David focused on talking about sustainability, conservation, and community development. David mentioned of how Arturo, him, and others in their farming group work towards promoting ecological farming, within their own community and beyond. He said that there are currently only 14 farms in the Los Santos region that are ecological farms, while there are over 3000 conventional farms. I want to highlight what David said to explain La Biofabrica, "it's something different, not new". He says this because the farming techniques, traditions, and methods, they use may seem new but if you think about it, the forests have been doing it for as long as nature has been around, self sustaining. Arturo and others must learn as they go when it comes to ecological farming, for there is not much they can read about or research out here, whereas conventional farming you can spray the hills with pesticides and you're pretty much good.
Sustainable development: filling the needs of the current generation without compromising the needs of future generations. This is a great goal, but the issue is that people are still struggling with filling the needs of themselves, let alone make it sustainable. In the united States, people have to worry about making enough money to put food on the table, and they cant even afford to live in the same town that they work, how are they supposed to think about being sustainable? … At least in Providencia, people have been doing the farming business long enough to be comfortable with small changes here and there, such as organic farming with compost and natural bug sprays.
One last thing from the discussion that I wanted to reflect on was that the climate in Costa Rica is changing faster than the environment can evolve. In the United States, we don't see this as much because the affects are more prominent at first near the equator and secondly, we mainly reside in cities with air conditioning and grocery stores, not seeing much behind that. In Providencia, the farmers are getting silk worms, that usually reside in lower altitude, that are moving higher to the cooler temperatures. These silk worms build big nests in the trees, eating their leaves and sucking the moisture from the tree. This is just ONE of the organisms we've learned about that is being negatively affected and therefor negatively affecting others. David mentioned that although climate is always changing, it usually takes the amount it has in 40 years, 500 years, us humans have sped it up. This discussion was very helpful the hear and I hope whoever else reads this takes something away from this as well.
The rest of the day consisted mostly of looking at our job sites and discussing what we were going to be working with. We were delighted to see that the trout farms terrain wasn't as bad as we were expecting, all the equipment we want to install will fit. Tomorrow we will work on clearing all the brush and digging a ditch for the bioswale. I'm really excited to get to work. Ciao
No comments:
Post a Comment