Road to peace

Google maps described my road to peace as just under 12 kilometers and 18 minutes by car. On my Kona mountain bike the first time, it was 55 minutes. I began last Wednesday at 6 am at approximately 920 meters before I dropped to 800 meters, and then climbed back up to 910 meters. I traversed hillside homes and compounds, a typical Costa Rica town (Ciudad Colon), and the Pecacua River gulley. I saw the sun rise in the coffee fields around 6:30am and arrived at the University of Peace campus at 7am. My short trip by bike that morning ended at the University for Peace, but my journey here took over a dozen years.

Luck brought me to Costa Rica for the first time in 2001. I was a second year assistant professor navigating a joint appointment in political science and our small environmental science and policy graduate program.  Getting my first taste of academia at the front of the classroom, I found myself with the challenge of teaching and working with students at the intersection of the ecological and social sciences.  I recently returned from a tour of European Universities exploring environmental study abroad opportunities for our predominately Midwestern students.  I was one ten years earlier in Indiana when my own semester abroad in the Netherlands helped spark my intellectual curiosity.  Later, in my graduate studies, renowned social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006) would teach us how important international studies could be.  He told us a very simple axiom shared in one of his influential publications.  “A person who knows only one country basically knows no country well” (Lipset, 1993, p. 121).  My study abroad began to expand my vision.  I returned to the U.S. with a new perspective, or as I often describe; I gained a new set of lenses to view my own country and the world.  My semester abroad gave me a prism that expanded my perspective well beyond the singular spectrum I had viewed my American experience thus far.

The European connections never panned out while another one came out of the blue. Or, in other words, out of the green.  I received an offer from a business instructor I had never met.  She asked if I would be interested in joining a study abroad trip to Costa Rica. I didn’t hesitate.  Another professor would cover ecology, she would handle the economics, and I could do political and policy stuff.  She knew a National Park in Costa Rica we could do volunteer work for. We attracted more than 25 undergraduates and off we went for two weeks.  This was my first foray into sustainability education, or teaching at the intersections of ecology, economics, and social equity. I never could have imagined how deeply I would be affected by this Central American nation, but more directly, by a week immersed in a rainforest side by side with the people working to preserve an island of biodiversity in Carara National Park.

I soon left my first academic institution for a second. I quickly built another study abroad program that took Wisconsin students out of the harsh winters to Costa Rica in the first two weeks of January from 2003 to 2006. Emphasizing ecology and economics, we explored the conventional sides of Costa Rica. Rainforest, beaches, volcanoes, and ziplines. But we never confronted one of this nation’s truly exceptional conditions and captured by this photo of a popular tee shirt souvenir: no army.

Imagine more teachers than soldiers. Imagine no guns, no war. It’s not easy, despite what Lennon’s lyrics tried to tell us, even when you try. It’s so far from the politically possible in the US that even one presidential candidate’s proposal for a Department of Peace ensured his relegation to the left fringe of Democratic politics. Conversely, most living Costa Rican’s can’t imagine a Department of Defense. In their 1948 Constitution, and after a two year civil war, Ticos banned the military. More than thirty years later and because of a history of stability in a conflict-ridden region, the United Nations General Assembly established a University for Peace in Costa Rica. www.upeace.org

In the summer of 2006, I was introduced to the UPeace through a collaboration with a George Mason University (GMU) graduate course titled Environmental Security and Sustainability. After a week delving into new concepts like negative and positive peace, peacekeeping, and ecological marginalization, I began to imagine how a similar experience for undergraduates would complement their extensive background in economics and ecology. The imaginary became possible when I transferred to Western Washington University’s Huxley College of the Environment.

In my annual study abroad program, two days at the University of Peace campus in Costa Rica present students with the third sphere of equity.  They contemplate how environmental conflicts can be driven by unequal and degraded natural resource conditions. Students read seminal work on environmental scarcity and how it, according to Homer-Dixon, “. . . can sharply increase demands on key institutions, such as the state, while it simultaneously reduces their capacity to meet those demands. These pressures increase the chance that the state will either fragment or become more authoritarian” (1994, p. 6). University of Peace professors complement this reading with lectures on environmental scarcity and conflict in Costa Rica. 

These classroom presentations are magnified throughout the students experience traveling across the country.  For instance, after driving through a multinational corporate resort one student observed: “You can go to Costa Rica but never be in Costa Rica.”  Another observed that “Visiting Costa Rica has reinforced the beliefs I already held for the importance of preserving natural areas.  However, I have a better understanding now of the problems that can arise when setting aside land for conservation.  This human perspective of conservation is probably the most enlightening knowledge I take away from this trip.”  These experiences and UPeace instruction provide students with concepts to recognize how equity is instrumental to sustainability.  This also becomes the foundation for students to contemplate and discuss how rainforest conservation is not only an environmental problem, but a much more complex socioeconomic challenge.

Eight years after my first visit to Universidad Para La Paz, I’m back for a 12 month sabbatical. Like so many of my students before, the faculty and staff have welcomed me into their community. I am grateful to Amr Abdulla, Pablo Richard, Jan Brietling, Robert Fletcher, Victoria Fontan, Esteban Gutierrez, Blanesta Ada and so many others. On Tuesday January 15, 2013, I received my UPeace identification badge pictured on the left. One chapter on my road to peace has ended, and now another begins.