Tuesday, May 27, 2008
EO Wilson, Hotspots, and Global Warming
Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC pioneers educating for environmentalist careers and building a sustainable college community. When Nobel laureate E.O. Wilson, who created the new sub-field of sociobiology, spoke at the college a few years ago, he highlighted the challenge and adventure of a naturalist’s career, showing scientists in cloud forest canopy walkways such as those we experienced in Monteverde. At the end of his talk, a suitably awed student asked, “And who will carry on this work when you are gone?”, Wilson immediately answered with a smile, scanning the thronged chapel, “Why you will, of course.”
Preserving hotspots, and training those who will safeguard them, is a splendid idea, and organizations like Conservation International are making great strides in doing just that (though preserving the human cultures who live alongside these rich genetic troves has proved a challenge. But during the question period, I raised the issue of the impact of climate change upon these preserves, forcing their inhabitants to shift to more suitable climates, and thus frequently facing the daunting prospect of traversing adjacent areas heavily populated by human beings. Wilson was perturbed. “One problem at a time,” he begged.
Up to the late twentieth century, science advanced through just this approach. But I’m sorry Professor Wilson, we can’t pick and choose our problems; they are all happening at once. During the last half century, the field of ecology has matured, and has necessarily introduced the study of the systemic complexity characterized by many mutually-affecting variables. Wilson was unhappy with the question because he was at Warren Wilson to recruit naturalists. But the question still stands, and we face the awesome task of addressing the whole host of variables in the earth-system unleashed by global warming. We are the Flood, and we need to collectively remember how to be Noahs, not just by preserving ecologically sensitive hotspots, but by fundamentally changing the way we live.
My last post chronicled a happy sojourn in Costa Rica and its hotspots, preserved by an enlightened government and citizenry. The discerning reader might ask, “But what about the ecological cost of ecotourism?” Among the perplexing tasks of sorting variables is weighing the relative carbon costs of flying in ecotourists to the cutting of trees and putting in cattle in unsuitable terrain, as the Quaker “pioneers” did at Monteverde. Raising cattle is perhaps the single most destructive thing that we do. Ecotourism seems to be a progressive move, but just how much do the consumers, the eco-tourists, do to help the equation?
No matter what our efforts to set aside habitat for future genetic diversity, the larger issue always remains the human context for these areas. Excepting the most basic elements of life - the bacteria, algae, fungi, and insects - we have become the dominant life-form, and all other species live within our context - the honeybees surviving in urban and suburban areas while dying in the countryside - or they are in preserves, effectively, zoos.
But there are moments when the primordial still rears up and swallows us, natives who were thrown out of the Garden, now casually and mindlessly raising colonialists of the natural order, addicted to our industrial ways and imagined separation from our ground in Gaia. When Geeta and I arrived at our lodge adjacent to the Corcovado rainforest preserve in the Osa Peninsula, the sound of the cicadas was so deafening I couldn’t hear myself think. I was worried, fearful that I would be trapped for a week amidst this deafening chant, unable to thread my identity along the string of my occasionally brilliant reflections. Mercifully, at nightfall, the chorus abruptly ceased, and I relaxed. But during our stay at this glorious place, each day inevitably produced a time when the chorus rose up to swallow me again, reminding me that in the big scheme of things, I and my thoughts were perhaps not so important after all.
Preserving hotspots, and training those who will safeguard them, is a splendid idea, and organizations like Conservation International are making great strides in doing just that (though preserving the human cultures who live alongside these rich genetic troves has proved a challenge. But during the question period, I raised the issue of the impact of climate change upon these preserves, forcing their inhabitants to shift to more suitable climates, and thus frequently facing the daunting prospect of traversing adjacent areas heavily populated by human beings. Wilson was perturbed. “One problem at a time,” he begged.
Up to the late twentieth century, science advanced through just this approach. But I’m sorry Professor Wilson, we can’t pick and choose our problems; they are all happening at once. During the last half century, the field of ecology has matured, and has necessarily introduced the study of the systemic complexity characterized by many mutually-affecting variables. Wilson was unhappy with the question because he was at Warren Wilson to recruit naturalists. But the question still stands, and we face the awesome task of addressing the whole host of variables in the earth-system unleashed by global warming. We are the Flood, and we need to collectively remember how to be Noahs, not just by preserving ecologically sensitive hotspots, but by fundamentally changing the way we live.
