the past week has been so full of change and unpredictability for us personally, and I think it has made me feel so incredibly alive. We went to four different locations in just a week, and adapting to each one has made us all develop so much as a group and as humans. Tortuguero and lomas del volcan fall in similar categories for me, since they both functioned more as relaxation points in our journey. For me that sudden shift to socializing time from research time was something I could not adapt to very well. The change got the better of me and I felt so foreign in the environment that I just was completely out of it mentally. After those vacation spots we were rocketed directly into the fire again with Palo Verde, mosquito and bug capital of Costa Rica apparently. We were forced to adapt when the mosquitos literally covered the ceilings of the bathrooms and swarmed as soon as you went to shower or use the bathroom. We learned to use mosquito nets and wear long sleeves (Sadly I had none), and learned that mosquitoes in fact can bite straight through your pants if they feel like it. We learned to adapt to
the lack of laundry services through the trip, bonding together over how hopeless it was to stay good smelling and clean in these kinds of situations. Finally in Monteverde, the cloud forest felt desolate compared to the lowland rainforests I had been used to, since on those hanging bridges it was almost absolute silence. Almost no bird calls and only a couple patches of incessant cicadas, so I took even more time to focus on the smallest things on the trail. Even the course design has been throwing assignments and projects at us like nothing, forcing us to confront and adapt to the constantly changing landscape of the program. With the mounting stress and need to reach deadlines, it was hard not to proportionally speed up, to take shortcuts and panic. However, instead of exerting more energy, and falling into the same trap we have as a society of desperately fighting against change, my brain did the exact opposite, and started to slow down.
Throughout this entire trip I have been forced to move slower, not faster, by change, to really take in what had changed around me in order to react accordingly, and I think it is what I have primarily taken from this trip. Instead of walking the same pace and speeding up my eyes and brain to scan for new threats on unfamiliar trails, I have walked slower, taking in my surroundings at a sustainable speed that won’t give me a migraine by midday. Instead of speeding through all the statistics and letting Eric just give us the results, I asked him to explain and slowly came to an understanding of what our data actually meant. And at the end of it all, on the final day, we took our time saying goodbye. We didn’t let go until it felt like it was time,
and if that meant staying up the whole night, being as close as we possibly could to each other, looking at the stars for hours, then so be it. The more we took our time and slowed down, the more werecognized just what we had accomplished and experienced, and especially who we had met on this program. I frankly broke down at our final reflection, and I let the tears come as much as they needed to, slowly falling down my face until I was ready to continue on. As individuals and as a society, we need to recognize the importance of taking the long route and taking things slow. We aren’t going to be saved from the climate crisis by some silver bullet, we aren’t going to solve world hunger with one innovation, and we aren’t going to be truly sustainable until we sit down, take it easy, and understand the entire picture of how we exist on this planet.
It’s far-fetched, I know, and sometimes quick action is necessary, surely we need quick action to ensure we don’t destroy our planet more, but that action needs to be thought through. We cannot just jump onto the next big trend and assume it will fix it all. I don’t want my food magically delivered to my door when I want it. I don’t want a house perfectly climate controlled to 63 degrees fahrenheit. I want all the ups and downs of shopping for an ingredient that might be out of stock, or the joy of getting to wear my comfy sweater and socks when it’s cold out. I will take my “Pura Vida” and savor it, exploring every possible aspect until it is time to finally let go. I can’t imagine any better way to truly live.
-Kieran
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