Summertime

… and the livin’ is, if not easy, at least fun and rewarding. Once again I have left this blog neglected for far too long. The calendar pages are turning so fast I can’t keep up. A brief update, then, on the past few months:

The semester finished in mid-May, in a whirlwind of grading. The day before the students left, we visited Rincon de la Vieja national park, where an active volcano looms over the dry forests of Guanacaste. I took four hours from my grading schedule (by staying up insanely late the night before) to be able to hike the volcano and see the mudpots. I didn’t get all the way to the top of the volcano, only to treeline. That was the interesting part (for me as a botanist, anway; geologists might beg to differ). The forests at the lower edge of the mountain are the typical dry, scrubby, thorny forests of the lowlands in that part of the country. As you go up in elevation, the trees get bigger from the moisture of the clouds trapped by the mountain. Many trees were fruiting in the middle elevations, and I surprised monkeys, parrots, and guans in the foliage. Higher up, truly enormous oaks cover the slopes. They give way to a stunted, wind-warped forest of Clusia with an understory of Geonoma palms, and then to pure Clusia clinging to the slopes with its stubby, succulent stems, and finally to low sedges that give way to bare gray rock. Up near treeline the wind whipped through the branches carrying shreds of fog and a malevolent sulfur odor that could make one imagine the approach to Mordor. The temperature dropped sharply and the rain began. (At that moment, I must admit, I thought of the White Mountains in New Hampshire). The contrast in climate between the sun-baked thorn forest down below and the barren, wind-scoured, foggy approach to the summit was truly startling. I was prepared with a rain jacket and sweater, but I saw a lot of tourists in their shorts and t-shirts on the way up, in for a rude surprise (perhaps it was this that really reminded me of New Hampshire).

After the hike to the summit—almost a run, really; I went as fast as I could to stay ahead of the crowds and be able to see as much as possible—I headed back down to see the mudpots. If you ever have an opportunity to see a volcanic mudpot, take it, even if it means traveling out of your way. Mudpots are fantastic. They occur in places where boiling water and steam bubble up from volcanic vents through muddy soil. Bubbles form slowly in the mud and pop, shooting out spurts of steaming mud with a plopping sound. Words don’t do it justice. I will try to post a video, along with some photos, when I am somewhere with faster internet. A mudpot is a perfect combination of the sublime and the ridiculous, combining funny, gross, and fascinating in proportions that only a five-year-old could truly and rightly appreciate.

Those were the highlights of Rincon de la Vieja; then it was back to grading and the final discussions. When the course ended, I missed the students a lot. What a great group of people to travel and work with. I hope they learned a lot from me. I know I learned a great deal from them.

The week after we finished the course reports and final grades, I went to Nicaragua for a few days with Alex and Steven. We visited Granada and Masaya, and made delicious mojitos with cheap Nicaraguan rum and mint and sugar we bought from a wizened old lady in the covered market in Masaya. It was good to make some new memories of Nicaragua. The only unfortunate thing about the trip was that Alex got food poisoning in San Juan del Sur, and had a very unpleasant bus ride back. She recovered quickly once she got home, though.

The first week of June I attended a meeting that my former advisor organized, with scientists who work on forest regeneration in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Panama. We talked about future directions in forest succession research, and we came up with a series of papers that we plan to write. I can’t say too much about it now, because it’s very much in the beginning stages, but they have agreed to share data and nominated me to write a paper that could be an important advance in the field, depending on how the analysis comes out. I’m really excited about it. I have a paper in review right now that deals with the same topic, and I’m crossing my fingers that it will be accepted.

Ever since the conference, I’ve been up at Alex’s farm working on a vegetation inventory project. The forest at low elevations here is ridiculously well-studied, but the middle elevations have had much less survey work. Alex is planting a long-term reforestation experiment, and we want to have an idea of the species composition in the surrounding forests so we can compare the reforestation plots to the natural forest in the region over time. The forest here is remarkably diverse—we found 239 species in half a hectare (a little over an acre) at the back of the farm. There are many species I don’t recognize from the lowlands. Given the elevation and the remoteness of the site, it’s quite possible that there may be undescribed species out here. Most of the forests around here have been high-graded, if not clear-cut, so there’s a lot of disturbance, but we’ve also worked in some areas where we find species that are usually indicators of undisturbed forest. One of my favorites is a little palm, generally no more than waist-high, called Reinhardtia gracilis. It has windows in its leaves that make it look like stained glass.

