Our modernist society, although having given us remarkable gifts such as democracy, the Internet, and merit-based ascension, has also burdened us with a belief that science, technology, materialism, and individualism can solve all of our problems. We're stuck then with a lot of outmoded paradigms about planning, management, and community, among others.
To move beyond these requires understanding the nature of paradigms and paradigm change (at least somewhat) and trying to put those into action. In two areas in particular we have attempted to do this. One is to create a new paradigm in planning to be applied in protected areas, one that focuses on learning, continual adaptation, and community empowerment rather than hierarchical, science-based control that leads to highly technical plans that end up on shelves (see illustrated essay on the topic of barriers to plan implementation in protected areas, www.jonkohl.com/pup/pupbarriers.pdf). The other area is the application of new paradigms to creating a community. Querencia is a community in formation that will both exhibit new low-impact technologies such as alternative energies, green/vernacular construction (i.e., biophilic design), permaculture, as well as social construction technologies (consensus, power sharing, conflict resolution, intentional cultural design, and others). We will create a space that uses technologies relevant to urban and rural populations, rich and poor, Latin American and North American. Unlike most ecovillages and intentional communities, this community will be highly relevant to the urban core of Costa Rica.
What's more the entire community and its accompanying interpretation center will apply the best of what's known about heritage interpretation, environmental communications, and cooperative business development, to offer the services of interpretation, education, and extension broadly throughout Costa Rica. We will develop the community through a series of alliances with landholders, green developers, international advisors, government agencies, and local neighbors.
Strangely enough, it's a small place, but I've come to love it. For the past 15 years I've bounced around every 1.5 to 2 years throughout Central and North America. I spoke and taught about place, but never had one of my own. I remember my house fondly where my mom lives, my home town in Massachusetts, but I'm okay if I don't visit even once a year. But now, in only the past 2 years, I have taken up organic gardening with my wife. During the remodeling of our little house here in Costa Rica, our backyard devolved into a construction destruction. Broken cement, rusty nails, dirt packed hard by the ramble of work boots. That was our organic garden before, when it held scant hope for the future. Now we have surrounded our 3 x 4 meter garden with a stone wall reminiscient of my New England home. Our first seed-planted papaya tree rises 4 meters with full-sized green fruits. Our yellow-flowered cucumbers spiral up a fence. Spinach clambers along the ground. The first tomatoes bob on flimsy, tied-back branches. The arcing sun tells a different garden story with each passing hour. I no longer find ceramic shards in the dark soil. Everytime I walk into our kitchen with large glass doors that overlook the garden, I stand and study today's changes in the garden's evolution. I don't know where it's going, but I am an eager passenger on the journey. I never thought 10 square meters could mean so much.
For communities in Costa Rica to move from modernist ideas of community and environment (build walls around houses, depend on government to do what we as citizens should do, environment is a spiritless resource to be exploited) to a post-modern/integral worldview where small communities are primary movers of change, striving for low-impact, using only their fair share of a region's resources, that have developed the ability to learn as a group and adapt at a rate commensurate with the change around us. I worked in conservation and environment for many years, but like all specific issues, they are only fragments of a larger problem. That larger problem is principally one of consciousness.
My interests include management of visitors in special places and many of the tools that that implies: heritage interpretation, creating and modifying spaces to protect visitors and protect resources, involve visitors in the mission of agencies that manage special places (such as parks) through creating conditions for transformative experiences that create new meaning and new relationships with places. In this capacity I work with UNESCO's World Heritage Center's Public Use Planning Program to help protected areas develop capacities mentioned above, forming a part of a community of stakeholders to manage places. I am also an interpretive planner and trainer for a sustainable tourism planning company in the US, called Fermata, Inc.
I am a teacher in Costa Rica of such topics at the University of Costa Rica, CATIE, Latin American School of Protected Areas, and others.
I am a freelance writer. I write for popular magazines, trade publications, and academic peer-reviewed journals on topics of community, ecotourism, protected area management, biophilic design, conservation, and others.
Perhaps most of all, I'm now a community builder. My wife and I started out by desigining a green house, then we moved into a progressive apartment and realized that we wanted green community, not just a house, so we set out to create a unique ecovillage in Costa Rica, one th at not only benefits its inhabitants, but benefits the entire nation and beyond. Querencia is now the purpose I have always wanted. To do this I read extensively, visit communities, and make contacts throughout the world. Nothing is guaranteed, but there is a vast experience that can be reaped in planting our own community.
For more information, I invite all to visit www.jonkohl.com
