Week 8- Nina Huang

For this week’s readings, the two articles talked about how Costa Rica uses large amounts of pesticides on their banana and plantain trees, and how the country became ecotourism. The country use imported pesticide to “produce export-quality plantain and bananas,” but the chemicals from the pesticides are doing harm to the country (Polidoro and Morra 5983). It is poisoning not only the soil, plants, and fruits, but it is also harming the fishes. The toxic pesticides end up in Costa Rica’s streams and rivers because the pesticide application are managed poorly and the flooding from high rainfalls. Since the people who live in Costa Rica and in other countries consume the bananas, plantain, and fishes, they are putting the toxic food in their body, which will also lead to health risks. Even though the pesticide is harming their natural resources, Costa Rica still continues to use it to keep their fruit exports and ecotourism a live so that the country can get more income. Besides using pesticide to rebrand their country, Costa Rica gets help from small-scale entrepreneurs, forest and wildlife biologists, ecotourism entrepreneurs from foreigners, and other businesses so that the country can continue its ecotourism and fruit exports. The small-scale entrepreneurs “helped ensure that formally protected areas remained sustainable parks and reserves,” whereas the ecotourism entrepreneurs “brought ecological ideas and together with Costa Rican biologists and environmentalists helped to spread these ideas widely” (Jones and Spadafora 40-41). Lastly, many people can start up businesses that it helped increase ecotourism.

For my group’s project, the most valuable aspect of San Jose is that many ethnic groups are living there. This create cultural diversity in the city that San Jose wants to brand cultural tourism. This can help San Jose rebrand itself, but many people who live there are assimilated to America that they either do not know their culture and heritage or they are starting to lose their roots. If their culture and heritage is lost, the city would not be that diverse anymore and the next generations will not know about their roots. Since my group is focusing on Southeast Asian Americans, our precaution is to have Southeast Asians immigrants teach their home country’s culture to the adolescence. That way, the adolescence are getting primary sources instead of secondary sources that could have wrong or biased information.

Question: Is there a way to get rid of large quantities of pesticide on land and in water when a country, like Costa Rica, has been using the chemicals for many years?

Works Cited

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/08/f0/b7/08f0b776ff3e259e5ffc93bf4fa81906--voyage-costa-rica-costa-rica-itineraire.jpg

Jones, Geoffrey, and Spadafora, Andrew. “Entrepreneurs and the Co-Creation of Ecotourism in Costa Rica.” Harvard Business School General Management Unit Working Paper, no. 16-136, 2016, pp. 1-56.

Polidoro, Beth, and A. Morra. “An Ecological Risk Assessment of Pesticides and Fish Kills in the Sixaola Watershed, Costa Rica.” Environmental Science and Pollution Research, vol. 23, no. 6, 2016, pp. 5983–5991.