No matter which side of the country, no matter which coast we were visiting, people across Costa Rica all said the same thing: “pura vida”. 

Pura vida means “pure life.” It describes Costa Rica’s attachment to nature. Most of the country is forested. Most of the people make their money off of the land, whether it be through agriculture or ecotourism. Costa Rica depends on the care of the planet in order to survive. The phrase was plastered everywhere, from billboards to t-shirts. Costa Ricans would say “pura vida” right alongside their hellos and goodbyes. Many times, I felt like it was ingrained in everyday conversation. The country’s slogan can be a beautiful thing because it emphasizes the need to care for the planet, a national priority.

However, on one interesting, late night, I was reminded to take a little deeper look into that seemingly harmless phrase. 

A few of my classmates and I decided to stay up later than most in the cafeteria of one of the biological stations to play a game of Euchre. It wasn’t unusual for me to go to bed later than most, but this night in particular was well-worth the loss of sleep. In the middle of the hand, we were joined by a sweet, old woman named Rosella. She had woken up from sleep in one of the cabins nearby, and came to the cafeteria to try to connect to the wifi. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly), the internet connection was out. However, instead of going back to bed, Rosella decided to sit down and try to learn how we were playing our game.

Rosella was born in Costa Rica, but she had spent most of her life traveling the world. Rosella has a passion for helping others. She’s led many different service projects, most of them targeted towards helping underprivileged teenagers. Rosella’s life story was inspirational to me in many ways. Recently, she’s returned to Costa Rica to start a new program working with teens who have been incarcerated. 

Rosella has a quam with her nation’s catch phrase. Pura Vida paints this beautiful picture of a happy, green republic. Rosella thinks this is dangerous. She said she doesn’t like how the slogan greenwashes public perception of real issues going on in Costa Rica. She said it’s not always pura vida, and people need to recognize that. I took Rosella’s warning into consideration when thinking critically about the places we visited. 

During the last week, we visited a family-owned coffee farm. The owner, Jacqueline, had just recently taken control of the farm after her father’s passing. The farm was completely organic. The land was filled with forest, coffee plants, and a wide assortment of crops. The rejection of monoculture is good for the environment. Everything in the farm is done by hand, including picking thousands of seeds off of hundreds of coffee plants. All the work stays in the family. Jacqueline explained how she grew up on the farm, and hopes one day to pass it on to her kids. For the most part, this farm seemed to fully embrace Costa Rica’s pura vida. 

However, upon closer inspection, it is easy to see that not all aspects are pure. Jacqueline pointed out the problems she has faced as a young, female land owner. She complained that many of the local vendors and sellers don’t take her seriously as a business person. They expect men to be doing her job, and her age doesn’t add to her credibility in their eyes. 

Societal expectations are not her only obstacle. The government also fails to provide the funds she needs to remain a sustainable farm. The government offers land owners payments for ecosystem services. Jacqueline tried to cash in on these offers, but she complained the government looks for tiny loopholes to get out of paying. They ask her to make big, costly changes to her land to earn the payments, but often these changes cost much more than what she would gain from the government. To be pure is to be perfect, but it is impossible to be perfect when the government and society is imperfect, just like everywhere else in the world. 

Rosella told us about the lack of options for many people in underprivileged communities. She said it is hard to imagine a different way of life when everyone around you follows the same path. She was specifically referencing the children she works with who choose a life of crime. This problem isn’t unique to Costa Rica: we see this everywhere. However, the concept of choosing the familiar path is applicable to a lot of circumstances. 

We visited a banana farm which had been owned by the same family for generations. During the tour, we saw how extensive the day to day labor was for many of the family members. Personally, I couldn’t imagine doing the same thing my entire life, especially work that required so much physical grit. Our class helped them chop down a banana herb (bananas grow on the largest herbs on the planet, commonly mistaken for trees). We also planted a few new banana plants. It let us see and experience the process first hand, but the concept of doing that from sunrise to sunset was difficult to grasp. I was happy that after working for a short while we were able to return back to our cabins for lunch and spend the rest of the day experiencing new things. It occurred to me that most of the people in that community had never left. I felt guilty that I had the opportunity to attend a university and choose any career I wanted, anywhere in the world. That is not an option afforded to many people. 

However, there are two sides to every coin. Costa Rica’s culture is built around family. This sense of closeness and support is something often lost in many American households. My family is fortunate enough to be considerably close, but we are close because of our family’s values, not because it is a societal expectation. American society pulls families apart, spreading children across the nation when they turn 18, and coercing young adults to divert from their parents’ way of life. There are ups and downs to both cultures. Costa Rica’s pura vida may not be perfect, but it is beautiful. After all, there is a reason Costa Rica is one of the highest ranked countries on the happiness index. Most people here are able to find peace in nature and in their family, making them some of the happiest people on the planet.  

There was a PHD student studying at one of the research facilities we stayed at. She was looking into how cultures differ across different towns in Costa Rica. She described how most places embrace the phrase “pura vida,” but people in the capital city, San Jose, rarely say it. 

We visited San Jose for a day. It was much different than an American city. If I were to walk the streets of Chicago, Seattle, New York, Indianapolis, or really any major city in the states, I would see tall skyscrapers, trash along the road, and at least a few homeless people camped out every few blocks. In San Jose, most of the buildings were only a few stories tall. The trash welled up in big pot holes that would easily break your ankle if you weren’t careful. There weren’t really any homeless people, which the PHD student attributed to the powerful family ties which keep sons and daughters off the streets. Of course, this is a generality and not the rule. As Rosella would say, people are struggling everywhere, just like in America. The lack of homelessness could also be attributed to the sheer number of police officers who patrolled the streets constantly. Most stores had a security guard, and there was usually a cop standing every few feet. I did not get the chance to see the city at night, as our professors required us all to go home by sunset. This was probably for the best. I have been told that things can get really dangerous at night in San Jose. 

People who live in the city are much more exposed to crime and poverty, and far removed from the serenity of nature which embodies the rest of the country. It makes sense to me why they do not embrace “pura vida.” City life is rarely described as pure anywhere in the world. 

I learned that pura vida in Costa Rica can mean a lot of different things to different people. I don’t think it is just a form of greenwashing and nothing else. It is true that many ecotourism sites plastered it on advertisements, but the phrase runs much deeper than that. I thought it was amazing how people on every corner of the country exchanged that phrase as a greeting. It felt like it was uniting the nation. The slogan should not be used as a blanket statement to say that life is always good. However, there is value in appreciating nature, which is at the heart of pura vida. 

This trip showed me a new way of life, and necessary changes I should make to how I live my own life. This month, I had a healthy balance between work, play, and sleep. I ate balanced meals. I avoided gluttonous consumption. It was easy to feel at peace in Costa Rica when the pressure of real life felt far away, and I could focus on myself and my mental health. Nature had an ever present calming essence. I was able to take each day one at a time. Like I said, living a balanced life was easy. The challenge is bringing this balance back home with me. 

How can conservation be improved so that it holistically meets the needs of people and the environment? In my view, an implementation of global reparations and decolonization is needed. In this blog post, I will first review two problems posed by modern conservation. Second, I will characterize potential solutions to these problems.

The first problem: the dehumanization of global South communities

Global North led conservation efforts dehumanize communities living in the global South because the economic influence of the global North enables well resourced global North organizations and individuals to promote their self-interests abroad at the cost of the livelihoods of local people. 

One example is the creation of protected areas by foreign NGOs. In this process, foreign NGOs buy land in Costa Rica or other countries with the intent of protecting it. With complete private ownership of the land, these organizations are able to dictate how the land is used, who has access to the land, who benefits materially from the land, and other important rights. The typical set of rights is called “fortress conservation” which reflects the belief that biodiversity protection is best achieved when protected areas are guarded from any unauthorized human disturbance (Dominguez & Luoma, 2020). In this view, local communities should be completely barred from the land (Dominguez & Luoma, 2020). This directly threatens the livelihood of local and indigenous communities because they have less land to support their own food systems, culture, and way of life (Dominguez & Luoma, 2020). In fact, 50% of the protected areas created by the global conservation establishment in the 20th century were located on lands either occupied or regularly used by indigenous communities (Dominguez & Luoma, 2020). As a result, millions of indigenous people have been evicted from their ancestral lands and exposed to poverty, inequality, and conflict (Dominguez & Luoma, 2020). Furthermore, due to the economic insecurity resulting from colonialism, imperialism, and debt traps, few communities have the economic or legal resources to challenge wealthy foreign NGOs funded by governments or private grants (Dominguez & Luoma, 2020). While local and indigenous communities suffer, foreign organizations are benefited with exclusive access to pristine lands and revenue from visitors and scientific research (Dominguez & Luoma, 2020).

I’ve seen elements of “fortress conservation” in play at all of the research stations I’ve visited. One example is the first research station I visited which was heavily surveilled. The site had many security cameras set up inside and outside buildings. A few local residents were present as staff, but no local residents were present simply to experience the research site. Before I left the research station, I learned something that offered context to the situation: a local resident had poached a monkey for food a few years ago, and the degree of surveillance and inaccessibility were justified to prevent future incidents. After hearing this, I wondered what material conditions would incentivize a local to go into the protected area to poach for food. It made me wonder whether any communities were displaced or nudged into less than ideal living conditions to establish that biological research site or any of the others I had visited. 

The second problem: the failure to address the destructive nature of capitalism, imperialism, and the legacy of colonialism

Any mode of environmentalism or conservation that does not critique capitalism, imperialism, and the legacy of colonialism also does not adequately address the magnitude of the environmental crises that societies face. In the case of climate change, a relatively small portion of society that is well resourced may be able to counter climate change by reducing their energy consumption and fossil fuel use and choosing locally sourced food. However, these choices are mostly inaccessible to people in poverty or economic insecurity, or the vast majority of people globally. In addition, the individual actions of a few do not change the profit motive enabling the accelerating destruction of the environment: 100 companies produce 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions (CDP, 2017). Without challenging the global economic system that extracts resources for profit, society won’t be able to decarbonize at a fast enough rate. 

This issue is further compounded by the fact that the people who did the least to cause the climate crisis, and other ecological crises, are disproportionately impacted. Global North countries have historically contributed 92% of global emissions in excess of the Earth’s capacity (Hickel, 2020). However, the global South is set to be disproportionately impacted by climate change. This is partly because of heightened vulnerability to food insecurity and severe weather, and partly because of a lack of resources to adapt to climate change (Hartnett, 2021). Centuries of colonialism and ongoing imperialism have resulted in the global North taking $2.2 trillion dollars in value from the global South every year (Hickel et al., 2021). This mass transfer of wealth leaves the global South with few resources to prepare for the turmoil that the climate crisis will bring. 

My experiences in Costa Rica revealed how the logic of individual actions dominates in modern conservation. At a lecture on sea turtle conservation, we were told to reduce our plastic use and overall consumption. Everybody in the class has the means to make these choices, but plenty of people globally, who will be affected more by climate change than many in the US, do not.

The solution: global reparations and decolonization

I argue that global reparations and decolonization are both needed to restore self-determination to communities of the global South and to adequately address the systems that create and exacerbate ecological crises. 

Global reparations would call for a massive transfer of wealth from the global North to the global South. In contrast to the current status quo where the global North uses their resources to lead conservation efforts in global South countries, global South communities should be given the resources to lead their own conservation efforts and build their own resiliency against ecological crises including climate change and habitat destruction. This would mean that the world has to abandon a profit centered economy so that the global South has the right to social and economic sovereignty. 

Decolonization would call for prioritizing the sociocultural needs of indigenous people, restoring settled land to indigenous community ownership, and centering indigenous people’s leadership and knowledge in the environmental movement. Given the centuries of economic, social, and political oppression faced by indigenous people throughout the globe, there is first and foremost a moral imperative for decolonization. However, indigenous communities, more than anyone else, are able to lead the globe in environmental conservation. Although indigenous territories make up 22% of Earth’s total surface, they contain 80% of Earth’s biodiversity (Dominiguez and Luoma, 2020). Furthermore, research shows that when indigenous people have complete sovereignty over their ancestral lands, they are able to protect biodiversity and reduce deforestation as well or better than government owned parks at a small fraction of the cost (Dominguez and Luoma, 2020). 

There’s many signs that the world is starting to connect the ecological crises to global economic and social systems. First, in recent years, there’s been a slew of democratically elected left wing presidents in Latin America that have vowed to counter a global North led world economy. Most notably, newly elected president of Columbia, Gustavo Petro, has vowed to eliminate Columbia’s dependence on fossil fuels while building economic self-sufficiency (Lo, 2022). Furthermore, courts around the world are hearing liability cases against global North governments and fossil fuel companies (Sengupta, 2021). Finally, climate reparations has become a part of climate change discourse. At COP26, Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, voiced her support for climate reparations (Sengupta, 2021). As mass movements critiquing capitalism and imperialism grow larger, we may see a fundamental shift in world economy and politics enabling humanity to adequately counter the ecological crises we face today. 

Works cited

CDP (2017). The Carbon Majors Database: CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017. https://cdn.cdp.net/cdp-production/cms/reports/documents/000/002/327/original/Carbon-Majors-Report-2017.pdf?1501833772 

Dominguez, L. & Luoma, C. (2020). Decolonising Conservation Policy: How Colonial Land and Conservation Ideologies Persist and Perpetuate Indigenous Injustices at the Expense of the Environment. Land, 9(65) https://doi.org/10.3390/land9030065 

Hartnett, R. (2021). Climate Imperialism: Ecocriticism, Postcolonialism, and Global Climate Change. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 20(2), 138–155. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3809 

Hickel, J. (2020). Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown: an equality-based attribution approach for carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary. The Lancet Planetary Health, 4(9), e399 – e404. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(20)30196-0 

Hickel, J., Sullivan, D., and Zoomkawala, H. (2021, May 6). Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960.  Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/6/rich-countries-drained-152tn-from-the-global-south-since-1960 

Lo, J. (2022, June 20). Colombia’s new president Gustavo Petro pledges to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Climate Home News. https://www.climatechangenews.com/2022/06/20/colombias-new-president-gustavo-petro-pledges-to-keep-fossil-fuels-in-the-ground/ 

Sengupta, S. (2021, November 11). Calls for Climate Reparations Reach Boiling Point in Glasgow Talks. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/climate/climate-glasgow-cop26-loss-damage.html 

      My time in Costa Rica came to an end this week. No more leaf cutter ant highways to carefully step over. No more bus rides up steep, winding mountains. No more falling asleep to the sounds of tink frogs or waking up to monkey howls. No more night hikes or crossing waterfalls. No more breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all that in between with some of the greatest people I’ve ever gotten the privilege to know. Just as I was starting to believe that this experience was real life and not just a dream, I was forced to accept a new reality in which this life-enriching experience was now ending. I have learned so much on this trip. Not only about biodiversity, climate change, environmental policy, planetary health, and animals, but also about myself and what it’s like to witness the human experience around me. So I take this opportunity in my last blog to reminisce and reflect on my human experience in Costa Rica.

Kevin and Debby:

      On the plane ride into Costa Rica, I found myself seated next to this kind couple from Texas on their way with their three dogs to see their son who lives in Costa Rica. The gentlemen, Kevin, struck up a conversation with me upon hearing that this was my first time in the country and my very first time abroad. We continued to talk for the remaining hours of the plane ride about Costa Rica and its beauty. He told me all about how they fell in love with the culture of Costa Rica: the connection with nature and the land, the kindness to others, and the chance to live a pura vida lifestyle. They have traveled to many places and loved Costa Rica so much that they decided to make it their home. The country and the people had such a profound impact on them. Before even landing in Costa Rica, I had already fallen in love with the country through the eyes of someone else. If this place was able to touch the hearts of such a special couple, I knew it was going to be special for me too. And it indeed was. After a month of learning and living throughout the country, it was time to go home again. The day we left was a day of bittersweet tears and reminiscing on all the memories we made together as a group. We did everything we could to soak up every last second of our time together at this place. Again, it didn’t feel real that I had to say finally say goodbye to the people I have been spending every waking moment with and to the country that made all those moments even more beautiful. As I was in this state of limbo and after watching several friends board their flights and then waiting for my own flight to whisk me away, I looked up and saw Kevin, Debby, and their three dogs walking by. I ran up to give them a hug. It was so crazy that out of all the people in this world and during all the seconds in a day, it just so happened that I saw them again. Kevin asked me if my experience was all that I hoped for and as wonderful as I thought it would be. I told him that it was so much more. I told him that I learned and saw so much and that I had the luck to do it with such a special group of people. I enjoyed every second of it. Having seen Kevin and Debby brought me out of my sad state. I realized that these memories and people aren’t going anywhere for now. I felt like all that had happened and all whom I had met were meant to be. Some things are just coincidences, but some things are meant to be and will have a lasting impact just as this trip had on me. And these connections I have made can last a lifetime. As well as the lessons I’ve learned. Everything I’ve learned, especially from the people I’ve met, I will take with me back to the states and in my future to make this world a better place just as I had hoped to do. My Costa Rican experience doesn’t end in Costa Rica – this is just the beginning and there is so much more waiting for me. 