The inventory work is fairly intense. We try to leave for the field by 7 am, and we work until it rains heavily or gets dark, running survey lines into the forest and collecting a sample of each species we find. Generally we can do about 0.1 hectare in a day, though once we managed 0.13 in a particularly nice forest, “nice” meaning relatively level and free of vines. Few forests around here are nice in that respect, though. We have worked on hills so steep that we considered belaying each other with the rope from the collecting poles. Alex and I have a great time in the forest. We have a similar quirky sense of humor, and we’ve cooked up a steady supply of geeky botany jokes and lewd anatomical descriptions of certain plants (have you ever seen the roots of Iriartea deltoidea? You would understand!) to keep each other well entertained.

In other news, I have finally started dating somebody again. His name is Dixon, and he works on the construction crew that is building Alex’s house. He is sweet and gentle and treats me like a princess. And he is certifiably single, or at least he was until we started dating. We don’t have much time to spend together, since he works something like 60 hours a week and I’m in the forest half the time, but we’ve had a great time on the weekends. Last fall I was talking to my stepdad about how to find a good man. “Pick someone who’s sweet on you,” he said. Dixon is definitely sweet on me, and I’m getting very fond of him. We’ll see where it goes.

Hard to believe the course will finish in two weeks. A few notes on the last places we have visited, then. Photos will have to wait, since they are on my home computer and I am once again in the field.

At the beginning of April we visited San Gerardo Biological Station at the edge of the Children’s Eternal Rainforest in Monteverde. The reserve, a complex of cloud-laden mountaintops along the contintental divide, came about through one of those heartwarming 1980s “children save the world” efforts, in which kids from all over the globe contributed to purchase protected land. Twenty-some years later, it is gratifying to see the land still protected and the forest growing back. The managers of the field station were a family who had lived there when the area was still farmed, and they pointed out where their pastures had been. You can still see the difference clearly between the new forest—spindly Heliocarpus trees with an understory of shrubs and a few grasses—and the gnarled, moss-covered, hulking trees of the old forest. Almost all the pastures have grown in, though, and the birds are beginning to come back into the young forests. We saw a blue and gold tanager (which, if you know birds, is apparently a big deal) hopping around in the edge of the old pasture area. I went looking for umbrella birds and bellbirds, a pair of unusual and attractive species endemic to this mountain range, but I didn’t spot any. One of my students saw four umbrella birds while he was out looking for plants. Figures!

One of the best things about San Gerardo was the unobstructed view of Arenal, an active volcano that is a major tourist attraction for this part of the country. The lava flows on Arenal aren’t smooth rivers, but rather tumbling aggregations of half-molten bolders. I think the technical term is a pyroclastic flow. Visually, it looks like the mountain is full of trapped light that occasionally struggles to the surface. The view from San Gerardo was better than anything I saw in La Fortuna (the tourist trap village at the base of the volcano); at night when it was clear we could see the glint of orange lava where the mountainside broke open. Even in the day we could occasionally see puffs of smoke in lines where flaming boulders went bouncing away down the slope.

I was surprised how many clear nights we had at San Gerardo. From my limited experience of cloud forests, I had expected unrelenting gloom. This is the tail end of the dry season, though, and we only got rained on twice. The second time was on the hike out—4 km uphill with all our gear in backpacks. I was actually glad it was raining; it kept the temperature down and made the steep uphills more bearable. I was reminded of a day on the Appalachian Trail years ago, when I was hiking through the rain with the inimitable Waterfall. I’ve never liked rain very much, especially cold rain, but Waterfall had a way of seeing the best in every situation.

