Published in the ICYE International Journal / Nov 2008
In January 2008 came to Honduras with ICYE. I volunteer for Guaruma, an environmental organisation working in the Cangrejal valley about 20km from La Ceiba. As a project we work with rural communities along the edge of Pico Bonito National Park – the second largest protected area in Honduras spanning 107,300 hectares. Comprising of 20 river systems, dense unexplored jungles and cloud forests it is thought that Pico Bonito is home to species of animals rarely found in other parts of Honduras. As an organisation we run a number of community education projects working with young people age 9-19. We run photography, environmental and computer classes and encourage the students to use their creativity to tell stories about their lives. The stories are there in abundance; annual flooding, deforestation and impoverished communities trying to forge an existence in this environmentally delicate area.
For all I knew about environmental issues like deforestation and sustainable farming, I can’t say I had begun to understand the complexities of them until I came to live here. Back home when we speak about environmental issues we do so as a matter of responsibility and rarely as a matter of survival. Here in Honduras the forests are disappearing at a rate of 3.6% each year. Honduras is an extremely poor country, consistently hindered by large amounts of debt and endemic corruption. Eighty percent of Honduran people live below the poverty line with nearly half surviving by working the land. A large percentage of land lies in the hands of foreign-owned fruit companies. It’s a sad pattern that land in the developing world rarely lies in the hands of the people who would most feel the benefit. Such dichotomies are prevalent throughout Latin America where economies are reliant on the price of their exports in foreign markets; markets over which the Latin Americans have little influence.
As I live and work in the small communities in this valley I become more closely acquainted with and implicated in such issues. At night I hear whispers of ‘burnings.’ Men leave at the break of day to hike steep trails and burn vast stretches of forest. On my evening walks I see deforested hillsides and fires blazing on the peaks. Two weeks ago I hiked up a trail to a bare stretch of hillside sporting a few sad tomato plants. I can guess that the tomatoes I will buy tomorrow in my village were farmed this way. These sharp mountain hillsides are a logistical nightmare to farm, but they represent the only choices for local people trying to feed their families. Soon the rains will come and the volume of water will be too much for the deforested hillsides. The Cangrejal river will swell to within an inch of our doors and the dirt tracks that connect our communities will become impassable mudslides. Our vital connection with the town will be lost. Tonight I will prepare some extra food for my neighbour. Two years ago a mud slide buried his house and killed his wife. These are painful side effects of simple actions and they represent the lack of choice available to the people in these communities.
Environmental protection has been a theme in my life for as long as I can remember and the span of issues is vast and rapidly expanding. More recently the idea of environmental protection has taken on a new life as the global community gears up to meet the challenges of ‘climate change.’ Since coming to Honduras I have come to believe that for many us in the developed world, environmental protection is a question of choice. In Britain we benefit from a society and a standard of living that is ready to support us in meeting the environmental challenge. Yet with so much freedom and so many choices laid before us, we are still unable to make the smallest of concessions and changes in our lives. Instead we engage in debate, lose ourselves in denial and spiral into apathy about the very real challenges that face us. In a society of so much comfort, it is very easy for us to feel the challenges of environmental protection intellectually. But it begs the question – how are we really engaging with the problems and understanding our part in them?
My time volunteering here has strengthened my conviction that for many in the world there are simply fewer choices. As a volunteer from the developed world it is easy for me to come to here and ‘educate’ about the choices that need to be made to benefit the environment. But how easy is it for the people here to make and live with those choices? Living and working in a community such as this I see the huge gaps between their expectations of the world and mine, between what they have to do to survive and what I have had to do. As a foreigner I am in a unique position to promote change. I provide contrast, present different ways of doing things and bring new ideas. In a way it’s all too easy. Where I often find myself stuck is how to effect change in the systems that allow these huge gaps to prevail.
Since coming here I find I often think about my own choices; my choice to come here and do what I am doing but also the choices I made in life before I lived here. More so I think about the choices I will make for a better future and I see that individual choices can only go so far. As people of developed nations we need to ask serious questions about our exploitation of less developed nations. We need to consider the price of our lifestyles and consider the part we are going to play in the environmental challenge. We also need to consider the huge demands that we are currently making of people who have so fewer choices to take.