Rosella:

      While Kevin and Debby embraced the “pura vida” lifestyle, I met someone else who was not fond of the saying. One night in La Selva, my friends and I met a woman named Rosella who was in the cafeteria while we were up late playing a card game. Kate started talking to her and soon we all became entranced by what she had to say. Rosella was a beautiful woman inside and out. She was here at La Selva leading a program for underprivileged youth to reconnect with nature and the arts. Rosella had studied the arts including classical dance in America and Europe I believe before returning to Costa Rica to help those in need. She has seen a lot in her life: poverty, abuse, addiction, illness, the list goes on and on. She works hard to provide sanctuary for at-risk teenagers struggling from these afflictions along with providing resources and opportunities to experience new things. She does this by connecting them to art and dance. She teaches them that have worth and can be successful. They can escape their situation though even she believes that it may be impossible sometimes. I remember her exclaiming, “Not everything is pura vida, we have problems!” This changed my outlook on Costa Rica and life in general. Costa Rica is not exactly the pure life everyone thinks it is. It is not always just an escape into nature and away from reality. I am not here to escape my own reality though I know I had originally looked at this experience as a way to do that. Global problems still exist like social injustice and climate change. People like Rosella are doing what they can to provide solutions and provide love, but they cannot do it alone. It is up to us, the future generations to make meaningful, lasting change. The main thing I learned from Rosella that night was to learn as much as I can so that I can return that to others and leave the world a better place than how I found it. That is and has always been my goal and I see now that it’s possible. 

The Ngöbe tribe: 

      Looking back, I have learned many things that can help with that change I wish to see in the world. I learned how important it is to integrate native, indigenous voices into education, policy, and conservation plans. They have many answers, especially answers concerning the preservation and appreciation of natural habitats. However, due to continued racism and ignorance, they have no ears in the government willing to listen to them. I learned this from the Ngöbe tribe. They need open hearts and minds who will fight for them in order to gain recognition from the government so that they can teach their culture in schools. If they don’t teach their culture to the children, it will die. This is something I have always known about indigenous tribes but I have never witnessed in person. I had remained in my ignorance and privilege while these groups of indigenous people have been fighting for recognition. I have never been able to witness the urgency and rightful anger come directly from a tribe member as he expressed his hardships and challenges to simply provide books for children to learn their own language. Even as I witnessed his emotion, I was able to sit in complacency as the translator cherry-picked terms that wouldn’t offend us as white people (meaning colonized people as Wendy informed us) being that the teacher from the tribe was angry at white instituitons for keeping his culture at bay. The teacher, Alexis, had every right to be angry and the translator had no right to make us feel comfortable in that situation for fear of being uncomfortable. It was Wendy who told me that we should not be scared of being uncomfortable because being uncomfortable with the way things are is what brings about change and being comfortable is what keeps things rooted in the past. By cherry-picking words, it was another way of continuously silencing indigenous voices. It was time for us to speak up. My classmates decided to put together a fund that would help the Ngöbe tribe obtain resources for their classrooms. We raised over $700 just from 20 of us. We also plan to create programs that connect IU student to the Ngöbe tribe so that both groups can work together to give the tribe the recognition they deserve from the government. As a future scientist committed to conservation and global equity, I plan to make indigenous voices heard.

Jacqueline:

      Among the voices that are often silenced include the voices of women. I learned more about the inequality that exists in sustainable agriculture after visiting and talking with a woman named Jacqueline. Jacquelin is the daughter of Don Roberto who had owned the coffee farm for decades. Her father had recently died so now, after studying Anthropology in France for some time, Jacqueline took over her father’s business. She is trying to downscale the farm and only foucs on selling locally. She had told us the advice her father gave her, “The business is good but the land is more important.” Because of this, she farms sustainably and protects the environment. She showed us the plants along the paths that control flooding and how the coffee plants require shade so they maintain native plants. She told us about how she had been experimenting with two varieties of coffee plants – one was tolerant against a disease while the other was not, so now they decided to transplant the disease-tolerant species. She asked us if we had any ideas for solutions on how to increase yield and take advantage of the new water source she found on her property. When asked if she has ran into any problems while maintaining the farm in a sustainable way, she said, “The first problem is that I am a woman.” As a young woman, she has been met with much sexism in the farming business. Farmers don’t recognize her efforts and she doesn’t get much support in the farming business. However, she still persists becuase of everything her father taught her. She is trying to break boundaries. Jacquelyn said to us, “My voice is not as strong, but my example is.” She is so incredibly smart, innovative, and passionate. She truly inspired me to not only become part of a community of women committed to sustainability but to create one. I hope I can reach back out to her and revolutionize a movement for women committed to conservation and sustainability through sustainable practices such as agriculture. I hope my peers and I can come back to Jacquelyn with solutions to her problems and solutions to global inequity in conservation movements. 

My friends: 

      The last humans I want to talk about while evaluating the human experience in Costa Rica are the friends I made along the way. I entered a new country not knowing who I would be learning and living with for an entire month. I hada tough year prior to this adventure that had me questioning who I was as a person and what kind of person I wanted to be. I had lost touch with myself and my passions and was looking forward to this experience as a way for me to develop into the person I strive to be and to gain even more passion for a life in science and conservation that I have always wanted to make for myself. I was hoping I could start fresh with new people and new perspectives. I didn’t realize just how much these people would have an impact on me. Every person in my group, including Dr. Libby and Dr. Wasserman, was just absolutely incredible. Everyone was so smart and passionate and wanted to learn about life as much as I did. We were all different but we all had common goals and aspirations. We all wanted to build a better world for the future. I learned a different lesson from each person: how to be yourself, how to ease anxiety, how to let go of control, how to be okay with making mistakes, how to be optimistic, how to approach difficult situations, how to expand my worldview, and so much more. I came to Costa Rica to learn about biodiversity and ecotourism and climate change, and although I learned about all that and more, I actually ended up learning more about what its like to be human. I learned more than I could have ever expected about myself from these experiences and from these people I met along the way. Saving the natural world is not just about conservation, science, climate change, or biology. It’s about the connections you make with people, too. I know these connections will last and will turn into something great. Every one of us was great on our own but we are even more wonderful and powerful together due to the connections we were able to make. I have a great feeling that we are going to do some amazing things in the future. We already have.

I’m starting to think Marvin’s bus was some sort of time machine, because there is no way that we just spent an entire four weeks in Costa Rica and the whole trip is already over. The past four weeks simultaneously were some of the busiest and most tiring, yet most rewarding and fun weeks that I have experienced in a long time. So many memories were made in the past month that my brain can’t even handle them all, so instead of using this blog to talk about our final week in Costa Rica, I am going to dedicate it to the memories that didn’t make it into my other blogs for one reason or another.

As I talked a little bit about in a previous blog post, my research throughout the month focused on primate species and how their behaviors changed between the edges and interiors of their habitats. In order to collect data for this research, my partner and I had to actually go out into the forest and look for groups of primates to gather data from. There was another group whose research involved collecting primate data, so we decided that it would make sense for the four of us to travel together when searching for these groups in order to increase our chances of finding usable data. Since our two groups were trying to answer two different questions we could observe the same group of monkeys and have different data at the end of it, so it was no problem that we worked together to get the data. Together, our two monkey-related project groups formed The Monkey Gang. Our goal: to blur the lines between man and monkey and collect as much data as we can by any means necessary. When we entered the forest, there was no stopping us from finding some monkey business to gather data from (unless we were at Las Cruces, where we did not see a single monkey, but we don’t like to talk about that). One day, on one of our less fruitful monkey hunting expeditions, we came across a stream. Since I was one of two members of the group who had Muck Boots® (use the code “MONKEYGANG4LIFE” at checkout for 25% off your first order), I was tasked with finding a way across the stream for those of us who were wearing less waterproof footwear. I made it across the stream and set my bag down, but as I came back across to begin helping others across I did not notice that the area that I thought was about three inches deep was actually about three feet deep and made the mistake of trying to step there. The next thing I knew I was sitting in the stream, rushing water up to my chest, questioning all of my life choices that led me to that moment. It took about a day for boots to dry, two days for the rest of my clothes to dry, and I will get back to you about how long it takes for my ego to recover.

Another fun experience I had during my time in Costa Rica took place toward the beginning of the trip. That day, we had been able to stop at a supermarket for the first time to get snacks or whatever else we needed. I, along with many of my classmates, loved the opportunity to explore the aisles and check out all of the Costa Rican foods that we had never seen before. I left that day with a bag of Chiky’s (the greatest cookies that I had never heard of before this trip) and a bag of plantain chips. On the bus ride back to La Selva I cracked open my bag of plantain chips but did not finish them, so I rolled the bag up, put it back in the grocery bag, and tossed it with the rest of my stuff when we got back. A few hours later I returned to the bag of plantain chips in hopes of satiating my unending hunger for snack food, but what I was met with will haunt me for years to come… I grabbed the bag and walked out of my room, eating a few chips as I walked. After I had already tossed multiple chips into my mouth, I felt something tickling my hand, so I looked down and saw ants crawling up my arm. “Hmm,” I thought to myself, “how interesting. I wonder where those ants could be coming from?” I soon learned where the ants could be coming from as I peered into the bag of chips to find an ungodly amount of ants wreaking havoc on my dear plantain chips. I do not know, nor do I want to know, how many ants I ate that day, but the feeling of them crawling up my arm and my realization of the situation will forever be burned into my mind.

I have many tales of my misadventures in Costa Rica that I could tell, but for the sake of word count I will leave you with those two anecdotes and now transition to a more serious retrospective on the course as a whole. Coming from a computer science background where I am so used to my schoolwork consisting of myself working out math problems or writing programs for hours at a time at my computer, this course has been such a breath of fresh air. The clear focus on collaboration and thoughtful discussion throughout the course pushed me out of my comfort zone in the best way, forcing me to work on and grow areas of myself that would otherwise not have been challenged.

I also want to give a huge thank you to Dr. Wasserman and Dr. Libby for leading us through this experience. I can’t even imagine the amount of work that was required to plan an entire month in a foreign country for a group of 20 college students. And then to have to actually make sure the plans work out, lead and be responsible for these students, AND also conduct a course throughout it all? I have a lot of respect for all of the work that the professors put into this trip, and I am sure that all of my classmates would agree wholeheartedly. I also want to shoutout Eric Johnson for helping make sure everything ran smoothly and also for having an awesome mustache.

I don’t have much else to say other than that, if given the opportunity, I would hop back into Marvin’s time machine and go back to the moment I got on the plane in an instant.

-Tate

As I am writing this fourth and final blog, I am sitting in Indiana, and left reflecting and reminiscing on the past month in paradise. But more than that I am left pondering the future of conservation, sustainability, and the inevitability of the planet. Throughout the course, we touched on biodiversity, agriculture, ecotourism, and eventually climate change. All these topics are complex and require in-depth conversation, especially as we search for solutions for the future.

However, the hunt for plausible solutions is extremely difficult, and that is one aspect we learned about during our final week in Costa Rica. One activity we completed in search of international cooperation was a UN debate where we were placed into groups and researched various countries across the globe. My group and I represented Bhutan, a small country of 750,000 individuals sandwiched between China and India that is known because it is a carbon-negative country and sequesters more carbon than it produces. The Bhutan energy grid is a completely renewable form of energy, but Bhutan is already facing the effects of climate change due to its proximity to the Himalayan Mountains. The Himalayan Mountains are a sensitive spot for the effects of climate change because the rising temperatures are melting the snow and causing glacial lake outburst floods (GLOF), in countries such as Bhutan. In 1994, the GLOF Lugge Tsho burst and damaged homes and closed a major road which isolated the civilians of Bhutan from necessary resources. This was one occurrence, and these will become more common since there are 2,674 glacial lakes in Bhutan which could melt as global temperature rises (Bhutan Watch, 2022). Learning this information is extremely eye-opening because climate catastrophes are hurting countries, like Bhutan and Costa Rica, that have contributed very little to the problem.

Due to this nature, we need to work on solutions now. And it is extremely important to have global collaboration and to pool resources for an issue that knows no borders.

But, as we learned from our UN Debate and then the US Senate Debate, this is very strenuous especially when money and self-interest are involved. The US Senate debate highlighted the barriers within American politics, stemming from science denialism and a dependency on fossil fuels. Even within a committee labeled the “US Senate Committee for Energy and Natural Resources”, science denialism and American perceived superiority prevented solutions from formulating. It is difficult to continue being hopeful when acknowledging the systemic barriers in the US government for any sort of large-scale action, particularly climate-related.

However, now reflecting on the trip I still have optimism, but I also realize that change must come from all levels for something as drastic as the climate crisis. We can’t rely solely on the US Government or systemic change to happen fast enough. Individual and collective action are vital in this fight for our planet.

But this is not as unattainable as it seems, because climate change is an issue that brings all different specializations of people together. You can see this on our trip, as we have people from different backgrounds and subject expertise. There were those who were more focused on the natural sciences, and then those more specialized in the social sciences. But we all came together to discuss the implications of climate change and to work together towards a collective goal. The importance of collaboration within the environmental field is something that I focused on as the Communication and Marketing Intern with Sustain IU, but this trip reinforced this trend in a real-world scenario. You can see how representation from every discipline and a variety of viewpoints can make stronger and more cohesive results.

A collection of ideas can also be viewed with our research projects. Throughout the course, we worked in groups of two to conduct a research project. I worked with Dylan Surkein to investigate how the edge effect is altering behavior between the sexes of Costa Rican primates. Our findings showed that the presence of humans would cause female capuchin monkeys and male spider and howler monkeys to adopt more vigilance behaviors. These behavioral differences could cause reproductive dissimilarity if one sex is more defensive or vigilant in the wake of humans. We took our project from a behavioral science lens, but a wide variety of different disciplines were highlighted through our research projects. Not only that each project was developed and very professional given the time constraints of our time in Costa Rica. It was amazing to see the fascinating work that my peers completed and once again it showed to me the scope of environmental change. Every discipline and specialty is needed for this fight, and even the small group from Indiana University is an essential component.

Realizing the importance of the collective is also important as I prepare for my junior year at Indiana University. This coming year I will be joining the Executive Branch of IU Student Government as a Sustainability co-director and want to prioritize partnerships across the university and throughout the hundreds of disciplines available. It will create more feasible collective solutions which is what we need moving into the future. Especially as the students of IU demand clear and official plans for the university.

Although this drive for collective action is just in student government, it can also be found in municipalities and at the state level. These are both locations where change seems to be more frequent and fundamental within a larger system. As I shift back into my life in Indiana I will be working on the Senatorial campaign for my father, Dr. Ron Itnyre. He is a college biology teacher who running for Indiana State Senate for District 27, not because he wants to be a politician, but because he is tired of nothing being accomplished within Indiana education, climate action, and other issues. However, unlike other individuals who will just move away if there is a problem, my dad is standing up and uses his voice for others. It is not going to be easy, but that is once again why we need collective action. Because even in situations of individual strength, they are upheld by a collective group of people who believe in their cause. So, I will volunteer my time for my dad and a cause that I believe in because now the planet depends on it. I can’t believe it required time abroad to understand the scope of collective action, but there was something about stepping away from the situation that ignites a fire in me. I feel a spark of renewed hope seeing work by my peers and from people all around the world who traveled to Costa Rica just to participate in a global cause.

I’ll still promote individual action, and I will shorten the lengths of my showers after visiting Costa Rica, but now I realize the true significance of cumulative endeavors. We are not going to fix systemic issues or massive obstacles alone, but together we can combine efforts and help our world.

Works Cited:

Adhikari, P. (2021, January 10). Bhutan and Climate Change. Bhutan Watch. Retrieved June 21, 2022, from http://www.bhutanwatch.org/climate-change-impact-in-bhutan/

Zajdel, A. (2022, June 20). Ron Itnyre for Indiana State Senate. Itnyre for Indiana. Retrieved June 22, 2022, from https://itnyreforindiana.com/

For my final entry in my Costa Rican blog I wanted to direct my focus on my thoughts concerning ecotourism. Considering the class and I have spent our month doing just that, I feel that it is an important topic to consider. 

Now that I am back in the United States, I have had time to truly reflect on my experience as a whole for the past month. I can confidently say that my views on many things involving ecotourism have changed heavily. For example, I have made it a point during the course of this class that I did not enjoy some aspects of certain tours because they seemed to exploit wildlife rather than just show it. I do understand that an aspect of ecotourism is showing foreigners, such as ourselves, parts of nature that would not normally be seen. However, to me that is the beauty of nature. Part of the ecotourism draw for me personally was the unknown. I enjoyed that at places with tours like the hanging bridges, I did not necessarily know if I was going to see anything let alone what specifically it would be. This unknown beauty of nature was not what was present for some parts of the ecotourism we were a part of because it was not an organic experience in my opinion. Instead, there were times where I watched as an animal writhed around while being held up for tourists to see. It is almost comparable to a zoo animal and the stresses they endure. While physical damage may not be done, there is physiological stress that can cause real negative symptoms (Fischer 2019). Once again, I do understand that this is part of the business, but I just appreciate ecotourism more when it feels natural to me in terms of wildlife. 

As for some of the human focused aspects of ecotourism, I found there to be both positives and negatives. During our last week, our class was able to visit a local coffee plantation. This plantation seemed to be on the smaller side in relation to major producers. The owner was very willing to give information, and she mentioned that she does not do major exports. In this regard, I assume that ecotourism has a very positive influence on her livelihood considering it is tourists like ourselves that buy plenty of coffee from her and then spread the word of her business. On a small scale like this, I do believe that ecotourism is a promising thing that can bring money in for local people. However, there are also aspects of the ecotourism industry that do seem damaging. For example, when an area over devotes itself to ecotourism, it can feel that the area has lost some of its own culture. This was apparent in areas like Tortuguero during one of the early parts of the trip. These businesses were so invested in tourism that it almost seemed like an extension of an English speaking country. The menus were all in English and most everyone spoke to me in English as well. As convenient as this was for a person like me, I almost wished that these places would force us to adapt to them instead of them adapting to us. Once again though, I understand that this is part of the business but that is just my view on the whole situation. 

