On the bumpy bus ride back to the airport, all of us were somewhere in the range of exhausted to asleep. The past three weeks had been amazing, as we hopped from spot to spot learning about Costa Rica, climate change, and the people we met along the way. Gazing out the bus window with tired eyes, I couldn’t comprehend not just how much I had learned, but how close I felt to everyone on the bus sitting around me. There’s a lot to unpack, both mentally and physically, now that I’m at the end of my study abroad, and that’s what I hope to do with this final blog. I want to highlight the experiences that were meaningful and extraordinary to me, especially this past week. Still, the most important takeaway I want to share is what I have discovered time and again in Costa Rica, that there is a delicate, yet crucial, tradeoff between sustainability and accessibility.
My last blog left off at Tortuguero. This was a riverside oasis with lessons about sea turtles and pesky capuchin monkeys. Our time there felt like a short vacation. We lounged by the turtle-shaped pool and took photos on the beach. This all-inclusive resort-type location attracted much more than the study groups and researchers of La Selva. There were lots of tourists, the majority of whom seemed to be retirees enjoying Costa Rica with a branded lanyard around their neck. These tourists were slower moving. Some had accommodations that made hiking trails difficult to impossible, and the relaxed boat tours around Tortuguero national park allowed them to see life in the rainforest in a way they probably couldn’t otherwise. The activities in Tortuguero were at times boring for our group of fit and active college students. However, what this helped me realize was the extent of my own privilege when it comes to traveling and exploring.
Many times I think I take my body for granted. Throughout this trip I’ve been able to walk miles along difficult trails, hike through trees or mud, and while I have been out of breath, I have never worried too much about my safety. This is not the case for every person that wants to visit or learn about the rainforest. In Tortuguero I started to reflect on this tradeoff between accessibility and sustainability. More accessible places offer more people the chance to gain meaningful experiences and knowledge. However, in the nature of making places more accessible, sustainable practices are often challenged or compromised. Take, for example, the boat tours I mentioned. These tours offer a chance to see the very wildlife threatened by climate change, without hiking through uneven or narrow trails. However, the thirty or so boats buzzing about in the river at five-o-clock in the morning contribute to water pollution and have repercussions for the organisms that depend on it.
Of course this all occurs on a spectrum. Using boats probably trumps plowing through forest to make highways for cars, which would make the area much more accessible and terrible. After Tortuguero we moved to Arenal, a fairytale-esc place with a perfect view of the great Arenal Volcano. Our stay there was dotted with bouts in the Jacuzzi, in between which we toured the forest canopy on high up hanging bridges, explored La Fortuna town, and drank up the beauty of La Fortuna Waterfall. Lunch and dinner were three course meals, served slowly with time to mingle and grab drinks from the bar. During this time we were working on our projects, but that vacation feeling that enveloped us in Tortuguero hadn’t quite gone away. Arenal and La Fortuna offered beauty and luxury, but also another glimpse into that relationship between being sustainable and being accessible to all.
The hotel at Arenal was perfect. There were wide open, lighted paths, a spider bridge highly lacking in spiders, and rooms with AC. The little girl in pigtails who waved to us in the Jacuzzi one day let me know this was a place people could bring their families. Along the trails the forest seemed manicured, with the undergrowth tame and two agoutis acting like actors as they frolicked in a pair. After my time in La Selva, I knew this couldn’t be completely natural. There was obvious disturbance seen in the bromeliads on the trees, and while the goal of protecting and appreciating the forest was clear, nothing was quite as raw as what I’d experienced before. This was most clear in the food we ate. The burger on the menu and fancy table settings were meant to make us feel lavish and comfortable, accessible for the vacationing American. However, the food lacked that fresh, home cooked quality, leaving us dissatisfied at times with the taste and sustainable promise. It is clear that Arenal is a much more welcoming place than a research station like La Selva, but it also sacrifices some sustainability.
Our adventures in La Fortuna exemplified this further. At the Hanging Bridges, gorgeous views were sometimes hidden behind a group of 15 slow walking travelers, or paths were blocked by a poor, overstimulated kid. This meant there weren’t any bullet ants along the trail, but without this challenge it wasn’t quite as impactful as hiking through the forest during our data collection runs. The La Fortuna waterfall was another story altogether. We paid $20, hiked down 500 stairs, and then found a gorgeous, fairly undisturbed waterfall spilling into a surrounding pool. The view was breathtaking. Crawling around slippery rocks to get a better photo and hiking back up those steps was a challenge for all of us, it would be nearly impossible for some to see that view. And so the story follows a similar theme. Nature in its most pure and preserved is extraordinary, but reserved for the privileged few. Yet, making areas accessible requires energy and invasion, although not in all contexts.
