If the Oceans Don't Make It, Neither Will We: Thoughts and Reminiscences on the Value of Nature

(title is partly from the Jackson Browne song If I Could Be Anywhere)


The New York Times ran a recent story on the wildfires devouring the state of Washington, with an emphasis on the potential devastation this could wreak on people living nearby. Juxtapositioned with a picture of a house silhouetted against a flaming forest was another article, suggesting--or admitting--links between increasingly worse droughts and climate change.

Several things are missing from this picture, this mild portrait of disaster packaged as neutrally and blandly as possible. For one, it is a fallacy and a grave tactical error to merely suggest that these fierce droughts wracking the western states are a product of climate change--a fallacy because science tells us quite clearly that if we raise global temperatures and throw off the balance of forces in the atmosphere, rainfall is affected and therefore droughts--and by the same token, elsewhere extreme flooding--become more common and severe events. That is climate change. To pretend otherwise, or even to only grudgingly admit the links, is to deny climate change--if not its existence, then at least its already-visible and visceral effects. It is to play into the hands of those who are willing to let our planet quite literally burn because stopping that fire might be damaging to their way of life, ideologies, or profit margins.

Second, on the topic of these specific Washington forest fires--while every blaze is devastating, the ones that the New York Times chooses to showcase are those threatening large highly populated areas. Meanwhile, a barely-mentioned fire, dubbed Paradise Fire, is burning steadily through Washington's Olympic National Park. Not only is pristine forest going up in flames, but part of that forest is a rainforest, one of the few temperate rainforest zones. The rainforest is on fire--an unstoppable blaze, so it seems, due to the difficulty of spraying water through the dense canopy--but the New York Times and others have chosen to focus not on the fires incinerating protected land, ancient forests, and rare havens of biodiversity and healthy forest, but on the fires that threaten towns or cities. While it is admirable that the media does sometimes bother to worry about people living in the path of danger, it is an unnerving display of how little attention the destruction of nature alone warrants. It calls into contemplation the things and places we have given value to, and those we have not.

The temperate rainforest and the rest of Olympic National Park, like all areas under conservation, were clearly, at some time, awarded value--whether of an aesthetic, ecological, or cultural sort--since that area is indeed a protected national park. Logging interests and others opposed the creation of the park, but eventually conservationists prevailed. Yet now, that value is being traded away--in media attention, in public outcry and concern, and in firefighting focus--in favor of worrying about places where people and corporate profits more likely lie. The anthropocentric view of what parts of the world deserve prioritized saving, and which can be allowed to burn--not to mention the racist or classist views on which people in the world are judged worth saving, and which  worth abandoning--is unjust and bitterly sad. Our house is burning out of sight and mind, and so for now some of us can look away without feeling the flames.

I think now of other rainforests, and other places of value. What we value, what we disregard, what we sacrifice for monetary value, what we protect, what we forget. I think of Costa Rica, and wonder: if the rainforest burned there, in a tropical paradise, would it spark--so to speak--more alarm? Perhaps yes, but even while the rainforests remain rainy, a less smoke-and-sparks kind of destruction is creeping in there, too, threatening to leave a different kind of ashes.

          ~ ~ ~ ~

Costa Rica is a beautiful country. Stunning. The humidity, I thought wryly for my first days there, is also stunning, or perhaps just smothering. But the natural landscapes are fantastic: the supremely biodiverse flora and fauna of the mountains and valleys and beaches and forests are unparalleled; and for those of us who are the type to enjoy urban wandering as well as wilderness trekking, the colorful ramshackle houses and surrounding sprawl of the cities offer a tantalizing course for wanderlusters, desultory explorers, and photographers.