“Don’t the plants look happier being wet?” she said. I had to agree.

The plants at Monteverde certainly seemed happier in the rain, and the landscape, too, seemed to take on its true dimensions with wisps of fog and rain obscuring the distant mountains. It was impossible to see how far the mountains extended, impossible to see the pastures and cleared areas in the lowlands. Aside from the road—a one-lane mud track suitable only for quad bikes and intrepid horseback riders—it seemed that we were in the wilderness primeval.

Leaving Monteverde, we headed for Cabo Blanco on the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula. Cabo is closer to wilderness primeval, actually, although the scrubby, dry, vine-festooned secondary forest there is not nearly as interesting. Cabo Blanco is an absolute reserve: only researchers and a select few students ever get to see the place. When no academic groups are visiting—much of the year—the station is boarded up and left for the land crabs, racoons, and monkeys. Cabo was Costa Rica’s first national park, in 1963. At the time it was converted to park, the area was all cornfields and pastures, so the forest is not much to look at. But the park was really established to protect the shoreline and the marine areas. At low tide, rock formations make a natural lagoon that is home to shells, corals, anemones, fanworms, and shoals of colorful fish. Very few people ever get to see an undisturbed reef like this one. We even spotted a sea turtle, a small leatherback, making its ponderous way along the sea floor in the lagoon. My favorite animal was a tiny blenny, about as big around as a pencil, with a green body and rings of bright red like makeup around its eyes and mouth. Their googly eyes and oversize bright red lips give them something of a Betty Boop look.

The one drawback of being at the beach, for me, is that my skin just doesn’t tan. Aside from a few freckles, I go from white to burned faster than toasted Wonder Bread. I’ve always been more of a forest person than a beach person, partly for this reason. I was very careful to keep myself slathered with sunscreen and covered up as much as possible, even to the point of wearing long sleeves and long pants while I was snorkeling. (I’m sure it wasn’t the most attractive beach outfit—sopping wet button-down shirt and field pants—but besides the anti-burn protection it also kept me insulated in the relatively cool Pacific waters.) Despite my precautions, I ended up with a perma-freckled face.

After a short few days at home, I’ve re-joined the course at La Selva for the final stretch. I don’t feel quite as rested as I would like to be, but it’s just two weeks…

Palo Verde

A post written some weeks ago, and not uploaded till now thanks to RACSA’s breakdown…

I am back in Heredia again, after a three-week stint in Palo Verde. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d been led to believe—the hordes of mosquitoes I recall from the wet season were almost entirely absent, the ungodly heat was tempered by a breeze, and the scorpions (large and abundant though they were) mostly kept to themselves. I think I could develop a taste for Guanacaste in the dry season. It was strange, though, to see a tropical forest with hardly any leaves. I've become so accustomed to the evergreen forests of the Atlantic lowlands. I think many people,when they think tropical forests, think rain forests. But 42% of tropical forests are dry forests, and many dry forest trees are deciduous. Hence the strange combination of blinding sun, scorching heat, and leafless trees.

Some researchers have argued that dry forests are even more endangered than rain forests. One reason is that dry forest makes great cattle pasture, and it's easy to keep it clear by burning. The trouble is that burning favors invasive, exotic species, here particularly the pernicious pasture grass jaragua (Hyparrhenia rufa), which can form stands so dense that tree seedlings don't stand a chance. Parque Nacional Palo Verde protects one of the last remaining fragments of tropical dry forest in Central America, clinging to the steep sides of limestone ridges along the edge of the Tempsique floodplain.

In Costa Rica, most of the formerly dry forest areas have been converted to giant ranches, making Guanacaste the Wild West of Costa Rica. Cowboys (sabaneros; literally "men of the savannah") on horseback are a common sight along the dirt roads, and vast expanses of ranch land with emaciated Zebu cattle stretch off as far as the eye can see. Even within the park, cattle concessions still operate, though the cattle are now pastured in the marshy river floodplains rather than the few fragments of remaining forest. I never did get a clear answer as to why there are cattle in the park; my cynical side expects that there is a payoff somewhere. According to certain factions, the cattle help keep down the cattails (Typha domingensis), another invasive species, in the marsh... but none of the scientists I met agreed with this view, and there certainly seemed to be plenty of cattails in the areas with cattle.