My last post chronicled a happy sojourn in Costa Rica and its hotspots, preserved by an enlightened government and citizenry. The discerning reader might ask, “But what about the ecological cost of ecotourism?” Among the perplexing tasks of sorting variables is weighing the relative carbon costs of flying in ecotourists to the cutting of trees and putting in cattle in unsuitable terrain, as the Quaker “pioneers” did at Monteverde. Raising cattle is perhaps the single most destructive thing that we do. Ecotourism seems to be a progressive move, but just how much do the consumers, the eco-tourists, do to help the equation?
No matter what our efforts to set aside habitat for future genetic diversity, the larger issue always remains the human context for these areas. Excepting the most basic elements of life - the bacteria, algae, fungi, and insects - we have become the dominant life-form, and all other species live within our context - the honeybees surviving in urban and suburban areas while dying in the countryside - or they are in preserves, effectively, zoos.
But there are moments when the primordial still rears up and swallows us, natives who were thrown out of the Garden, now casually and mindlessly raising colonialists of the natural order, addicted to our industrial ways and imagined separation from our ground in Gaia. When Geeta and I arrived at our lodge adjacent to the Corcovado rainforest preserve in the Osa Peninsula, the sound of the cicadas was so deafening I couldn’t hear myself think. I was worried, fearful that I would be trapped for a week amidst this deafening chant, unable to thread my identity along the string of my occasionally brilliant reflections. Mercifully, at nightfall, the chorus abruptly ceased, and I relaxed. But during our stay at this glorious place, each day inevitably produced a time when the chorus rose up to swallow me again, reminding me that in the big scheme of things, I and my thoughts were perhaps not so important after all.
Labels: cicadas, Corcovado Rainforest Preserve, ecotourism, EO Wilson, hotspots, sociobiology, sustainable colleges, Warren Wilson College
Friday, February 29, 2008
Ecotourists in Costa Rica
Dear reader, following the meandering gifts of a privileged life, I am going to post a series of blogs on Costa Rica before returning to our “Two Paradigms and the Perils Between” – title of my Cabin Fever University course here in the WNC mountains, ongoing...
Celebrating our thirty-fifth anniversary, Geeta and I just spent three glorious weeks in Costa Rica. It contains the most biodiversity of any place in the Americas, and after decades of struggling to build an economy in more conventional ways (coffee, bananas and pineapples, cattle), it has embraced ecotourism, taking advantage of its greatest resource of all. Not only does Costa Rica host a tremendous diversity of wildlife and flora, the people are unabashedly friendly. This combination, enhanced by a sensibly designed tourist infrastructure, makes a visit to Costa Rica a unique, unforgettable adventure.
We organized our trip around visits to forest reserves, both tropical rain forests and cloud forests. We traveled for the most part by bus, though we did take one private taxi, some boat launches, as well as a short plane ride in a tiny plane utilizing a gravel airstrip. Costa Rican buses are modern, on time, clean, and have mostly middle class riders, plus a sprinkling of tourists. The meal stops are also clean, with good food – local diners with cafeteria-style service. They put Greyhound to shame.
We are Quaker, and visiting the Quaker community at Monteverde in the northwestern highlands was a high priority. The core settlers were farmers from Fairhope Alabama, who arrived in 1952 during one of the government’s periods of agricultural expansion, giving land away in remote forested areas to squatters who were willing to improve it. The Quakers paid off the squatters, who were happy to squat again as neighbor. These “pioneers,” as the locals call them, took the patchwork of holdings, divided it amongst themselves, and proceeded to do what they knew best - clear most it for cattle.
In the early seventies, a series of visiting biologists persuaded the Monteverde Community that what they were doing was a huge mistake. One young man in particular, who had come to research his doctoral project, was so alarmed that he dropped out of his doctoral program and stayed to educate the Monteverde community. The Quakers renounced clearing more land, and supported the young biologist in his efforts to establish a forest research reserve, the Tropical Science Center, now 3500 hectares.
So the settlers who had modeled the government’s efforts at expanding the cattle industry now were chastened into the forefront of the preservationist movement, and a second wave of homesteading deeds became the last, superceded by a remarkable national effort to preserve as much rain forest as possible (now over 25%). In the Monteverde area, there are now three forest reserves; we stayed at a bed and breakfast between two of them. The Monteverdeans also took the lead in developing ecotourism.
