Costa Rica service stories

 This week Dr. Chris Vaughn, director of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest's Costa Rica Field Research Program, came to St. Olaf to share his experiences in Costa Rica and give students more information about the program. Chris has followed his passions for conservation ever since embarking on the same program while in undergraduate studies at Grinell College in 1969.

After graduating college and completing two years of Peace Corps work in Costa Rica helping to set up their world-class national parks system, Chris began working at the National University of Costa Rica. There, he taught population biology, ecosystem management and conflict resolution and helped establish the first graduate program in wildlife management in Latin America. Other than recently returning to the states to obtain a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Chris's work as a conservationist, teacher, farmer and activist has mostly taken place in the beautiful rainforests, mountains and valleys of Costa Rica.

The talk began with some background information on Costa Rica while bags of raw cocoa beans and organic chocolates Vaughn had brought back from Costa Rica made their way around the room. Costa Rica, "the number one happiest country in the world" according to CNN, is one of the most bio-diverse regions of its size and is home to one of the most impressive wildlife reserve systems in the world. Nearly a quarter of the nation's land falls into protected areas. The happiness of Costa Ricans, according to Vaughn, is partially due to the parks and beautiful scenery, but also to the universal heath care system, quality education, lack of military presence, and overall simpler lifestyle.

But there are still many problems the country faces, he pointed out, such as being one of the biggest users of pesticides (primarily on the large mono-crops like pineapples and bananas), illegal poaching of wild animals, deforestation and destructive ocean fishing practices like shark finning by international fishing industries. Global warming also poses a serious threat to many habitats and species, especially certain frogs and toads whose fungal food sources are moving out of their habitat zones and up into the mountains.

This imperfect and imperiled world is why people like Vaughn are inspired to continue their work and find solutions for these problems with sustainable alternatives like organic agriculture, reforestation projects, community education and fair trade alliances. For example, after completing his Ph.D. degree, Vaughn began coordinating the Wisconsin-Costa Rica Chocolate Initiative, which seeks to understand the bio-diversity of cacao agrosystems and help small farmers with ecologically sound practices and fair trade marketing. Another one of Vaughn's most notable accomplishments has been his work with the scarlet macaws of Costa Rica, a bird species who's populations were plummeting because of illegal poaching but were able to reach a level of equilibrium after 10 years of monitoring their numbers and habitat with ACM students and other organizations.

Vaughn emphasized throughout the talk what a great opportunity conducting research like this is for students. These programs allow students of the 14 ACM colleges of which St. Olaf is a member of, to study for a semester in Costa Rica either focusing on language and society or field research. Two St. Olaf students who completed the ACM Costa Rica program expressed their appreciation for their experiences, and the great project staff and home-stay families they met on the program. For field research, students can choose their area of study from a wide range of disciplines including social science, natural science, archaeology, anthropology, literature, arts and more.

St. Olaf student Kelly Harrington ‘10 chose to do her psychological field research on "The effect of conflicting cultural values on emerging adulthood." David Mitchell ‘10, another Olaf student on the program who did his biological field study on  ‘Amphibian Diversity in an Organic Farm.' Mitchell's research which documented how an organic farm, while still containing much less amphibian diversity than a natural jungle environment, can have over five times the diversity of a degraded agricultural environment.