Aside from cattle, the floodplain marsh supports an amazing variety and quantity of water birds: ducks, herons, egrets, storks, spoonbills, rails, etc. The marsh was dried rapidly; we watched areas go from deep water to dried, cracked dirt in the three weeks that we were there. Flocks of birds congregated in ever-smaller spaces as the water receded, making their numbers stand out even more. One afternoon I was fortunate enough to spot a jabiru stork. These massive birds can stand up to 1.5 m (5 ft) tall. I stalked out into the marsh to try to get a picture of it. No luck-- they are very wary birds-- but I did get a picture of my footprint next to the bird's. (For reference, I wear a size 10-11 shoe.) Outside the marsh I also spotted a pair of scarlet macaws, my first, but once again I was not quick enough with the camera.

The marsh at Palo Verde had a somewhat otherworldly aspect, with the weirdly-shaped limestone mountains rising up all around and giant, ungainly waterfowl flapping in slow motion against the constant wind. I sometimes felt (especially before my coffee in the morning) that I'd landed on an inhospitable marsh planet from the Star Wars universe, where the only human habitations cluster around the base of mountain ranges. It would not have surprised me unduly to see Imperial Walkers approaching from the Tempisque.

In the middle of our stay at Palo Verde we took a side trip to a mangrove swamp, which really looked like something out of Star Wars. At the outskirts, the white mangrove (Avicennia germinans) formed a monospecific stand. The regularly-spaced, sandy-brown trunks looked almost too orderly, as though they'd been planted. Here's the weird part: Avicennia has aerophores, little nobbly roots that allow gas exchange in the fine, silty soil. They stick up like a congregation of miniature snorkels, ankle-high all over the forest floor. We walked towards the ocean a ways (smelling the salt and hearing distant surf above the rush of wind in the trees), and we came to the red mangroves (Rhizophora mangle). I don't imagine many people have seen old-growth mangrove trees. Hopefully my pictures (scroll down) will do them justice, but I will add a few words as well. From ten feet up they look like a forest of aspens (same gray trunks, same cheery yellow-green in their leaves as aspens in about mid-June); from among the roots they look like a crazy jungle gym. They look like they walked there. They look like they could take off any time they wanted, like the jumping trees in the E.T. book (which was so much better than the movie, by the way!)

On the way back from the mangroves we visited Megafauna Park, a collection of statues of the extinct fauna of Central America. For anyone who wants to buddy up to a gomphothere, here's your chance! It was neat to see how large some of these animals really were.

Well, this entry is long enough by far. I will upload some photos and post it before it gets any longer!

Images of Las Cruces and Cuericí

OK, take 2... I am really not happy with the way that blogger uploads images, but I was on my way out the door when I posted this and didn't have a chance to fix it! Let's see if this works better...

Among the clouds

I am home in Heredia for a few days, catching up on sleep and tying up loose ends. Here is an update I wrote at our last site, but never posted due to lack of internet:

We are spending the week at Cuericí Biological Station, in the montane oak forest at an elevation of 2600 m (8500 ft), with frequent hikes to higher-elevation sites. The few remnants of oak forest remaining on the high peaks of the Cordillera are lovely to behold; giant shaggy-barked trees hung with moss and often fog-festooned, with an understory of bamboo and tree ferns. When the sun is out, the landscape is inviting, but the clouds roll in inevitably, dropping the temperature and spattering occasional rain and putting a damper on my spirits. I’ve noticed for a long time that the weather affects my mood to a great degree, and the effect seems to grow even stronger as the years go by. This morning, I woke up feeling cheerful and optimistic with the sun pouring through the skylight. At mid-morning, when the cloud layer’s first tendrils whisked through the clearing and then the sky went gray, I felt gloom settle over me. I am trying to be aware of how the weather affects my mood so that I can try to mitigate the impact. Well, I’m very aware of it, but the mitigation strategies have yet to materialize. So, cloud forests: beautiful. Gloomy. And cold. Nights here drop into the 40s, and I have lost all my tolerance for it. I am working hard to muster some appreciation for cloud forests, but (as the clouds close in thicker and begin to dribble) I am once again forced to conclude that they are mostly better viewed from a distance, or for brief periods of time.

