Back in Ecotopia's Prism

Troy Abel... We have completed nearly half of our 2012 trip and I am back in Playa Dominical and around some reliable internet. For most of our last 15 days, we were living and working in the El Sur community in the hills on the southeastern tip of Carara National Park. Many students have written about this wonderful community before but for me, El Sur and their cooperative rural ecotourism cooperative Ecosur draws my attention to the dilemmas of sustainability. Below is one of the most common images used to represent sustainability. Ecology, economy, and social equity are in balance for a kind of cum by ya moment of e-cubed.

El Sur, and our program, instead are more consistent with a sustainability wrought with conflict as depicted in the next figure that comes from Scott Campbell's 1996 publication in the Journal of the American Planning Associating titled "Green cities, growing cities, just cities?

He provocatively argued that the sustainable development center “. . . cannot be reached directly, but only approximately and indirectly, through a sustained period of confronting and resolving. . . “ three conflicts. The property conflict between economic growth and equity involves competing claims on, and uses of property. In the resource conflict, there is the contradiction of resisting regulation of natural resource extraction and regulation to conserve resources for present and future demands. Finally, the development conflict lies between the social equity and environmental protection poles. The question Campbell poses is this. “How could those at the bottom of society find greater economic opportunity if environmental protection mandates diminished growth” (Campbell 1996, p. 5). In El Sur, they welcome our research tourism while at the same time cater to ATV tours from the nearby city of Jaco. Such contradictions are the topic of many a discussion within our group and continue as we move south towards the Osa Peninsula. Pura vida,