Barichara: Getting Familiar with Flora

This week I do aim to take advantage of the time lapse that we have between the events I’m writing about and where we are now. So I’m going to zoom out a little to try and tell the story of one particular element of our stay in totality.

At the point where Zia had started going to school in Barichara it created a routine. Each morning we were up and out of the house by 7:30 to walk along the top of the ridge and drop her off to catch the bus. This meant that by 7:45 I was free to get on with something else. On the first morning that I had the opportunity I made by way down the hill towards a corner that had caught my interest when looking on the map. Firstly, because on satellite view it looked as if it were only half built and secondly because the contours of the land suggested that there would be water down there and I was keen to investigate.

As I arrived it was clear that it was a little more developed that the satellite imagery suggested with roads at least and a number of houses. It was also clear that this new corner of Barichara was different to the older part in which we were staying. The houses were being made to have the superficial appearance of their older counterparts but it was sad to see that a number of them were going up with metal frames and concrete walls and then having thin slices of stone tile stuck to the front. We have seen similar developments near us in which the buildings are given a knapped flint facade. It seems like a token nod from a developer who has little interest in buildings other than as a way to make a big profit. Inevitably this leads to a scenario where they are trying to minimise the material cost so that they can maximise their profit. The traditional buildings in Barichara, made from rammed earth (tapia pisada) require time, skill and a reasonable amount of materials as the walls are so thick. It is an investment but as I’ve mentioned before those thick walls are a fantastic thermal buffer which create an ideal environment inside the building. Lamentably, the wisdom gained from collective experimentation to discover a climate appropriate building is discarded so that the material and labour cost can be made as low as possible. When you reflect back that this building is to be a home in which families live and raise future generations for years to come it seems an even greater sin to skimp so greedily. For me at least buildings are part of our collective infrastructure – something which will continue to house fellow humans into the future and as such there is a responsibility to design them so that they are apt for that purpose. In the current short-term profit based paradigm this is unfortunately not the case.

This estate was also distinct in having gated communities which seemed hugely out of place in Barichara which is otherwise a very connected community. All the more strange when you consider that it is an incredibly safe place where people rarely lock their doors which left me wondering why on earth anyone would feel the need for a gated community?

When I reached the bottom I was at least a little glad to see that a few stands had been taken to made a handful of houses in the traditional manner. I don’t know if these were private investments or if the developer had decided that by putting in a few properly built houses the overall illusion would be improved but at least they were there. I could at that point hear a reasonable flow of water but going all along the bottom edge of the estate I could not find my way through to any path that would afford me a view of the water.

Fortunately there was a bonus to be found. I often write about buildings and have worked in construction on and off for many years but it’s not my main interest. I actually think that for the most part people have developed an unhealthy obsession with buildings – partly because they have become such lucrative investments and stores of value and partly because lifestyles have become more interior. The thing that tends to light my interest far more is plants and landscapes which have a diversity and complexity that really makes building a bit of a bore by comparison. So on this particular morning walk I’d been paying far more attention to the plants than I had the buildings. It is uncomfortable for me to go from a situation back home where I know the trees and plants that surround me to our situation over here where everything is foreign and unknown. Over the years that I worked with plants I’ve developed a bit of a theory about this with regard to what it really going on and how it affects us. As children we are keen to know the names of things and our parents dutifully teach us about our surroundings – we acquire language and through doing so we can draw lines around objects (and later concepts) so that eventually we can name our surroundings. They become familiar. In most environments we reach a level where we know the names of all the things around us and I think that this also creates a level of security; or again, familiarity. The odd thing that I realised through my own process of learning the names of trees and plants and through observing the same process in others is that for most people once they are in an outdoor (or natural) environment that they cannot name most of their surroundings. Looking at the word ‘familiar’ that I’ve chosen to use we can see its relation to the word ‘family’. So now if we reflect on the situation in which we cannot identify our surroundings, that they are ‘unfamiliar’ we have a scenario in which we are surrounding by strangers. Framing it like this it’s a very weird situation: that we have become so estranged from the natural world.

So coming from a situation in which I have become familiar with the names of the plants that surround me I am perhaps more sensitive than most people to this feeling of unfamiliarity. My natural response when surrounded by strangers is to try and find out their names. It’s a simple thing to do and it has the huge and fairly indescribable effect of transforming the unfamiliar into the familiar. Suddenly we are comfortable in our environment. It’s for this reason that I draw the parallel to those early formative years in which we are first acquiring language and making sense of our surroundings.

This has been a fairly long preamble to get to the heart of what I intended to write about. We’d spent a few months already travelling around Costa Rica and while there I had managed to identify a handful of plants but hadn’t made any serious effort to get to grips with them. In the Bioparque there are a number of trees which have helpful name plates and so I’d decided that I would use my new-found morning slot to get up there and begin learning some of them. It was low-hanging fruit. I planned to take pictures of the name plates and a few identifying features and through this process I could become more familiar with the various species. I quickly realised that a helpful by-product of this process would be that I could put the photos into a map as long as I had the GPS enabled on my phone. However, a few days in I looked at the various options for mapping my photos and found that none of them were really up to the job. At the same time, through my regular morning walk I was quickly getting to know a number of the species. Back when I was foraging full time we developed a system for recording everything that we harvested so I decided that I could reuse some of the skills that I’d previously developed in mapping plants.

