Galapagos + Finca La Fe

Sorry I haven't posted in so long. It's been a crazy month! Here are some pictures from my trip to the Galapagos Islands at the end of March:

Now I'm in Pucara, Intag, a little over a week into my independent study project at Finca La Fe, a newly established permaculture farm. Pucara is less of a town and more of a small hamlet, but it is incredibly beautiful. When I walk to the farm every morning I can see the peak of Mt. Cotopaxi, one of Ecuador's largest volcanoes, looming in the distance.  I'm working with the farm's owner, Peter, to design and begin to implement the system of water capture, use, and treatment for the farm. This is a huge but exciting undertaking that includes planning ponds to cultivate tilapia and other fish, building terraces Inca-style into some very steep inclines for veggie cultivation, retrofitting his house with gutters and catchment tanks, and thinking about the creation of a natural swimming pool that will filter rainwater for household use.

Here are some pictures from the farm:

 Cotopaxi, one of Ecuador's largest volcanoes, as seen from the town center.

 The farm from a distance.

 View from the farm (landslide in distance on left)

Amazon Recap

Whew it has been a crazy week!  One of the downsides to having a month for independent research at the end of the semester is that all of our other work is really compressed.  However, unlike my classes in the states, I really feel like all of the assignments I've been hard at work on are valuable and applicable to the real world.  For example, next week we have a grant proposal due: we have to find a source of funding for a local organization or one in the U.S. and apply for it.  Some people are writing "green fund" proposals for projects at their schools (note: most colleges now have a specific source of funding for campus sustainability projects that comes from a $5-15 yearly contribution from each student), and others are working with Ecuadorian organizations.  I'm actually working on two projects right now: 1. creating a U.S.-based crowd-funding site (like Better Place or Just Giving) for Casa Palabra y Pueblo, the community organization in the Intag region (where I spent a week in February and will be doing my independent study project) that provides educational resources and computer access and houses the region's independent newspaper and radio station, and 2. with the help of another student, Erik, coordinating the creation of an SIT Ecuador version of the video that my friends at Wesleyan made last week protesting the recent ideological attacks on Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides incredible health resources to both men and women and which should be supported regardless of your stance on abortion. These videos are the next version of the "It Gets Better" campaign - youth all across the country have started making their own.

So that's a small bit of what I've been working on this week. Here's a recap of my week in Amazonia:

We spent a week at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station (on the Tiputini River, a major tributary to the Amazon), studying both the natural and social history of the region. Every day we woke up at 5am and worked until 9am, usually with an hour break during the hottest part of the day. We had a few classroom lectures but most of our time was spent in the forest and on the river.

Highlights:
1. Seeing SO many different kinds of monkeys: howlers, sakis, spiders, squirrels, woollies.
2. Seeing two big peccaries (wild hogs: think Pumba from the Lion King) run across the path in front of me and another student and tracking them by their scent (gross) until we lost them in a ravine. Usually they travel in huge packs and have been known to stampede humans, but I guess we got lucky. We were strategizing which trees to climb though :)
3. Seeing tarantulas the size of my hand.
4. Seeing tons of venomous insects and not getting bitten.
5. Swimming in an Amazonian tributary full of caimans (tropical crocodiles) and piranhas and electric eels and surviving.
6. Climbing 35m into the canopy (via a suspended walkway) and watching the sun rise over the forest.
7. Hiking WAY into the forest on our free day with a few other students - we took the longest trail (still only 10km) and saw, among other things, a huge group of woolly monkeys who began to drop huge branches and fruits on us to scare us away (it kind of worked).

All in all it was an incredible week. Below are some pictures. You can see all of my pictures (and a few poorly captured videos of monkeys) via my Picasa account at:https://picasaweb.google.com/erinroseod/TiputiniBiodiversityStation228372011#

One month in

Well, it's hard to believe, but I've already been in Ecuador for a whole month!  The past two weeks in Quito flew by.  I'm heading into the Amazonian rain forest for a week starting tomorrow, which will be a VERY welcome relief from the city.  I like to fancy myself an urbanist, because I think that creating functional cities where people can live healthy productive lives is the only way our planet's going to be able to handle 9 billion people by 2050.  However, try as I might, I can't say that I love Quito. Don't get me wrong, I really like the people here, and the historical district is beautiful, but I need a break from walking to school through black clouds of suffocating, noxious smog every day, being cat-called by every man I walk past. Amazonia here I come!

