Costa Rica Play 2008

Shame on us destroying our planet.

On the spur of the moment, my boyfriend and I decided to meet in Costa Rica on a backpacking trip. We would stay mostly in hostels (our first experience together hostelling where we met many supportive people that suggested destinations and arranged future travel for our unplanned trip) while moving around the country just as locals did - by bus.

We criss-crossed the Costa Rica experiencing rainforests where we flew over lofty vegetation canopies on an 18 station zip line, bungee jumped (my first exciting time), slept at the observatory and witness volcanic eruptions in the black night.

We travel down dusty, ridged mud roads in a bus, then by a small boat to arrive on the pacific coast where we spent days lazing around beaches and climbing up a three tier waterfall that required I shimmy down a rope to the water pool below, well worth the hot, dusty vertical accent.

Wanting a bit more diversity and to leave tourist behind, despite many warnings of danger, we then took a bus across the country arriving in Cahuita, on the Caribbean side, where the color of skin darkened dramatically.

Right now, this is a very poor economic area that has recently been devastated by the death of the coco industry due to plant disease. Recovery monetary attempts now seem to be focused on tourism but standards here are so beneath other destinations – only a trickle come.

Due to deforestation through stepped up logging efforts, there has been an increase in erosion. Loose soil washes into the sea and clogs up the feeding cnidarians that form Costa Rica’s prime coral reef.

Then large corporations came in and created banana plantations, used pesticides that washed into the ocean and damaged sea life. The 1991 earthquake raised the shoreline by more than a meter (3.3 feet) exposing and killing parts of the coral reef as well. An increase of ignorant or not so, have damaged the coral as tourists stepped on this fragile environment adding to its destruction.

So logging initiates a process that is multiplied by these other occurrences of destruction. The people here fight to maintain their original life style that is rapidly changing, and fear the worst. Other countries' citizens come to Costa Rica and offer 10 to 100 times more than the original value of these beautifully forested farms. Eventually these poor natives have difficulty living on their meager mean, much less buy property or keep up with their taxes when they sell their land compounding the countries’ economic woos. Where will these people resettle?

Speaking with many hostel travelers we hear the same story of properties’ soaring value in their countries as well. Around the world, the prosperous haves are pricing natives out, even in my small mountain town in Idaho. My concern is as we destroy our environment, price out locals with the population doubling and tripling in shorter spans of time, we are destroying diversification, charm and peace.

Everywhere we traveled in this country we have heard locals concern for global warming, much as we did in Alaska. These people are in touch and dependent on their land and have seen alarming changes in the past ten years.

One example of global warming surfaced as we were treated by a principal of a school from the small Caribbean town we stayed in for a day’s walk through his treasured park, Parque National Cahuita. He spoke with passion, "as the ocean rises it undermines the coconut and other trees roots toppling them to the sea and further eroding soil that again washes to the once crystal clean azure waters, now becoming silty and accelerated killing the fish and sea life at alarming rates."

We Americans are finally starting to recognize the global warming trend that these simple people have known and feared for years. Some of us care, most don’t. We have more pressing concerns – money, living within our electronic cocoons and our phobic inner concern for ourselves.

We found loving, relaxed people here and just were saddened by the "maturing" of their country.