Ecotopia for the tenth time

Greetings from Santiago de Puriscal. I’m back in Costa Rica for my tenth time since 2001. This nation’s name originated from Spanish conquistadors. It means rich coast in English. The colonizers thought the land would be filled with gold. Columbus set eyes on a Caribbean coastline in 1502 that stretched for 132 miles (212 km). In letter a year after his travels, Columbus had this recollection. “I arrived in the land of Cariay, where I stopped to mend and provision the ships, and to give some rest to the crew members who were quite ill. . . There I heard tales of the gold mines that I was searching for in the province of Ciamba” (July of 1503). To the west of where Columbus first anchored, nearly 20,000 square miles of land undulates through 23 different ecozones (Holdridge, 1967). Framed on the other three sides by a 192 mile northern border with Nicauragua, a 397 mile border with Panama, and 800 miles of Pacific coast on the western side, many recognize that Costa Rica’s riches are more green than gold.

Countless observers have documented Costa Rica’s natural exceptionalism. In one of the first, an author in 1895 called it the gem of American republics. “A naturalist’s paradise” proclaimed Alexander Skutch. One coffee table book labeled Costa Rica The Last Country the Gods Made. It was one of The Living Edens featured in a PBS television series. An environmental historian labeled it The Green Republic (Evans, 1999). Others would proclaim that Costa Rica was the Switzerland of Central America. In a more infamous reference, conservative radio voice Rush Limbaugh exclaimed that he would move to Costa Rica if the 2010 health care reform legislation passed. Ironically, Costa Rica has universal health care. It also has a longer life expectancy then the U.S. and a larger share of land protected from development. Rush didn’t immigrate nor did he recognize the double serving of contradictions in his statement. But many other journalists and observers have been drawn to this country’s exceptionalism.

One New York Times journalist would celebrate Costa Rica’s recent ban on oil drilling (Friedman, 2009). That was 2004 when the former Present Abel Pachaco overturned the permits a Texas Oil company had acquired. In an ironic twist, George W. Bush was on the board of Harken Energy when they first got permissions to explore oil along Costa Rica’s coast. Imagine President Bush denying BP’s applications for deep well drilling concessions in the Gulf? That never happened and the Gulf of Mexico Oil spill will go down as one of America’s worst environmental disasters. But not in Costa Rica!

You also won’t find an army, something another columnist marveled at because Costa Rica has seven decades without an army (Kristof, 2010). That is impossible to imagine in the US. Costa Rica’s former Minister of Natural Resources, Alvaro Urmana, called his home “a biological superpower.” The accolades could be continued. But surprisingly few have associated Costa Rica with the idea of ecotopia.

Wandering around my college bookstore in 1986, I saw ecotopia for the first time. I was a wide-eyed freshman buying my first college books. I didn’t stumble across a book about Costa Rica. I grabbed calculus, geology, and ecology; texts representing the accumulated knowledge of scientific disciplines. But for English 101, the required book was titled Ecotopia Emerging. This wasn’t going to be your typical text. Ernest Callenbach’s second novel was published in 1981 and served as a prequel for his 1975 book, Ecotopia. Inside each, I would find the fictional stories of a new nation forming when parts of northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the United States. But that was fiction. This blog includes real accounts of my experiences and the reflections of my students.

Since 2003, I’ve taken more than 100 students of environmental studies to explore the landscapes, culture and economy of Costa Rica. Costa Rica’s tourism bureau proudly proclaims “no artificial ingredients” to draw visitors from around the world. Situated at the confluence of two oceans and bridging two continents in the tropical latitudes, this small nation hosts some of the greatest concentration of biodiversity anywhere. Costa Rica is about the size of West Virginia, or, 0.03% of the world’s surface, yet it holds an estimated 5 percent of the world’s biodiversity. Species from North and South America mixed on this continental land bridge for over a millennia leading to new combinations of flora and fauna.

In the south central spine of the nation’s Talamanca mountains, the highest peak of Chirripo reaches over 12,000 feet with a cap of Costa Rica’s rarest life zone—an alpine cloud rain paramo. To the east, an alluvial plain spreads into the Caribbean and north to the Nicaraguan border. On the Pacific side, the geography varies more with clusters of mountains criss-crossing the landscape to create numerous valleys. A second and distinct volcanic range rises up again north of the central valley. This undulating terrain and climate creates the variations of elevation, temperatures, and rainfall that form differentiated cauldrons where the alchemy of speciation led to new life forms. Over 87,000 have been identified and scientists expect they might discover a half million species across Costa Rica (Zamora and Obando, 2001). You can’t really understand biodiversity and how thick nature can get until you are immersed in a tropical rainforest’s flora and fauna.


This blog, and the program I’ve been leading every year (called Rainforest Immersion and Conservation Action), is not only about tropical ecology. We embark on a broad study of the environment. The students will monitor rare Scarlet Macaws, study deforestation from satellite images, and learn about botany. They also take action to conserve the rainforests by building trails and volunteering in the communities outside Costa Rica’s conservation areas. We also learn about globalization and how economic forces can help and harm this nation in studying the tension between profits and people. Students are, for instance, confronted with the inequitable development patterns transforming Costa Rica’s coastlines. Oceanside property is predominately foreign-owned and often very different than typical housing in the interior. As one of my students put it one year, “you can visit Costa Rica, but never be in Costa Rica.” In short distances, you can see opulent clusters of homes and golf courses catering to the super rich near the meager homes of ordinary residents. The former’s wealth can be a hundred or even thousand-fold higher than their neighbors. According to the New Economics Foundation (NEF), nearly ten percent of Costa Ricans live on less than $2.00 per day. Such inequity is an often an underappreciated weakness of any community or country’s aspirations to hit the sustainability sweet spot.

This blog will give you a glimpse of the three-dimensional perspective we use here, and in doing so, illuminate Costa Rica’s lessons in the triple light of the ecological, environmental, and social dimensions of sustainability. These complicated webs will make or break Costa Rica’s environmental achievements.

Pura vida amigos, 14 June 2010.