It reminded me of Chile, but with fewer upthrusts of industry and development to scar the land. Costa Rica was less concrete-laden, less oversized, and lacking this unquantifiable sense I had in Chile that this was a country not yet recovered from the "shock therapy" visited on them after 1973 by the CIA-backed dictatorship and economic restructuring. Something of the forced nature of that brutal economic transition remains in the way the building and development seem to hurtle mindlessly, frenetic, embracing recklessly what was force-fed so long ago. I know that Costa Rica had its own brushes with neoliberalism a few decades ago, but that experience was less bloody than Chile's, and left the country not so traumatized, less deeply paralyzed. Environmentally, Costa Rica seems like a paradise--25% of its land under conservation, much of the south stretching away in folds of what looks like pristinely undamaged land. The value of this extraordinarily biodiverse slice of the tropics has not been lost on the government, for the most part. But the ravages of the globalization era have not skipped over this paradise--indeed, industry has capitalized on exactly that: unironic signs sprinkled through the area in which I stayed read, in English, "We Sell Paradise."

The southern regions may look, or even be, largely pristine, but elsewhere in Costa Rica, development is taking its toll and the land is being compromised by the scourge of the resort hotels, sprawling compounds that devour land and livelihood, creating for tourists a snow-globe in which their every need is catered to by the tour company, allowing them to experience some of the aesthetic and geographic aspects of the country without really ever experiencing the country. Tourism is a profitable industry, but little of those profits ever reach the communities whose quality of life has been deemed less valuable than the opportunity of carting in foreign tourists and presenting to them the tour company's version of Costa Rica, comprised of 5-star hotels, shopping centers, luxury, private beaches, a perfect cross-section of paradise. An illusion, and a dangerous one. In the north--and probably elsewhere--perhaps the Chile phenomenon is not entirely absent: the country is rushing unthinkingly to keep up with what it has been taught its future must look like. Critical mangroves bulldozed and paved over to make way for glittering tourists reclining on beaches that sea turtles no longer feel safe returning to for spawning, people pushed off their lands and robbed of their water and livelihoods to help feed an illusion. Costa Rica is not a "developed" country, per se, but to plasticize and shellac a coastline to feed someone's bottom line has the country learning the cost of dragging a "third-world" nation into the global economy--the corporations profit while local people pay.

In the poorer, less industrialized southwest Osa Peninsula, this rush of development has the communities caught in transition--an awkward divide between some parts still old and rural, and others that sport rows of stores and advertisements. As former fishing towns transition to the tourism-driven economy, people must adapt their livelihoods, which every house seems to be trying to do, whether by hanging out tapestries for sale or offering drinks to passing tourists. The tourism scene seemed to be locally dominated and also generally environmentally sustainable, since the Osa Peninsula is not so "discovered" yet by the major industry. The overdevelopment and gargantuan resort complexes did not mar the land there; what development there is is human scale and not so destructive, which are tenets of the so-called ecotourism movement. But that gentler model of tourism is threatened as the multinationals begin trying to move in on the Osa Peninsula and start (over)developing here. The first step, if they get their way, will be to construct an international airport in this fragile, rural region, which will begin to funnel a stream of tourists to the area that is unsupportable by the small-scale local tourism. The people of the Osa have no intention of finding their land stolen or ruined by the same forces that have desecrated Guanacaste, in the north. But the fight is a long one still, and the industry has clout and teeth that governments may not be eager to stand up to, despite the prevalence of nationally protected land in the Osa. Like the Olympic National Park rainforest in Washington state, these are areas that the government once decided deserved special recognition and value, but may not actually rush to protect when destruction threatens.

Besides the chimera of the tourism industry, whose impact is clear in the transformation and privatization of the northern regions, other, perhaps quieter menaces have Costa Rica in their crosshairs: climate change and ocean degradation. One morning we took a long walk along a beach; within the Marino Ballena National Park, it was void of beach homes, docks, marinas, and even many people. The unmarred vista reminded me of a tropical version of Norway's mountain villages nestled in fjords, but without the colossally oversized cruise ships or ocean liners. The walk was beautiful, with foggy mountains in the distance and flat sand streaked dark by snail trails. A tour guide told us about landmarks we passed, and what shocked me were the foundations of a collapsed stone building half-buried in sand. It was an old park rangers' station, and was supposed to have been built 50 meters back from the highest tides. Those highest tides now roll right up to the foundations of that now abandoned outpost, which stands at no remove at all from the beach itself. Sea level rise isn't a bad-case scenario prediction--it's happening now. It's eating up Costa Rica's beaches, not that soil or coastal erosion helps either. It's striking, and sickly, deeply alarming.

