Personally Speaking

On winter break, Tim Foley traveled to the tropical forests of Costa Rica with his advisor, Paul Baker, and fellow Master of Environmental Management students Kerry Schlichting, Noah Yavit, Heidi Hausman and Brent Wanner. Here is his story about their quest to see how global environmental change is manifesting itself in that part of the world.

When they hear I am focusing on global environmental change (GEC) at the Nicholas School, people often ask: “So what exactly are you studying?...what is global environmental change?” Global change has come to mean so many different things and encompass so many different effects in recent years that there isn’t a simple answer.

Last spring, my fellow GEC students and I talked about the diverse subjects each of us was studying within our program. From wind energy to tropical biodiversity, from ecosystem services to water quality and forest carbon sequestration, we each had chosen a different path—all tied together by the concept of global environmental change.

We agreed we had received a year and a half of excellent classroom education studying how the climate system works and how the environment responds to anthropogenic activities. But we felt like an important field component to our education was missing, a component that would help answer the question.

If you want to know what global environmental change is, you need to go out into the world and see it for yourself.

So we initiated a field trip this year to Costa Rica. Over winter break, five students traveled with our advisor, Paul Baker, to the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica to see its biological diversity and to try to observe how global environmental change is manifesting itself in the tropical forests of our planet.

Costa Rica is an ideal destination for this objective. From a logistical point of view, Costa Rica provides the best opportunity to view a wide range of ecosystems—montane cloud forest, tropical rainforest, coastal mangroves, coral reefs and more—in an amazingly small geographic area. In one 75-mile transect, you can begin in the coastal Pacific rainforests, cross over 12,000-foot cloud forest peaks and descend to the Caribbean Sea’s coral reefs.

Additionally, Costa Rica is often cited as a model nation for the protection of natural ecosystems. More than 25 percent of the land area in Costa Rica is protected by the government in one form or another as one of 161 different national parks, biological reserves, wildlife refuges, monuments, biosphere reserves, international parks, forest reserves, wetlands or Indian reservations.

Costa Rica has made it a national priority to preserve its biological treasures for the sake of ecology as well as for the eco-tourism industry that drives the nation’s economy. Led by the tourism industry, the service sector employs more than half the nation’s workforce and accounts for more than 60 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Tourism has provided an important economic alternative to environmentally damaging practices since the 1980s.

From the outset, I was thoroughly impressed by the tourist infrastructure that Costa Rica has created. Some of the most amazing biological areas in the world are, at the same time, easily accessible and yet still extremely well preserved.

I found, however, that biological diversity isn’t always what it appears when it is examined thoroughly, and one can see environmental changes that have occurred within the ecosystems. During our stay at one Pacific Coast ecolodge, we observed
a wealth of howler monkeys, toucans and other tropical megafauna. Removing the façade of a healthy tropical ecosystem revealed that these species were overabundant because humans had manipulated the environment. No visitor to a pristine ecosystem would witness from their front porch this enormous degree of biological diversity. It was an important lesson for us to learn: ecotourism, despite its positive benefits still impacts the environment it is based on.

Causes of other environmental changes we observed were less attributable to direct ecosystem manipulation. We spent a large portion of our time in Costa Rica at the Proyecto Campanario biological research station on the Osa Peninsula in the southwestern part of the country. The station’s location on the edge of Corcovado National Park (one of the most biologically diverse places in the Americas) makes it an ideal setting to educate visitors on regional tropical ecology. At Campanario, researchers tell of the gradual environmental changes they have seen over the past decade.

I could see for myself the extensive growth of lianas and other choking vines throughout the forest responding to higher atmospheric carbon levels, and the decline in annual rainfall as monitored by the station’s rain gauge. Unfortunately, these are changes that neither Campanario’s researchers nor Costa Rica—which ranks 106th in the world in CO2 emissions—can do much about.

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report suggests global climate changes such as those observed at Campanario likely are attributable to anthropogenic activities generally associated with the lifestyle to which we, as citizens of the richest country in the world, are accustomed. The United States is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. The gas we buy for our cars, the lights we turn on in our houses and the food choices we make all contribute to the effects of global change around the world and in places like Costa Rica.

In addition to educating us on tropical ecology, the Campanario research staff made it a priority to give us a message about the far-reaching impacts of our lifestyle and how we interact with the environment. Nightly lectures on energy use and recycling enlightened us about how wasteful and over-consumptive typical Western lifestyles are. Meals were served buffet style. You could eat all you wanted, but you had to finish everything on your plate. Electricity at the station is used only for cooking and is generated on site with solar panels and a small water-wheel turbine. The gift we took from this experience was the knowledge that with a little extra effort anyone can drastically reduce the footprint he or she makes on the environment.

The researchers did not condemn the Western world. The information they gave us was intended as an eye-opener about the choices each of us makes and the wide-ranging effects these choices have. The parting message Nancy Aitken, director of Proyecto Campanario, gave us was to go home and help spread what we had learned. The changes we need to make as individuals to transform our society and our lifestyles are not insurmountable. These changes rest on the spread of information and the building of a new societal consciousness.

I headed to Costa Rica excited about making my first trip to a tropical ecosystem, and about exploring how the nation that virtually invented ecotourism is able to manage its resources. I left it with a greater understanding of how I connect to the future successful management of those resources, and about what global environmental change means.

We who live in the Western world find ourselves in a quandary: Our actions seriously affect individuals and nations thousands of miles away who we know little to nothing about. This quandary is the crux of the climate change problem facing our generation. It cannot be dismissed and will take the combined efforts of each member of society, including those of us who are working on the different aspects of global climate change.

As Nancy would advocate, education and communication are the best tools to change our lifestyle and help nations like Costa Rica continue to preserve their incredible ecological resources.