For some final thoughts on the whole trip, I wanted to really speak on the amount that this experience changed me. From the small things like appreciating warm water at home, to the bigger (and scarier) things like knowing that climate change is a real global threat to not be underestimated, there is so much that I know now that I just did not fully grasp before leaving the United States. It is so easy to forget that not everyone lives the same way that you do, and that there is much more in the world to explore and experience. From the humid jungle in La Selva, to the mountainous and mild area in Las Cruces, there is truly nothing that I could compare at home to these locations. Pictures will never do this trip justice just because of how rich the entire experience was. The opportunity to dip my toes into the research field was something I have not taken for granted and I am thankful to have gotten the chance to do just that. Just as important as the actual trip itself, there is so much to this experience that was enhanced by the people that were a part of it. It is with great sadness that I have to say and accept that I will most likely never be driven on a bus by Marvin ever again. In all seriousness, I do want to thank Marvin, Eric, Dr. Libby, and Dr. Wasserman for enhancing the experience for all students. It was a pleasure to be a part of the group and an even better feeling to have built friendships with so many classmates along the way. From beginning to end and no matter the conditions, I always felt part of the team, and it was rewarding to have finished the trip as part of the team as well. 

Even with the excitement over for now, I am happy to be able to say that I embarked on this journey early in my college career so I can start to think about what I learned for the future. In no way is my perspective without flaws, but I know that Costa Rica has taught me so much about another culture, and about the world in general. All I can ask for is improvement, and I know that this past month in Costa Rica has been a big step for me in terms of being a student and a person. 

Works Cited 

Fischer, Clare Parker, and L Michael Romero. “Chronic captivity stress in wild animals is highly species-specific.” Conservation physiology vol. 7,1 coz093. 4 Dec. 2019, doi:10.1093/conphys/coz093

Week 4 of Costa Rica

     This was the last week of my Costa Rican study abroad experience. It was bittersweet because I was excited to reunite with my family and friends back at home, but extremely sad to leave the beautiful souls I now share many memories with. A prevalent theme I saw myself focusing on during this week was cooperation and acceptance. The ability to cooperate and see things from a different perspective has been just one of the many life lessons I have learned from my experience in Costa Rica.

     Living with 19 people for a month straight with no breaks has its ups and downs. Everyone has their own perspectives, personalities, worldviews, and desires. With this much individuality and variation, people are bound to clash. However, during this trip, I learned to accept people in my times of frustration and to truly consider the motivations behind people’s actions. Furthermore , it made me happy to be traveling with a community in Costa Rica that accepted me, flaws and all, as well. 

     During the last week, many of our assignments in Las Cruces dealt with cooperation. One specific assignment that came to mind was the UN debate. Originally, only the UN debate was planned, but later a US Senate debate was added. The professors included this addition after students advocated for a national debate to help better understand the views of US senators on climate change. Personally, I was glad the professors cooperated with the students and allowed for them to express their ideas. This situation was refreshing because many students are accustomed to not being heard. Moving on, I was part of the Philippines committee. Through this assignment, I was able to learn various amounts of information regarding many different countries . For instance, the Philippines is one of the most at risk countries in terms of devastation that could be potentially caused by climate change. Despite their at risk status, the Philippines carbon emissions are negligible. On the other hand, the USA is one of the top contributors of carbon dioxide emissions, but they have the proper resources and infrastructure to acknowledge the possible consequences of climate change. I think it is the duty of high emitters, such as the USA, to help fund countries, like the Philippines, who are most at risk and lack necessary funds to plan for and confront climate change. 

    Surprisingly, all of the resolutions created in the UN debate all passed. After the UN session, the resolutions created  were discussed in a US senate debate. Everyone was assigned a senator. My senator was Maria Cantwell, a Democrat representing Washington. Cantwell is a senator that believes in climate change and thinks that necessary action needs to be taken to preserve biodiversity. Moreover, She has been a leader in proposing environmental policies that advocate for clean energy. Due to her background, I assumed that she would vote for all of the UN resolutions. Despite her and other democratic votes, none of the UN solutions were passed in the senate debate. I think this demonstrates the lack of cooperation present within the senate across party borders. For instance, a common theme was a majority of Democrats voted in favor of the UN resolutions, while a majority of Republicans voted against. This divide between parties is dangerous, especially when confronting climate change, our true greatest enemy.

    Another community that demonstrated cooperation was the Boruca tribe. My group and I had the pleasure of meeting some of the indigenous people that are part of this tribe. These people kindly welcomed us into their home and showed us their different practices. They showed us both wood carving and thread making. I was shocked by the beauty of their art. The masks were made in two different forms. Some were traditional masks while others were ecological masks. At times, the artist even blended these two concepts together, creating both an ecological masks with aspects of a traditional mask. While the woodcarving can be done by a single artist, the indigenous artist mentioned that different parts can be done by different people. For example, someone could carve the masks, while someone else paints the design. This was also the same for thread making and weaving. The thread utilized by the tribe is made up of cotton. The process from cotton to a beautiful bag or table mat can be split up as well. Different people can participate in making the thread, dying the thread, weaving the thread, and sewing the final product. I was shocked at the the amount of cooperation and the trust one needs to end up with a final product. It really shows you that teamwork can be a beneficial addition to one’s life, and I hope to achieve more of a collectivist mindset. 

    Additionally, I can’t believe it! My time in Costa Rica is over. This trip has been rewarding and enriching in many ways. I hope to adapt my life at home in accordance with the lessons that I have learned in Costa Rica. Furthermore, I would like to finish with thanking some people. A big thanks to my parents, who helped fund my trip. Thanks to the professors who gave us many unforgettable memories in Costa Rica. A big thanks to ERIC for showing me around Costa Rica, despite my slow walking speed. Finally, an immense thanks to all of my classmates, who gifted me with so much laughter and happiness. 

   As a closing thought, I encourage everyone to be critical but to enjoy the little moments. Many hard lessons were learned in Costa Rica, but falling too deep into despair can really take away from one’s experience. It’s important to understand and acknowledge the bad, but don’t let it over shine the good. There is always good if you’re willing to look for it. Also, please travel! Through traveling, one can understand the perspectives present in another country. Sometimes these perspectives can be similar to your own or strikingly different. However, these various perspectives can impact you in ways you never thought possible. Anyways, it’s time for me to sign off! 

PURA VIDA

If I have learned anything from this trip, it is that community, above all, will always be there to teach you, care for you, and work with you. I have seen so many different ways a community can impact people, the planet, and how we learn and understand one another. This trip has taught me more than I thought possible, and it was all because of the community I was part of and the communities I was able to learn from. I greatly appreciated all the experiences that I was scheduled during the trip, but I feel I learned the most from the conversations I had with my classmates during meals, on long bus rides, or exploring towns and the outdoors. The community that I was gifted with during this trip allowed me to understand things in new ways and unlearn so many of my preconceived ideas about how the world works around me. Not only this, but the activities we did during the program also illustrated to me how vital communities are especially as they relate to climate solutions. 

Talking to the indigenous communities during this trip taught me more about the importance of community and how it relates to the environment and enhanced my understanding of what it really means to live with nature. I think in the United States, or at least my understanding of it, living with nature is not the primary way of living. Rather, it is natural living for us, for it to serve us and to meet our every demand and want. The Boruca people showed me the beauty of living with nature and how the community you are part of should not only involve people but also the environment around you. This was clear to me when the women illustrated how they make several different colors of dye using just leaves and water. They even showed how you can make different shades of the same color using different amounts of leaves. This was so interesting to me, and it really showed me how Earth provides us with such beautiful materials to make beautiful things, but capitalism has exploited, or just ignored, this and unsustainably makes clothing and textiles from synthetic dye at an outrageous rate. Seeing how much work Boruca women put into making the dye, the thread from the cotton, and weaving the thread to make the bags that were on display for purchase made it so clear to me how things are supposed to be made intentionally with love. This perfectly showed that if things are produced slowly and with purpose, the Earth will also be thankful. It was such an incredible experience and I am so thankful for their kindness and hospitality in showing us how they make their bags and traditional masks. 

Watching the Boruca man carve and paint the mask was also such a transformative experience. The way he naturally carved the wood was so interesting to watch and when he began painting the mask, I was speechless. Watching him do it with such ease and precision, all with a smile on his face, was something I didn’t know I needed to see. He did it with such purpose and intention, and I just kept thinking of how I wanted to do something in my life with such purpose and intention as well. I couldn’t help relating this thought to the community I have built myself with the environment around me and how I can live more intentionally and purposefully with the Earth. I thought of possible changes I could make when I returned to the United States in order to better my relationship with the Earth. I plan on taking more walks in the mornings to begin my day connected with the Earth and to listen to what it’s saying in the morning. I also decided to keep my newly formed habit of coexisting with the bugs and insects around me, even though they still slightly freak me out. I think by being able to coexist with them, I’ll understand more about how to live with things that make me uncomfortable but are good for the Earth and its ecosystems. I used to exclusively take warm to hot showers, but I am going to begin taking cool showers because this trip has definitely taught me that it’s okay to be uncomfortable for a little while if it ultimately contributes to the greater good. In terms of my career goals, I also want to do something with such intent and purpose as the man carving and painting the wood. As I am beginning to prepare for my career in medicine, I want to unconditionally love my patients and be an advocate for them when it seems like all hope is lost. I want to care for them with such intent and purpose, just like the Boruca people do in all they do. 

I am so grateful for all that has happened, both the good and the bad, on this trip. I have learned from my peers, from my professors from the grass, from the trees, from the insects, from the mammals, from the amphibians, from the reptiles, from the sky, from the food, from the long bus rides, from my fear, from my discomfort, and from myself. Most importantly, though, I’ve learned from the various communities in which I passed through and found myself. Thank you for teaching me to live with intent and purpose.

As my last week in Costa Rica comes to a close, I am leaving with a greater, and more nuanced, understanding of planetary health and global climate change. I admit that over the course of this trip, I’ve been met with lots of mental strife. The events of this month have led me to question the ethicality of visiting a country of the Global South as a member of the Global North, especially having participated in more than a few ecotourism activities. In addition, in my experience, receiving environmental education has a tendency to create feelings of despair and send students down a doom spiral when learning about the state of the earth. With every effort that myself and others make towards climate change mitigation, it feels as if each attempt simply serves as reminder of the futility of action in a world of enduring inaction. As some people say, it feels like “going down the up escalator”. However, I’ve also had the privilege of meeting people (who I can happily call my friends!) on this trip that are bright, authentic, and hopeful. Talking to them helped immensely when I needed to work through my thoughts on issues and class happenings. Regardless of the program content, I can firmly say that I have learned endlessly from the people I have engaged in conversation with.

One point I’d like to note was how easy it was to live more sustainably when everything around me was encouraging it. The field stations each had an impressively low carbon footprint,

 some more so than others. Sorted recycling and waste baskets were placed throughout each station, climate controlled buildings were scarce to none, small farms sustained a large portion of the food supply, and water was conserved where possible. As I type this from my suburban home back in Bloomington, I can confirm that I am much more aware of my role as a consumer of the Global North. My apartment complex lacks a recycling system and requires residents to visit the local center on their own. The grocery store selections have small sections for locally sourced goods. Greenwashing is evident at all levels of establishments in town. Bringing back sustainable habits to the US from the Green Republic requires a level of friction when one considers the culture of consumerism ingrained in the Western mindset. The hedonic treadmill is a human tendency that I believe manifests itself in varying degrees. Nevertheless, small changes do add up. Taking cold showers and re-wearing clothes are easy, noninvasive ways I can begin to mitigate my footprint. Even so, when zooming out and reading world news about the latest climate legislation that was just struck down, it gets difficult.

During a Model UN debate our class hosted earlier this week, we explored the processes legislators and world leaders go through to pass global climate policy. My group represented Bhutan, a landlocked country adjacent to China and India. It was encouraging to read about their sustainability efforts – Bhutan runs on 100% renewable energy, and serves as a huge carbon sink as a result of their land remaining 70% forested (Youn 2021). After discussing and voting on resolutions each country proposed, we shifted to take on the role of individual US senators on the Energy and Natural Resources (ENR) committee and voted on each passed resolution. It quickly became evident that passing resolution at the global scale was exceedingly easier than that at the US scale. Coming into the UN meeting, each country acknowledged the existence of anthropogenic climate change and was acting in their country’s best interest. In contrast, it was difficult to pass anything in the US Senate due to the presence of one very human phenomenon: denial.

In a lecture by Dr. Libby, he introduced the supposed roots of climate change denial from an economic and political lens. He referenced the negative perception some Americans held: environmentalism as a ruse to regulate capitalist markets, and thus the personal freedoms of its people. The tobacco industry popularized the practice of funding bad science in order to plant seeds of doubt in consumer minds, and the fossil fuel industry took inspiration (Yach 2001). However, denial doesn’t act alone in halting climate progress. Denial works in tandem with insecurity and hopelessness. The jobs of many established politicians rely on big oil and gas to fund their election (and re-election) campaigns. This career insecurity is also seen in middle-class individuals who feel that they have lots to lose in the form of tangible assets. In addition, hopelessness arrives when people simply cannot see past short-term repercussions. Those who believe we are past the tipping point have no hope in collective action or organized grassroots movements, when they serve as at least part of the very solution to the climate crisis. These very human emotions act as gears to continue moving the climate escalator up, and only when we address the systems creating these sentiments afloat may we begin to move the needle the other way.

Thanks Costa Rica – signing off! 🙂

Works Cited:

Yach, D., & Bialous, S. A. (2001). Junking Science to Promote Tobacco. American Journal of Public Health, 91(11), 1745–1748. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.91.11.1745

Youn, S. (2021, May 3). Visit the World’s Only Carbon-Negative Country. Travel. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/carbon-negative-country-sustainability

This past week has been extremely bittersweet and now the past month feels like a complete blur.  Waking up in the States without my peers brings a new feeling of homesickness for a place that quickly became a sanctuary to travel through.  We finally arrived at our final destination of the Las Cruces Biological Station in the Talamanca Mountains.  Unlike every other part of the country that we travelled through; the higher elevation resulted in much colder temperatures which was a very welcoming change.  Each morning I would wake up early with a few peers to enjoy our coffee before breakfast on the beautiful balcony view of the mountainside.  Our first morning we were taken on a tour of the Botanical Garden which is home to over three thousand flora and fauna populations.  About sixty percent of the tree and other plant species are international, mostly imported from southeastern Asia.  We saw the country’s smallest, but inedible, pineapple as well as the Garden’s oldest tree which is estimated at about 150 years old.  The age of this tree was measured based on the diameter and height since the tree and its roots could not be cut into.  Another interesting addition to the area was a unique looking white tree that had evolved to develop spikes near the bottom to ward off against ancient predators that used to claw into the base.  The fibers within the base absorb water, which creates a unique bulge-like shape; whereas palm tree is usually perfectly straight because they equally distribute the water they absorb.  Although I have no idea how to pronounce this specific tree name, when hit lightly with a rock, a hollow noise can be heard from the large amount of rainfall that is collected by the roots.

Las Cruces was the final location for my research partner and I to conduct our interviews for research purposes.  In addition to informal interviews, our entire class spent a few class lectures discussing the book 6 Degrees and its implications into the current political and environmental climate of the global community.  Following this severely depressing lecture, we were split into groups the following day where we were sent to prepare for a United Nations debate where we each developed policies to implement to mitigate the damages of climate change.  However, we each had to represent a specific country and create a plan based on the values and financial implications of the country we represented.  I may have dreaded this activity in the beginning, but I thoroughly enjoyed this portion of our assignment and how everyone came together and developed a resolution to accommodate a majority of the countries.  Following this debate, we were then assigned a United States senator to impersonate and host a mock voting poll over the resolutions we had created in the UN perspective.  It was very interesting because in the eyes of the United States senate, none of the resolutions passed and the highest reasoning for this was the fact that a majority of United States senators do not “believe” in climate change, which is another topic entirely, unfortunately.

Unlike taking courses in the States, I look forward to each of our lectures and the relatability to Costa Rica and the surrounding environmental and public health issues.  With Dr. Wasserman we learned about the Great Acceleration and theories around human carrying capacity in relation to affluence, technology, and population size.  Another interesting topic of this lecture was potential biological responses to climate change and the impending sixth extinction.  These include phenotypic plasticity and flexibility, migration, adaption, reduced reproduction and survival, and extinction.  Although most of or climate change discussions and lectures were quite morbid and negatively connotated, it was inspiring to hear a diverse group of thoughts from my peers and professors.  With Dr. Libby we were taught about the historical purpose of using science to discredit data and cast doubt.  This concept, coupled with the Fairness Doctrine created a disproportionate balance of information that was broadcasted to the public.  Science is based on evidence, and not opinion, which is the cause of continued confusion and drastically different ideologies among our society.  Another very interesting lecture revolved around the six different stages of climate change denial, which is a topic that I have never been educated on previously.