We'll be staying at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station, which is located within a relatively small area of "protected" forest.  I write "protected" in quotes because the area has still been subject to large-scale oil extraction for the past several decades, and settlers are encroaching from all sides.  This week is going to be a chance to see some amazing wildlife (we get up at 5am every morning to go up into the 35m tall canopy tower and walkway to observe monkeys, birds, etc), as well as an opportunity to hear from members of indigenous communities who have been on the front lines of the fights against transnational oil companies for 40+ years. We leave bright and early tomorrow, because, although Ecuador is only the size of Colorado, it's going to take us all day to get there: 30 min flight, 45 min canoe ride, 1.5 hour bus ride, and another 2.5 hour canoe ride.

Below I've included some pictures from our day trip to the Cayambe Coca Reserve in the paramo (high altitude shrubland) this past Wednesday. We were way up in the mountains at 14,000 ft.  Most of the paramo has been burned for use as cattle pasture, but the remaining polylepis forest is incredible.  This is the same kind of forest in which the Fangorn scenes in The Lord of the Rings were filmed.  I definitely felt like running into an ent was a real possibility.

Yaruqui Reforestation Project

Today we participated in another minga (community work project), this time at a reforestation project in the town of Yaruqui (about an hour outside of Quito). The program really prioritizes reciprocity and giving back to the communities that are supporting us, so we'll be doing projects like this throughout the semester.  About 4 years old, the reforestation project in Yaruqui is working to restore forests to land that was razed for use as cattle pastureland (like much of the forests in Ecuador and Latin America in general). Another aspect of the program that I'm really pleased with is that we all have to conduct "sustainability projects" in an effort to make our semester carbon neutral.  Today, one of the groups worked to survey all the trees at Yaruqui and determine the total carbon sequestered per tree (and per tree-planting person). I'm serving as coordinator for all of the sustainability projects, and I'm excited about what's in the works: carbon sequestration through Yaruqui, the expansion of the rooftop garden and rain catchment system on top of our school's roof in Quito, the development of an urban farming education program with our homestay families, the expansion of composting at our school, and the creation of a comprehensive sustainability policy for the whole of SIT (it's hard to believe they don't already have one). So we're keeping busy and learning lots in Quito! Check out my online photo album for more pictures of Intag and Yaruqui: https://picasaweb.google.com/erinroseod Thanks for reading!

El bosque nublado de Intag

I spent the last week in the Intag zone of Cotacachi county, in the cloud forest! Cloud forests occur above lowland rainforests forests as the moisture from those lower altitudes rises and condenses into near 24/7 clouds and rain. We spent half of the week at the La Florida Reserve, and the other half in rural homestays in the nearby (less than a 2 hour walk through the forest) towns. The community here is incredible - they've defeated two transnational mining companies who want to pit mine the forest for copper, and they recently passed a resolution declaring their county an "ecological county."  They've also been hard at work developing alternative economic projects in response to the pro-mining factions, including organic shade-grown coffee and a woman's collective that cultivates a type of agave and spins the fibers into beautiful handicrafts that are sold internationally.  Here are some pictures from the week: 

Doing a light trap to observe the cloud forest's insects.

Quick visit to Lago Cuyacocha (guinea pig lake) near the city of Otovalo - it was formed by a meteor strike way back when.

 

The bridge we helped build during a community work day (minga) on Friday.

 

My host sister, Kati, and her friend, Alex, in their town of Palo Seco.

 My host mother and sister on our mountain-side trek to buy some cheese for the next morning's empanadas.

 One of the many stunning fews of the mountains.

 Our cabin at La Florida.

Learning to identify plant families in the forest.

 

 Roundhouse where our lectures at La Florida took place.

 

Saludos de Quito!

