One Big Thing to Learn from… Costa Rica

This post is part of what will be a periodic series (see this earlier post) on how other countries work on big problems they are facing, and what the US might be able to learn from them.

Costa Rica's mangroves filter toxins, connect salt and fresh water, nurture vulnerable animals, protect the country from tsunamis and pollution. They also make a pretty good metaphor for our times.

My son and I had been on a 20-foot boat for a half hour, weaving through a shallow, narrow, twisting fresh water stream. On either side of us was a network of spooky trees, each with a spider’s web of thin, overlapping roots diving in to muddy land or brackish water. The spindly stilts support the mangrove trees, but they also give them a sort of superpower.

We were there, offishally, for the fishing. But I was really there for the mangroves.  

I’d read an essay by Tom Friedman earlier where he had imagined the mangrove system as a metaphor for our times, and I wanted to see them for myself.

Here’s what I learned about mangroves:

·      Mangroves are nurseries. They provide a safe place for fish to grow up, giving them hiding places where they can escape predators. In a mangrove forest, fish can thrive, crabs can creep, crocs can crawl, birds can breed.

·      Mangroves are filters. Their roots absorb and filter out salt and poisons and other toxins, protecting humans and other plants and animals  

·      Mangroves are buffers and anchors. They stand between the ocean and the mainland of Costa Rica, protecting the ocean from toxic runoff and the mainland from hurricanes and tsunamis.

Nurseries, Filters. Buffers. Anchors. In the essay I’d read earlier, Friedman noted that our society is losing the “mangroves” that protect us, from the violent clash of opposing ideas (in the mangroves, it’s salt water vs fresh water), as well as physical threats (for mangroves, think pollution and tsunami). Let’s think about how the metaphor of the mangrove might apply to our society.

Nurseries: We need places where our fledgling ideas about the world, our notions of what we care about and believe in, can be tested out safely. One place for that, historically, has been our college campuses. But more recently, students say they don’t feel comfortable doing that. A 2022 survey by the Heterdox Academy of college students found that 59% of students don’t feel comfortable sharing their opinions on race, religion, politics or sexual orientation because of potential criticism from their classmates. We don’t need to coddle students, but we do need to make sure college campuses are places where young ideas don’t get strangled in the crib.

Filters: In his essay, Friedman oberved that in the past, locally-owned newspapers played an important role in helping readers wrestle with big issues. Because they derived ad revenue from a broad range of community members, local papers were more likely to report news in something closer to a moderate perspective. By 2023, local newspapers were disappearing at the rate of 2.5 per week, leaving more than half of US counties with no local news source and leaving local residents more likely to get news only from partisan national outlets.

Buffers: The number of us who are part of teams or civic groups or book clubs continues to decline. Those are the places where we have historically come together for something approximating civil discourse, environments where we can talk to people we share one thing in common with about other things that we might disagree about. Those kinds of places can give us safe harbor during tsunamis.

Anchors: Our connection to organized religion continues to decline. Between 1999 and 2020, the percentage of Americans reporting belonging to a church, synagogue or mosque declined from 70% to 49%. A Pew study shows the percentage of Americans with no religion, the so-called “nones,” has increased from 16% in 2007 to 29% in 2021. Religion is not the only way to anchor a life, but we need a moral code to help us navigate when salt water and fresh water violently collide.

In the US, we’re watching as our metaphorical mangroves slip away.

Costa Rica is investing in protecting their actual mangroves. Over the past tsenty years, the country recognized the value of mangroves, to its environment and to its economy, and has invested mightily in preserving them: the government has stepped up to shore up old groves and nurture new ones.

In the past five years, the country has poured unprecedented resources into heading off a new threat: just as fish can swim in among the mangrove roots to escape catching, drug dealers are finding cover in the groves to run cocaine and fentanyl throughout Central America. The very protection the country is providing to preserve the mangroves makes it possible for people to exploit the weakness.

It's not clear how all this is going to go for Costa Rica. But the country knows how important the battle is, and is taking the threats to its mangroves seriously.

It’s hard work, worth doing. So is the work of protecting the “mangroves” in the US.

Notes:

Military coups as a solution to political challenges in Latin America: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2024/0702/bolivia-military-coup-democracy-latin-america

Tom Friedman and our loss of “anchors”:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/06/opinion/society-decay-america.html

Heterodox Academy 2022 survey: https://heterodoxacademy.org/reports/2022-campus-expression-survey-report/

Costa Rica immigration and seasonal workers: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publications/mpi-costa-rica-report-2021-english_final.pdf

Costa Rican mangrove protection efforts: https://oppla.eu/casestudy/21680#:~:text=A%20pilot%20restoration%20project%20of,out%2Dcompeting%20the%20mangrove%20trees.

Costa Rican efforts opposing drug cartels: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/15/world/americas/costa-rica-drug-trafficking.html