After two days full of only research, debates, and lectures we went on a night hike through the Garden which was much different than the night hike through La Selva.  Without the canopy forest cover, and the dense forest around us, this night hike felt very sparse.  One thing I really appreciated from this specific night hike was the very clear view of the sky and how peaceful we all felt in the moment, even though our group hikes can be heard from miles away.  The morning after we visited a local, family-owned coffee farm.  We were led on a trek deep into the forest where we were able to see everything this family grows, including coffee, cacao, bananas, lemons, avocados, and sugar cane. It was remarkable to learn how much manual labor and dedication goes into this sector of Costa Rica’s agriculture.  An interesting fact that I learned is that coffee beans from shaded, high elevation areas are superior to lowland beans.

After rehearsing our presentation and making our final editions, my research partner and I, along with IRES research students visited the town of San Vito for the day.  It was refreshing to be able to be a normal “tourist” for the day.  We visited a local coffee shop for breakfast and coffee, then shopped at some thrift stores, and finally arrived at a local pizza restaurant, which was absolutely delicious.  This change of pace from research, assignments, and lectures was much needed and helped rejuvenate most of my peers to prepare for our final research presentations.

Each group did a phenomenal job at presenting their research and results from the past month, and I felt quite relieved when my partner and I were completely done.  We created an in-depth risk assessment regarding natural disasters and the exacerbation of them by climate change at La Selva Biological Station, Osa Conservation, and Las Cruces Biological Station.  We did this through informal structured interviews, statistics from online journals, Dire Predictions, and our subjective observations after visiting each site.  I really enjoyed this social research project and hope to continue similar endeavors in the future and use this experience to direct my potential schooling options.

I know waking up in my own bed back in Bloomington, Indiana will come as quite a shock, but I will look back on this trip and the lifelong friendships with great fondness.

The Citizen’s Role in the Climate Crisis

I’m typing my final blog on my flight back to the United States. I honestly cannot believe that the study abroad program is over. This may have been one of the most transformative months in my life and it came at the heels of the most instructive semester of my life. I’m really thankful for both my time in DC and Costa Rica because both of them give me a better view of what I, and others, can do to change systems at large. I’ve learned a lot and I’m compelled to use my knowledge, my time, and my skills to make the world a better place.

Last week, I talked about climate change and the Global North’s failure to take adequate responsibility for this crisis. This week, the Model UN and US Senate simulations showcased how the United States could be dysfunctional when it came to climate policy. The reality of the climate crisis is that we need immediate and aggressive action at the highest level of government. Instead, the United States, the nation with the most fiscal and technological resources to address the climate crisis, is allowing its political structure to block crucial climate action. 

I sometimes wonder if the inaction would be as grave as it is if policymakers understood the extent of the crisis. I truly did not understand the urgency and gravity of the crisis until our class read the piece Six Degrees. Six Degrees laid out scenarios for various nations across the globe that would be affected by the climate crisis. The chapters of two degrees and three degrees of warming were incredibly terrifying because they highlighted how close we were to the dramatic changes in the world’s biomes and the potential collapse of civilization as we know it. During our discussion, it seemed like our class was deeply distributed and moved by the piece, Six Degrees. They seemed to understand the extent of the crisis better than our lawmakers. 

I saw Six Degrees, my own experiences with government dysfunction. and the grandmother’s health failure as a rallying call for me: if I actually care about the climate crisis, now is the time to get up and fight back. There’s no more sitting on the sidelines for me. Technically, everyone can fight back with their individual economic power. Yet in practice, it’s difficult for individuals to switch their source of electricity from fossil fuels to renewables or buy an electric vehicle. Our power as individuals lies in our ability to collectively organize. We all have ties to institutions that can do more to combat climate change, whether it be Indiana University, Duke Energy, the State of Indiana, or the United States of America government. People have to rally together to move these institutions to stop their lip service and take dramatic action on this crisis. 

What am I going to do in the short term?

In the short term, I’m going to move out to Nevada and work for Senator Cortez Masto’s campaign. Every single vote in the US Senate is necessary to pass climate legislation in the following session of Congress. With how many climate deniers and climate skeptics hold seats in the US Senate, we must fight to keep every Senator who supports addressing the climate crisis. After working on Senator Cortez Masto’s Energy and Natural Resource portfolio, I have a better understanding of how Senator Cortez Masto understands the extent of the climate crisis and is willing to utilize her standing to advance climate action. I am further motivated to work on Senator Cortez Masto’s race because it will be one of the most competitive races in the nation this fall. Nevada is a purple state that has been trending Republican over the past few election cycles. Every vote will matter in this election. As an organizer, the tactics that I employ could be critical for the outcome in November. This election is also important because of the balance of power currently held in the United States Senate. There are 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, meaning that the loss of one Democratic seat could give Republicans the majority of the chamber. Senate Republicans are not concerned with climate action. If the Democrats lose the majority this fall, there may not be a chance for climate action until the next decade and at that point, the effects of climate change will be harshly felt by the entire world. 

My job on campaign starts on July 5th. I currently don’t have an end date. When I initially applied for the job, I thought that I would finish it up in time for the fall semester to start. The experiences of this trip have me questioning that idea entirely. If this crisis is as urgent and deadly as I learned about in class, then I should dedicate more time to ensuring the US Senate is best equipped to handle it. I’m now actively considering taking a semester off from school in the fall to work on Senator Cortez Masto’s campaign. 

Senator Cortez Masto

What am I going to do in the long term?

To be completely honest, I’m too scared to think of my future after my graduation in Spring 2023. I’m going to simply take life as it comes, one year at a time. I’ve had some ideas about simply embracing organizing as a long-term career and this summer (and potentially this fall) will help me understand how organizing will fit into my life. If not organizing for competitive US congressional races, I may try to pursue action at other levels, including international or state. I believe that governmental action can solve this crisis in its current form, but this will be less true as time continues to tick and lives continue to be lost to the climate crisis. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this trip abroad. I was so ready to come home at the end of it, but I truly learned so much about climate change from other individuals, lived experiences and class material. I have much to think about over the next few weeks as my life may take an unexpected spin. 

Sources

Lynas, M. (2008). Six degrees: Our future on a hotter planet.

U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. (n.d.). U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Retrieved June 21, 2022, from https://www.energy.senate.gov/

Citations

This will be an overall reflection of the program that I’m writing after getting back to Indiana. The main focus will be on my views of conservation after this experience and what I’m taking away from the program.

The takeaway that has stuck with me the most from this program is realizing what lens the field of environmental science is taught through, at least in my experiences in this major. Throughout my courses at Indiana University, and even in my environmental science class in high school, I’ve always noticed a shift in responsibility toward the countries that me and other students of color identify with, which are also usually the countries that have contributed the least to causing climate change. At times, these even manifest as attacks on those countries or the people of the Global South, like what we read about India and China in 6 Degrees: “few people in today’s India give much of a damn about global warming” (Lynas, 2007). For most of my time in college, I haven’t really challenged some of these attacks or the dismissal of the Global South, even though I identify as a person of color and I find them uncomfortable. And it’s not just me: when talking to other students of color, we usually have had these same concerns throughout college. It’s also telling when almost all of the few students of color in this program came to the same conclusion that the reading of 6 Degrees was racist. These experiences, whether it’s frustration with openly racist readings or disappointment when the damages that are done by climate change to the countries that we or our families are from aren’t acknowledged, are shared between us. However, what’s just as disheartening is when we start to challenge these systems but any signs of change are hard to see. When a lot of the material that we’re provided with in these classes continue to exclude sensitivity to marginalized communities, it’s clear to see that conservation, at least in the United States, doesn’t seem to be open to these communities unless if we’re alright with pushing through material that is insensitive to our communities; if we do push back, it’s rare that we see any changes to the system that we’re challenging.

Expanding beyond the United States, we saw a similar issue in Costa Rica. A lot of the places that we stayed at were foreign-owned bubbles where researchers, a lot of the time from the Global North, could study an ecosystem that they’ve never been able to before. Staying at these locations felt isolating from the rest of the country, especially Costa Rican communities and cities. It was surprising to see the exclusion of or lack of accessibility to these sites for Costa Ricans while in Costa Rica; instead, it seemed to mostly be filled with foreign researchers, a lot of whom seemed to be from the Global North. It’s hard to see conservation , as it is currently practiced, as an inclusive field that actually works to equitably mitigate the effects of climate change.

The positives that I’ll take away from this program were from the conversations with everyone else in the class. The first thing was that a lot of the other students were interested in pushing for changes at Indiana University and in the United States after the program; for example, there was interest in joining the current movement to get a commitment to carbon neutrality from Indiana University. This was especially hopeful given the United States’ disproportionate contributions to the causes of the climate crisis. I also got connected with ways to support the Bloomington community in multiple ways, such as cooking food for the unhoused community in Bloomington. When helping out with these organizations, we’ll also have a stronger sense of community since many of us from this program are closer with each other now and will be participating together. Staying connected with other students from this class will be the most fulfilling outcome of this program.

Work Cited

Lynas, Mark. Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Fourth Estate, 2007.

Words

I usually spend a lot of time writing this blog every day before bed but I’ve been sick and my creativeness/desire to write is lacking. Eric I apologize if this blog sucks but I’m not feeling good enough to write something witty or of good quality. 

Bromeliads and Mosquitoes 

This week I didn’t spend much time on activities because I spent most of my time at Las Cruces doing research. On Monday, Piper and I went out into the field and set out our six bowls for the collection or rainwater and flagged the three bromeliads per site we were interested in collecting rain water in. We chose five different sites, with the edge of the forest being our control and the minimum and maximum ranges being our disturbed and undisturbed sites. 

The following day, Tuesday, Piper and I set out on a hike ( with Sam because his partner, Will, has a sprained ankle). Piper and I stopped at every flagged bromeliad and rainwater collection bowl to collect samples using a pipet. Shoutout to Sam for taking pictures of us at work. Anywho, after collecting all the samples we decided to go back and play with the microscope.

At the lab/library I realized identifying species richness was difficult so we took a break since we had already done a lot of work and waited to speak to Dr. Wasserman. 

Eventually, we spoke about changing species richness to mosquito larvae abundance since I could easily identify larvae in the samples. 

The following day Piper went into town and I stayed back because I wasn’t feeling too good and I looked and analyzed all 21 samples. I took the chemical samples, pH and looked through the microscope at each individual sample and recorded the number of larvae as well as some phenotypic qualities. 

Here were our hypothesis: 

1. There would be a difference in water quality because of the filtration system of the bromine as
2. More mosquitos in better water quality
3. More mosquitoes in undisturbed areas 
4. There would be no difference in water quality due to distance because of the filtration system 

We got some interesting results. Rain water and bromikead water did differ. Significantly actually. 

Mosquitoes, as expected, were in bromeliads of better water quality. 

Oddly enough, disturbed areas had more mosquitoes. We think this is maybe because deforestation is driving mosquitoes out of the forest and into areas with better resources (by humans!) 

Nonetheless, the purpose of this experiment was to be able to map the mosquitoes in areas affected and unaffected by mosquitoes so that one day we can prevent the spread of arboviral diseases in a world where climate change is affecting the land in which mosquitoes can inhabit (Sukhralia, 2018). 

Eric helped us with statistical analysis because I had forgotten how to run a T-test on excel (Wendy for future reference go to data > data analysis > run T Test of Unequal Variance). Thank you Eric! You’ve been a phenomenal AI and meeting and getting to know you has been  a highlight of this trip. 

Friday was exhausting!! The entire day was working on presentations (yes we only got a day to analyze data and make nice presentations) and it was stressful because the wifi was out of wack. Regardless, Piper and I walked to the local bar down the road from Las Cruces to steal their wifi and eat their pasta. The pasta was BOMB! It was much needed after only eating salads all day every day. Also. Why do Costa Ricans use refried beans on nachos instead of whole beans? Interesting. 

This project has allowed me to grow my ability to work with other people. I am someone who finds it difficult to trust someone with school work but working with Piper has been really good because it has allowed me to learn how to compromise with tasks. Piper was an excellent partner and I couldn’t have asked for someone better to work with. 

Final Words

I’ve always had really bad imposter syndrome in stem and even on this trip sometimes I have felt like I don’t belong. One big take away (apart from the slow pace and at my own pace rant I had last week) I have had is that I belong in whatever I want to belong to. I have this newfound confidence in what I do and the presentation showed it. I usually get anxiety before presentations but somehow the final presentation went perfect. Words just flowed freely from my mouth and I ranted about all I had learned this last month and it was such a beautiful feeling. I worked with mosquitoes under Dr. Manzella in the asure lab, and the mosquitoes were an extension to Dr. Hardy’s lab work and I have been SO interested in it but I am yet to confront Dr. Hardy about the potential of getting a formal position in his lab because I felt like I didn’t have what it took to be in a formal lab. This trip has made me push myself to my limits but has allowed me to find this confidence I was missing to explore the Hardy lab. 

I am thinking this is going to be my last semester TAing for Dr. Manzella and the genome engineering lab so that I expand from my comfort zone and interview for a lab position with Dr. Hardy. Who knows, maybe he can be my mentor for the Panama trip. Hint hint (-:

I tried to save the majority of my reflection on the Costa Rica trip for after I returned to the US. It is hard to evaluate an experience holistically while you are enveloped in it. Now that I am back at my home, in a familiar environment, I can more completely evaluate what I learned and how I changed. I certainly did change. I have noticed that I feel like a different person that has been thrown back in to the exact same conditions they were in before the trip. My friends and family know me as the person I was before the trip, and until I socialize with them more there will be a bit of a disconnect.

To say I changed so much sounds rather dramatic, but I do believe my academic and professional interests as well as my worldview have shifted greatly over the course of the trip, and it will take more work than this blog to nail down how they have done so. Still, it will be a good start.

My previous blog questioned the role of scientific research in the context of climate change and an oppressive global political system. I may have been overly critical of research, and I still consider it as a very possible career choice for me for at least some time of my life. I think that I need to find questions that interest me and that I believe hold great societal importance, as I think my curiosity and enjoyment of the scientific process can only carry me so far. I have found that I enjoy simply asking and answering questions, and the great reveal of your findings following data analysis is exciting. It is gratifying to see data you collected in the field get interpreted into tangible numbers with real world implications. Field work also appeals to me, and this trip has cemented a love of outdoor exploration in me. Especially now that I have the field gear I purchased for this trip, I want to venture out more and learn as much as I can about nature.

However, I can now just as easily see myself being more involved in action and policy that benefits the environment or sustainability overall that is informed by research, but not participating in research itself. I am interested in habitat restoration, sustainable agriculture, and exploring alternative methods of land conservation. There is certainly an extensive body of research in those fields, and I may find it to be more fulfilling to work based on that and create meaningful change rather than conduct the research itself.

This brings me to a less critical perspective on research than that which I outlined on my previous post. Research informs action. It is the compass directing the steering wheel. Its role grows more important with climate change, as disruptions to natural systems will create new questions with very high relevance to human and environmental well-being.

I also recognize the importance of social research more than I did prior to the trip. There is no piece of land, no organism, no individual that is unaffected by humanity’s presence on the planet. Even “wild” lands that have never been settled by humans are being affected by anthropogenic climate change (). We have only obtained such power and such a wide-reaching impact on the planet in the last 250 years or so, or arguably in the last 70 years with the Great Acceleration. Humans existed on earth for at least 130,000 years before achieving anything near this much power (). Nothing about our biology fundamentally changed over those millennia. It is the way we structure our societies and the scale of those social systems that are responsible for such large-scale climatic change. It is essential to understand what social structures threaten the health of our planet and what can be done to alter them to prevent this. I want to explore degree options in geography, anthropology, or perhaps history or sociology to obtain a better understanding of what changed in the last few centuries to cause climate change, with the ultimate goal of better informing practices like conservation, agriculture, or even governmental structure to create a more sustainable future.

My understanding of the world and my place in it also changed over the course of the trip. I feel the need to better understand my identity as a privileged white man from a wealthy country and how that relates to global social dynamics. This is a daunting task, and one I need to fully commit myself to in order to really change anything. I will have to investigate the resources at my disposal to understand what it means to be privileged and what I can do about it. This trip was unique in motivating me to do that because the other times I have travelled internationally I visited France and Spain, two other wealthy countries. The main distinction between Europe and Costa Rica is the history of colonialism its persistence in one form or another. I felt uncomfortable very often as someone coming from a wealthy country that has interfered so greatly in Costa Rica and Latin America in general. Visiting only the most exciting natural areas and accessing more and better resources than the general population during our week of ecotourism made me reckon with my privilege more than I ever have, and even then I did not do so to a great extent.

There is much more to say and do about how I have changed and what future steps I can take to continue to evolve. I am fortunate to have done this trip as a freshman, as I have the rest of my undergraduate career to explore these questions and interests. I would like to thank Eric, Dr. Libby, Dr. Wasserman, Marvin, and all others involved in the trip for orchestrating a life-changing experience for me and hopefully for others as well.

Work Cited:

Wilford, John Noble. “When Humans Became Human.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 Feb. 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/26/science/when-humans-became-human.html.

Saying goodbye to Costa Rica was hard. I was sad that the trip came to an end. It felt like the month just flew by and I wish I had more time there. Going into this trip I was excited to learn about all the biodiversity and sustainability that this country had to display. And through my experience I started to learn about the intricacies of this country. It was an eye-opening experience that I am so glad I got to be a part of.

