Nature Air

Hope plays a major role in the environmental movement. There is this inherent sense that it is possible to actually effect change. Throughout Costa Rica, there are individuals from extraordinarily different backgrounds with unique histories, who share a sense of hope, a fight worth fighting. For many of us, this is a time to reflect on where we have been and where we are going. It is probably not overstating things to say that the coming year will be frought with challenges. Even a small amount of hope will be a good friend to have in these times.

Luis Villa, is a friend of ours and part of the Nectandra Institute, an incredible organization  devoted to creating  economically viable water shed protection strategies with local communities in the San Carlos region of Costa Rica. Recently, he was asked what gives him hope, especially when facing the obstacles that threaten the flow of water to small villages throughout the country.

Luis’ response is fairly long, especially by blog standards. I was initially going to edit it down to a more acceptable length, but changed my mind. If you are interested in knowing what makes people like Luis so special, please read on. We are all in this together, and I think it is important to share hope because it is contagious.

“What gives me hope?  Turns out I had a lot more to say than just a few lines.  Thank you for asking the question.  Here you go:

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a local elementary school to give a class of 5th graders a short presentation.  As part of the presentation, they saw Agua…más que un tubo, which was a real treat for them because it was filmed in their local community so they recognized many of the places and faces in the video. 

The other part of the presentation was me talking about some of the more “bigger picture” concepts that drive the environmental effort and movement towards sustainability. One of those concepts is the difference between linear, extractive processes vs. cyclical, renewable ones.  I started by making sure they understood the term “process” and then gave them several examples of both linear and cyclical ones. 

I concluded my presentation by comparing planet earth to a spaceship with limited passenger capacity and resources, but with the technology to support its passengers’ lives indefinitely so long as its physical limits were respected.  This, in an effort to illustrate the concept of a (almost) closed system.  Prior to giving my presentation, I’d been somewhat worried that the ideas I wanted to discuss would be beyond the kids.  But their enthusiastic participation showed me otherwise.  Despite their young age, they were able to understand what I was trying to tell them rather easily.

A few months ago, during a water management association meeting in a local rural community, I was asked by the association’s president to give a brief chat about Nectandra Institute, our work and environmentalism in general, to the residents in attendance.  I had just finished reading Paul Hawken’s Ecology of Commerce so I was inspired to talk about what I like to call “a history of the flow of the world’s capital – the abridged version.”  I asked the various kids in the audience to help me out by coming to the front of the room in order to “represent” the different types of capital over time.  Placing all the kids on one side, I started out in prehistoric times, before there were any humans, telling the audience that all the kids gathered on one side represented the world’s natural capital, as yet undisturbed by human hands.  Then I “fast forwarded” to the appearance of mankind on earth, took a couple of kids from the first group, formed a second one and called it “human capital”.  Then, after talking briefly about our nomadic beginnings, I landed on 10,000 B.C., the agricultural revolution, and with that a third group of kids, this time representing “manufactured capital”, was formed.  We all know, of course, that the agricultural revolution was the impetus for the first major population explosion, so I took even more kids from the “natural capital” group and introduced them to the “human capital” group. 

To make a long story short, you might imagine what the “natural capital” group was reduced to when I had finished going through the industrial revolution and landed on the present day.  The question I asked the audience at this point was, “Do you see something not quite right with this picture?”  Like the fifth graders, they got it.

Two years ago, I was not an environmentalist, not even close.  After moving to Costa Rica from the U.S., one of the first ideas I had for making a living here was housing development, since I’d had a stint as an affordable housing project manager in California.  Actually, I grew up on the outskirts of Los Angeles, California.  The closest I came to nature growing up was going to the city park or riding my bike in the cemented over flood channel that is the L.A. river.  In college, I studied psychology, not environmental science.  So it goes without saying that, like most people, I’ve never bothered much with concepts such as sustainability, conservation, and the biosphere’s carrying capacity.  Climate change, peak oil and overshoot were all but unfamiliar terms to me until relatively recently.  My world view has mostly been shaped by my experience with the conventionally accepted notions, at least in the industrialized world, that bigger is better, exponential growth is good, and material accumulation is a requirement for well being (all linear processes, by the way).

But before allowing the booming local real-estate market to draw me into building cookie cutter homes for middle-income Costa Rican families, I had the incredibly good and very random fortune of finding work with Nectandra Institute.  In order to improve my “eco-skill set” I started a process of self-indoctrination, involving soaking up as much as possible from my co-workers, who had much more experience in conservation work than me, but primarily by reading books by folks such as Hawken, Donella Meadows, and Jared Diamond. 

I began to learn about and appreciate the very real connections between forests and water, biodiversity and health, the environment and us.  I started to understand that “environmental services” isn’t just a catchy eco-term made up in order to market the idea of conservation to a consumerist society that is used to seeing everything else marketed, commercialized, and branded.  No, “environmental services” referred to very real and tangible benefits we continuously receive from nature, benefits I’d seriously taken for granted just about all of my life.  I was blown away when one day I learned that if we were to attach a price tag to all the goods and services we receive from nature each year, the amount on that price tag would be twice global GDP.  I also read about the controversy surrounding such estimates, but it didn’t matter to me, because my human instincts immediately told me that the only thing in doubt was just how understated they really are.  Like the fifth graders and the audience at the water association meeting, I got it.

You asked me about hope, and all of this is my way of saying that my hope comes from the fact that I’m just an average person who “got it”.  I’m like an average Joe, a “Joe the plumber” if you will, who in an epiphany slightly drawn out over the last couple years of his life, has come to understand that “spreading the wealth” is absolutely necessary in order to achieve environmental equilibrium and sustainability.  And not just spreading it amongst human hands, but rather returning some of it, maybe lots of it, to nature, motivated by a new economic paradigm that at last reins in all of our current society’s socio-environmental cost externalities and fully accounts for the value of natural capital to our lives, thus closing the flow of capital loophole.

An “eco-loan” to a rural community in Costa Rica on which not monetary interest, but rather “ecological interest” is charged is but a tiny manifestation of this new paradigm.  It is also exemplified by the implementation of higher water rates by water management associations so they have the resources necessary to buy and protect groundwater recharge lands instead of settling for just repairing PVC water lines and concrete storage tanks.  Or it is made visible by schoolchildren who, despite their young age, can answer correctly when asked, “Where does water come from?”  (See scene in Ague…mas que un tubo).

My hope comes from the fact that it has taken me a relatively short amount of time to understand this, despite having spent most of my life not getting it.  It comes from the fact that all it took was a little nudge in the right direction.  My hope comes from my belief that it is my human heart and instinct that has allowed me to get it.  It comes from knowing that every average Joe or Jane is a human being, with a heart and with instinct.  It comes from knowing that, as a natural part of the beautiful and amazing web of life, we humans are not set up to fail, we are predisposed towards success, but we must act towards achieving that success.  My hope comes from me believing that everyone can and will “get it”.”

 Luis Villa

Instituto Nectandra

San Ramón, Alajuela

Costa Rica

Tel/Fax: 2-445-5627

Luis@Nectandra.org