Blog #4

May 12, 2022

Day #4

Today was by far the biggest day we have had yet. It was an early morning with the alarm clock going off at 4:50 am. Duffy and I quickly ate cereal and packed a couple of sandwiches for the road. We swung by Alida and Wyatt's place to pick them up and then headed to the institute. We all rolled out of Monteverde at 6:00 am in a big, 1980s Toyota Land Cruiser. We headed out for Tronadora, a small town about an hour and a half away. The drive down there was pretty silent as everyone was very tired. Upon arriving, an entire team of about 12 of us spent the next few hours loading 5,000 saplings into the back of an immense truck. The tree nursery where we were picking up the plants is funded by an organization named The Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE). ICE is a government-run electricity and telecommunications provider that oversees all of the renewable energy resources programs in Costa Rica. The nursery where we picked up the trees currently had over half a million trees that were scheduled to be distributed this year. Our order of 5,000 healthy trees, some of which had been growing for up to eight years, cost the Monteverde Institute absolutely nothing to purchase. Furthermore, the Monteverde Institue distributes those trees throughout the community for free. All of this is made possible through government funding and volunteer work. I feel super fortunate to get a first-hand, behind-the-scenes look at how the operation of taking a tree from the seed to full-grown can be executed at absolutely no cost to the customer. Not to suggest this process is cheap, but I do believe that it could be beneficial for other countries to take note of Costa Rica's environmental action toward a more sustainable future.