Just to give a glimpse into my last week, we had a lot going on in class. I finished up my research project with my partner Michael, and it was pretty rewarding to see our project finalized. Although it was only a mini research experience, it was still fun and made me want to do more research in my future. We focused on biodiversity of mostly birds, and Costa Rica definitely had a lot to offer. Overall, I am so happy I had this opportunity, and I really hope that I get to do more fieldwork soon! After we left Las Cruces Biological Station, we stayed the night at Trogon Lodge. That was probably one of my favorite places on the whole trip because the mountains were gorgeous. Also, it was nice to be cold for once instead of enduring the heat like at most other places. During our time there we went on a Quetzal tour to see one of the most beautiful birds which was very fun. After that we headed back to San Jose until we all said goodbye. The ending was bittersweet, I wish I had more time to keep exploring this place.

I really did learn a lot on this trip. We talked about climate change and the imminent threat it poses, which I already knew about, but I guess I never realized just how soon we these tragedies would start. As I talked about extensively in my last blog, the book Six Degrees really did serve as a wake-up call, and it is something I want to share with others. And of course, I got to learn about the country itself. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I got to see the agricultural practices I was unaware of before coming to the country. It was disheartening to learn about how Costa Rica has a high rate of pesticide use and that most of their food is exported out of the country. And how they have taken first place for pesticide usage, which is terrifying and detrimental to the health of the people who are working on or living near those large monocrop farms (Alvarado). In our UN and senate debates I saw a sort of mock trial for how a country makes influential change. The senate debate was the one that really hit home since we can see the direct effects of it when we are home. There are many senators who are climate change deniers, which is honestly pathetic. But even more importantly there are too many senators who are being paid off by the fossil fuel industry and put their own benefits above helping our country. It is hard to create lots of change because of the hold that these people have. As the person that got to play Joe Manchin, I really felt the hate from everyone around me since I was basically just a republican in democrats clothing. I am quite a pessimistic person, and the senate debate did not help with that. But I felt a lot better after the discussion that we had as a class. It made me hopeful to hear my classmates talk about how they think change is possible and that our generation will push the US in the right direction. And I guess they have a point; the small grassroots movements are starting to make meaningful change and influence politicians/organizations to do better.

While I did learn about a lot about planetary health and global climate change, I also learned a lot about myself and other people. It was definitely a learning curve being around people 24/7, but it made me realize the importance of community. Costa Rica seemed like such a nice place; the people seemed more connected there. The communities seemed to care more about each other, which is something I do not really see in the United States. Some of the people there were very inspiring. Like at the Don Roberto Coffee Farm we visited, the new owner Jaqueline was insanely cool. She talked about carrying on her dad’s legacy and how she kept the coffee local and sustainable. But she also talked about her struggles with owning a farm as a woman in Costa Rica. She talked about how it is hard to be taken seriously or that the different older men would not listen to her advice because she was just a woman who did not know what she was doing. She has difficulties, yet she is still defying boundaries and doing the best that she can in order to keep her farm alive and well. And she is setting a great example that hopefully others can eventually turn to in order to see sustainable local farming.

It is important to remain hopeful in the face of adverse situations. Admitting defeat to the threat of climate change will do no good. I want to take some of the different things I have learned in Costa Rica to change my ways. I want to be a better friend to the environment and also influence the people in my community to do the same. I know I have said it a lot, but I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to be in this program and to learn from this wonderful country. Not everything is perfect, but they are trying their best to make a meaningful impact on the world. I am happy I got to learn from this country and grow as a person throughout the month here.

Alvarado, L. (2018, May 3). Costa Rica takes first place in the world for the use of pesticides. Costa Rica Star News. Retrieved June 21, 2022, from https://news.co.cr/costa-rica-takes-first-place-in-the-world-for-the-use-of-pesticides/72749/?__cf_chl_tk=O8G_4PZdrq1bN_ZADEACZlpG0D6QpuYJnt5JQOliUNw-1655835440-0-gaNycGzNB6U

Class this week has shifted to a discussion of energy and climate change. My mind has been actively sifting through these topics since last summer. I’ve heavily thought about climate change through the lens of the United States Policy and the responsibility of the Global North. My lived experiences over the past two months have convinced me that it is time for the United States and other rich nations to pursue aggressive climate action at home and help the rest of the world transition to a clean economy.

Much of my reflection this week goes back to before this trip, but it is still focused on climate and climate action.

India heat wave(BBC)

I first heard about India’s heat waves from climate scientists on Twitter. These climate scientists not only highlighted the intensity of the heat wave but the lack of coverage by the media in the United States. After speaking to my mom about the heat waves, I decided to visit India to see my grandparents. I was initially planning to visit them in Winter 2022, but I was worried about the heat waves creating potential health complications for them. I arrived in Hyderabad, India at 3 AM. I’ve been to the subcontinent before, but this late-night arrival felt different. The air felt sticky and hot despite it being the dead of the night. Yet, the real surprise came in the following days. The highs in Hyderabad hovered around 100*F for the six days I was there. I spent most of my time in the comfort of my aunt’s house, relaxing with my grandparents and my aunt. I knew that most Indians did not have the luxury of a home with air conditioning. Even if individuals were able to stave off this heat wave, there would always be a longer and stronger heat wave in the future. 

Weeks later, I left India and began my study abroad in Costa Rica. Yet, my mind was jolted back to India. My mom had informed me that my grandmother had suffered a stroke and had been hospitalized. At first, her future looked uncertain but she had since been stabilized. I did some independent research, realizing that an increase in temperature was linked to an increase in stroke risk. Climate change had increased the possibility that my grandmother suffered a stroke. Climate change had finally hit home for me, even though it had hurt someone halfway across the globe. My grandmother was incredibly lucky to get the help that she needed to recover from her stroke. Other citizens of the Global South may not have the same resources to mitigate the effects of climate change. It began to dawn on me that we would have massive human suffering in the Global South within the next decade instead of the two or three that I imagined. Individuals are suffering because of the average increase in global surface temperature. These temperatures are a direct result of the CO2 emissions emitted by humans since the industrial revolution. As the temperature of the planet increases, we will see increased suffering from climatic events.

Six Degrees (Lynas)

In Six Degrees, the Three Degree chapter discussed dangerous climatic events that would increase in frequency from rising surface temperatures and rising CO2 levels. This chapter also highlighted how individuals would increasingly be mobile as the effects of climate change ultimately reshaped the land they lived on. Some individuals would have to leave the desert that once claimed their fertile lands and others would be threatened by the rising sea levels. The chapter concluded that it was likely that the rule of law would be replaced by the rule of the gun, showing us that climate change will alter systems of government and society. 

While Six Degrees discussed the effects of climate change, it failed to discuss the main contributors to climate change. Countries in the Global North, including the United States, have historically contributed the majority of CO2 emissions to the atmosphere. The Global South, despite having the most vulnerable populations to climate change, has contributed the least to our worldwide problem. This is based upon a concept called common but differentiated responsibility, which states that all nations are responsible for addressing climate change but not equally responsible. ( Encyclopædia Britannica) This is a concept that we discussed heavily in class when determining who should be responsible for addressing the climate crisis.

The Global North has emitted the most CO2 and garnered the most wealth and resources from this path of development. The Global North holds the tools to address climate change and ensure that all citizens of the world have a brighter future ahead of them. The Global North must take decisive action to address this crisis, especially because it fueled much of the crisis. The United States, in particular, has an important responsibility because it has contributed to around 25% of historical emissions. 

US Climate Policy

As we worked through the UN exercise and the United States Senate exercise, I thought a lot about the potential of America. The United States is the country that produced the first manned flight, developed the atomic bomb, and placed the first man on the moon. While the United States should be at the forefront of addressing the climate crisis, the country’s scientific prowess is being hampered by its legislative gridlock. President Biden campaigned on restoring the United States’ leadership on climate action. Yet, he has struggled to convince the United States Senate to act in a bold way on climate.

Biden has proposed a climate framework that totals 555 Billion dollars and would help President Biden meet his climate goals. His goals include cutting America’s 2005 CO2 emissions 50% by 2030, transitioning to a clean energy grid by 2035, and achieving a net-zero economy by 2050. (Lashof) This one proposed piece of legislation would move the United States closer to a clean economy. Instead, the bill stalls in the United States Senate. While Biden continues to use his executive orders to pursue climate policy, the United States energy transition cannot be fully underway until Biden’s climate framework becomes law. Failure to pass this legislation means that America will fail to only meet its climate goals, but it will fail to address the climate crisis that it helped create. Some outside force, whether it be Joe Biden, lobbyists, or the American people, must move the United States Senate to combat this crisis and deliver America’s promise to the world. The United States should also deliver upon Biden’s promises to deliver climate finance for cash-strapped nations so that the Global South can better prepare for climate disasters. The United States can no longer be the child clapping “everyone clean up” while the world takes climate action. It’s our turn to get our hands dirty and use our wealth to ensure a more prosperous future for all nations.

Works Cited

BBC. (2022, May 5). Heatwave: India’s poor bear the brunt of blistering temperatures. BBC News. Retrieved June 17, 2022, from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-61330046

Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (n.d.). Common but differentiated responsibilities. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved June 17, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/common-but-differentiated-responsibilities

Lashof, D. (2022, January 12). Tracking climate action under the Biden Administration: Where has progress been made? World Resources Institute. Retrieved June 17, 2022, from https://www.wri.org/insights/biden-administration-tracking-climate-action-progress

Lynas, Mark. Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. , 2008. Print.

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.

For this blog post, we have been asked to pick a theme to talk about. I have struggled with picking a theme. There is the safe, emotionally distant option of talking about my research. Then there are the enormous, weighty topics that have been drifting through my mind—privilege, colonialism, climate change and all that entails, and so on.

I admit, I would like to talk about easy things. I have grown weary in my travels, my friends. These heavier topics have burdened me for weeks now, and I crave something straightforward and shallow. 

Perhaps now is not the time, though. Thus, I will share with you my thoughts on something in the middle—agriculture—in a few different aspects of our journey throughout Costa Rica.

Of course I would examine agriculture. It is my research interest here, and it is my current career interest, and it is my beloved job that I miss fiercely.

We have visited three farms as a group, and I visited an additional one on my own time. Each farm had its own unique flavor. The first one was the pineapple farm, Certified Organic and a monoculture for the most part. It felt superficial to me—to be both a Certified Organic farm and a farm with just pineapple fields stretching into the distance. I felt comforted by the banana farm we went to. The banana and the plantains were interspersed with many other types of crops, and it reminded me more of what I believe embodies the values of organic agriculture. 

The difference between Certified Organic and fully organic farming is more than just being able to use certain chemicals like they told us at the pineapple tour. To me, it is the difference between wanting to be a part of a functioning ecosystem or not. With polyculture organic agriculture, I find an effort to bring the strength of the different crops and the balance that comes with greater species diversity together to create something like a proper ecosystem. Under the title of Certified Organic, what is practically monoculture reeks of disease, greed, and greenwashing. Nature does not exist in a state of monoculture, and it shows in the way that nature treats monoculture. Monoculture crops are more susceptible to disease and pests, and they damage the soil. Monocultures do not breed life, only propagating a good while the world around it is left to rot.

I should lighten my argument at this point. I do not believe that Certified Organic agriculture is at the same level of industrial monocropping. I want to believe that there is some desire to be good stewards of the land within individuals who have Certified Organic monocultures, that they don’t just want the money that organic products can bring them. And, even if they don’t hold that desire, at least their practices are not as damaging as industrial agriculture.

While here in Costa Rica, we’ve learned about industrial agriculture in the US, especially surrounding corn. For me, it was review to talk about how the vast majority of corn produced in Indiana is not meant to be eaten by us, rather being used as biofuels, animal feed, or processed beyond recognition into every junk food imaginable (Libby, 2022). Again, review to discuss how the main commodity crops—corn, wheat, rice, soy, cotton, and dairy—are heavily subsidized (ibid). What was new to me was something called commodity dumping, which is a practice of selling products below the cost of production, especially overseas (ibid).

You may be wondering why this matters. People sell cheap goods all the time—what makes this commodity dumping worth noting? On the surface, it seems harmless enough, even maybe good because it lowers the costs of the products. But if we only look at the surface, we won’t see how nefarious it is in its implications. 

Commodity dumping, according to Libby (2022), is designed to create cheap food. However, it is still oriented against impoverished individuals. In the 1970s, Nixon was the one who reconfigured the subsidies to make a global food market that would be able to be flooded by cheap American goods, because, of course, selling below the price of production is only possible with subsidies (ibid). This is devastating to farmers in the global market because they just can’t compete with the prices that we create (ibid). This eliminates competition for US agrobusiness.  Meanwhile for these farmers that have been pushed out of their business, they often end up having to go to cities to find jobs (ibid).  Usually when us in the US think about urbanization, we think of something called urbanization with industrialization, which creates jobs, housing, infrastructure, and so on and so forth in urban areas (ibid). However, this urbanization that these farmers experience is called urbanization without industrialization, which implies no jobs, housing, or infrastructure in the city, creating huge slums of people left behind because of commodity dumping (ibid). Commodity dumping selling cheap food thus becomes the solution to a problem created by commodity dumping as these countries can’t feed themselves with their own agriculture or afford to buy better food (ibid). Thus, we learned this practice is deeply troubling and an important issue to address.

Talking about all this makes me think of the land held by my family. It has been treated horrendously, as much of the agricultural land in Indiana is, for decades in the name of the corn and soybean agri-industrial money. If you recall, both corn and soybeans are part of the big commodity crops that have led to this imbalance and injustice through commodity dumping. It saddens me to think about how that land is still being managed like this under the willful consent of my own family. 

I’ve seen how land can be treated better, and I’ve learned ways to treat it better. At the banana and plantain farm, they used the space in between their production plants to plant a multitude of other crops for themselves. At the coffee farm we just visited, we also saw how a production farm can use its space to grow a variety of other crops as well as grow a forest. I asked the farm owner if she would call her practices agroforestry, and she said she had no name for it, that it is all one big lab to experiment with. I want to have an experimental farm like that, where me and my cohort can explore and experiment and learn and grow with our farm and our plants rather than being trapped in the endless cycle of harming the earth to pump out more corn to make obesogenic foods (Samsel, 2012).

I also got the chance to do some work at another farm at a research station as well, which also struck me as inspiring. That farm was used to support and feed the station, feeding anywhere between 50% and 100% of the station depending on how many visitors there are at any given time. They had a great deal of companion cropping, especially munuga to fix nitrogen around the plantains. The volunteer there told me the manager wants to do more experimentation in the future too. Apparently they’ve also tilled and added a great deal of organic materials into the farm to repair the soil deeply damaged by extractive agriculture. The farm reminded me of the one I work at back home, and it made me long even more to return to it.

Agriculture is one of the most foundationally important aspects of our economy and our lives, whether we care about it or not. Because of this, we need to be aware of the implications of our agricultural practices and work to improve the systems we have in place.

Libby, Andrew. “Agriculture Lecture.” HON-H 251: Planetary Health and Global Climate Change in Costa Rica. Indiana University, Bloomington. La Selva, Costa Rica. 30 May 2022.

Samsel, Anthony. “Obesity, Corn, GMOs.” The Cornucopia Institute. The Cornucopia Institute. 24 July 2012. Accessed on 16 June 2022. https://www.cornucopia.org/2012/07/obesity-corn-gmos/.

3RD Week in Costa Rica

     I just finished my 3rd week in Costa Rica. I have been so thankful for my time here and have experienced so much critical thinking and novel memories. Looking back at my time in Costa Rica, I have learned to understand and appreciate communities. Communities are everywhere, and sometimes I get too absorbed in my own little world to consider their presence. Furthermore, communities do not just consist of humans, but can exist in nature or at the intersect of both nature and humanity. The idea of communities including both the natural environment and humanity is further exemplified by witnessing Costa Rica firsthand. In Costa Rica, many people value nature and place immense importance on its conservation. In addition, at the core of this value lies apprehension that is healthy when navigating Costa Rica’s tropical rainforests. This mindset was shocking to me because I come from a country that has conquered nature in an overwhelming amount of area. For instance, during my time in college many trees were cut down to open up space for the oh so “necessary” Costco. I wish I could see more Americans adopt such a mindset because then Indiana might be covered in more forests. 

     I would like to use this space to bring attention to some of the Costa Rican communities I was able to meet and interact with. With the worsening effects of climate change, we are witnessing natural disasters that are more devastating and more frequent. While in Quepos,  I witnessed a natural disaster firsthand at La Foresta Nature Resort. During the last full day at this resort, it started to rain midday. At first the rain wasn’t concerning because Costa Rica receives an ample amount of rain per year. However, as the day progressed, the rainfall got more intense and eventually even the Costa Rican staff were starting to get worried. I noticed the severity of the rainfall when dinner had to be cut short. This decision was made by our professors in fear that the roof might collapse because the roof was experiencing leaking at various spots. As we were leaving, I could see the sadness and disappointment on the staff’s face, and it made me worried thinking about the possible damage that might occur during the night hours. During the morning meeting, I was shocked to learn about the night events. Apparently, four members of our group had to be evacuated out of their rooms due to flooding. While the relocation could be thought of as an inconvenience, the real problem was the damage the resort sustained. Due to the flooding, the staff had to make a makeshift buffet in front of a random room. Tables were lined up single file for eating space, and one probably would have walked 40 feet to reach the final table. Throughout this entire ordeal, all of the staff had a smile on their face and were working relentlessly to fix their resort while still providing for their guests. The teamwork displayed by the staff demonstrated the closeness of their community. Despite a terrible ordeal, they all banded together to try to make the best of the situation. This entire event exemplified to me the power of community, and its ability to help individuals push through disaster with resilience. 

