Ditz

Issue date: 2/2/09 Section: Outside the Bubble

Media Credit: Rachel Keylon

Personally, conservation has always been important to me. However, it wasn't until I spent a semester studying abroad in Costa Rica that I became passionate about it. I spent three and a half months in this beautiful country, studying tropical ecology and the issues of conservation, and I will admit, I have been deeply changed. I am a bit of a conservation freak now, but it is only because the things that I learned over this experience were so eye-opening that I do not see another way for me to live now. I am so changed that I want to share my story and what I have seen and learned to hopefully inspire a little change.

Harsh Realities
Everywhere you turn today, you find green consumerism, a term for products being marketed as good for the environment. However, not all forms of green consumerism are equal-some environmental issues go far beyond the question of whether to buy frozen yogurt made from organic ingredients. Some problems require action on the national and international levels. I believe it is largely the responsibility of the government to protect the environment, just as it is our responsibility to do what we can to live a sustainable lifestyle in order to preserve our world for future generations.

One of the biggest challenges to living sustainably in the U.S. is that American culture removes the affects of our consumption from eyesight. The statistics on how our Earth is changing are often grim, and many do not want to believe that they could be true. This is the most deadly viewpoint to hold. It is necessary that everyone come to an understanding that our actions do affect the world, an affect that is very negative right now.

To help us reach this mutual understanding, here is a short and non-exhaustive list of the problems we are causing with our behavior, many of which are not yet common knowledge, and many of which I witnessed during my stay in Costa Rica:

• Each year as many as 50,000 species disappear
• There are still over a million species identified that have yet to be studied and even more that are unknown, many of which may also be on the brink of extinction.
• Extinction is a normal occurrence; however, the current extinction rate is 1000 times faster than average and resembling extinction rates of past mass extinction periods.
• Almost 80% of the world's fisheries are currently fished to capacity, overexploited, depleted or about to collapse. Approximately 90% of large predatory fish stocks are already gone.
• The tropical oceans have increased in temperature by about 1ºC over the past 100 years. Coral reef bleaching occurs whenever sea temperatures exceed long-term summer average temperatures by more than 1ºC for several weeks. Since 1979, six periods of mass coral bleaching have occurred, the worst happening in 1998 when almost 16% of the world's reef-building corals were lost.
• It is predicted that all coral reefs will be gone within fifty years at the current rate of coral bleaching and climate change.
• The earth's climate has warmed by approximately 0.6ºC over the last 100 years with minimum temperatures increasing at twice the rate of maximum temperatures. As a result, there has been a decrease in snow cover and ice of the ice caps and glaciers.
• Tropical forests support approximately 50% of the world's described species and many more which are undescribed. They are also massive carbon sinks. Each year, human deforestation accounts for the disappearance of these forests at a rate of approximately 15 million acres per year. Up to two-thirds of this loss is due to slash-and-burn agricultural practices.
• If the mangroves in Sri Lanka had been preserved, the affects of the 2004 tsunami that hit the country and killed 35,322 people in that country alone would have been severely lessened by the barrier many deaths could have been prevented.
• Preserving rainforest near a coffee plantation ensures that there will be pollinators for the plants, which can result in an increase in plantation productivity.

Heartbreak in Costa Rica
It is eye-opening to witness this devastation. Costa Rica is a beautiful country-I am not talking about beautiful surfing beaches or resorts where you can go zip lining; I am talking about tropical dry forests, rain forests, and cloud forests. Every step there is an orchid hanging off of a tree, a toucan calling, a lizard crawling through the leaf litter, monkeys high up in the canopy. Just seeing this beauty, it is evident that this is what we are called on to preserve, because this is what we are destroying.

Costa Rica has tried to protect these habitats. However, the many national parks are small and disconnected-even the largest park is only large enough for one endangered jaguar to live in and maintain a territory. And if only one can live there, where will it find a mate so that it can reproduce? This fragmentation of natural habitats is only one of the ways that humans have disrupted the natural environment.

If you find your way out of the Costa Rican rainforests, you may find yourself in a pineapple, coffee, or banana plantation. These plantations are planted in areas where the forests have been cleared to expose the iron-rich nutrient-poor soils of the tropics. In order to grow any cash crop in this soil, heavy fertilization is necessary.

There are also many herbivores in the tropics that love to eat crops, so pesticides are necessary as well. Some herbivores do not even affect the fruit, such as insects that make black marks on the banana peels. But aesthetics matter to the consumer, so blue plastic bags are fitted around each fruit bundle to protect them.

Finally, some plants try to invade the cleared plantation, which used to be their natural habitat, so herbicides must also be applied to them. Many of these chemicals and plastic bags get washed into the water systems by the heavy rains and then are transported downstream into natural habitats where they disrupt the natural environment.

