Ecology and Technology
As I write this, I’m sitting in a snug, paneled mountain
lodge cabin. The rain falls heavily outside, rare for the dry season. It
started while we were just on a horseback ride, and the rain falling on the
surrounding jungle as we rode was resoundingly primeval.
Costa Rica is based on eco-tourism, and it’s far more than
lip-service; it’s a true core value. There is a strong concern about waste, and
carbon footprint, and general human impact. Even in the much more touristy
places we’ve been — heck, even on the public beach — there have been recycling
sorting systems that put the US to shame (seriously, if a small beach town in
Costa Rica can easily sor, why is it so hard on Grand Avenue, and why do we
need single sort?)
Trogon Lodge where we are now, a small mountain lodge in San
Gerardo de Dota, takes this to a wonderful extreme. We’re in a small cloud
forest, one of the two places in the country where the quetzal bird flourishes.
Hummingbirds dart between the beautifully landscaped flowers (the government
has recently banned feeding them in manmade feeders, since the sugar water was
not providing the birds with the proper nutrition and was inhibiting
pollination). At night, we all eat in a hillside dining hall, with tick wooden
tables, heated with woodstoves, and with a wonderful repast of trout caught
onsite and other produce grown here, and last night, even a carrot flan. The
cabins have little gas heaters that come on only at night, and hot water
bottles that the staff tuck into our beds. The lodge takes sustainability to a
whole new level, and that makes it so much easier to think about it myself. For
years, I have argued that plays are important because they make people think in
new ways and change their behavior — I know my core behavior will change as I
return home, and I wish every American could come here and see it in action.
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We’ve been on several nature hikes, due to Beatrix’s love of
animals, which is how we found ourselves standing on a hillside at 5:15 this
morning with a small group looking for quetzals. When we spotted a juvenile
male, our guide (for whom the quetzal is obviously a passion), whipped out his
cell phone so he could play a recording of a young female to coax it out. For
the next half hour, we drove that poor young male crazy as he flew around us,
looking for the female he heard calling.
Every guide we have had has made excellent use of technology
to help interpret the tour. From the night hike in Monteverde, where the guide
showed us pictures of exactly how a certain moth paralyzes tarantulas to lay
its larvae inside the spider (and then they are born they slowly eat the
tarantula from the inside out), to those who use it to demonstrate calls such
as the earlier example, to using their phones as a translation aide, smart
phones have become invaluable to natural interpretation here.
Later, as we ate lunch on the deck, Beatrix asked me to
download a hummingbird call so she could attract them. I guess I’m not the only
one whose behavior has changed.
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