I had walked down to the national seashore park several times in Cabuya, Costa Rica, but never really noticed the beautiful butterfly and organic flower garden on my way. However, after a celebratory evening on my birthday there was good reason to pay more attention to it. I spent a three-month stint in this isolated piece of Costa Rica a few years ago and I truly believe that it is a portal to another universe. I met the wackiest people I have ever seen on this piece of land.
The Unknown Thong
The owner of the organic garden was a middle-aged woman who kept to herself until the stuff hit the fan the morning after my birthday. I was reporting in to my station at the regular morning hour at the animal rescue sanctuary where I had helped design a new website and start an endangered sea turtle rescue project and one of the volunteers approached me with the news. It seemed the sanctuary’s owner had found an unmarked black thong under her pillow that she believed belonged to the owner of the organic garden. The story was that she appeared that morning dangling the thong in front of the young female volunteers at the sanctuary asking if any of them recognized it. She believed that her husband was cheating on her with the owner of the garden and had left the thong as a warning that she planned to take over the rights to the sanctuary by stealing the woman’s husband and saving up money by going occasionally Miami to attend to her weathly, needy male clients. Apparently, she was a practitioner of the world’s oldest profession in addition to her organic gardening skills, although I had a very hard time believing this.
An Eco Paradise?
The dust settled and we never found out who the thong belonged to. Meanwhile, the sea turtle project was moving forward full blast and we found a nest of an endangered leatherback sea turtle! One thing that I began to realize on this trip is that the idea of Costa Rica as an eco paradise was not entirely true. There were monkeys being electrocuted on uninsulated power lines in the rural areas around us at an alarming rate. We often saw the aftermath of these electrocutions and it was not pretty. Also, I learned that a lot of the issues they had with the decreasing native bird population were due to locals stealing eggs to eat and/or catching birds to keep as pets and then throwing them out when they no longer wanted them. This causes the birds to lose their ability to fend for themselves in the wild if they are captured at a young age. This is true for most animals. They must grow up in the wild to be able to survive there as adults.
Your Call to Action
There are many organizations that are helping solve these problems, but there are also a lot of new resorts and buildings popping up in this part of Costa Rica that are decreasing the amount of suitable habitat for Costa Rica’s already threatened rare species. So what can we do about it? Well, first of all, consider volunteering at or donating to a good environmental organization in Costa Rica if you are going to visit there soon as many Americans do. EARTH University is doing some amazing things in Costa Rica with organic farming, fair trade products and environmental conservation. The Nature Conservancy is also working to protect wild areas and biodiversity in Costa Rica.
Here is a short video about EARTH University.