Alternative Farming
Organic farms are found all across the country, as are shade-grown coffee plantations. These farms are considered better alternatives to traditional farming techniques. While these traditions have positive points, such as the absence of chemical fertilizers, they are far from perfect.

An organic pineapple plantation looks the same as a traditional one, except that it has black plastic covering the ground in the place of applying chemical herbicides. This plastic lasts about three years, and then it is discarded. Shade grown coffee, unlike what most people expect, is not grown under a natural canopy but on a plantation plot in which other commercially beneficial trees are grown to create shade. In doing this, it is harming the natural biodiversity of a forest. It seems that these forms of agriculture, although better than traditional agriculture, do not correct all of its problems.

One of the most dangerous crops of all is soybeans. Soybean production results in massive amounts of deforestation in the Amazon, which is also one of the most biodiverse locations in the world and is a center of endemism-the only location where some species are found.









Greenhouse gases, which have been indicated in global climate change, are closely tied with the cultivation, packaging, refrigeration, and distribution of food. Oil is used in every part of the growing process in modern society, from the production of fertilizer to the transportation by plane of a pineapple from Costa Rica to the U.S.

Since the advent of modern technology, the ratio of the amount of energy input by oil to the energy output in food calories has steadily declined from almost 100 to less than one. We are pouring more oil energy in and getting less food energy out. This use of oil emits large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Many food products themselves also emit greenhouse gases, such as cattle and even rice, which both emit methane gas. It is necessary to continue food production to sustain human life; however, our current habits in the food system are not sustainable for the world as a whole and need to be re-evaluated.

Logging
Food production has a large impact on the environment, but it is not the only source of degradation of the natural environment-in fact, it is the second use of cleared land in almost all cases. The first is logging.

The rainforest is full of valuable trees, such as mahogany and teak, most of which are slow-growing and will not grow in a plantation. Areas are clear cut to obtain these valuable trees and other less valuable timber. This practice is not sustainable, especially since the cleared land is normally not replanted or left to regenerate, but is used for other purposes such as agriculture.

The affects of logging and agriculture were as evident in Costa Rica as the affects of global warming. While I was living in Monteverde, a tropical cloud forest where clouds intermingle with the canopy and precipitation is generally high, the transition from the dry season to the wet season was extremely delayed. A month after the transition from the dry to the wet season normally occurs, there had still only been about three days of rain and another two or three days in which the clouds touched the canopy of the forest. This was very different from the usual occurrence during the wet season, which typically means heavy rainfall and cloud cover every afternoon.

Personal Changes
Seeing the first-hand effects of human impact on global climate change and the environment has dramatically changed my perception and how I live my life. I make little changes, like using a reusable bag to go grocery shopping-I even carry a little roll up bag in my purse, just in case I forget to bring bags. I try and buy food that is grown and raised humanely. I buy organic, but I try to research how it was grown organically also. I walk instead of drive when I can. I am big on recycling. I try not to buy things with plastic wrappers.







I am a green consumer now, but it is important to note that not all green consumerism is the same. Buying a brand new Lexus hybrid is still going to have a negative impact, due to the environmental costs of production. More importantly than simply being a green consumer, I've changed my entire outlook on how I live my life. When I get the chance, I will be living in a house that has grass on its roof to reduce reflection of sun waves, which reverberate in the atmosphere and increase heat. I will have my own garden and my own windmills; I will drive a "veggie" car, driven on vegetable oil. Now I notice the environmental issues that continue to come up, and I pay attention instead of just writing them off as something that I cannot fix.

Believing that you can make a change is the first step to actually doing it. We cannot sit back and know that we have created problems in the environment and not try to solve them, as big and scary as these problems may be. A little change that one person makes can become a little change that one million people can make. And if one million people decided to stop using plastic bags at the grocery store, who knows how many endangered sea turtles, who eat those plastic bags thinking they are jelly fish, could be saved. Sure, one person telling the government that they need to act now to save the environment may not make a big change. If they are part of a million demanding it, though, change can happen.

The Politics of Going Green
It is not just the job of the individual to reduce their footprint on our earth; it is the duty of our government to protect our world and to make the environment a priority. The government focuses on human issues such as race, religion, politics, welfare, war, and in so doing they ignore the issues of the environment surrounding us. Of the over 100 federal agencies and commission in existence, only five address environmental issues and only one is strictly concerned with the conservation of the environment. Now that what we are doing to the environment has come to light, it is time to demand change.

As Americans, we have a large footprint on the earth, yet remain very separated from the actuality of that impact. In this position, it is necessary to continue to educate ourselves about our affect on the environment. Choosing to participate in green consumerism can cause big changes if we actively evaluate the value of each purchase and decision. One less plastic bag cannot save the world-something more must be done, something bigger, changes that are not made by the individual alone but at the national and international level. When big changes in the way we deal with the environment have occurred, only then can we hope to see a good change in the world.

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