Another menace, plastic, also made its presence known on the beach. Perhaps it's a mark of eyes well-adjusted to the splatter of unnatural colors in the midst of a place we would call nature, but it took me a while to feel the wrongness of blue or yellow or pink flecks in the sand. Not shells, not the sparkle of sea glass or anything, but plastic. Plastic tossed and torn in the oceans so long that it has photodegraded to this: specks on what is at first sight a pristine beach.

I knew about the problems of ocean pollution, especially plastic--I'd read books like Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn and I was eager to help do something about it. But despite living in a coastal state, I'd only rarely been to the beach, and back then I was certainly not scanning the sand for trash. When I did, I was almost surprised how easy it was in some areas--just turn in a circle, just watch. It's not always unsightly or even recognizable as plastic trash, but it's everywhere. Everywhere, including inside our bodies and our very DNA, since the plastic eaten by fish in the ocean moves up the food chain until it gets to us. We are becoming plastic. We are what we eat, and we reap what we sow.

We watched a video on plastic in the ocean, sobering while alarming. Midway through, it was almost numbingly depressing, and for better or for worse, the video's amelioration of that effect was to put a perhaps overly positive spin at the end, by telling us about a clothing company that is making clothes out of ocean plastic--melting and recombining and spinning collected trash into yarn. Although it's a start, and innovative and cool, as a broad solution it fell a bit short, especially since it was nearly the only positive development given much weight at the end of the video. That manufacturing process of plastic yarn must release a whole host of new, different chemicals, and not to mention, the plastics industry will fight tooth and nail to keep from losing an inch of space in the market to recycled ocean plastic. Although the video tried to hype up the capitalist potential of ocean plastic as a new lucrative resource for production of plastic commodities, presenting a disaster as a business opportunity is disturbingly reminiscent, though by a different manifestation, of what Naomi Klein calls precisely "disaster capitalism." Making money off of reusing ocean plastic doesn't have to be a bad thing, but capitalism/consumerism's response to capitalism/consumerism's problem is not going to undo the damage. We can't buy and sell our way out of an environmental catastrophe. Giving monetary value to the detritus we've thrown into our priceless oceans will not even the scales.

And there is so much on this earth to value, in a non-monetary capacity. So much to lose, but so much to cherish in the meantime. In Costa Rica we took a full-day expedition to the islands Corcovado and Caño to hike and swim, and the landscapes we passed through were inarticulably stunning. I couldn't absorb it fully, I thought; no matter how awed I was, my appreciation was not enough. Within sight of our boat, dolphins and whales--mothers and calves--surfaced and flipped, and I felt my mind so quickly turned it blasé: "Oh yeah, we saw beautiful creatures of the untamed deepest oceans, ho hum..." I took no pictures of those, which I didn't mind: photographs are a form of traveling by proxy, some breathtaking enough to be truly affecting, but the experience can be diluted from behind a camera lens. And if photographs are good enough to stand in for the real thing--though I'm not speaking for people who would never have the means to see the real thing--does that make us content to believe in the flashes of beauty and unsullied "wilderness," without ever concerning ourselves too much with whether those places are staying beautiful? Or does extraordinary photography make us more impelled to protect them?

The day of the islands trip, we woke at 5:30 in order to make it to the motorboats on time, and it was a pristinely gorgeous day--clear skies and not very humid. Something about whipping over teal oceans with wind and sun all around and Costa Rica's mainland fading into grey behind us--it put me in a very Jackson Browne mood, and I sang into the wind. My usual music of choice is angrier and harsher-sounding, but Jackson Browne's songs have a better tone and cadence for appreciation, for beauty, for reveling.

