Viewing the Parking Lots in Paradise
A note from Costa Rica, with an eye on everyday infrastructure
Be careful taking me on vacation with you. Sure, I’ll hang out with you at the beach or be happy to observe unusual birds and animals, but I’m as likely to want to linger in the areas that seem less than ideal, that represent the intrusion of reality into one’s imagined paradise. I usually return from backpacking trips with plenty to say about dying trees, for instance, and the photo evidence to go along with my report.
Case in point: I’m traveling in Costa Rica for six weeks, and during my first few days my camera roll was mostly filled with pictures of the challenging pedestrian infrastructure in San José, roadside erosion on the highway, and the palm plantations on the Pacific Coast that fill land which last century held tropical forest but was then cut down for growing bananas imported to the U.S. and other places abroad.
I’m not trying to be a downer; it’s more the consequence of trying to be aware and responsible as a traveler (and, well, just as a person). Big international trips like this—my last one was roughly seven years ago—feel important to me to do, despite my misgivings about air travel, for how they offer a chance to directly experience the global impact of many Americans (as tourists, as consumers, as implicit supporters of a military with a heavy worldwide footprint) while also offering reminders both of what other places do better and what I value about my own society back home.
Paying attention to those sights that seem less than stellar is a good way to keep me grounded, and I’m especially glad of the practice on this trip, as it seems I may have soaked up a bit of Costa Rica’s self-promoting propaganda, all abuzz with descriptions of tranquil natural scenery and ‘pura vida.’ A country without a standing army, providing for its own citizens rather than weapons! (When the military was disbanded in 1949, its funding went to health care and education instead.) A visionary leader of ecotourism! A place where 95% of electricity is renewable!
There are plenty of reality checks to be had. That renewable electricity, much like in those cities in the U.S. that make similar claims, comes from hydroelectricity generated by dams, which have their own host of negative social and environmental consequences. Almost none of the country’s transportation sector is electrified, which is why by some estimates it represents nearly 84% of the country’s carbon emissions. You don’t even need to be particularly concerned about climate change to be worried about that; the particulate pollution in those emissions is well outside established recommendations, and your nose will tell you the truth of the matter and warn your body of the risk. I’ve found myself wearing a mask outside with some frequency, as I haven’t really developed a taste for inhaling diesel fumes.
Dreams of social and ecological paradise tend to be just that. There is no place that doesn’t require our active relationship and effort to maintain, only places with different forms of the work of restoration and daily renewal to take on.
Also much like at home, here in Costa Rica there is appreciation for the number of people wanting to visit natural areas that is tempered by concern about the consequences of increasing facilities to allow for greater access. The concept of “induced demand”—which describes why building out more infrastructure (such as new highway lanes) fails to reduce congestion—is popular in transportation advocacy circles, and certainly applicable to the roadways here, but I’ve already overheard multiple conversations discussing the same issue with regard to Costa Rica’s parks. Do they build more trails in Manuel Antonio National Park, the smallest yet most visited in the country? Or will that only create more problems? (For a quick take on how induced demand plays out on public lands in the United States, see this recent report on BLM-managed Calf Creek in southern Utah over at The Land Desk.)
I visited Manuel Antonio last Sunday, and for once opted to be part of a group tour, allowing myself to join the dense throng of tourists on the park’s main path. There was genuine benefit to this, as spotting the ingeniously camouflaged creatures in the park is easier with a guide, and the guides are clearly all collaborating, flagging to one another when they’ve managed to sight a chameleon or tiny tree frog. Given how little knowledge I have of the area, it seemed the most reasonable option. Given the discussion I heard once arriving, I was also glad for seeing the park in this way. I don’t need to be one of the tourists demanding “my own” or some kind of “unique” experience and hence pushing at the boundaries the local community has set but found it difficult to maintain.
I’m trying to reconcile for myself what it might mean to take a similar approach to those spaces in which I have traditionally gone to rather extreme lengths in search of solitude. My intuition here is that this is not an either/or situation, but that we should make actual collective decisions about those spaces we want to build out for popular access and those that should be kept aside, not just for human solitude but also for the wellbeing of other species and as sacred sites for local Indigenous communities. Of course, answering who gets to make those decisions and how is not precisely an easy one.
I’d like to talk about some of that decision making this year here at Unsettling, to break down and reimagine the choices we make about how to build all that physical and social infrastructure that shapes our interactions with our plant and animal kin and our fellow humans and sets the foundation for our daily lives. Not just in tourist zones, but where we live—these days, it can be difficult to tell the difference anyhow, as town after town opts into variations on the tourism economy in ways that often de-center the needs of local residents.
There’s an awful lot we take for granted when it comes to basic infrastructure, from how we get around (be it on a highway between cities or on a trail between campsites) to where or how we dwell. (Just think, what makes a house a house? Why do so many these days look the same?) I’m about to have some experiences that will be good fodder for poking at preconceptions about all this. It’s part of why I’m here in Costa Rica, and the reason for some other travel planned later this spring; I’ll be attending workshops to learn from those involved in natural building about both how and why they do their work. I do a great deal of my learning from books, and for once it will be nice to learn by literally getting down in the mud, squishing earth and straw together in a once-common process for building earthen walls. But I’m hoping to take these concrete lessons and put it together with past and current learning about land use and local governance to see if we can’t come to some new conclusions (or at least some new and better questions) about how to craft the communities in which we live.
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And if you made it this far, here’s a photo that is neither crowds nor concrete:
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
Meg