At the moment I’m on brief trip to my once-regular field site, in northeastern Costa Rica. This particular patch of lowland tropical rainforest feels like a second home to me. I’ve spent so much time inside the boundaries of this one field station, La Selva, which is operated by the Organization for Tropical Studies. Even though I grew up in southern California, my ongoing development as a biologist has featured on long days of fieldwork in the rainforest, and from training students in the same forest. When I’m not there, plenty of my research time has involved thinking, writing, analyzing, conversing, and wondering about what happens in there. Because I intermittently come and go from La Selva, every trip back is flavored with familiarity and freshness. Nostalgia and novelty. Imagine you go periodically go back home to visit with family every several months for a holiday. Each time, it’s the same home, mostly the same people, but there might be something different. Maybe your parents finally got rid of the land line, or they got a new TV, or your cousin is getting a divorce, there’s a new addition to the family, or one of your siblings is facultatively avoiding gluten for specious reasons. Visit after visit, year after year, these changes add up. Some people are gone, there are some new people, and the place simultaneously feels different and the same. Going back to La Selva is like that. It’s been a year since my last visit, and the smallest, littlest, most inconsequential change is the one that I can’t stop thinking about, as an itsy bitsy indicator of broad social and environmental change. This is the kind of field station that provides three meals a day. If you’re not planning to make it back for lunch, they’ll prepare a field lunch for you. As (bad) luck would have it, I wasn’t able to make it to lunch not because of fieldwork, but a marathon zoom meeting with a misaligned lunch break. So, I asked for a field lunch to eat al desko. This is what I got:
Looks normal, right? Sure, it’s perfectly normal. The way they do field lunches at La Selva hasn’t really changed since I ordered my first one 1995¹. Don’t fix what isn’t broken. You might not get exactly what you order, but it’s enough calories to get through a normal day in the field and is delicious and nutritious enough. But this one was different: it came in a paper bag. Okay, so what. It came in a paper bag. In my three decades of field lunches, they always, without fail, came in clear plastic bags. I suppose they switched to paper bags just now to reduce plastic waste. It’s a good thing. But it’s also super hilarious to me, and I believe I gave a little self-chuckle out out to myself. This might sound incredibly minor, but boy howdy let me tell you, at one point in time paper bags in La Selva were anything but trivial. Not long ago, they were a desperate necessity and a scarce commodity, for me at least. I could have channeled King Richard, “My kingdom for paper bags!” And now they just come along with lunch. While the procurement of paper bags in Costa Rica is simple enough nowadays, this was not the case before the turn of the century. This isn’t trivial if you’re doing some ecosystem ecology related projects, because paper bags are standard supplies for processing plant material in drying ovens. (Which is more common than you might imagine. The station has a whole bank of drying ovens, all filled with paper bags of stuff drying out. There was so much consistent competition for their use, my project bought its own own.) Even though I am an ant person by trade, I’ve had pressing needs to calculate the percent moisture and dry weight of the litter which my ants were inhabiting. Which needs paper bags, and at one point I needed more. I grabbed a taxi into the neighboring town, and nobody had paper bags for sale. Not the grocery stores, not the hardware store, not the bookstore, not the pharmacy, not any of the the other convenience shops. It used to be a small town, so it wasn’t hard to ask around everywhere. The people working on station with paper bags had brought them from abroad. I then started talking with the research support folks with the field station, because if you pay them a very reasonable fee, they’ll procure not just lab supplies, but whatever else you might need too. Their office, in the big metropolitan area, looked around and then said, “Nope, we can’t get paper bags for you, we don’t know where to get them.” I imagine there had to have been paper bags somewhere somehow in Costa Rica in the late 1990s, but I didn’t know where to go. I eventually got some paper bags by contacting other researchers who were planning to come from the US and asked them to get a bunch of brown paper lunch bags and bring them in their luggage. So I eventually got my paper bags. My project didn’t fall apart. But let me tell you, getting paper bags was Very Much A Thing. A couple years later, when I was spending startup from my first faculty position, I remember going through Target filling up for stray field supplies, and loaded up on paper lunch bags to bring down here. (That stash still hasn’t run out, in case you’re down here and need some. You can also borrow my oven, but please give the lab manager a heads up.) Meanwhile, what was inside that paper bag along with my lunch? A plastic bottle of water. Which also is a relative novelty. Long after the United States had transitioned to selling all of its beverages in plastic bottles, when I first started working in Costa Rica they still were using bottles on a deposit/reusable basis. You couldn’t go into town and get a bottle of beverage in plastic. It wasn’t a thing around the country². But now they’ve gone away with reusable glass bottles, and replaced it all with plastic. As you might imagine, everything is in plastic bottles, or maybe aluminum cans. Transformation happens everywhere. I feel like I am more sensitive to it in Costa Rica because I keep periodically visiting, arriving and leaving, giving me renewed opportunities to note little changes. International chains are widespread though were practically absent thirty years ago. Costa Rica has almost doubled the amount of forested land. Intel is now manufacturing computer chips in the country, and customer service call centers are a source of jobs too. Pesticide application rates in Costa Rica have grown to be perhaps the highest in the world, theoretically under regulation but rarely in practice. Massive declines in insect densities in Costa Rica are unmistakeable. The country has gotten cozier with China. These are things that you don’t necessarily notice as you go about your day to day business. But that paper bag for my field lunch? That gave me a chuckle but also is a reminder that each revolution around the sun brings evolution into new territory. 1 So running the numbers, yes, I’ve been coming down here on a regular basis for 29 years. Which in the eyes of most people makes me an oldtimer, and I suppose I can’t disagree with that, but when I think of the oldtimers of La Selva, there are lot of people senior to me with longer and deeper ties than I do. When I started working down here, the place was already well established as a landmark world-class field station with a lot of infrastructure, large staff, and a steady flow of researchers, courses, and nature-oriented tourists. 2 I do remember when I was a very little kid in the late 1970s that we did the same thing in the US. If my parents bought a big bottle of soda, it was a glass bottle they’d take home, and when it was empty, it would be returned to the store. But that disappeared in the late 70s and early 80s in the US, and that transition was apparently delayed by a couple decades in Costa Rica. Maybe we could manage to get back to that system? That would be nice. You’re currently a free subscriber to Science For Everyone. Thanks for your support! If you wish to support this work more, then you could pay for a subscription.
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Monday, 29 April 2024
Plastic bottles and paper bags
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