Local community members in the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica had always felt apart from the environment, until the Corcovado Foundation gave them the perspective and tools they needed to learn how to be a part of it.
In the most isolated areas of Costa Rica, like the Osa Peninsula, many people have never left their rural communities and have lived inside the same twenty square miles for their entire lives. Their geographic isolation also often leads to a lack of government support. All of these factors combined mean the people are highly independent and confident in their way of living. Because of this, there is a common mentality when it comes to the prospect of change: if it isn’t broken, why fix it?
These community members know what’s best for them based on the specific lives they’ve lived within these specific communities. This has made it difficult to implement environmental initiatives in these areas, because for the most part, these initiatives have not been tailored to them and they have not been offered the knowledge to understand why these efforts benefit them. For example, they saw the expansion of the Corcovado National Park that occurred a couple decades ago as an encroachment on their territory and their resources. They saw it as a loss. Alejandra Monge, the Executive Director of the Corcovado Foundation, described them as initially holding resentment towards the park as a result. Why?
Environmental Education Program Director Helena Pita provided some insight into how it can be difficult to communicate the intrinsic value of the natural world to the people. “In the Osa Peninsula, local people will not work or live here for 100 years,” she said, meaning that these people have no reason to think about how the environment will look and function once they’re no longer around to see it. Additionally, she spoke about how this area is their home; they know every tree and every corner of every area from spending their whole lives there. As a result, they do not see a given tree or jaguar as beautiful, rare, or pure, when realistically it may be endangered and can only be found in a biodiversity hotspot like Costa Rica. As such, they do not see the value of protecting these species and the ecosystem in which they live.
Communicating this to the people will often not be enough to gain their support of environmental protection measures. This is why the Corcovado Foundation has focused their efforts to not just protect the environment, like the Corcovado National Park after which the foundation is aptly named, but to also empower the people to work with the environment to their benefit. As Programs Director Francisco Delgado put it, they see sustainability as having three components: social, economic, and environmental. This is because issues that on the surface seem so separate, like environmental and social justice, are actually so often interconnected. Helena said, “Many conservation problems come from socioeconomic and health problems, and they require creativity to solve.”
Accordingly, it is critical to listen to the people, and understand their local perspective (e.g., their history, their customs, they ways of living, their knowledge on the issue) before they can be provided with an environmental frame of mind. Everyone I spoke to at the foundation said that this was the most important aspect of the work: meeting these communities where they are, listening, communicating, and above all, learning from them just as much as the communities can learn from the foundation. Using the insight they gained from conversing with these communities, they are then able to implement their environmental initiatives to provide the right economic opportunities and broaden the people’s horizons.
On the subject, Francisco said, “I am learning every day, and I have learned to listen to the people we work with in these communities. Sometimes, when you are a project officer, you have a project and you [initially] write the objectives, tasks, and goals. Then, once you get to the community, other new ideas or ways to do it are suggested by the people themselves. At the beginning, you think, ‘This is my project, and this is how it has to be,’ but you learn to listen because you remember that the project is for them.”
Regenerative agriculture has been one of the most successful solutions in the Osa Peninsula in recent years. It provides the farmers living in these towns the ability to grow more variants of quality crops and in higher quantities per year, which increases the quality of life in these communities. As the farmers also learned, and Alejandra detailed, this kind of agriculture helps to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, structure the soil so it is better protected against landslides and flooding, enhance ecosystem function, and more. In this way, by providing them with new tools to best improve upon their primary source of food and livelihood, the community is empowered and the local environment is that much more protected.
Additionally, these agricultural efforts have mainly been led by the women in the families. This in combination with the provision of sex education and workshops on violence has led to female empowerment, which was lacking in the area. As Francisco detailed, pregnancy rates are very high throughout the most isolated communities in Costa Rica, and accordingly, young women do not typically find themselves venturing outside the livelihood that is motherhood. The Corcovado Foundation’s program stresses the importance of safe sex, while also providing young women with the skills and strength they need to get involved in the professional world like the young men do.
The Corcovado Foundation can truly be found doing good across all walks of life. They have recently delivered food to the elderly and stray dogs during the COVID-19 pandemic, taught community members how to present themselves best in public places to earn respect (e.g., how to eat and sit at a restaurant), provided free scuba diving lessons for kids in Cano Island, and more. They have even helped garner the funding needed to build a new outdoor area at a local school.
One of their most touching projects has been to raise funds to throw Christmas parties and give Secret Santa gifts to children around the country. This is especially moving to hear once you learn that most of the kids attending these parties have never received a gift before in their lives. Many of them do not even know their exact birthdays, as their families have never had the funds to celebrate before and so they did not keep track of the date. Alejandra described how touching it was to watch the kids “open their gifts with care, as they did not want to rip the pretty paper.” She spoke of how some of them would even take the paper home, because they saw the gift giving as a gift in and of itself and they wanted to keep every physical aspect of the event that they could.
Their general work with youth has been especially impactful. Some of their educational programs have made lifelong impacts on the kids they have worked with. Alejandra detailed how some of the kids she worked with back as long ago as in 2003, who were about 10 years old at the time, have come back to volunteer with the foundation in the present day and are now about 30 years old. You can hear about the wonderful experiences of program members like Raquel Quirós and Josué Quirós in the following video, which beautifully highlights the amazing youth programs that the foundation has carried out for the past few decades.
All in all, the biggest takeaway from my time talking to Alejandra, Francisco, and Helena is the power of community empowerment and education in achieving environmental progress. Helena said, “In the world, conservation is seen on its own without looking at community’s socioeconomic and health problems. There is truly no point in conserving [the environment] without community, because you need to understand it is their environment. It is not apart from them, it is a part of them, and they are a part of it.” This is why their approach in tackling the root of the issue – a lack of education and empowerment – has worked perfectly in the Osa Peninsula, led to both social and environmental progress, and would no doubt serve as an apt model for similar communities throughout the world.