The proprietor of Cuericí, Don Carlos Solano, is a native Costa Rican whose grandparents settled the land many years ago. He used to support his family through trout farming and occasional tourists, but now he mainly hosts educational groups like ours. He is an amiable man in his fifties, I would guess, who speaks eloquently of the need to balance conservation and responsible resource use. The farm is a model of sustainable operation—he gets much of his electricity from a small hydroelectric generator at the base of his steep pasture; he has replanted forests on many of the former pastures, and he has preserved almost all of the old-growth oak forest on his land. He still runs the trout farm, which I can see through the window as I type this, but he has tried to minimize the environmental impact by composting the solid waste (when he dries down each of the ponds every four years or so) and building better retention systems to keep the fish from escaping. (Trout are non-native here, and their original introduction wreaked havoc on natural stream ecosystems.) Like so many Costa Ricans I have met, Don Carlos is working hard to make a living and to make the environment a little better. The uncharitable, seasonal-affective-disordered side of my brain, though, can’t help but wonder why anyone would want to try to make a living at these elevations at all. Even now in the purported dry season, fog, mist, and drizzle are the order of the day. I am reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Venus.

In a lot of ways, this field station reminds me of hiker hostels on the AT. The student lodging, especially, a warren of bunks upstairs in the main house, now adorned with layers of gear, detritus, and drying clothes. A basket of old Newsweeks and Christian Science Monitors completes the hiker hostel appearance. There’s even an old notebook filled with messages from people who have stayed here before, and I leafed through it somehow half-expecting to see familiar names from the trail—Pilgrim and Gollum, Porkchop, Waterfall, Blue Skies, Blade. I did find a few names I knew, the world of tropical ecology being as small as it is, but nothing like the wealth of information that a trail register conveyed. Especially in the early winter when Isis and I hiked alone, trail registers were our link to the rest of our community, and we followed the unfolding sagas of romance, injury, hardship, and humor from shelter to shelter along the trail. Ridiculous as it was, I felt a little let down to open the notebook at Cuericí and not see the familiar scrawls of GAME (Georgia-Maine) and the AT symbol.

Sometimes I miss the trail a lot. I miss the instant camaraderie that developed between hikers at a shelter. I miss the sense of belonging. I’ve had so few times in my life when I really felt that I belonged where I was. Growing up on the coast of Maine with parents “from away”, I was “from away” by default. College was the first time I found a group of like-minded people who I could share everything with. The trail was the second, and I’m beginning to fear it may have been the last. I certainly don’t belong here. For a time, perhaps, but I can’t imagine settling here anymore. Wherever I go, I am inevitably recognized as foreign, and it begins to wear on the nerves. A few weeks ago I was riding the bus from Heredia to San Pablo, and another gringa (unknown to me) got on at the next stop.

“Son como pisotes,” the driver observed. “Se ve una, se ve otra.” They are like coatis (raccoon-like rainforest animals that generally travel in groups)—you see one, you see another.

Yet another reminder, if I needed it, that I’m a stranger in a strange land. Also a rather unwelcome breed of stranger, unfortunately. Public opinion of Americans has risen slightly in the last month, but not enough to make up for a generally concealed tide of anti-American sentiment, driven more by our appetite for real estate than our political foibles. In many parts of Costa Rica, speculation has driven land prices so high that Costa Ricans can no longer afford to buy farms at all, and the only people who can are foreigners. Mostly Americans. Americans who come for three weeks and spend money are welcome, but Americans who come looking for a second home are (quite understandably) personae non grata. As someone who’s here for a few years, I occupy a somewhat tenuous area of middle ground. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty, as a foreigner here, working at a job that could presumably be filled by a tico. In order to get me a work visa for this job, OTS has to write a letter claiming that they had to hire a foreigner because there were no qualified locals. Is it true? Admittedly most of the bilingual ticos with doctorates I know are currently pursuing post-docs in the US…

Gloomy thoughts of a cloud-forest-addled brain. Maybe when I get closer to sea level I will be able to think this through and feel more like I belong here.

