More from Cavan in Costa Rica

Six months have passed since I arrived in Londres de Aguirre, Costa Rica.  Currently I am working on a number of small projects including creating an internship program, researching questions about Analog Forestry, updating the website and various outdoor activities.  Of the projects, the research is the one I find the most interesting because of the subject matter.  Questions relate to larger land management ones like the following: How much land in a region should be reserved as representative intact ecosystems?  Can exotic plants fulfill the same ecological function as native plants?

This week we had a workshop on Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS).  Basically, PGS is a way of verifying compliance with a set of standards, but instead of a third party certifier, it uses a peer review process.  The standards can be for anything and are often determined by the parties being certified, for example, organic certification in Peru or wild harvested products in India.  There were three experts at the workshop and a number of other people with experience implementing PGS in Mexico and Costa Rica.  Hopefully the IAFN will be able to work out some guidelines for implementing PGS with its Forest Garden Products (FGP) standard.

Cavan speaking with another participant from the Participatory Group Certification Workshop

The weather has finally switched into the dry season after a delayed start.  This means that the river is low enough to swim in and that the days are mostly sunny.  While the sun is nice, it makes the days warmer than during the rainy season.  After this many months of warm weather, it hardly seems possible that the temperature in Canada only rises above the minimum temperature here for two months of the year.  Tourism is also more active during the dry season, which means that everyone is busier because so many people work in the industry.  So with nice weather and interesting work, all in all things are pretty peachy.

A view from Cerronara, a town about 3 hours from where I am based.