     Another community that had a profound impact not only on me, but the entire Indiana University group, was the Ngäbe Tribe. The Ngäbe  tribe inhabits areas both in Panama and Costa Rica (Tella, 2018). My professors arranged a discussion with 6 representatives of the tribe. I learned many valuable lessons during this meeting. First, I learned about the unjust treatment of the Ngäbe tribe by the Costa Rican government. For instance, the Costa Rican government refuses to help fund the education system of the Ngäbe children. They will not support these indigenous schools because they do not follow the standard Spaniard curriculum and instead desire to teach classes regarding the Ngäbe native language and culture. During our discussion, one indigenous representative was begging for help in obtaining textbooks and the proper resources to ensure education for the Ngäbe children. Everyone deserves a right to education, and this education doesn’t need to model a standard forced upon others. The Ngäbe tribe should have the necessary funds to aid in teaching and preserving both their culture and language. Moreover, this is just one of the many problems affecting the Ngäbe tribe. The tribe experiences high rates of poverty and areas of their land are threatened by the Barro Blanco hydroelectric project. Since being filled in 2016, the Barro Blanco hydroelectricity plant has displaced countless indigenous people and has flooded large areas of their land (Kennedy, 2016; Grossman, 2018). The government has failed the Ngäbe tribe, but international awareness and donation may be another route to guarantee preservation of the Ngäbe tribe. 

Another community that needs to be acknowledged is the natural community. My time in Costa Rica has given me the ability to witness a vast wealth of species in a single area. This immense biodiversity is present in all of the national parks and research stations that I have visited. The biodiversity in Costa Rica is a stark contrast to Indiana, where I rarely see animals outside the common deer and robin. Moreover, observing the biodiversity in Costa Rica has given me an appreciation for considering an animal’s impact on their own community. For instance, the sea turtles in Costa Rica are important ecosystem engineers that cause a chain reaction as their numbers drop below acceptable numbers. The natural community is like a puzzle and without certain puzzle pieces, the puzzle piece will never be complete. Natural communities, the puzzle, need certain species interactions, the puzzle pieces, in order to survive and maintain biodiversity. 

    The ability to be an observer silently witnessing various species in their natural environment has allowed for me to reconnect with nature. As of right now, I feel like a small blip in the world existing with the animals I have observed. With nature, sometimes you just have to be at the right place at the right time. I was fortunate to witness such an experience. While collecting data on a beach near Piro Research Statoin, I heard these beautiful squawks and looked into the sky. I was greeted with three majestic Scarlet Macaws soaring through the sky. I was amazed that such beautiful animals existed and marveled at their many colors. I also thought about how I was existing peacefully with these Macaws in their own natural community. This experience made me question some of the choices I make at home. Going back to the United States, I want to ensure that I am aware of the companies or corporations that directly and/or indirectly contribute to the eradication of the natural communities. 

Works Cited

 Grossman, D. (2018, March 6). Dam lies: Despite promises, an indigenous community’s land is flooded. Pulitzer Center. Retrieved June 15, 2022, from https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/dam-lies-despite-promises-indigenous-communitys-land-flooded 

Kennedy, J. (2016, April 8). Ngäbe communities facing evictions call for International Solidarity. Intercontinental Cry. Retrieved June 15, 2022, from https://intercontinentalcry.org/ngabe-communities-facing-evictions-call-international-solidarity/ 

Tella, S. (2018, July 25). The ngäbe-buglé: A home cut in two. Pulitzer Center. Retrieved June 15, 2022, from https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/ngabe-bugle-home-cut-two 

   Costa Rica is a beautiful country far removed from the stresses of my real life. No worries, happy life, pura vida. However, as our friend Rosa exclaimed “No! Not pura vida, we have problems!” Life does not stop because I am here. There are torrential rain storms causing flood damage along the coast and heat waves back at home. There are wars for fuel, and feuds over energy. Marginalized people are suffering globally due to policies and damages they did not enact. Indigenous people are losing their lands and culture. Species are becoming extinct right before our eyes. I am in Costa Rica but Mother Earth is sick. I am in Costa Rica but these problems still exist. I am in Costa Rica, but what can I possibly do? 

     I was shook by the sudden acknowledgment of the gravity of these worldly problems when we were hit by an unusually strong tropical storm during our last night at the hotel La Foresta. Like I said, while learning and touring in Costa Rica, I expected a pause to my ordinary life. I expected to learn about global health and planetary climate change so that I can take these lessons back home with me to enact meaningful change at a small scale that may turn into large scale change. I didn’t expect to be confronted head on with a freak climatic event. 

     We were eating dinner in the open hotel restaurant while the clouds emptied themselves all around us. The thunder and lightning intensified to frightening levels. The rain soon gained power to match the fury of those forces. We then became worried about the roof which was cracking and leaking water now. The professors told us to abandon our dinner and go to our rooms. We experienced a flash flood that night. The restaurant flooded and so did some of our rooms. The rain was still not letting up. It continued on through the night and into the morning. We woke up to flooded roads and pathways. Workers’ homes had been damaged yet they still showed up to work to serve us breakfast. Apparently it had been a serious tropical storm – the worst one they’ve ever experienced at La Foresta and in many years. It had started out normal but quickly turned into an abnormal event and something to be worried about. This experience opened my eyes to the way climate change is felt both by me and the people around me. It is obvious that some people will feel these effects more than others and it is a sad reality that those people are not usually the ones responsible for these changes. Those that contribute most to climate change most likely exist in a state where they can more easily sustain themselves and remain comfortable even with certain dramatic changes. Those that will be most impacted will be those who are marginalized, often in developing countries, and reap the consequences of developed countries who look down on the global south, tear their land up, and fail to offer reparatory support. Many local people here in Costa Rica do not have much compared to people in America. If they lose their jobs, livelihoods, families, belongings, or homes due to climate change at the hands of carbon-emitting, over-consuming Americans, they lose everything. It is not fair. It is not fair that the Costa Rican workers served us breakfast on our porches while their homes were flooded. It is not fair that we could pack up and leave La Foresta on a tour bus while they were left to clean up a mess. It is not fair that those who contribute to climate change the least will suffer the most. 

     I learned more about climate change while reading and discussing Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas. The author explains what is expected to happen to different parts of the earth with each 1 degree increase in average global temperature (Lynas 2007). 1 degree: we lose our biodiversity. We lose our forests. The golden toad disappears from our planet forever. We become the canaries in a coal mine – trapping ourselves in a world in which we cannot breathe in. 2 degrees: heat waves. We move toward the poles if we have to but there are some who cannot escape the wretched heat. The old, the poor, and the marginalized will be hurt the most. Our bodies will only be able to tolerate so much until the heat alters the proteins in our brains leading to heat stroke and eventual death. 3 degrees: wildfires, hurricanes, snow storms, droughts, heat waves, and floods (much worse than the one at La Foresta). Extreme climatic events happening at a much faster rate than history remembers. Fires and hurricanes that happen once every hundred years now happen every decade. Our coasts which hold a majority of the global population will start to disappear. Drought and floods will eliminate our resources. People will be displaced and forced to move. The ones that can escape these events will be forced into sympatry. Harsh climate along with depleted resources historically leads to desperation. Desperation leads to panic and upheaval, death and violence. Those who already had few resources or existed in unstable political, social, or economic states to begin with will be the first to hurt. Those who are comfortable enough to move away from such fighting will likely watch until the end of the world no longer discriminates. 4 degrees: we are past our tipping point. Our solutions are not strong enough to protect us against the new natural forces. Sea levels will rise and force migrations. Agriculture will shift north and suffer altogether. Nature will take back its power and remind us with no mercy that we cannot play God. We are not above the natural forces of the planet though we’ve tried so hard to ignore our natural limits. We will then see that Mother Nature is queen. 5 degrees: war. Zones of inhabitability increase across the world. War ensues on a planet whose oceans are burning due to a release of methane. Are humans a virus? Could we be the cure? Is it too late? 6 degrees: it’s too late. Humans are likely to die out and those that may survive will be left with cancer. These changes will occur on such a quick scale that evolution and adaptation is not likely to occur. The world that is left after a 6 degree increase in global temperature will be unlike any world we have ever known. 

     This conversation scared us. It should scare us because it’s real and it’s happening. I have been conditioned to think that humans are a virus to the biological system that is earth. We invade and infect the living system at the expense of the planet, depleting the host cell of nutrients like a tumor. I think that can be true. However I also think humans can be a cure to the disease that is plaguing this earth. We are compassionate and innovative, curious and loving. We do not have to be cancerous. We can foster peace and power and beauty. The author of Six Degrees thinks we’ll be okay. I like to think that too. I like to think we’ll find solutions and future generations will be more caring to our Mother Earth. I hope we’ll be more loving and helpful. Just by learning from and getting to know my peers on this study abroad experience, who are now my friends, I believe in the healthy future of our world even more. I believe if people like us keep learning and asking questions to develop integrative solutions, our children and grandchildren will be okay.

Leading into the third week of the Costa Rica Trip, not much research on our research project had been conducted. Stints at various eco-tourist sights prevented us from being at research stations where proper scientific methods could be enacted for the biological center projects. For instance, Will and I’s research project is heavily centered around doing line transects in order to collect data rather than interviewing people for social data which is largely applicable when at an eco-tourist site. This week, however, was a great week for many biological centered groups such as the primate study group or the plant research groups including Will and I. When arriving at Piro on the Osa peninsula, Will and I were skeptical of the quality of data we’d be able to acquire. Fears about being able to identify research as well as the legitimacy of our carbon reading device crossed both of our minds before the research had begun. Luckily these worries were soon dismissed following our first transect line.

Will and I are researching the biotic and abiotic factors that affect the abundance of reptiles as a baseline for the importance of the forest on all species biodiversity. In order to prove this daunting question, we will be conducting transect lines which are sectioned out points in a path where at each point readings are taken in, and in our case, we take readings on the carbon dioxide amounts, light/canopy coverage, temperature, humidity, time, and of course reptile abundance and species. With a collection of all these biotic and abiotic factors we hope to see not only trends with the carbon levels decreasing inside the forest, but also trends with the reptile abundance being higher with more canopy coverage or lower carbon levels as well. Our transects are a kilometer long, and we stop every 50 meters to take the reading. On our first transect at Piro, the carbon readings were quite interesting because we saw the lowest readings outside of the forest at our starting point, and we saw abnormally high readings at spots in the forest that seemed to be dense. One would naturally expect the carbon readings to be in the densest parts of the forest because the greenery should be sequestering the carbon. We have discussed that the dead decaying leaves may be releasing a lot of carbon causing the readings to be high, but we also believe it could be the forest holding carbon from the atmosphere within. Despite these high readings, we still found many reptiles, mostly including small lizards and anoles. The ability to find reptiles seemed quite easy, and although I can’t confirm it yet, we seemed to find more reptiles in areas with more canopy coverage which seems to be slightly counter intuitive considering reptiles use the sunlight to help regulate their temperature. It’s possible that in low altitude, high temperature areas, they don’t need to bask in the sunlight to reach their homeostasis.

Our second transect was when things got interesting in my opinion. We saw the same trends in carbon readings which helps confirm that the device is not to blame for previously thought unnatural readings. We also saw a high number of wild reptiles, and some of the species were quite incredible. The Osa Anole highlighted the journey as it showed off its yellowish-orange underbelly in a display used to threaten potential predators. I will try to show a video of it below. However, this was not all. I spotted a lizard which I was unable to identify, but it had a translucent effect, and as it climbed a tree, the sunlight perfectly hit it, giving us an incredible picture opportunity which I will also try to show below. Although the data collection of a research project is entertaining, and helps me appreciate a possible career in research, it is quite enjoyable to take a step back and enjoy the surroundings and take pictures of unique things seen when doing research.

For our third transect line, we went down a different trail at the same time of day as the first transect we did the day before. We wanted to limit the variability from transect to transect. When we started our next few transects at Las Cruces, this became less of a focus. The third transect provided us with new carbon readings because of the new trail, and although we haven’t fully dissected the data yet, it seemed to be more consistent with previous knowledge. We were still able to find over 20 reptiles during our walk, but we were unable to see any water preferring reptiles despite this trail having more creeks. Jesus Christ Lizards were not found, sadly. The Osa Peninsula is home to 2.5 percent of the earth’s biodiversity despite being only 0.01 percent of the total land. Being a prime location for many groups to do research it will have fond memories for many of us as a starting point for our biological researching careers. La selva will always be our first experience with the lifestyle, but in terms of research, Piro was the perfect place to engage the students with the wildlife and concepts of the scientific method.

Once at Las Cruces, these profitable conditions for research went away. A few transects later, and not a single reptile has been seen. The forest fragmentation is possibly a large part of the lack of biodiversity present. We continue to gather data because even no data is still considered data in the scientific community. Carbon readings can still help us understand sequestration, and it might be able to help us answer reptile preference to carbon levels or forest coverage. The next week should be time for us to maybe continue with a few transects, but it’s time to start dissecting the data and making conclusions from what we have collected. My partner did just sprain his ankle, so we might struggle to get any additional data.

In the modern world humanity is faced with a variety of environmental problems that loom and threaten productivity of humans and wildlife alike. Present environmental issues of intense natural disasters, resource exploitation, pollution, and freshwater depletion are just some of the problems that result in loss of life, precipitate political strife, and intensify existing inequalities. But all environmental dilemmas are exacerbated by climate change. Climate change is the warming of the earth’s atmosphere from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane are released during fossil fuel combustion and are trapping too much terrestrial radiation within the earth’s atmosphere. Some of these greenhouse gases are important for warming the earth and making it habitable from humans, but we are adding too much, too quickly and it is warming the globe and destabilizing natural geochemical cycles. 

The climate crisis is anthropogenic and can be traced to beginning in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution, when European countries switched from burning wood to coal. This increase can be seen as carbon dioxide levels in 1880 were 280 ppm (parts per million), and less than 150 years later, CO2 levels were at 420 ppm (Dr. Wasserman, 2022). And since the industrial revolution, the earth’s global temperature has increased by 1.1* C and is approaching 1.5 much too quickly. We are unsure if there is a tipping point, or if the earth’s temperature will keep increasing. During class this week, we investigated what would happen to the earth as temperatures increase to two, three, four, five, and finally six degrees. Already at one degree we are seeing serious biodiversity decline including the loss of the Golden Toad who went extinct in the 1980s after their spawning pools dried up from higher temperature. Then at two degrees we will see loss of human life from heat stroke due to dry, hot conditions and extreme natural disasters. Eventually at three and four degrees, soil won’t sequester carbon any more, meaning that it will instead release CO2 into the atmosphere. This switch could suggest a final tipping point that will plunge us into an apocalyptic scenario of major loss of life, from political upheaval, sea level rise, and mass migration across the globe. Eventually at five and six degrees humans would be “powerless to intervene as their planet began to turn into Venus” (Lyas, 2007). It was an intense and emotional discussion, but eye opening as it illustrated the reality of the climate crisis with apocalyptic, science fiction-esque rhetoric. And with this knowledge it is clear that the climate crisis is probably the most impending global threat that humans have ever faced. 

With this horrific scenario resulting in the extinction of humanity, it is almost certain that biodiversity will be left to perish. Wildlife and other natural organisms can’t evolve fast enough to adapt to the speed of the changing climate and there will be repercussions on global resilience. But, as Lyas reminds us in Six Degrees, “the survival of the Siberian tiger would be a secondary concern in a world where human survival was itself becoming increasingly precarious” (Lyas, 2007). This is a thought-provoking statement when coming to one of the most biodiverse locations on the planet and seeing the intense conservation efforts being completed for species survival. One program we saw was at the Piro Research Station under the leadership of Osa Conservation. At this location, they were implementing extensive Sea Turtle conservation programs  in the fight against global sea turtle population decline. Sea turtles are hurt by anthropogenic pollution and poaching, but with climate change they will be pushed to extinction. This is because sea turtles exhibit temperature dependent sex-determination and the sex ratio will become skewed as temperatures increase. Future embryos will develop into females and sea turtles will die out from the lack of sexual reproduction. And this will occur under climate change even despite all of the hard work from modern sea turtle conservation. And therefore, it’s clear that one of the most important conservation efforts is the battle against climate change. 

But, a fight against climate change is also the most important method for addressing other social and economic problems, because climate change will impact specific geographic locations and impoverished communities more harshly. We saw this impending issue first-hand here in Costa Rica. During our travels we visited a fancy resort called La Foresta in Quapos, a tourist city on the pacific coast of the country. At our time at La Foresta we were spoiled with queen-sized beds, warm showers, and a fantastic cuisine. But, during our final night at this resort, torrential storms hit the pacific coast. It started off like any storm we’d experienced in Costa Rica, but turned dangerous as water poured through the roof of the restaurant. And eventually, we were quickly evacuated due to the threat of the roof caving in. As we sprinted back to our rooms, we found water flowing in the walkways and had to wade in waters above our shins. Some of us managed to escape into our rooms, but there were a select few who had to evacuate their rooms due to the flood. In a way to make the incident comical some of us labeled it the “Great La Foresta Flood of 2022” or “La Floodesta”, but after listening and some analyzing it was clear that this event was unusual even for the precipitation in Costa Rica. We learned later that the employees of La Foresta were shocked by the downpour and worried about their family and homes during the flood.