The system that we used at the time was a good open source system called the Open Data Kit. It would have been straight forward to do the same again but I got in touch with my friend Adam at Native Ecology to explore a couple of other options. He suggested a couple of systems which they use and gave me lots of useful guidance to get me started. So I finished up using the open-source platform QGIS. This was definitely a good move as it is a much more powerful tool than the one I’d used previously plus I later found out that ODK does not have an option to use on iOS which would have eventually limited the options for other people to participate.

For the next few weeks I continued to go up to the Bioparque every morning. My process for quickly learning trees is a little odd and difficult to describe. For some people I think that identifying plants is a daunting task. However, with practice it is no more difficult than discerning between any two objects. I would look for key features in each species which struck me as unique. I would also use hand gestures to represent those characteristics while repeating the name, walking around and touching the leaves and the bark. I’ve kind of borrowed the principle behind this from my school days when I was taught Spanish. We had a very good teacher who told us that when learning vocabulary we should write the word down and say it out loud. This method means that you are employing more of your senses: reading the written word, forming it in your mouth, hearing it as you say it, seeing it written and spelling it out. All of these things mean that it is going through more of your neural networks which accelerates learning.

After about 2 weeks I could identify the majority of the tree species in the park. At the same time I had been creating the map and the form to collect the data; each day going up to test it against the reality and refine it. I have learnt previously that you have to get this first step right because if anything isn’t right when you begin collecting data it is impossible to disentangle the information. As well as the species present I’d decided that certain other data would be useful. The form was set out to collect the height and spread of the tree as well as the shade density. I then found that these datasets could be used to influence the way that it was being displayed on the map so that there would be circles representing each tree which showed the actual spread of the tree and the colour of the circle would represent the shade density. My assumption here was that at a later date the information might be useful to begin understanding some of the evaporation taking place.

One morning when I was happy with the form I went up to begin a trial. I started in the South West corner of the Bioparque which was closest to where we were staying. In this corner there is a great density of species and they are growing very close to each other. After about a 15 minute trial I was happy with the way that everything was working but I also came to the realisation that the project was going to be far bigger than I could complete within the couple of weeks we had left. I knew that it would be a great project to handover to the community but couldn’t see an immediate way for that to happen.

The next day I took Zia to school again and set off to the Bioparque but not quite sure what my next step would be. As I climbed up the first slope I encountered a group of school children who were being given a tour of the park with the two women who founded the project – Camila & Vicky. Camila told me that the students were learning the names of the trees and I told her that I was there to do the same thing. In that moment I had a realisation. I briefly told her about my mapping project and said that it would be great if the students could be involved. She seemed to like the idea but as she was busy giving them the tour we arranged to get in touch and discuss. A couple of days later we met up at the Bioparque again and I outlined the whole project and gave her a brief demonstration. They were keen to use it! I was extremely happy as this fortunate encounter had landed the project in the best possible place. It was a happy coincidence to discover that it was also the first time that they had taken a group on this kind of trip.

The way that all of this fell into place was really better than I could possibly have designed it. It’s worth sharing a little of how I felt about the project and the process as this was part of how I described it to them. The thing is that the map itself may one day be useful. I might be useful as I’ve described for making further analysis of the area and the ecological processes which are unfolding. It could also be useful for making comparisons over time and seeing which species are most successful, which are growing fastest, which seed most easily and so on. However, we don’t know the future. We can make guesses at how what we are doing might be of service in the future but history shows us that often the final application for something is not what it was originally designed for. To me this doesn’t matter. The map is a by-product. The process of making the map is a tool. The important thing to me is what will happen through that process. From my own experience I had in the space of 2 weeks managed to learn around 40 species of tropical tree. That had been my primary motivation but I’d built a process around doing that which would have the potential to produce other benefits. At the same time the process itself was a useful tool to accelerate learning. So the real project and the benefit that I could see was that if people could engage with the idea of mapping the species they would end up becoming familiar with the species native to their landscape.

Returning to my starting point this would be a fantastic outcome. Becoming familiar is the first step to becoming connected. Once we become connected to a landscape and we know the names and perhaps later the uses of the plants which surround us we begin to value them. Once we value them we begin to care about them. If I were to link back to my first section about buildings I would say that once we value these things it becomes a consideration before putting up yet another speculative settlement. Each and every bit of land is covered in plants and other species. If we don’t know them and don’t value them then it’s easier for us to replace them with something else that we think does have value. The catch here is that value is just something that we do as humans. We decide if it is valuable or not.