Abstract: Economic globalization has led to the seemingly unstoppable spread of a culture of exploitation and consumption; and both people and planet are suffering as a result of its unintended consequences (Böhm et al. 2015). In light of increasingly startling statistics on climate change, resource depletion, land degradation, and biodiversity loss, we are starting to see a global shift towards conservation and restoration. As more research reveals the complexity of these ecological problems and demonstrates their inextricable connections to socioeconomic instability and poor public health (Cross et al., 2019), practitioners are beginning to employ community- and place-based approaches to restoration and conservation. With a growing consensus in the global conservation community that the participation of local communities is essential for the success of conservation initiatives (United Nations, 2021), there remains a large knowledge gap in how to integrate conservation and community well-being. I propose that a series of community characteristics and project design factors grounded in a biocultural approach can help guide this integration. I present ethnographic and ecological evidence from four communities engaged in community-based conservation in Costa Rica. My main finding was that while each community operates within its own unique social-ecological context, communities engaged in conservation share notable similarities in community characteristics and project design.
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The purpose of this paper is to propose environmental education and eco-literacy as components of education for sustainable development through the examination of an eco-literacy program offered by EARTH University in Costa Rica to rural community public schools. To illustrate these components we examine the development of a program/curriculum used in 17 elementary schools. We draw two important conclusions from our examination. First we found that external national political, social, and economic forces were important to the program’s success. Secondly we illustrate the importance of developing and programs that address the specific needs and issues of the local region.
Continue ReadingAbstract An innovative framework for sustainability helps investigate the impacts of real estate development and educational attainment of newcomers; more specifically, landscape transformation due to ‘amenity migration’ into the Global South. We argue that sustainability research requires a de-categorization from mutually exclusive ‘human’ and ‘nature’ divisions, to refocus on intersections of multiple and complex socio-environmental […]
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