The next day our group was treated to breakfast and left on our bus for Piro. But the flood truly displayed the reality of climate change and how it impacts people differently. We went through a flood but we were extremely fortunate because although mildly inconvenienced, none of our belongings were destroyed, and no one was hurt. And not only that but we were able to leave the problem for another location. However, the employees did not have this luxury or ability to move away from the event. Instead they had to deal with the lasting impacts and repercussions. They were resilient, but with each extreme event, recovery will be more economically challenging, until there may not be any other option than migration. But, safe migration requires financial resources, something that may not be viable until the situation is so dire that there is no other choice. Realizing this inequity and seeing it firsthand, while learning about climate change was eye opening to say the least, but reminds me of the imperative need for climate change action. Climate policy will help protect biodiversity from rapid decline, but will also protect individuals who are most vulnerable. Therefore, going into the next week we will be debating feasible resolutions and hopefully there will be manageable results that we can take back to the United States and help within our communities, to help the overall survival of the global community.

Works cited:

Lynas, M. (2007). Six Degrees. Fourth Estate Ltd. Publishers.

I feel the status of women and minorities is often excluded in the mainstream climate change narrative. The state of plants and animals as well as the levels of carbon emissions are generally at the forefront of the conversation, and although Earth’s ecosystems and greenhouse gas concentrations are incredibly important to consider when engaging in the climate crisis conversation, the conversation is incomplete without feminism. I concretely believe that without an intersectional feminist approach (including but not limited to indigenous feminism, radical feminism, and ecofeminism) to the climate crisis, the environmentalist movement alone will fail. There are undoubtedly parallels between feminism and potential solutions to the climate crisis, and these parallels allow us to question whether the solutions we propose are actually plausible. For example, the United States has largely adopted liberal feminism, a feminist movement that focuses on the issues that primarily impact white women and amplifies the voice of the white woman. Liberal feminism does not work to dismantle the systems that create inequalities for women but rather works to exist within the system. It essentially works to create equality for women while remaining in the patriarchy, which will continue to create inequalities for minority women, the LGBTQIA+ community, and poor individuals. In contrast, radical feminism actively works to dismantle the patriarchal systems and uproot the cause of the inequalities and injustices experienced by all women. Although it may seem unrelated, I see clear parallels between climate change solutions and this comparison between liberal and radical feminism. 

A popular perspective is that climate change is a market-based issue fueled by capitalism (emphasis on the desire to maintain power over the planet and the resources it provides). Because of this, proposed solutions to reducing carbon emissions in the United States are heavily concentrated on market-based solutions. Examples of market-based solutions, as we learned in class, include carbon taxes (on companies and/or gas consumption), cap and trade, or subsidies. However, I wonder if implementing solutions while remaining complacent in the system that created the problem in the first place will be successful. Parallel to liberal feminism, market-based solutions remain in a capitalist society (the same societal structure that created the climate crisis) and, in my perspective, will continue to create inequalities within the capitalist system. For example, if carbon taxes on gas are implemented, how will this impact individuals who cannot afford to pay for the gas and rely on transportation for their jobs or education, especially in areas where public transportation is not readily available or efficient? Current research shows that a carbon tax will exacerbate inequalities, as low-income individuals and families will be forced to spend more of their income on carbon-intensive items, (Fremstad, 2019). I recognize that completely dismantling our current economic and political system and rebuilding it in a way that actively rejects inequalities while simultaneously fighting against carbon emissions is extraordinarily unlikely. However, I am hesitant to fully embrace market-based solutions as the only form of solutions that will solve the climate crisis because these solutions continue to exist in the system that created the problem. 

If we are to continue with our patriarchal, capitalistic system in the midst of the environmentalist movement, then we must incorporate indigenous feminism and ecofeminism into the conversation and amplify the voices of indigenous and minority women. The patriarchy and capitalism are intimately intertwined as they both prioritize and fixate on power, control, and ownership. It makes sense, then, that gender inequality and climate change are also deeply connected to one another, since the climate crisis, as mentioned previously, is the result of capitalism. As we’ve discussed in class, climate change will ultimately impact everyone. However, it is clear that climate change will impact everyone differently, with poor individuals, marginalized communities, minorities, women, and girls being impacted most heavily. According to several studies, the majority of people who live in poverty globally are women. Women bear more responsibility to care for families and the communities in which they reside. Yet, they are often underrepresented or are completely absent in decision-making settings, especially indigenous women, minority women, and marginalized women, (Data point, 2022). Without the voice and perspective of all women, climate solutions are bound to fail, as women and the status of women are at the heart of virtually every climate solution. The ideas behind indigenous feminism and ecofeminism are the foundation of that claim, as indigenous feminism advocates for decolonization, indigenous sovereignty, and human rights for indigenous women and indigenous families and ecofeminism emphasizes that the state of the Earth and the state of women are inextricably intertwined. 

The need for these feminist approaches to environmentalism was obvious to me when our class spoke to the Ngäbe about their experiences and efforts to have their school legally recognized by the Costa Rican government. They spoke of not receiving any funding from the government because their school curriculum incorporated their culture and language. Without funding, recognition, or official acknowledgment from the government, their efforts to preserve their language and culture are threatened. I want to emphasize that ecofeminism and indigenous feminism are not and should not be thought of as separate entities, but rather intersect with one another. An example of this intersection is the Chipki Andolan movement in the 1970s in India. Indigenous women were at the forefront of this movement and were also, unsurprisingly, the ones who were impacted most by expeditious deforestation. All this is to say that I fundamentally believe that there is no one solution to the climate crisis, but whatever solutions we eventually implement, women, from all backgrounds and demographics, must be actively involved. 

Works Cited

Data point: Climate change is a feminist issue. (2022). Economist Impact. https://impact.economist.com/sustainability/social-sustainability/data-point-climate-change-is-a-feminist-issue

Fremstad, Anders & Paul, Mark. (2019). The Impact of a Carbon Tax on Inequality. Ecological Economics. 163. 88-97. 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.04.016.

Six Degrees by Mark Lynas was an impactful book that we were assigned to read for class. In our discussion of the book, it was quite depressing. I was apart of the group for the 6^th degree, and while reading the chapter I was honestly expecting it to be a lot more dramatic. Don’t get me wrong, that chapter was pretty upsetting, but it was mostly just talking about how there would be nothing left. Once we actually came together as a group though, I realized why my chapter was not as impactful as I imagined it would be. There was so much buildup from the other chapters that once we got to the 6 degrees, it made sense why there was a lack of substance. It started with the first degree, talking about the loss of the golden toad from Costa Rica. It is disheartening to realize that we have already started losing awesome species from climate change. As we continued our discussion, things only got worse and more depressing. There will be worse climate disasters that will destroy homes, lives, and towns. This will be especially prevalent for costal areas, since they will have these effects combined with rising sea levels from the ice caps melting. The tropics will start to dry up and desertification will start spreading. The migration of people will have a large toll on cities that cannot sustain the large amount of life in the shrinking habitable areas. The lack of resources like safe drinking water and food will put a strain on government who will no longer be able to provide for their citizens. This could further cause conflict between governments, who will end up fighting over the last bits of resources. And I think we can all realize that once we reach this state, the last thing we need to be worrying about as a society is wars between countries. It is hard to think about how humans will adapt when we face these challenges, and if we will be able to evolve on such a small timescale. This is something that was talked about more in the 6^th degree chapter. It focused a lot on talking about the Cretaceous Period, where the Earth faced the largest mass extinction. During this period, it is estimated that around 95 percent of species were lost. That is the closest estimate to what we could experience from this amount of warming. My chapter described how it talked about how the Hydrogen Sulfide will work as a silent killer, starting with costal residents and moving inland, slowly suffocating people. And then it described how the people who survive this will then have to endure being penetrated by the sun rays that will cause cell mutations and outbreaks of cancer in the population. It is difficult to imagine this future, and I think that was shared among everyone in the class. No one wants to envision a future where there is no biodiversity, habitat loss, and extreme suffering.

La Foresta Nature Resort was our last bit of luxury before returning to the biological stations. This place was really nice, and it was so refreshing to stay somewhere with air conditioning and a full-size bed. However, we did get caught in a storm which started to destroy the roof in the dining area, and we had to leave dinner early. Although my room was not affected, some of my fellow classmates had to evacuate their rooms due to flooding. Afterwards we discussed it as a class, and it was reminiscent of climate change itself. It kind of showed how the effects of climate change are not going to be distributed equally. There will be some people that experience the effects of climate change much worse than other people. And it is example of the fact that we are already starting to experience more frequent weather disasters due to climate change. There has been a fivefold increase in the last 50 years, with climate and water disasters accounting for 50% of all disasters from 1970-2019 (World Meteorological Organization, 2021). I feel like most people do not realize that the recent disasters are related to climate change. On page 260 of the book Dire Predictions we read, it discusses the lack of equity in climate change, and explains that it may even work in a “reverse Robin Hood” fashion (Mann & Kump, 2015). This means that the poorer nations (like developing tropical countries) are going to face the worst impacts from climate change, while places like North America and Europe will not face these same consequences. The tropics will face intense weather disasters like flooding more often and at worse levels, which will harm these people that do not always have the proper infrastructure to deal with such. This was apparent at La Foresta, which was mild compared to what we may see in the future. It made me sad to learn that the workers said they were worried about how well their homes were going to make it through the storm. It also helped me realize how fortunate I am to live in an area that has less of a concern of this. (Although I will acknowledge that a day after I originally wrote this, my parents texted me about how our shed got blown away due extreme winds in my hometown which have never really happened before – which is just ironic even though I cannot say that its climate that caused this).

The point I wanted to get out of this is a concept Dr. Libby discussed – common but differentiated responsibilities. This means that the entirety of our world has the same goal of combatting climate change, but we do not share the same responsibility for how much we need to help – since not all of us put the same impact on the Earth. We have to hold developed nations responsible for the damage they are doing. The largest carbon emitters like the US need to take the most action when it comes to combatting climate change, instead of focusing on others to take on this responsibility. It is important for corporations and the government to take large scale actions, but also us as individuals can take action too. Things as simple as using less air conditioning or energy at home can be small steps for any person to take. But on a larger scale, people can do things like consuming less meat, committing to driving less (or using public transport), and even working to make the energy in your home more efficient (like installing solar panels if you are able to). There are steps that we can take as individuals to help our planet! If interested, you can even calculate your own carbon footprint and see how your current practices may or may not be sustainable for the future.

https://www.footprintcalculator.org/home/en

Lynas, M. (2009). Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Fourth Estate.

Mann, M. E; Kump, L. R. (2015). Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming. Pearson.

Weather-related disasters increase over past 50 years, causing more damage but fewer deaths. World

Meteorological Organization. (2021, September 9).

Last I left off I was in a hotel room at La Foresta Nature Resort during a torrential downpour, sitting comfortably in my room. Meanwhile, the rooms of others in our group were flooding as they had to carry their luggage over their heads through knee-deep water that may or may not have contained raw sewage. This inequality among members of our group acted as a stark reminder of the fact that major climatic events do not affect everyone equally. In fact, the sad truth is that people who are most affected by these events are those who contribute the least to climate change. This is something that we have been discussing a lot recently as the focus of our class has shifted from ecotourism to climate change.

With this shift in course topics, it seems to me that our class discussions have gotten more serious as we all seem to be feeling the direness of the state of our planet. To begin our consideration of this topic of climate change we were separated into five groups of four people in each group and assigned one chapter of the book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas. This book is separated into six chapters, each one describing the state of our world in a future that is one degree hotter than the chapter before (hence the name “Six Degrees”). So, for example, my group was assigned the fourth chapter, and therefore read about the effects of a 4°C warming of our Earth. This chapter talked a lot about the sea level rise that would occur due to the melting of the polar ice sheets and all of the complicated issues that it would cause. For example, as the land coverage on Earth begins to shrink, mass refugee situations would occur, forcing humanity to retreat inland. With this exodus from the coasts the world’s largest cities, many of them on or near coastlines, would be left abandoned and waiting to be eventually taken by the sea. In addition, many areas that have currently fertile soil and are thus good for agriculture would be rendered unusable in the four degree world as cycles of heavy rain and extreme drought would erode all of the soil away, leaving only topsoil and dust in their wake. These are only a couple of examples of the things discussed in my group’s chapter, and, unsurprisingly, things do not look any more optimistic in the other five chapters.

Another thing that Six Degrees talks about is the fact that these situations are not isolated. Once we get to a certain increase in global average temperature (I believe it is around 3°), we begin a positive feedback loop, where the temperature will continue to rise increasingly fast and there will be nothing that we can do about it at that point. For example, ice reflects heat from the sun, so as the ice coverage on the surface of Earth begins to decrease there will be an increased amount of heat being absorbed, which will then lead to more ice melt and so on. This is only one example of how global warming will become uncontrollable if we do not act quickly, but there are many other examples of these feedback loops that will all compound to make the situation even more dire.

One thing that I mentioned earlier is the fact that climate change does not affect everyone equally, and this is something that we have discussed a lot throughout our climate change discussions as a class. The societies that will be most quickly and directly affected by climate change will be those near coasts and those in the global south, which are generally less developed and prepared than countries such as the US and China, who contribute the most to climate change. It is a sad reality when the countries that contribute the most to greenhouse gas emissions can continue to do so selfishly while the countries that are less to blame feel the effects. In America, about 80% of our energy production is comprised of fossil fuels including oil, natural gases, and coal. We are also one of the largest emitters of CO2 in the world. We comprise only about 5% of the world population, but account for 28% of carbon emissions, so there is clearly something wrong there.

None of this has sounded very optimistic for the future of our planet, but there are actionable steps that we can take on a global scale that can prevent these futures from becoming reality. These steps may not be comfortable for us to take, especially those of us living in industrial consumerist societies whose lifestyles revolve around material goods with little respect to the waste we produce, but it is possible to combat climate change. One seemingly obvious thing that we can do as a planet to drastically reduce the risk of anthropogenic climate change is to reduce our carbon emissions by making the switch from fossil fuels as our primary energy source in favor of more renewable, clean energy sources.

While the topic of anthropogenic climate change is a complex and uncomfortable thing to discuss, we must act now to reduce our production of greenhouse gasses globally. This must begin by the countries who are most to blame for the current state of our emissions taking responsibility and leading the charge toward a more renewable and sustainable future.

We began our week 3 adventures with a 7 hour bus ride from Rancho Margot to La Foresta Nature Resort in Quepos, a town in the expansive province of Puntarenas. Puntarenas occupies much of the western coast of Costa Rica and has provided us with beautiful views and plenty of opportunities near the Pacific Ocean throughout the whole week. Despite the length of these bus rides, I’ve found my own version of peace in getting to experience the variety of landscapes that Costa Rica has to offer. Listening to music while watching the ocean, forests, pasturelands, and mountains roll by has allowed me to take time and reflect on natural beauty, conservation, and my own purpose in protecting the health of the planet. 

It’s clear the destructive impact that climate change is having on this planet, and this course has helped me to understand that these impacts are not caused equally nor are they felt equally. Both Dr. Libby and Dr. Wasserman continuously articulate this throughout their lectures – the ecological, economic, social, and political forces that are both cause and effect of climate change. Coming to Costa Rica, a country that is smaller in area than Lake Michigan, from a country as large as the United States offers a dynamic and direct learning opportunity. As we spend time here, I feel everywhere we go the disparities that exist here and around the world. 

Data from the IEA, the International Energy Agency, enables you to easily compare how a country like Costa Rica differs from the US in terms of energy consumption, energy supply, imports/exports, and a myriad of other energy-related statistics. Doing the research, which can take as little as 5 minutes, cues you into the nuances of sustainable infrastructure and climate change. A quick search helped me discover that Costa Rica’s energy usage is more than 1.5x more efficient than the United States and Canada. It’s 2.5x more efficient than Australia and China. 3.5x more efficient than South Africa. Costa Rica also only contributes 0.02% of the annual global CO2 emissions.

In my opinion, infrastructure is the determining factor of how well a community can respond to climate change. Partially, it is a determining factor of how a country is contributing to climate change. Renewables and sustainable energy consumption are the future of energy – they have to be – but for some reason we are actively choosing to not make this switch. I understand that changing global systems is not an easy task, but it seems like it should be a priority at this point.

So why am I ranting about this? It is easy to treat climate change as a problem for another day. It feels that there are innumerable responsibilities that we have to adhere to every week, every day even. When you’re working full time, where is the time (and energy, for that matter) to engage in advocacy? When gas prices are over $5, where is the extra money to buy groceries not coming from industrialized agriculture or companies that donate to large carbon emitters? It is also difficult to contemplate how you or I, as individuals, can make a difference in an issue as significant as this. 

However, climate change is not a tomorrow issue. It is here. The effects are being felt now. Just because we may not feel them in a college town like Bloomington with a (mostly) solid electrical grid and plenty of other built-up infrastructure, we can’t expect that the peace will last forever. Just look at the heat wave happening right now across most of Indiana! We think of heat waves, cold snaps, heavy rainfall events, etc. as anomalies in the weather system, but these kinds of events are becoming more frequent. They are not anomalies – they are a pattern. Some of us got a taste of what is already happening in regards to severe weather this past week while staying at La Foresta. 

