Panorama view from the mountaintop restaurant where we ate lunch overlooking the Central Valley. Click to enlarge.
Today was spent driving through the mountains and seeing a couple of small communities on the way to the airport hotel. We really gave the gears of the van a good workout. The road was windy, with traffic coming to a full stop several times, including one long stop due to a traffic accident. But the air was cool enough to turn off the van’s AC and open the windows. This was maybe the first day in Costa Rica when I wasn’t covered in sweat from the moment of walking out the door – even at midday I was pretty comfortable.
Gardens outside church in village of Zarcero.
The view was gorgeous the entire trip. We saw several hills covered with coffee plants or terraced with cabbage. We also passed lots of trucks loaded with sugar cane, as well as a former sugar cane factory that is now a milk factory. This made me wonder if they pasteurize the milk in Costa Rica. Obviously they didn’t at Laureles Farm – they drink it straight from the cow. But probably the milk sold in stores is pasteurized. It also makes me wonder if Costa Rica has large dairy farms with industrial practices as in the U.S. or if most of the milk is sold to the factory from small or organic farms. In fact this whole trip has made me wonder how the representative the animal welfare practices I saw at Earth and the home stay farms are of the rest of the country. Our guide Mario discussed this a lot when it came to organic vs nonorganic crops such as bananas but we didn’t really touch on this regarding animal husbandry or welfare practices. It’s also telling that the students on the trip had never seen the word husbandry applied to animal care because in the U.S. it’s all about animal science.
Wedding in progress in Zarcero
While we were driving through the mountains, the resident director Paul told us that back in the 70s, McDonald’s had deforested thousands and thousands of hectares in the area to create room for beef cattle to graze. This is an area where trees grow very slowly, and it has still not recovered. We did see lots of small groups of cattle grazing – some of them balanced in very precarious spots on the side of mountains. It made me wonder if many of the lose their footing and go tumbling down. They are such large animals with such small legs to support their weight, and clearly were not designed to graze on the sides of mountains the way, say, mountain goats are. I also tried to imagine what the area must have looked like covered in virgin forest. Some of it probably would have been cut down to make way for towns and such, but not nearly as much as to graze cattle. This damage to the mountain forests in Costa Rica a generation ago may be part of why the country has such a strong environmental mindset now.
Deforestation and other land use changes are a major contributor to climate change – not as much as fossil fuels but definitely a major factor that also needs to be addressed. I feel like industrial farming as it has been practiced in my lifetime has been part of the problem, but farming could also be part of the solution if it is done with an eye toward keeping carbon in the ground. The kinds of farming practices we are seeing in Costa Rica definitely help contribute to the solution. I feel like research in this area is just beginning, but it can’t be done fast enough.
View from the mountains. Note the terraced agriculture and full sugar cane truck in the road below us. Click to enlarge.
The earth evolved with certain areas to be used in certain ways – whether grazing millions of hooved animals such as in the great plains of North America or boasting loads of biodiversity in jungles and forest as in Costa Rica. If humans are to become caretakers of the earth and not destroyers, we will have to learn to live in harmony with what the earth itself has evolved to do, even if it is somewhat turned toward our own purposes. That means while we might be grazing cattle in Nebraska where millions of wild bison used to roam, we need to keep forest to act as the lungs of the planet and host the biodiversity that strengthens the web of life — and not coincidentally provides many of our healing products. What is good for the planet is in the end good for us, and vice versa. We can either accept this and live within the planetary boundaries, or we can go extinct and take a bunch of other life forms with us.
Unfortunately after McDonalds and the other large corporations were done with Costa Rica, they moved on deforesting the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. For many years the problem has been acute, with many football fields of forest disappearing daily. After 2004 rate of deforestation had been declining, but recently it has gone back up. It can be dangerous for environmental activists to try to stop this. A nun from Dayton named Dorothy Stang was murdered in 2005 for just this kind of work in Brazil because there is a lot of money to be made in selling off the rainforest for cattle ranches. Hundreds of environmental activists are killed each year in various places around the world. We must find a way to make preserving the planet as it was meant to be more profitable than liquidating it like a going out of business sale.
Biggest ox cart in the world in Sarchi.
The two communities we saw were very relaxing. At Zarcero we stumbled on a wedding in progress at the town church which was really neat. The gardens at that church are famous and tended to by hand by a longtime volunteer. In exploring the town I wandered into what looked like a small business version on PetSmart or Tractor Supply – the store was full of animal feed, boots, bird houses, medicines, saddle gear, and pretty much any animal paraphernalia you might need. In Sarchi we took a group picture at the largest ox cart in the world, which took four years to build, then visited shops owned by the guy who made the cart. We saw where the workers hand paint the wood items sold in the store. I got a great inchworm puzzle with the alphabet on it for my nephew in Scotland, and a 3D cat puzzle and CD of Costa Rican music for my husband.
Group photo near the ox cart.