For the past two weeks, I have been at Las Cruces Biological Station beginning my work as a professor for undergraduate study abroad courses. The job is exhausting, inspiring, overwhelming. I think I’m learning at least as much as the students are. We begin the day with breakfast at 6:30 (orange juice, gallo pinto, coffee, bread), then classes or field trips all morning and lectures at 2, 4, and 7. Time alone for reflection is a rare commodity. Mondays are our nominal day off, although I have spent most of the day catching up on correspondence, fine-tuning my lectures for next week, and helping a friend with some plant identifications.

The students are a diverse group: three Costa Ricans, two from South Africa, one from Japan, and the rest from the US. All of them are a joy to work with. They ask great questions and approach their work with determination and good humor. I was a bit nervous about teaching, but I have found that my nervousness disappears the minute I step in front of a crowd and start lecturing. It’s funny—if I had to stand up there and talk about myself I’d be tongue-tied with stage fright, but when I’m sharing information and making connections I get so engaged in the material that I forget to be nervous. I guess it’s a good thing I like teaching so much—I am pretty much overqualified for any other career!

Las Cruces in the dry season is almost preternaturally beautiful. It rains a bit at night, the morning dawns clear or with a little mist over the valley, and the days are endlessly blue except for the cap of distant clouds hovering over the summits of the Talamanca range. Part of the field station is a botanical garden, which includes the second-largest collection of living palms in the world. (My favorite: the Asian genus Zombia, with fearsome rows of spines adorning every part of it.) The manicured hillsides have gardens of bromeliads, gingers, anthuriums, tree ferns, and thousands of other plants. Venturing out of the garden, you can walk through a fragment of the remaining forest in this area. The steep slopes support stately, moss-covered trees with an understory of shrubs and broad-leaved herbs, with less lianas than the lowlands. It took me a few minutes of close observation to realize that most of the big trees here are actually oaks. With their small, unlobed leaves, they don’t look anything like the temperate oaks, but the fruits (acorns) are identical. Many are flowering now, dropping their catkins onto the forest floor.

As a tiny fragment of forest surrounded by degraded pasture land, Las Cruces is hardly the pristine rain forest that many people come to see. It’s an ideal place, though, for studying fragmentation and the way organisms persist in human-dominated landscapes. A friend of mine is engaged in a long-term project studying the movement of bats and birds between the forests and the small farms and pastures around the area. In a lot of ways, this landscape is more typical of the tropics than the places I studied in Sarapiquí. There’s a lot less natural forest remaining, the soils are much less fertile, and people have been present as a dominant force in the landscape for a much longer time. The amount of forest regeneration, and the rate at which forests come back when the land is abandoned, are correspondingly reduced. It’s a hard place to balance the necessities of conservation and human livelihoods. A few days ago, though, I had an experience that gave me a lot of hope for the future of the forest and the people here. We visited a coffee farmer, Roberto Jimenez, who is making a real effort to balance sustainability and economic viability on his 6 hectare (15 acre) farm.

We have a unit on coffee production in our environmental policy course. Some facts I didn’t realize: coffee is the #2 traded commodity on the world market, after oil. The price of coffee on the world market sometimes drops so low that it costs more to produce it than farmers can receive for their crops, yet the consumer price of coffee remains pretty high. From bean to cup, there is a markup of nearly 100x. The people who get the profits are the middlemen, rather than the farmers. Coffee production, as it’s practiced in most countries today, is a monoculture crop with huge chemical inputs. Conventional coffee processing (from fruit to bean) causes extensive soil and water pollution. I didn’t realize, either, how closely Costa Rica’s culture and national identity is tied to coffee. Costa Rica was a country of small farms, mostly producing coffee, since before its independence. Donations of coffee from farmers all over the country financed the building of the national theater in San Jose in the 1890s. Even in the idioms here, traces of this history remain. Someone who is mortally exhausted is hecho leña—literally, “made into firewood”—just like the coffee plant that has exhausted its productivity. But with the price of coffee dropping so low on the world market, many farmers have been forced to turn their land into cattle pastures—or sell out to land-speculating gringos.