Before our day in the Monteverde cloud forest reserve, we spent a morning on ziplines and canopy walks in a nearby park. It was exhilarating, and from canopy bridges we looked down on the scene we would explore on forest trails the next day. One quickly learns within these forests the immense importance of preserving them. Not only is there plant life in virtually every available patch of earth, but the trees themselves are covered with epiphytes, vines that root in the canopy and grow down towards the earth. Plants grow upon plants who grow upon other plants, a riot of symbiosis. One researcher found that a mature tree in the Monteverde forest hosted a ton or more biomass – dry weight! All of this is a carbon sink, the exact opposite of raising cattle, which when done conventionally is the most destructive agricultural practice on the planet, emitting vast amounts of CO2.
At the Monteverde Tropical Science Center, we went in a group of eight (the maximum countrywide) on a guided walk with a well-educated guide with a fancy scope for spying birds in the tall canopy. He confessed to us that as a boy, he used to come into the forest with a slingshot, but that attitudes had changed in twenty-first century Costa Rica. He helped us see that the mass of plant life also hosts a huge array of creatures: mammals, birds, snakes and butterflies. Geeta became an overnight birder, and we saw over 50 different species between us in our various walks, including a handful of the heralded quetzals and an amazing array of hummingbirds of all colors and sizes.
Our final stay was in the Osa peninsula in the country’s southwest corner, at a delightful but funky (“faded elegance” Geeta called it) ecotourist lodge. Marenco Lodge excelled in genuine hospitality and superbly trained guides. On an unaccompanied hike to see the “Giant Tree,” I saw a large herd of peccaries, who diverted from our path as we approached them. For the next fifty yards, I smelled their strong, distinct odor.
In the Corcovado Rainforest Reserve, which, like everything else on the peninsula we accessed by boat, our guide helped us see sloths, foraging coatis (raccoon-like creatures), a huge variety of birds, including many scarlet macaws, a Jesus Christ lizard (who walks on water), a crocodile, a tent-bat, and several monkeys. Jose had just been written up in the Tico Times as the “guide of guides,” and he was indeed marvelous, including detailed interlocking evolutionary history of much of the plant life, not just providing a pair of trained eyes and a lexicon. At one juncture, he pointed out a hummingbird nest that thrummed to the rapid heartbeat of the chicks it contained. While I was looking at a baby howler monkey, the infant woke up, and I suddenly found these piercingly alert eyes looking back through the scope at me. When we spied some spider monkeys, the most spectacular, with prehensile tails featuring a patch that is sensitive like our finger tips, Geeta had the unforgettable sight through her binoculars of a newborn, still glistening with an amniotic slick.
Being plunged in the midst of all this biodiversity was pure glory. Looking up at gigantic trees, some of them a thousand years old, trying to absorb the acres of biomass, and feeling surprisingly marginalized by the assured way in which the animals traversed their territory, I began to realize the primal truth that modern life has led us to disbelieve: we are guests in this place. Indeed I was a careful guest, not yet even a participant observer.
We need far more areas like this, places that can heal, serve as laboratories for future evolution, and remind us that we can be guests, not always masters. This is the approach strenuously argued by EO Wilson, the Nobel laureate entomologist and ecologist, founder of sociobiology. NEXT, second in a series of three: E.O. Wilson, Hotspots, and Global Warming.
Celebrating our thirty-fifth anniversary, Geeta and I just spent three glorious weeks in Costa Rica. It contains the most biodiversity of any place in the Americas, and after decades of struggling to build an economy in more conventional ways (coffee, bananas and pineapples, cattle), it has embraced ecotourism, taking advantage of its greatest resource of all. Not only does Costa Rica host a tremendous diversity of wildlife and flora, the people are unabashedly friendly. This combination, enhanced by a sensibly designed tourist infrastructure, makes a visit to Costa Rica a unique, unforgettable adventure.
We organized our trip around visits to forest reserves, both tropical rain forests and cloud forests. We traveled for the most part by bus, though we did take one private taxi, some boat launches, as well as a short plane ride in a tiny plane utilizing a gravel airstrip. Costa Rican buses are modern, on time, clean, and have mostly middle class riders, plus a sprinkling of tourists. The meal stops are also clean, with good food – local diners with cafeteria-style service. They put Greyhound to shame.
We are Quaker, and visiting the Quaker community at Monteverde in the northwestern highlands was a high priority. The core settlers were farmers from Fairhope Alabama, who arrived in 1952 during one of the government’s periods of agricultural expansion, giving land away in remote forested areas to squatters who were willing to improve it. The Quakers paid off the squatters, who were happy to squat again as neighbor. These “pioneers,” as the locals call them, took the patchwork of holdings, divided it amongst themselves, and proceeded to do what they knew best - clear most it for cattle.
