Today’s adventure in Costa Rica includes a hike through the Cloud Rainforest and a lecture from Don Guillermo, owner of Life farm in Monteverde. After walking through the beautiful rainforest and hearing about the sustainability efforts at Life farm, I see the difficulty in balancing productivity with sustainability and conservation.
The hike through the Cloud Rainforest provided beautiful scenery, but also displayed the effects of conservation on the environment. While walking through the forest, you see numerous plants, trees, and animals that all call the environment home. Not only that, but you can feel the cleanness of the air and the rain as you hike. As a whole, the Cloud Rainforest showed the positive impact that conservation has on the environment and the world.
Don Guillermo also shared interesting points about sustainability in his lecture. For instance, he cited sustainability practices such as conserving water, composting waste, and utilizing electric/renewable energy. Overall, it is clear that incorporating sustainable practices into everyday life helps to preserve natural resources and energy, and improve the environment.
However, with these conservation and sustainability efforts, there are a few drawbacks. The largest of these is that conservation/sustainability can be expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, it can be hard to get people on board with using environmentally beneficial solutions when they are more costly than other solutions.
In total, although Costa Rica is an incredibly environmentally conscious country, it still faces problems surrounding conservation and sustainability. An example of this is the slow disappearance of the Cloud Rainforest due to increases in temperature from climate change. Although they can be costly, I believe that employing sustainable and conservative practices are more important than keeping things practical. If I had the decision of prioritizing one of these three I would choose sustainability. This is because making things sustainable will also improve conservation efforts and have an overall beneficial impact on the world.