I never expected that, at a prominent and well-developed ecolodge, my peers and I would fall prey to the effects of climate change. Due to unprecedented rainfall on the coast during high tide, we were caught in a flash flood – my roommate and I were evacuated to new rooms twice after 9pm, trudging through over a foot of rushing water and sewage. Following the ordeal, I couldn’t help but think of the low-lying communities that were affected greater than myself. The irony of the situation was that I am here in Costa Rica to study if communities are prepared for increased environmental hazards, but I ended up getting caught in one. I found my answer.

Risk assessment is a practice that has more and more utility in the study of climate change and public health mitigation as the years pass. The goal of risk assessment is simple – evaluate hazards, their likelihood and impact, and produce information and solutions for impacted communities. In practice, however, it can be a bit more difficult. To understand the hazards of an area, you have to understand the geography, history, demographics, infrastructure, future projections…

The list goes on and on.

Providing a holistic view of the impact is tough, but Izzy and I have tried to make this work throughout the process of our research project. As we’ve traveled across the country and across the different research sites, we’ve conducted interviews with staff members and researchers, scrolled through pages and pages of historical environmental and natural disasters, and we’ve made our own observations in regards to the preparedness of the sites. Our goal is to produce a portfolio of recommendations for these sites as we’ve seen how they vary: how the climate of a region varies. How rivers can swell following a heavy rain. How roads and bridges are critical access points to and from the nearest towns (and sometimes these towns are 30-45 minutes away). You will not catch me complaining about Indiana potholes ever again.

Risk assessment is essential, but it is also just a temporary measure for the long-term, precarious issue that is climate change. It is a preventive measure to protect public health from increased disasters, but none of us want to have to use risk assessment. So how do we propel ourselves into a safer future? I don’t think there is one simple solution… to me that means we should be implementing solutions whenever and wherever we can. Increasing renewables, transitioning away from CO2 heavy means of production, engaging in economic measures like carbon taxes and cap and trade, working to generate global equity, learning to live comfortably with less. 

I don’t know the right answer for sure, but I know that this is an issue that we should all be wary of. I believe in the power of individuals and communities, I believe in Earth Optimism, and I believe there is strength in numbers in combating this force which threatens our livelihood and safety. 

For this entry in my blog, I wanted to zone in on a topic that carries so much importance both over the course of this trip and over the course of everyone’s lifetime. This topic is global climate change. 

Over the course of the third week here in Costa Rica, the daily occurrences and discussions throw more fuel onto the fire which is the awareness of climate change. For example, during the a long drive to La Foresta, the class stopped to look at a crocodile that was resting on a small bank of sand in the middle of the river. While still definitely an impressive view, it was less than what was expected because usually there is more area to see these apex predators rest on. However, due to increasing extremes in rainfall it will be getting harder and harder to see these banks of land during certain times of the year. Of course, for these crocodiles this isn’t the end of the world as they can easily traverse an aquatic environment while still using the edges of the river. However, this concept of a changing physical environment is sure to be much more disastrous for species not as well equipped to deal with these pressures. 

    While many species are pressured from their habitats being altered from global climate change, there are also examples of increasing global temperatures being able to directly affect a species. This is especially true when considering my experience at Piro Research Station. Piro is located on the Osa Peninsula which is located on the southwest part of Costa Rica. The station is extremely close to the Pacific Ocean and the beach is used by sea turtle mothers to lay their eggs. Thanks to the Piro conservation team’s presentation, the class was able to learn tons of information about the difficulty of a baby sea turtle’s journey to adulthood. In fact, the chance to make it is only 1 in 1000 which highlights the importance of protecting the slim chance they have. However, increases in the temperature of a sea turtle egg can have profound effects on the sex of the hatched turtle. Specifically, the turtles that we discussed had an ideal incubation temperature of 31 degrees Celsius to get an even divide in male and female baby turtles. However, if the temperature increases by just 2 degrees, there will be a much higher chance of female babies which is harmful in the long run for the population of sea turtles (US Dep of Commerce 2017). With this in mind, it is obvious that rising global temperatures will be detrimental to the long term population of sea turtles and there are surely more species that will experience these negative consequences.

    Before participating in this program in Costa Rica, I was troubled by the prospect of humans afflicting the wildlife with temperature changes which is the reason I wanted to conduct my research on primates. While at Piro, there was plenty of opportunity to study the behavior of spider, howler, squirrel, and capuchin monkey groups. With this opportunity, my partner Annetta and I were able to observe and record plenty of behavioral data with different temperatures. Although there is not much time left for data collection and there have been difficulties finding monkeys in Las Cruces, we believe that with time we would be able to come to some sort of conclusions regarding the connection between male and female monkeys and the growing temperatures. To me, half of the battle with fighting climate change is to get the human population aware of what is happening. It is frustrating to be so seemingly small in a world where there are solutions to protect the life around us. It is so obvious that these effects will not only be felt by animals, but eventually by humans too. 

    In consideration of the human felt effects of global climate change, there are many right now and more coming. As if the dangers presented to the biodiversity around humans was not frightening enough, it is obvious that anthropogenic climate change will destroy the lives of millions and eventually billions of people if business goes on as usual. Specifically, during our time at La Foresta a huge tropical storm hit the area that even had the local workers shocked as they had never experienced so much water just from one storm. Water quite literally dumped from the ceiling of the outdoor dining area and the sidewalks were flooded with water up to my shins. As an foreigner at this location I knew my safety as well as my belongings were never in peril, but that is the saddest part of the climate crisis. People and nations who have contributed the least to climate change who inevitably face the consequences more than those who have contributed the most. For example, a multinational corporation in the United States may emit an obscene amount of carbon and feel the consequences at all until much later because of the resources available in that position. However, an indigenous person in Costa Rica may have their home devastated by extreme rain and floods that destroys everything they have by that same carbon produced by someone else. I can’t help but feel it is a huge injustice that some people without adequate resources must suffer from the decisions of wealthy company owners who will never feel the wrath of what they choose to do. This thought really came to light during the talk with the Ngobe people. I acknowledge that people want to act in their self interest, but there is a point where it goes too far and individuals must be held to a higher standard than what is currently the case. 

    While I would much prefer to conclude on a positive note, it is difficult to do so with so much on my mind in terms of my own future and the future of everyone close to me. We are so dangerously close to reaching a certain point in temperature increase that we as humanity will not be able to come back from. As Mark Lynas says in his book Six Degrees, there are clear repercussions that will be faced with each Celsius degree increase in global temperature. To be concise, once the temperature increases by 2 small degrees, he predicts that major coastlines will be drastically different with many major cities such as Manhattan, Miami, London, Bangkok, and Shanghai being flooded. A gigantic percentage of the population (50%) would have to relocate, and this does not even consider the massive amount of animal species that would go extinct during the process (Lynas 2007). My understanding of what is going to happen is not perfect and I do not know exactly how things are going to go throughout the years. No one does but that is part of the fear. There is fear and uncertainty that is building and building as this problem grows. Something must be done and it must be done soon. 

Bibliography

Lynas, M. (2007). Six Degrees. Fourth Estate Ltd. Publishers.

US Department of Commerce, N. O. and A. A. (2017, April 21). What causes a sea turtle to be born male or female? NOAA’s National Ocean Service. Retrieved June 14, 2022, from https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/temperature-dependent.html

        I can still picture the field behind my elementary school. My ten-year-old eyes saw infinite possibilities in that field every day at recess. Plants were scarce. The grass had been beat down by tiny feet over the years. Cars sped down the heavily trafficked road just a few feet away. Sometimes we might see some small birds or a squirrel, but much of the wonder of that field wasn’t actually there. It was all in my head. When my own imagination wasn’t enough, I turned to books and movies to fill in the gaps. 

       I remember our classroom had a big book of insects from across the world. One particular butterfly stuck out to me more than the rest. The Blue Morpho butterfly, only found in the tropical Amazon and nearby forests, was brilliantly blue, with wings that spread wider than my face. I imagined these beautiful butterflies fluttering around me while I played, but they never felt real. After all, I had seen unicorns and dragons in classroom books as well, but even as a kid, I understood I would never see these creatures in real life. This is how I felt about most of the encyclopedias. Books claim these things exist. They show you pictures of crazy bugs and huge animals. They tell you the world is big, wonderful, and diverse. But when the only thing you can see out of your small classroom window is a parking lot and an abandoned field, it’s hard for a kid to grasp just how much more of the world there really is. 

         Now that I am in Costa Rica, my whole perspective is changing. A blue morpho will flutter above my head casually while I walk to the cafeteria, just as big and beautiful as my childhood book described. I wake up to Capuchin monkeys outside my windows. Iguanas over a foot long block our sidewalks as they sunbathe. I feel like the things which once dwelled in my imagination are now coming to life right before my eyes. It’s spectacular.

         The forest surrounding our research station is protected. It hasn’t had the chance to be paved over by passing cars. Little feet can’t trample over the wildlife. Here the planet is free to grow as it pleases, a luxury often not available in the states. But just because the land is protected does not mean it is untouched. Our actions, as Americans and world citizens, have consequences for communities and environments hundreds of miles away. 

         The planet has warmed on average a little over a degree since 1880. At a one degree Celsius increase, we are able to see a world-wide loss of biodiversity as species become extinct at exponential rates. We see habitat loss across the planet as species are unable to adapt to new temperatures and humans tear down more of their homes. The ozone layer becomes increasingly depleted as we release more and more carbon into the atmosphere, and the catastrophic positive feedback loop of global warming is triggered. 

         At the rate the human race is consuming, the planet will not stop warming anytime soon. I recommend everyone read Mark Lynas’s “Six Degrees,” which we used to guide a class discussion this week. We are a few years away from two degrees, where increased famine and disease will spread, and health crises like heat stroke will skyrocket in prominence. If our race continues business as usual, we are expected to reach three degrees by 2060. At three degrees of average global warming, our damage may be irreversible. The melting of the polar ice caps will release unprecedented levels of carbon and cause meters of sea level rise across the globe. At our present course, we’re expected to reach four degrees by 2100, at which point coastal cities will be underwater, the Sahara desert will reach into Spain, and habitable land will be shrinking rapidly. Migration, history’s solution to many human problems throughout time, will no longer be a viable option. There won’t be anywhere for people to go. 

         Four degrees isn’t the destination: it’s just one stop on the way to mass extinction. The four degree world will quickly spiral out of our control into five and six degrees. At five degrees, war, famine, and disease will eliminate most of the race. At sixth degrees, it is unlikely any human will be able to survive. If we don’t change pace now, this dystopian future may be closer than we think. 

       United States citizens need to take a moment to self-reflect. We have a geographical advantage that shields us from the consequences of our own actions. In Indiana, we may experience less snowfall in the winter, or hotter days in the summer, but for the most part the effects are manageable — for now. However, for people who live closer to the equator, their already intense environments are becoming more and more dangerous every year. 

       This week, while staying at a hotel in Quepos, we were hit by a tropical storm ranked at severity level four, which is very high. The rain water flooded into our hotel rooms and many people had to move rooms in the middle of the night as the water reached their bed. The entire cafeteria was flooded. The owner said the hotel has never flooded like this since she’s owned it. Our hotel was on the top of a hill. My heart went out for the inhabitants of the village below us. Many homes were devastated by the flood. While we had the privilege of packing up and leaving the next morning, that was not an option for many. 

       Historically impoverished nations are being hit the hardest by the Earth’s changes. However, they are not the ones who caused the issue. The United States, and other major world powers, profited off of the destruction of our home. Giant oil and coal companies, major consumer-based corporations, and society’s complete lack of care for the planet abused Mother Nature’s gifts. It would take five Earths to sustain Americans’ way of life. This is unacceptable. 

        We had the opportunity to speak with a few members from the Ngobe community, a group of indigenous people who live on the border between Costa Rica and Panama. One of the men expressed his people’s frustration with the “white people” who don’t respect their customs or way of life. He said the Ngobe people have always lived beside nature, taking care of the land and only taking what they need. He said he is tired of white people’s hypocrisy, lecturing the Ngobe on climate change when it’s the white people who destroyed the Earth in the first place. This sentiment rings true for minority and disadvantaged people across the world. The global north drained the planet as a path to prosperity. We need to use the resources we stole from the Earth to help those who drew the short end of the geographical stick. As a species, we share a collective goal, but the responsibility to act is not equal. As Americans, we need to stop pushing blame onto others, take action, and lead the world to a better future than our current trajectory. 

          Unfortunately, to change our fate, our government must enact real, institutional change. I am less than optimistic given our country’s emphasis on money and disregard for the planet. Sometimes, I think about the type of world my children will grow up in. I imagine sitting down with my daughter and flipping through the encyclopedia I once looked at as a kid. I imagine showing her the same Blue Morpho butterfly that I once marveled at. I wish I could tell her that one day she would be able to see that butterfly, just like I did. I wish I could tell her the world was big, wonderful, and diverse. But sadly, by the time I have kids old enough to goggle at the big creatures and strange bugs, a lot of these species will be gone. They will be no more real than the dragons or the unicorns. This horrible, apocalyptic premonition will soon become our reality if we do not take action now. 

No Time Limits 

I came to Costa Rica in hopes of dropping my love for research and focus only on the MD path I’ve always wanted to do but in reality it has only exemplified my love for research. After joining ASURE and TAing for the genome engineering lab I was certain I wanted to only do a PhD in  infectious disease or in the realm of genetics. The last few weeks of my sophomore year I was going through an existential crisis because I was convinced I was losing myself and was no longer aligned with my goals and this led me thinking I was going to drop my passion for medicine. 

As students we are required to know what we want to do with life in just the first two years of school, we are required to make lifelong decisions under the pressure of being able to afford a meal after college, except we don’t have to make these choices.

Being in Costa Rica, surrounded by people who are aligned with their passions and have been doing things at their own pace has made me realize I don’t have to choose. I’m 19, turning 20 in two months, I have so much time to decide on what I want to do for the rest of my life. Eric (s/o to you for grading these) took a three year gap before doing his masters and is able to do all the things he does because he lives at his own pace. Debbie, Dr. Libby’s wife waited until she was 30ish years to get married. Dr. Wasserman is however old he is and is literally on a month long trip doing what he loves. Age is not a limit to the things you can do, age just increases the opportunities you get to do all the things you love. 

I think I am so worried about the longevity of a career as if time is the restriction I have. I think being here has allowed me to be more present and has allowed me to (for once) feel calm about being at my own pace. Everyone around me is doing what they love in a country that loves the environment and lives a slow-paced lifestyle.

I think I’m going to try doing MDPhD because I don’t have to choose what I want to do because I have no restrictions other than my own brain that is telling me I need to settle down and be out of school by 28 with a six figure salary. 

La Foresta

We were living large. A hotel with AC and a hairdryer.The sleep I got at La forests is probably the best sleep I’ve had in my life. I don’t know if it’s because I was sleep deprived and slept throughout the night or because of the AC but whatever it was I felt refreshed and energized.

Kayaking day was amazing. A few of us kayaked in the mangroves and it was amazing being able to identify wildlife. I kind of understood what the author of Tropical Mature said when he meant that the forest is something too big to see when we first go, but that when we begin to understand the dynamics of the ecosystem we begin to see things. The amount of Jesus Christ lizards I saw was insane. I’m not sure if it’s because I am beginning to see the systems interacting or because the area is rich in biodiversity. According to Forsyth it is because I am learning (lol). 

Anywho, the lizards were minuscule compared to the monkeys that literally jumped on our kayak. Crazy fun experience. 

The flooding of La Fortuna deserves a subsection itself, but for the purpose of organization I will be including it in this subsection. We were eating dinner and got startled every time the thunder began to shake the entire rain forest. It was craziness. Before getting our desert the roof began falling off of the dinner area

A Whole Other Life

PIRO! The place was beautiful and sleeping under a net for the first time ever was an experience but I just wish the people were more welcoming. We got to help build a hachling for baby sea turtles. 

Las Cruces

We arrived at Las Cruces on June 11th and the moment I stepped outside of the bus I felt… relief? The cold air, the trees, the garden… everything felt homey. I’ve been trying to find a place to apply to during my gap year for either an internship or just for a job outside of the country and I haven’t felt more connected to a place than here. I absolutely love it. The cabin felt like the cabins my family used to stay at in Lake Tahoe or Yosemite. It’s homey. The people are kind, the area is amazing. This place is phenomenal. 

Speaking to the people of the Ngäbe Indigenous community I have never felt more conflicted. Part of me finds the beauty in the preservation of their culture but a big part of me feels anger that they have to fight for this. Publishing books about their culture should not be a problem. Getting resources and school supplies for children should NOT be a problem.  Education should not be inaccessible. Children shouldn’t be sitting on the floor while they are being lectured. People shouldn’t be begging for their culture to be taught. Languages shouldn’t be going extinct. People shouldn’t be referring to themselves as museum exhibits for foreigners. People shouldn’t be calling themselves circus monkeys to the government. People should not be begging for help in educating youth. 

I could go on about the translation but I respect the intention, therefore I’ll just discuss this in person. 

Colorism as a result of colonialism runs DEEP in Costa Rica. A country so damn progressive about housing and the climate and healthcare should not be making education inaccessible to indigenous communities.

One of my favorite phrases is “La educación es poder” or in English, education is power. Depriving the Ngäbe community of education is depriving them of power.