On the island Corcovado, a national park, we hiked in the rainforest. I try to compare it, well-hydrated and lush with life, to the temperate rainforests of Washington, struggling to imagine how desiccated and desolate those forests must be for the plants to become kindling. On Corcovado, scarlet macaws, monkeys, and coatis leaped and flashed around us, like denizens of my old rainforest jigsaw puzzle come to life. I saw hyacinth macaws a few weeks later, in a zoo in the US, and I was struck by how confined and dreary the birds' quarters were, despite their regal beauty and relatively good health. Any zoo will, by definition, mimic very poorly the open skies and towering trees of the rainforests in which macaws naturally make their homes. But that precious habitat is shrinking, thanks to human encroachment and environmental damage, and macaws are highly endangered. The value of the ecosystems and species of Corcovado is unquantifiable, and to be ensconced in the vivid, thriving color and life there made it surreally clear how lucky the animals there are, to live on protected, healthy land, and how lucky I was, too, to be there to bear witness.

We went snorkeling afterwards in the most perfect aquamarine swimming-pool-color water off Caño, and while I wouldn't bill myself as an expert snorkeler by any means, it was incredible--the fish flickering far below; the clarity and color of the water; the feeling of weightlessness--lying on the surface looking down, sandwiched like a piece of paper pressed flat between the expanses of ocean and sky.

On the way back to the mainland, the water/sky contrast was stunning: oxidized-copper water against slate-gray stormcloud sky. We started seeing lightning and waterspouts--little streams of what looks like tornadoes stretching down from the clouds. And we heard thunder, very close by; not a best-case scenario when in a little boat on the ocean in a tropical lightning storm. By the time we neared land, the waves were enormous and choppy, tossing us between peaks that rose like something was thrusting them up from beneath. The rain pummeling us felt like hail. I had noticed earlier how eerie it was when our boat was in the trough of a swell and suddenly the flat horizon line seemed to become undulating waves. But now it was like the ocean was really trying to buck us off, fling itself free of these little humans who dared to ride on it, by distorting all sense of space and direction. Floating on the surface or just under it, rocked lightly by the water, it's easy to feel like you're a small and content part of a greater, beautiful whole. But the storm we rode through was a reminder of the other overwhelming power of nature--how fierce it is, how untamed, how no matter how we fail to respect that, the oceans can still swallow us whole.

Later, we saw a TED talk by a marine photographer about global warming and species extinction. It lacked consistent connections to overarching problems like our economic systems, and it lacked even a target of its anger or much of a plan for a solution--but the photography was beautiful, and the facts were devastating. I thought I would cry. We are driving to extinction species we don'dt even know about, discarding untold beauty and importance in the face of commercial value. We are losing things we will never get back and never even understand, and their value will go unappreciated until it's too late.

      ~ ~ ~ ~

A couple weeks after I landed back in the States, I found myself at a beach on Cape Cod--I don't go to beaches very often, but since I was there, I thought I might as well do some beach cleanup work, continuing the work I'd done in Costa Rica. Massachusetts isn't, so far as I know, a key hotspot for ocean trash, and I didn't find anything dramatic or well-traveled; most of the trash I found--and I found three shopping bags' worth in only an hour and a half or so--was clearly dumped by visitors of that very beach. The most popular brands were Budweiser and Dunkin Donuts, although miniature alcohol bottles made a good showing--of those, I found five vodka bottles, three of rum, and three of cinnamon whiskey. I found myself eyeing the other beachgoers--Did you drop this? Would you? Would you even think twice? Are you watching me now, wondering what that kid is doing, hacking through thickets of beach grasses to pluck out a Red Bull can? Would you ever consider joining me, or is it good enough for you that people have at least thrown their trash in the bushes, not in plain sight? In the part of Costa Rica where I stayed, trash collection services only began in 2007, and litter in the community is a significant problem. You might think, from looking at this beach, that trash cans were a new phenomenon in Cape Cod, too. Every thirty feet or so is a trash can, and still people have to toss--or hide?--their balled-up diapers and beer bottles and half-drunk coffees among the reeds. Out of sight, but not out of reach of the ocean.

