Out of the Park

Troy D. Abel, July 11, 2010

Since 2003, I have led over 100 students into the rainforests of Costa Rica and its national parks. Participants combined readings, reflection, and a service-learning project supporting two park’s efforts to protect biodiversity while also educating surrounding communities about rainforest conservation. For about one half of the experience, students conducted a variety of monitoring and education projects allowing them to learn firsthand about the interactions of environmental science and conservation policy in another culture. We voluntarily worked on improving trails and park facilities for the other half of the experience.
But three weeks before our 2008 trip, everything changed. Our planned 10 day stay and service in the Sirena Biological Station in the middle of Corcovado National Park was trumped by an emergency conference for park rangers. Consequently, our Costa Rica tour company (Endemico), arranged 7 days in Dante’s Corcovado Lodge in the village of Guadalupe near the park’s border. We again spent half of the trip investigating the reserve’s ecological condition but in the other half our service work focused on the community. Over six days, six houses were painted, we taught in the local school, 27 students were transformed, and I began to realize that there could be many environmental service-learning opportunities outside the park.
I am particularly interested in how I can strengthen the service-learning aspect of the RICA program so that it foster a more globally, yet civically-minded student. These kind of learners will recognize that they: “. . . cannot flourish unless the communities to which [they] belong flourish, and it is [their] (enlightened) self-interest to become a more responsible member of those communities—whether they are [their] school, [their] neighborhood or [their] nation (and perhaps even [their] world)” (Barber and Bettistoni, 1992, p. 237. In a world shrinking because of globalization, our students need experiences that expand their notions of citizenship from the local to the ecological, and to the global.
So this year, we intentionally ventured out of the parks for five days of our program and immersed ourselves in two communities near our two parks—El Sur and Guadalupe. In the former, we learned about their community’s cooperative called Ecosur that aims to develop sustainable agriculture and tourism opportunities to keep families from leaving the area. We also delivered an experiential education program about the importance of trees to eight elementary students from the community. And we dined in the community center, slept in the community lodge, and brought a small part of our economic impact to the families of El Sur. We just finished doing the same in Guadalupe.

Tomorrow, we go back into Corcovado National Park; a place that National Geographic called the most biologically intense place on the planet.