Environmental Adventure Tests Student Ideals

Tonight, while other San Diegans are seeking out the rowdiest party to ring in 1992, 11 San Diego State University students and graduates 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 today, the travelers 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 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 motivate people 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.

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. They studied examples of “win-win” strategies designed to help communities to preserve valuable habitats and their own economic health at the same time.

Through 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 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 (something) that I may have had a role in getting started,” said Hare, 37, who has two young children. “It’s a very exciting . . . 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 the Miskitos could breed exotic butterflies for sale to artists and collectors. The students 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 to 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. 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, 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 via fax machine, have sent word to try to prepare their visitors for the trip.

“Will 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.

Then there is the weather.

“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 mm (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.

“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.”

Once they had made up their minds, Priest said, those students of the future would enjoy the same adventure he’s preparing for now: learning by doing. “It’s not just reading a book,” he said. “You’ve actually experienced it.”