If this is the Third World, I don’t want to be First!
This summer, I took my 13 year old daughter to Costa Rica. It was a bit of a whim. Last summer we went to Kenya and, though it was amazing, we spent most of our time in a jeep. I wanted to choose something a bit more active and a bit closer. We arrived in the city of Liberia and drove in a bare bones car (a box with a steering wheel, motor, wheels and incredible gas mileage!) to the area around Arenal volcano where we planted ourselves for a week. Let me tell you, it was hard to leave. And not just because of the natural hot springs, horseback riding, white water rafting, hiking, delicious $3 dinners, drinkable tap water and incredibly nice people, but because it seems to me that Costa Rica has its priorities straight.
To start, after the 40-day 1948 Revolution, the country abolished its standing army. As my friend Salim, a native Nicaraguan who immigrated to Costa Rica says, “we’d had enough of fighting.” Instead, the Costa Rican government invests in education to the tune of a 96% literacy rate and bragging rights to having more teachers in the country than police. On our boat trip up the Rio Frio to Nicaragua, I asked Salim about the border between the two countries and why Nicaragua’s border started below the Lake. He explained that Nicaragua wanted the additional land security because they were constantly in a state of war and though it was Costa Rican territory originally, it just wasn’t worth fighting over. It was interesting to note the abject poverty in Nicaragua when we got there, complete with children begging in the streets, versus the general prosperity in Costa Rica and the incredibly well cared for children. Nicaragua has their standing army though, that cannot be missed.
 They're bats! |
Environmentally, Costa Rica is not perfect, but it seems far more advanced than the U.S. Roughly 18% of Costa Rica's territory is constituted as National Park or Reserve, including two parks declared World Heritage Sites by UNESCO. Costa Rica has oil deposits off its Atlantic Coast, but the Pacheco administration (2002-2006) decided not to develop the deposits for environmental reasons. Yet we have to have the same discussion in the U.S. Congress every year about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
Costa Rica produces 80% of its electricity using hydroelectric dams, 5.3% from geothermal sources and 1.3% from wind power. We stayed in an area that was reliant on geothermal energy from the volcano and wind farms, a fact we learned while relaxing in the geothermal heated Baldi hot springs and eaves dropping on a lecture that a high school science teacher from New Jersey was giving his bathing suit clad students who had come on a science expedition to learn about the rain forest. It made me actually want to go back to high school. In New Jersey!
Not surprisingly, eco-tourism is huge in Costa Rica, and they make it very accessible. The tour guides are all well versed in the ecology of the region, and Alex, our Rastafarian wannabe white water rafting guide, explained to us the importance of living fences on Costa Rican farms (they don’t disrupt the beauty of the land), the way pineapples and sugar cane are harvested and re-planted (you just fell a few pieces of sugar cane and up pops a new stalk from every notch in the cane) and the reason pineapple tastes so much better there than in California (it’s picked ripe!) He took us to a local fruit market where we sampled items I had never seen or heard of before. One red fruit, boiled and salted, tasted like a baked potato. Alex even took us to a little nature preserve by the side of the road and showed us a red tree frog and a mama sloth sleepily cradling her baby. 
Now, one can rightly say that Costa Rica has a poor track record when it comes to deforestation, and a worse track record when it comes to their native Indian population. However, they have in recent years taken measures to protect the remaining forests, issuing landowners forest protection certificates along with other financial incentives like carbon offsets. The point is that they are taking environmental concerns seriously, and using available technology to reduce carbon emissions, as well as using natural and renewable resources to a far greater degree than we do in the U.S. Their protected reserves are bigger than those of Texas and Oklahoma, combined!
As we were white water rafting, surrounded by lush, green forest on either side of us, I couldn’t help thinking that much of Southern California could look something like this, were it not for the McMansions, highways and strip malls. Perhaps we wouldn’t have a Lexus in every driveway or Manolo Blahniks on every foot, but we could have something far more precious. If only we shared Costa Rica’s Third World priorities.