Trash isn't a problem we're unfamiliar with, but our eyes are too often set to avert. In Boston, everyone seems to stalk down the streets facing forward and avoiding each other's eyes; no one looks behind them, looks back, looks down to see what we might be leaving behind. It's a phenomenon that translates well to elsewhere in life. At an open-air concert along the Charles River, I imagined the state of the park after the people had gone, imagined the river groaning as it receives more detritus. I watched the sky and wished thoughts at people in passing airplanes, tried to make out the stars as a blanket of darkness and light pollution settled over the city. These parks and streets are Boston's responsibility to keep clean, but the sky, like the ocean, belongs to all of us, if it belongs to anyone at all. National airspace borders notwithstanding, the atmosphere is part of the global commons. The sky I looked up at in Costa Rica is the sister of the sky I see here. There are kids in China who have never seen stars, who don't go outside because the air is too toxic, but it is not the sky that is failing them. It's us.

I am reminded of a line from Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind: how many times must a man look up before he can see the sky? I ask us now: how many times must you look up before you see the sky? How long can we look at rainforests burning, oceans filling up with poisons and plastic, and the global commons turning into a trash disposal, without seeing it? How long, to quote Jackson Browne, will it be till we've turned to the tasks and the skills that we'll have to have learned if we're going to find our place in the future, and have something to offer where this planet's concerned? How long before we remember why we must treasure this earth, and decide whether the invisible, unmeasurable value of the places we love--as well as the places we've never given a second thought to--is something we are going to protect?

On Voluntourism

*Note: This piece is one of hopefully several that I intend to write about a recent trip to Costa Rica, each discussing specific aspects or themes or whatnot. This one centers around voluntourism, my thoughts and experiences.*

    Back in June, I began to have serious misgivings about my summer plans: namely, an environmental service trip to Costa Rica. A beautiful country, a chance to practice Spanish, and the opportunity to make a difference in protecting the environment and the oceans--it sounded like everything I could want. But as my takeoff date grew closer, I started to resent locking myself into what I feared would be exactly the sort of do-gooder trip that I myself was known to mockingly refer to as a ‘white savior’ program.

    I didn't want to be a savior. I wanted to do something besides sign petitions and read articles,or sit in a nonprofit office making up Twitter newsflashes to encourage other people to sign those petitions or read those articles. One of my favorite observations by Noam Chomsky, which I'm liable to quote or paraphrase in any situation, is that in the US, people will ask him frequently ‘What should we do?’, while in countries we might relegate to the ‘oppressed’ bin, people don't ask him what to do--they tell him what they're already doing. That half-step between knowledge and action is one that I've always felt eludes me, and I hoped this upcoming trip would be a concrete antidote to that feeling of uselessnesss.

    But by the same token, I didn't want to be one of those privileged white kids who swoops down on a so-called third world country and returns home to put on their resume that they have Helped People. The closer I got to leaving for Costa Rica, the more wary I became about this voluntourism gig.

    Ambling through the airports the day I left, I relaxed into the feeling of travel and rootlessness, consoling myself that no matter how this trip ended up, I was sure to have some fascinating experiences and at least sate my wanderlust for a couple of weeks. This mellow attitude lasted all the way to Costa Rica, and I let myself be swept up in admiring my surroundings, making small talk with the other kids in the program, and trying to determine what I could anticipate for our activities in the coming days.

    I had imagined the people who would sign up for an environmental work trip to be kindred spirits, globally aware or concerned kids who were invested in discussing problems and making a difference. Sometime before the trip began, I had gotten a sinking feeling that maybe my anticipations had been misguided or over-optimistic. I conceded quickly that most of the kids who signed up were generally well-intentioned towards the ‘service’ component of the program but weren’t explicitly environmentalists. At one point, we each declared our reasons for joining this trip, and I was disappointed that several people said ‘surfing,’ and that some were only there because their relatives had sent them, or because they needed community service hours and thought Costa Rica would be a cool place to get them.

