Growing Your Way
out of a Depression
By Tom Peifer
The pictures came in one at a time, slowly downloading for over an hour. A friend was dutifully sending them from a different universe of high speed Internet after a couple of weeks slowing down around here. For an observer it was like watching someone else’s travelogue.
First, the portrait quality shots I had asked him to take of my project. Home sites notched into the forest. Bananas and fruit trees planted throughout. Stone work and native plants crafted into retention ponds in the streams. Then came a jolting discontinuity.
Massive towers of concrete and steel towered over a formerly placid village by the sea. A complete violation of architectural concepts of “proportion”, “sense of place” or “reflecting and integrating” with the surrounding environment. Monuments to little more than ego, greed and a more than a pinch of the quintessential human quality—stupidity.
Nonetheless, the total investment in all the ugly and climactically dysfunctional “developments” along the Gold Coast is chump change compared to the catastrophic losses in the ongoing collapse of that other monument to ego and greed—the world economy. It appears increasingly likely that the latter will have negative repercussions on the former. As if it weren’t enough to give pause to the rambunctiousness of developers, a recent study by the International Energy Agency concludes that future petroleum supplies are headed severely south. The world faces a worse energy crunch in just a few years. Even more so given the low price of oil and the lack of investments in future production. How easy to forget the recent impacts of fuel prices on airfares.
Nonetheless, as Einstein remarked, human stupidity has a better chance of being infinite than does the universe. Just down the road from me there is to be a ‘commercial center’ with 120 parking spaces. The fact that it is a few miles away from another commercial center, already built and desperately seeking occupants appears to be of little concern. Probably even less of a preoccupation is the substantial negative impact the project will have on the adjacent river which runs through our valley.
Attempting to decode the mind-set of these developers, it appears that in addition to greed, they share a couple of other things with the Wall Street wizards who have trashed the world economy. There is a kind of blind optimism: the ‘show’ must go on in spite of any evidence that it might not have a happy ending. They also suffer from a syndrome that a Navajo activist called the ‘White man’s disease’. Their bottom line is that it is money—not Mother Nature—which provides us with food, air, water and the other necessities of life. President Oscar Arias’ support for the open pit gold mine at Las Crucitas shows that this thinking reigns at the national level as well.
Similarly perturbing is the pervasive ignorance that we need to be preparing the infrastructure for a future dramatically less dependent on fossil fuels. This conclusion booms out loud and clear from the recent IEA report and a Department of Energy study in 2005. The DOE study argued emphatically that we need a long lead-time of well-planned transition before petroleum supplies start to taper off.
Sometimes however, the good news comes in small doses--and small packages. I listened intently last month as a friend’s daughter, Marian, age 10, explained to a group of adults why we needed to reforest the 50-meter beachfront at Playa Junquillal. Higher sand temperatures due to global warming are affecting the incubation success of the sea-turtle eggs along our beach, she said. Marian and her collaborators in the science project patiently explained to the grown up’s that if we reforest the berm along the beach, the shade will help the hatching rate and the uptake of CO2 by the growing trees will help with global warming.
In addition to Marian’s words of wisdom, there is a growing momentum in Junquillal to protect the majestic estuary at the mouth of the Rio Nandamojo. A forest buffer running parallel along the dunes would do just that. Plans are in the works to plant out thousands of native species in the next two rainy seasons--a proactive restoration effort which goes far beyond the Blue Flag Beach goals of picking up the trash and keeping the turds out of the tubes. Hats off to those far-sighted developers who have helped spur the mangrove protection within their properties and are on board for the bigger, outrageous goal.
We want to reforest the whole valley that leads to the estuary, or at least enough of it so that the river runs year ‘round like it used to. (See Restoring the River, The Howler, 2005.) The first step will be securing and replanting the 15-meter riparian corridors which are at least supposed to be respected according to law. Thanks to a grant from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, we have documented so much migratory bird activity in our valley and along the beach at Junquillal that they are considering a donation to support the planting of 50,000 trees over the next two years. Developers who want to “green up” their image and make a good faith contribution to the effort are climbing on the bandwagon and volunteering to dedicate parts of their land to the restoration effort.
Think of it as trying to rebuild a part of the sustainable infrastructure of the future, well insulated from the wild gyrations of a failed economic model based on diminishing resources. We are working to restore an ecosystem: a depression-proof ‘business model’ based on eons of micro management and fine tuning based on voluminous feedback from all components of the enterprise.
It’s a great recipe for the future that faces kids like Marian and the rest of humanity. Needs no fossil fuels, runs on solar energy with no external inputs. Reduces, reuses and recycles. Produces food locally, helps with global warming and makes a helluva setting for the kind of developments that do, in fact, have a sense of place, proportion and integration into the surroundings. Real estate types might consider it a strategic plan to outgrow the competition.
Tom Peifer is an ecological land use consultant with 14 years experience in Guanacaste. Phone: 2658-8018. peifer@racsa.co.cr
El Centro Verde is dedicated to sustainable land use, agriculture and development. Web site: http://www.elcentroverde.org/
We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them - Albert Einstein