After Arenal, we took a bus through terrain that must have been designed for a jeep wrangler and arrived all shaken up at the Monteverde research station. We wandered into our rooms and then to dinner, where we were served hot plates of pesto pasta. I remember this meal distinctly, because it was both a welcome immersion back into homemade food and a beautiful balance between sustainability and accessibility. Universal design is easy to explain in terms of food. People have all sorts of dietary needs, and these are usually treated with separate, and lesser, substitutes. But a universal meal feeds everyone effortlessly, and that’s what this pasta was like. The vegetarians and pescatarians of the group could enjoy the same plate of pasta and salad, made from fresh ingredients and scraped as excess into composing bowls at the end. Beyond this one meal, the research station in Monteverde felt like home. We took our shoes off when we went up the creaky stairs, to the classroom with doodles layered on the whiteboard and a drinking game scrawled on a piece of notebook paper on the way. The place held some nostalgia from La Selva, with a library that was the hottest, not the coldest, room this time. And the station shared the small-scale sustainability that La Selva had as well.
One evening at this station, while the sun went down and the room went dark, that old wooden classroom, we had a conversation about climate change. As the professors explained the science and history behind the problem, I felt like we were all connected through the gravity of the situation. We talked about the golden toad, a species that used to inhabit that very cloud forest, and how it has since gone extinct. The saddening realization I came to was that even the most perfect, sustainable station couldn’t make up for the actions of the big climate change drivers—global corporations. A quaint little house in the woods couldn’t make up for the decisions of everyone.
We left the research station after a morning hike and a walk around the town. By lunch time we had made it to Cafe Monteverde, a cute coffee farm. For the next few days we worked on that farm, digging a trench, cleaning chicken coops, and raking the trail. Outwardly, the farm was very accessible and digestible, with pretty painted signs and trails built for tours. However, this farm was not fully organic. They incorporated some sustainable practices, but still used some pesticides and fertilizers. Working there demonstrated the twist in the tradeoff that can occur when companies greenwash; the very accessible appears, but isn’t truly, sustainable. Nevertheless, I believe the farm was well intentioned, and certainly more sustainable than many coffee plantations in the world.
At the end of our days at the farm, we were lucky enough to stay with people willing to share their homes in Monteverde. Group by group we boarded the bus in the morning, then did the same in the afternoon to stay the night with our respective families. From the road you could see the goat bridge overtop the gate into our homestay house. Once you passed through, you were pelted with love by a precious golden retriever, and many times surprised by a random peacock screech. On one side of the house lettuce, broccoli, cilantro, peppers, and others grew in a garden, and on the other side were ducks, pigs, and a chicken coop with cats on top. After feeding the baby goats our first morning there, we ate homemade goat cheese and goat yogurt, and our leftovers went to the pigs. There was such beauty in how the house ran sustainably. Yet what really struck me was how accessible the home was as well.
We were not the only ones our homestay mom was taking care of. The first night, we met her 92 year old mother from Guanacaste and had dinner with the old family friend who lives in the room beside her. Her son tended the farm, he was up early every morning and out making the rounds, and a neighbor often came over to help and chat. The wheelchair sitting on the front porch was the backdrop for our conversation with some 9 year old neighbor boys excited about soccer, Youtube, and anime. The house always had open doors.
What began to become clear, in these last few days at the homestay, is that balancing the tradeoff between accessibility and sustainability is difficult. To make both of these possible, it takes a village. Creating a sustainable and accessible world for everyone takes the work and collaboration of everyone. We need creative ideas and different perspectives in order to find solutions that aren’t mutually exclusive. We talked to our homestay mom just a bit about climate change. What she said was that, for anything you want to do, “planta un árbol.” If you want fruit, if you want shade, if you want to read, planting a tree is the solution. The sentiment was somewhat cliche, but it was beautiful, especially in the context of the Costa Rican rainforest. In the tropical rainforest, trees mean community. Thousands of different species can live within the trunk, on the branches, or upon the leaves. To solve the challenging and interconnected issues that permeate our social and ecological world, we need to generate community. Community is what I felt that first night that we shoved the tables together at La Selva, our final night when we gazed up at the stars reminiscing about our time, and all the moments in between. But I also believe that community is what we need to start working towards that beautiful future for our planet, that future that I’ve gotten a glimpse of here in Costa Rica.
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