    I’ve had mixed feelings on schools having mandatory community service requirements (which my school does not): on one hand, there could be benefits to ensuring that everyone must break out of the little bubble from which they likely hail, in order to do some volunteering that they probably would never have engaged in otherwise, and it might enlighten such kids as to the value of the necessary and hopefully meaningful work they are doing; on the other hand, ‘forcing’ kids to ‘perform’ community service makes it seem like a pointless duty, a grudgingly fulfilled obligation, or an opportunity to ‘perform’ good deeds, as if there should be an audience on hand to applaud you for your actions (or your acting/playacting, perhaps, as you assume the role of a do-gooder who may do good not even out of a desire to feel helpful but a desire to accrue enough service points to go to college). My main quibble with requiring community service hours is that by framing it as something mandatory and inescapable, something to be endured and withstood, it will produce more of the second type of response than the first. The perceived nature of community service--something to be dreaded or groaned over--is what I think pushes kids who haven’t racked up the hours to search for more ‘enjoyable’ ways to get them, such as heading for a tropical country in which they can hope to work on their tans, go surfing, and have a vacation at the same time as they help some poor people over there.

    This assessment may be unduly harsh, and I do realize that if a school--like mine--does not require community service, then students may not ever do any. And I admit that I have partaken in fewer local volunteering efforts than I should or could have, to be able to stand on my high horse and call everyone out. But I think the markers are as follows for judging whether community service is effective and not detrimental (or just useless) within the communities supposedly being served: who is getting more out of it? Are the presumably fairly privileged kids who show up to ‘serve’ benefiting more--in terms of school credits, college application brownie points, or self-righteousness--than the people to whose aid they are presumably coming? Do we, as the ones on a service trip, give back as much as we get out of it?

    Judging by the code-of-conduct lecture we received, I think the program I joined has had its share of problematic experiences with the local community, and we are aware that we are treading a line between helpful and not-altogether-welcome. And the leaders did try to make it clear: we were not there to save or help poor little people here--we were there to learn and work because our interests align. As far as these programs go, this one was certainly aware of the pitfalls and preconceptions of a ‘service’ trip, regardless of the attitudes or motives of its participants. This program was also cognizant of the problematic aspects of the tourism industry, and actively avoids contributing to them, emphasizing sustainable ecotourism as an alternative. We talked about development and economics and the damage such ‘development’ has done to Costa Rica. And it was reiterated frequently that ‘service’ to others or the environment does not just consist of two weeks of enlivened thinking and the community service hours you get for them: to make a difference, you must use what you’ve learned to take action back at home, so that voluntourism may not only succeed in the local communities it aspires to support, but also may act as a stepping-off point towards a life of being an engaged, thoughtful, and powerful global citizen. Cynical as I am, I am not sure who will follow through with more environmentally aware personal habits or with larger-scale activism, but I was glad that the message was emphasized.

Something else I noticed is that one of the criteria for sustainable tourism listed by the program leaders was that it helps ‘promote democracy and human rights in local communities.’ That alone was the criterion I believe the program meets in perhaps only a limited capacity. Supporting local economies and not aiding in the destruction of people’s livelihoods and water rights could be construed as promoting human rights, but to me that criterion sounded like more than that: ‘promote,’ rather than just ‘don’t trample,’ implies more direct involvement or investment in politics and advocacy. The environmental work we support in this community may help foster democratic action and cooperative processes, but whether my program can actually say it locally promotes human rights and democracy--as in the end, its position here is a little tenuous, it did not originate as a project of the local community, and its contributions do not necessarily affect the political climate--still seems like an open question. However, the stricter the better, most likely, for criteria of what is acceptable in terms of tourism and what is crossing the line. That my program fulfilled so many is very commendable, I would say. The effort to present the program as apolitical or nonpartisan may be what gives me pause with that one criterion, since it seems to me that an apolitical stance (not that it was especially apolitical, except perhaps nominally) hinders--I would think, logically--political agency.

I was concerned at first that for all development was criticized and we were made to think about what the natural world is worth, climate change didn’t enter the discussion. We spoke of preserving Costa Rica’s incredible biodiversity for future generations, but didn’t mention that it may be lost even if we curtail the tourism industry and maintain or expand the national parks. I supposed the idea was to come at environmental issues sideways--or again, appear apolitical--and not scare anyone off by going straight to climate change, but it felt like an awfully large part of the equation is missing. Conservation is not enough, if what we are struggling to conserve now will be underwater at the end of this century.