In the early seventies, a series of visiting biologists persuaded the Monteverde Community that what they were doing was a huge mistake. One young man in particular, who had come to research his doctoral project, was so alarmed that he dropped out of his doctoral program and stayed to educate the Monteverde community. The Quakers renounced clearing more land, and supported the young biologist in his efforts to establish a forest research reserve, the Tropical Science Center, now 3500 hectares.
So the settlers who had modeled the government’s efforts at expanding the cattle industry now were chastened into the forefront of the preservationist movement, and a second wave of homesteading deeds became the last, superceded by a remarkable national effort to preserve as much rain forest as possible (now over 25%). In the Monteverde area, there are now three forest reserves; we stayed at a bed and breakfast between two of them. The Monteverdeans also took the lead in developing ecotourism.
Before our day in the Monteverde cloud forest reserve, we spent a morning on ziplines and canopy walks in a nearby park. It was exhilarating, and from canopy bridges we looked down on the scene we would explore on forest trails the next day. One quickly learns within these forests the immense importance of preserving them. Not only is there plant life in virtually every available patch of earth, but the trees themselves are covered with epiphytes, vines that root in the canopy and grow down towards the earth. Plants grow upon plants who grow upon other plants, a riot of symbiosis. One researcher found that a mature tree in the Monteverde forest hosted a ton or more biomass – dry weight! All of this is a carbon sink, the exact opposite of raising cattle, which when done conventionally is the most destructive agricultural practice on the planet, emitting vast amounts of CO2.
At the Monteverde Tropical Science Center, we went in a group of eight (the maximum countrywide) on a guided walk with a well-educated guide with a fancy scope for spying birds in the tall canopy. He confessed to us that as a boy, he used to come into the forest with a slingshot, but that attitudes had changed in twenty-first century Costa Rica. He helped us see that the mass of plant life also hosts a huge array of creatures: mammals, birds, snakes and butterflies. Geeta became an overnight birder, and we saw over 50 different species between us in our various walks, including a handful of the heralded quetzals and an amazing array of hummingbirds of all colors and sizes.
Our final stay was in the Osa peninsula in the country’s southwest corner, at a delightful but funky (“faded elegance” Geeta called it) ecotourist lodge. Marenco Lodge excelled in genuine hospitality and superbly trained guides. On an unaccompanied hike to see the “Giant Tree,” I saw a large herd of peccaries, who diverted from our path as we approached them. For the next fifty yards, I smelled their strong, distinct odor.
In the Corcovado Rainforest Reserve, which, like everything else on the peninsula we accessed by boat, our guide helped us see sloths, foraging coatis (raccoon-like creatures), a huge variety of birds, including many scarlet macaws, a Jesus Christ lizard (who walks on water), a crocodile, a tent-bat, and several monkeys. Jose had just been written up in the Tico Times as the “guide of guides,” and he was indeed marvelous, including detailed interlocking evolutionary history of much of the plant life, not just providing a pair of trained eyes and a lexicon. At one juncture, he pointed out a hummingbird nest that thrummed to the rapid heartbeat of the chicks it contained. While I was looking at a baby howler monkey, the infant woke up, and I suddenly found these piercingly alert eyes looking back through the scope at me. When we spied some spider monkeys, the most spectacular, with prehensile tails featuring a patch that is sensitive like our finger tips, Geeta had the unforgettable sight through her binoculars of a newborn, still glistening with an amniotic slick.
Being plunged in the midst of all this biodiversity was pure glory. Looking up at gigantic trees, some of them a thousand years old, trying to absorb the acres of biomass, and feeling surprisingly marginalized by the assured way in which the animals traversed their territory, I began to realize the primal truth that modern life has led us to disbelieve: we are guests in this place. Indeed I was a careful guest, not yet even a participant observer.
We need far more areas like this, places that can heal, serve as laboratories for future evolution, and remind us that we can be guests, not always masters. This is the approach strenuously argued by EO Wilson, the Nobel laureate entomologist and ecologist, founder of sociobiology. NEXT, second in a series of three: E.O. Wilson, Hotspots, and Global Warming.
Labels: biodiversity, carbon sink, cloud forest, Costa Rica, ecotourism, epiphytes, Monteverde Quaker Community, rainforest
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