Above are a few pictures from yesterday's trip to the Yanacocha Forest Reserve, which is located in the cloud forest (high altitude rainforest) outside of Quito. The group (19 students) has been staying in a hostel in Quito this week while we get acclimatized to the altitude (almost 10,000 ft!), the city, and each other. So far so good! We took a break from the city to spend all of yesterday hiking through the reserve with our Spanish teachers, learning how to identify and describe tropical plants and animals in Spanish and getting our first taste of the rainforest. Tomorrow we have a full day of Spanish and a lecture on deforestation issues in Ecuador. Then we head out to the Intag cloud forest on Saturday morning, where we'll be for a week in rural homestays. I'm very excited because one of the program directors lives on a farm in the Intag and we'll have a chance to see that and play with her six dogs!

If you're interested, I've posted more pictures of Yanacocha on my picasa account: http://picasaweb.google.com/erinroseod/EcuadorYanacochaForestReserve

Getting Ready!

Hey blogosphere!

In a little over a week, I'll be heading to Quito, Ecuador, where I’m participating in a field studies program through the School for International Training (SIT).  The program is titled, “Comparative Ecology and Conservation,” and the issues we’ll be studying include the culture, history, politics, and diverse ecological zones of Ecuador, traditional and currently appropriate uses for natural resources, natural resource management practices, and the intersecting social, economic, and environmental justice concerns related to sustainable living, in both an Ecuadorian and a global context.  Although the program is technically split into separate courses, the curriculum is very interdisciplinary, and most of our learning will take place in the field or in the form of guest lectures.  During the semester I will be living with a family in Quito, but, in addition to various day trips outside the city, I will also be traveling for 3 week-long stints to the Galápagos Islands, Yasuní National Park in the Amazon, and the Intag Cloud Forest Reserve.

I’m particularly interested in the conservation and sustainability aspects of the program, especially when applied to agriculture and food systems.  In the past two or three years, I’ve spent a lot of time working on broader environmental campaigns that were largely legislation-based, but as crucial as passing comprehensive climate legislation, banning mountaintop coal removal, and subsidizing renewable energy is, that work can be pretty dehumanizing.  I've found that keeping my nose to that grindstone for too long makes me feel like I'm losing touch with the personal, on-the-ground reality of those issues.  That’s why I’ve become increasingly involved with urban food security and sovereignty projects, which seek to ensure that all people have equal access to healthy food by reclaiming local community control of food production and distribution. 

More and more people live in cities every year, but our food system hasn’t adapted to meet their needs, and consequently many urban neighborhoods are “food deserts,” stretches as long as 100 blocks without a single full-service grocer in which residents rely on fast food and corner stores for the majority of their caloric intake.  We need to figure out how to transform cities into places where people can actually live healthy lives, and I think sustainable urban agriculture is a big part of the solution.  Urban ag is critical on a systemic, societal level if we’re going to mitigate and adapt to climate change, but it’s even more important on a personal, community level, because it’s bringing people together and putting the reins back in their hands. 

During the last month of the program, I will be conducting an independent study project in collaboration with a local community group or NGO, and I hope this time will allow me to hone in on Ecuador’s approach to sustainable urgan agriculture.  As more and more people migrate to Ecuador’s urban centers, the country’s municipal governments have developed a pretty solid record of subsidizing and promoting urban agriculture projects, which they see as an investment in the physical, economic, and social health of their communities.  These projects and their counterparts in other cities range from small private plots in families’ front and backyards, to larger community farms that are communally cultivated, to grocery stores' hydroponic rooftop greenhouses.  After working to address food insecurity in Cleveland last summer, I’m excited to see what systems with similar goals look like in Ecuador.  I'm hoping to return from Ecuador inspired to keep working on these issues in my own community and energized to hit the books again and finish my BA in Latin American Studies and Environmental Science.

Of course, the expectations I have about what I’ll be studying and what I’ll learn may completely change once I’m actually living it, but that will be part of the fun!  In the past, I’ve had trouble consistently blogging about my adventures away from home/school for people who are elsewhere, but this time I’m determined to succeed!  This may be the longest entry I post here, but my plan is to post about once a week with some photos and an update about what I’m up to. Thanks for reading!