Later, the leaders did mention climate change, if briefly. They also said that usually people spent much more time on the environmental discussions and such, but my group didn’t have that vibe and more just wanted to have fun. The leaders and the conversations I had with them made all the difference in this program, though, and the presentations or videos we saw were on the whole excellent. We discussed them less than we could have, unfortunately--a handful of the kids weren’t inclined to pay attention and some thought the videos were boring. What alternate universe, I wrote at the time, do these kids live in that they think this is not a burden whose responsibility they bear, a literally trashed world which they will inherit?

Despite the distances we'd all traveled to get to Costa Rica, I had the impression that many of us hadn’t really left the US in terms of mentality, and were comfortable to apply with impunity the same rules and cultural framework that work for us back home. My group received a hefty dose of lectures for breaking or misusing things or for being messy or rude; part of me wanted to declare that collective punishment is a war crime and besides, it won't change the mindset of kids who clearly don't care how their actions reflect on the whole group, but partly I just felt aggravated and guilty, even though I wasn't involved in the incidents. The day we left, the mentors were not in the best of moods on account of our group having broken a bed as a final destructive coup de grace, but the perpetrators and others alike would only complain about the unfairness of how terrible and angry everyone was, since breaking the bed had been an accident. By the end of two weeks of having your careless behavior criticized, an ‘accident’ is no longer a good excuse. I hated the word disrespectful for years, thanks to its overuse by patronizing or hypocritical elementary school teachers, but that was honestly all that could be applied here. At the base level, we were really there to be helpful and respectful--by my aforementioned litmus test, we should have been trying to give back to the community at least as much as we were getting, and being culturally insensitive or just generally rude or careless means you risk sabotaging that fragile balance between a person who does good in the world and an obliviously detrimental "do-gooder." Actions that may feel insignificant aren’t. Your things, your actions, the very environment here--it's not disposable. Not that a comfortably affluent US suburb or what-have-you is disposable, but what might be a no-brainer or have little significance there has more of an impact here. You are not special, not exempt from the ways of the locals just because you're not one. You don't live here, but other people do. Respect that. Respect them.

Midway through the program, I was concerned that many of my fellow voluntourists wouldn’t take away anything much deeper than that they had fun here. The number of times I heard lines like “Honestly, I just don’t give a shit about [politics, community service]” or “I really don’t feel like protecting the Pacific today”--it makes me fear for my generation. If a program as impressive as this one, which I thought genuinely tried to conduct a voluntourism trip with authenticity and respect, still can’t open people’s eyes, are those eyes doomed to stay shuttered forever? I suppose that the people who are going to be real change makers and battle to mend what is wrong in the world won’t have needed to go on expensive exposure-and-help programs in order to learn how. There was a man interviewing people in the program about our voluntourism experiences, particularly the experiences of kids who already went on one of these programs, and it was a little disturbing to me how little they were inspired to try to effect change at home after their experiences. They may have--probably had--learned a lot and returned home more aware, but the work they'd done while on their trips didn't translate to activism at home. A greater understanding of the world does not equate to action. If not actual apathy, informed citizens can still wrap themselves in alarming inertia.

One of the most uplifting moments of the trip, however, came shortly after my consternation about its lack of lasting impact. Near the end of the program, the people from the voluntourism survey interviewed us in groups about what we'd learned and what we planned to do about it, and I found myself honestly impressed with the detail and depth of the responses--clearly the plastic-in-the-oceans videos and all did get through. Kids remembered specific phrases--‘gill nets,’ ‘bycatch’--and statistics. Cynically, I have to wonder how long this awareness and concern will last, but I am heartened that it surfaced at all, given how flippantly I had been writing people off as flitty and shallow. Just goes to show me--I judge too quickly sometimes, too pessimistically.

I resolved, again, that I could talk the talk all I like, but I had to keep up the concrete action after the trip ended--run beach cleanups or an ocean awareness club, or just involve myself more in local environmental activism. I can’t know what the other kids will take away as lasting lessons from this program, but on that last plane flight home, I scrawled furiously in my notebook, brimming with the energy and knowledge and appreciation and desperation I accrued in Costa Rica. I intend to use it. When I left, I said I will come back, but before I do, I have work to do in the here and the now. The future is terrifying, but the present is still a gift. It is.