Ringing in the New Year With the Sounds of the Jungle

This New Year’s Eve, while other San Diegans are seeking out the rowdiest party to ring in 1992, 11 San Diego State University students plan to attend a small get-together in the remotest jungles of Honduras.

The dress code will, by necessity, be informal--when they board a southbound plane Tuesday, the students will each be limited to 35 pounds of gear, including their tents. The menu will be simple--the nine women and two men who will spend most of January in the Central American forest expect to subsist on little more than rice, beans and bananas.

The students, survivors of an experimental two-year project called Therapy for A Dying Planet, know that this trip--the project’s final phase--promises to give new meaning to the term “roughing it.” But they say they’re ready.

“I’m really excited. I’ve never done anything like this before,” Michelle Deal, 24, said recently as she completed last-minute travel preparations: typhoid and cholera vaccinations, iodine tablets, a list of relatives to be contacted in case of emergency. “I just hope that I don’t get malaria or hepatitis.”

Fifteen months ago, when professors Kathryn Wullner and Gary Priest first proposed a course to study how incentives can be used to modify human behavior to sustain the planet, throngs of San Diego State students signed up. Wullner, a psychology professor, and Priest, an animal behavior specialist at the San Diego Zoo, cautioned them that theirs was no ordinary academic endeavor.

The two instructors said they were looking for “a small army” of environmental activists who would risk snakes and wade through mud to get an education. Wullner said she only wanted students who would take the course for no credit, if they had to. Priest told a story about a polar bear at an Ohio zoo that ripped off an animal keeper’s arm and ate it.

In the San Diego State course catalogue, the first phase of Wullner and Priest’s project was called “Psychology and the Environment.” But students who enrolled soon were tempted to rename the project Environmental Boot Camp.

As Therapy for a Dying Planet participants, they conducted beach cleanups. They trained birds to fly on command, cut trails into the landscape and taught schoolchildren about the principles of sustainable agriculture. And they studied examples of “win-win” strategies designed to help communities to preserve valuable habitats and their own economic health.

Throughout it all, true to the ideals of the course, Wullner and Priest gave their students an incentive to do the work. Only those who mastered two semesters of course work and completed a summer internship at the San Diego Zoo were eligible for the grand prize: a trip abroad and a chance to apply what they’d learned.

“Right from the start, this has always been the carrot,” said senior biology major Valerie Hare, one of the 11 San Diego State students and recent graduates who have opted to devote the month of January (and more than $1,000 of their own money) to investigate which “win-win” strategies are best suited to the Honduran jungles.

“This will be a chance to do something positive--something that, when my kids are 18 or 19 or 20 they may be able to go down there and see that I may have had a role in getting started,” said Hare, 37, who has two young children. “It’s a very exciting and sexy way for me to get a chance to do my bit.”

On this trip, Hare and her comrades will set out to lay the groundwork for programs that could help the local Miskito Indian population make money as they preserve and sustain their natural habitat. Their hope is that, by offering such a reward, they can create an incentive to conserve.

In particular, the students and instructors will develop plans for a for-profit butterfly farm where exotic butterflies could be bred for sale to artists and collectors. They will survey the types of butterflies that are prevalent, take note of which plants they eat and of which predators eat them.

Ideally, when the group returns it will have enough information to compile what Priest calls an “owner’s manual” for the farm, complete with a list of potential markets for the butterflies. That manual will be sent to a Honduran Christian organization called MOPAWI, or Mosquitia Pawisa Desarrollo del la Mosquitia, which is helping organize the trip.

Students will also study the pros and cons of creating an eco-tourism industry, which would lure paying visitors to see unspoiled areas or to participate in projects to help the local people. And, at MOPAWI’s request, the students will seek out any medicinal plants native to the region that could be good candidates for export.

They’ll have nearly three weeks “in country” to accomplish their goals. Their accommodations in the forest will be so bare-bones, however, that they expect to learn as much about survival as about their study topics.

Half the group will be stationed at a preserve near the Rio Platano in northeastern Honduras. MOPAWI officials, who are communicating with Priest by fax machine, have sent word to try to prepare their visitors for the trip.

“We’ll be sleeping on floors in a house built on stilts,” it said. “Sanitary arrangements are poor. There is access to a pit latrine. And water from a well. One washes either standing by the well or taking a bucket of water into a shower room. No electricity.”

The other students will do their work near a coastal village called Raya, just north of the Nicaraguan border, in a region known as “Zona Recuperada.” The facilities there, by comparison, are luxurious--bunk beds, running water, gas stove. But there, as at the other site, the nation’s poverty will demand that the group be aware of their relative wealth and aim to be as unobtrusive as possible.

And then there is the weather to be contended with.

“The rainy season came late this year, so expect mud when you arrive,” Andrew Leake, a MOPAWI official, wrote to Priest. “Temperature will be around 30 degrees centigrade (85 degrees Fahrenheit) and humidity will be in the upper 90s. . . . Common natural processes: riverine flooding, hurricane (October), 4,500 millimeters annual rainfall.”

In light of these factors, Wullner, Priest and their students consider themselves lucky that they will be accompanied on their adventure by two horticulturists from the San Diego Zoo, Danny Simpson and Mike Bostwick. Simpson and Bostwick have weathered similar treks to Papua New Guinea, and, on a recent evening, they dispensed with a little advice.

“You’re going to be most vulnerable to malaria at night,” Simpson said, displaying the mosquito netting and insect repellent that will be among the most important items in the travelers’ backpacks.

“Take an Ace bandage with you--for snake bites, they come in handy,” said Bostwick, who also recommended packing a poncho and clothing with pockets.

In recent weeks, as they prepare to blaze an academic trail into the jungle, Priest and Wullner have also been turning their attention to the future.

Has Therapy for a Dying Planet been a one-time experiment, an aberration in the usually classroom-bound curriculum? Not if the instructors can raise funds--from grants or local institutions--by mid-1992, they say.

Priest and Wullner say that, if they can win a National Science Foundation grant or rustle up some other support, they will teach the course again in a heartbeat. Priest is presenting the class to his employer, the San Diego Zoological Society, with hopes for increased financial support.

“Zoos have long been viewed as consumers, but that role is starting to change,” Priest said, adding that, in his mind, the Therapy for a Dying Planet project is a natural extension of the zoo’s stated goals. With the January trip, he points out, “We are going into a country with no other agenda than conservation.”

“This is the way of the future,” Priest said. “Five years from now, if we can keep the project alive, I envision that we’ll have projects around the world--Australia, New Guinea, Tahiti, South America. It would be an opportunity for students to pick and choose their area of interest.”

And, once they have made up their minds, Priest said, those students will enjoy the same adventure that he is preparing for now: learning by doing.

“It’s not just reading a book,” he said. “You’ve actually experienced it.”