We got to see an alternative a few days ago. At Don Roberto’s farm, a canopy of shade trees covers the coffee, providing habitat for birds and other animals that need forest cover. Living fences and erosion barriers protect the soil. He only uses chemicals where it is absolutely necessary, for instance in controlling fungal outbreaks. Usually he uses natural pesticides that he manufactures on the farm, based on sugar cane and distillations from native plants. For fertilizer, he relies on compost from pig waste, discarded coffee fruits, and rice hulls, along with the organic matter from the shade trees and from pruning the coffee plants. He collects methane from the pig waste as well in a biodigestor that provides nearly all the gas they use for cooking. He and about 50 other farming families in the area have founded a cooperative dedicated to environmental sustainability. They built a new coffee processing plant, based on new methods that minimize water use and compost solid waste. The cooperative markets directly to consumers, mainly in the US, in partnership with an organization called the Community Agroecology Network. Rather than selling through a middleman, direct trade allows the farmers to actually make a living wage. It’s also allowed them to return parts of their farms to the wild. Don Roberto has reforested almost 1/3 of his farm. Fifteen years ago it was all degraded pasture, and now there are trees in many areas providing shade, protecting the watershed, and allowing birds to return to the landscape. A recent study by a visiting student found 50 species of birds visiting Roberto’s property. In Costa Rica, the decision to reforest is not one to undertake lightly. Once an area has been in forest for more than 15 years, the owner is not allowed to cut it or extract wood without a lengthy permit process. (While this law has protected some areas, it’s also caused a lot of damage: rather than letting their forests survive, many people will cut them back to the ground before they get more than 15 years old so that they don’t lose control of the land use on their farms. Several of the young forests I surveyed in Sarapiquí have since been cut for this reason.) For Don Roberto, reforesting part of his farm has been an act of faith. It was so inspiring to hear him talk about what motivated him to change. Here I translate and paraphrase, but this is pretty close to what he said:

“The way I learned to farm was a destructive way, with chemicals that poisoned the earth and our families and the people who bought our coffee. In recent years we started to realize that these methods don’t work in the long run. The coffee plants produce a lot of fruit, but they die faster. Our families were getting sick. We decided to start a new cooperative based on new ideas. It’s not organic farming—the humidity here makes it almost impossible to get an organic crop to grow—but we reduce chemical use as much as we can. We use the leaf litter from the shade trees for compost. And we plant trees so the birds can come back. I love to see birds on my farm. We try to be in harmony with nature. For so long we were fighting against nature on our farms, and now we are learning that we need to work with it instead.
“I hear people talk about the third world. What is the third world? There is only one world, and it belongs to all of us. The good that we do, however small, is good for all of us. The bad things we do come back to all of us. We can’t change everyone all at once, but we can make small changes for the better, and if enough of us do, it becomes a big change.”

I wish more people thought like Don Roberto Jimenez. One of the most inspiring things here in Costa Rica is that so many people do think this way, and they are taking steps to change the world in little ways. Here is a way to start: if you drink coffee, get it here instead of Starbucks. I don’t think I’ve ever used my blog to advertise a product, aside from my own books, and I don’t intend to do it very often. But this one deserves your consideration. The profits go right to the farmers, allowing them to continue taking their own steps toward sustainability. The coffee is marvelously flavorful. When you taste it, imagine the green slopes of mountains in the distance, the shade trees full of birds, the families with enough money to send their children to school, and the forests coming back across the landscape.

