31 March 2010 * Air Alaska

Our time is spent, vacation all burnt up. Now we're homeward bound, sailing over snow-frosted forests and soaring white peaks of Oregon's Cascades.

At our journey's start I wrote that "we must make meaning from this travel." Have we?

For me, it's been a study in contrasts--between several amazing, diverse enclaves of unspoilt natural areas and the heavily impacted realms of urban humanity. We walked through forests so wild and clean I felt as if all human works had vanished.

But, of course, they had not. The crush of our collective impact is inescapable: smog-choked streets and highways of urban San Jose and Alajuela; farmscapes of coffee, sugar, palm, and banana; a vast tracery of lights from cities and towns blanketing Mexico's nightscape; the seemingly endless urban vistas of the Los Angeles megacity; gas-powered transport in forms of cars, busses, taxis, vans, motorbikes, and fleets of jets roving roads and skies from one end of the continent to another; omnipresent logos of multinational corporations: McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Holiday Inn, Alamo, Coca Cola, Fox, CNN, Barbie; the overwhelming throngs of people in San Jose and parading through glass-metal-carpet tile airport terminals.

We humans are unimaginably numerous and we're actively transforming our Earth at scales of impact I can't begin to comprehend.

 

Costa Rica is a country that appears to be much more aware of human impacts than most. They abolished the army, set up schools in every town and village, set aside large tracts of forest as nature preserves, and built an economy on the provision of eco-tourism experiences. It was also quite evident to me that the Costa Rican society is broadly aware of the 3 pillars of sustainability: environmental, economic, and social. The Seniors y Senioritas Cooperative Factory is just one example, where they make full use of sustainably harvested exotic woods to provide economic opportunity for socially disadvantaged people. El Trapiche farm is another example, where a small-scale family-run business blends organic farming with eco-tourism education, keeping traditional knowledge and culture alive and retaining local stewardship for the land by people who care for and respect the natural systems on which it depends.

We can learn a lot from Costa Ricans, their intelligence and enterprising energy, their polite well-manored ease, their vibrant and active democracy, their care for nature and ability to impart this respect to visitors, and even their adoption of a deeply meaningful phrase into everyday conversation:

¿Cómo está?

¡Pura Vida!