Buses: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Public buses are the lifeblood of the greater San José metropolitan area, feeding workers and students from the outlying areas into the city center in the morning and back out at twilight. You can get almost anywhere in the area for under a dollar, but you have to learn the system. I dedicated myself to learning the major routes last week so that I would have some idea of how to get to work and back. Indeed, I was in one of these buses going from Tibas to Santo Domingo last week when the earthquake struck and I didn’t feel it. It seems a telling mark of the quality of the bus, and the quality of the roads, that a 6.2 magnitude quake did not feel like anything out of the ordinary.

Buses vary greatly in quality. Occasionally, especially for the longer hauls, one gets a bus with seats that approach comfortable, sometimes even with leg room. Some of the runs—Heredia-San José, San José-Alajuela—tend to have more modern coaches, and the drivers occasionally turn on a decent radio station, and you can enjoy the city going past with a nice salsa soundtrack and be thankful you are not among the honking hordes trying to force their way across three lanes of traffic. At the rock bottom of the bus quality scale, unfortunately, is the Universidad de Costa Rica bus I ride to work every day. There are a number of different buses that drive this route, all painted 1970’s wallpaper colors (so at least they are easy to spot and flag down), and they are all schoolbuses of uncertain vintage, of the sort I used to ride to high school, but with about 30 more rows of seats than I ever remember in a high school bus. The consequence, of course, is that there is about 3 inches of space between each seat and the one in front of it, and for someone of my stature there is no conceivable way to get my legs into that space. Of course, most days I don’t get a seat anyway—the bus fills up in Heredia, and by the time it gets to my stop it is SRO. Barely. This morning I ended up in the rear stairwell of the bus, holding on for dear life. Generally I end up jouncing along, crammed in with the other hapless aisle passengers hanging for dear life to a bar bolted to the ceiling, and ducking for speed bumps (lesson learned the hard way). And the soundtrack in the UCR bus is pretty horrendous, too—the grinding of gears, the straining of the poor motor as it wheezes up one last hill, and for some unaccountable reason, the CB radio chatter between the drivers on the route played at ear-splitting volume on the staticky speakers. If I had been anywhere near the driver I would have asked him to turn it down, but I was stuck in among the sardines in the back.

The design of streets and intersections here continues to boggle my mind. There is a semi-major thoroughfare between San Pablo and Santo Domingo that still has a one-way bridge over the creek at the bottom. People stop and yield and honk ceaselessly, as though honking will somehow magically summon a more logical and smooth-flowing traffic pattern. The most astounding of intersections is one somewhere in Moravia or Guadalupe, one of the towns that the UCR bus travels through in its loop around the city. It’s four roads meeting in a cross-shaped intersection, but the middle road is a jam-packed, two-lane, one-way street. The other two roads, feeding into it from opposite directions, are also two-lane, one-way streets, also jam-packed at rush hour. All without the benefit of any traffic signals except for the manifestly ignored stop signs at the corners of the incoming roads. The grand strategy is to honk loudly and force your vehicle into whatever gap appears. No matter how shoddy the bus, I am always glad I don’t have to drive through there!

There is an odd sort of fatalism in the way people put up with things here. The crazy intersections, the horrible bus radio, accidents, the weather. I’ve seen people walk down the street getting soaking wet in a rain shower, carrying umbrellas in their bags. It’s as though people put their fate in the hands of a higher power, and therefore don’t really do anything to try to change it. A couple of nights ago I was in a Tibas-Santo Domingo bus, jammed in at the very front by the driver, and I noticed a large sticker on the rear view mirror: Jesus guia mi camino. Jesus guides my path. Nice sentiment, but on the rearview mirror?

Well, I don’t want to come across as one of those embittered US expatriates who lives in Costa Rica and spends all her time complaining about how backward it is here. In some ways, it’s a more forward-looking country than the US. As much as I gripe about the UCR buses, it’s pretty wonderful to be able to get anywhere I need to for under a dollar, and often faster than by car—especially in the downtown area, the designated bus lanes still move when everything else is gridlocked. I don’t know of anywhere in the US with such a cheap, efficient, and effective transportation system. Something for our new president to work on!