Growing Dedication to Rain Forest Ideal : Volunteers Head to Costa Rica to Help UC Irvine Professor’s Restoration Project

While many in Orange County are contemplating or embarked on conventional summer vacations, or wondering whether they can afford them at all, a group of volunteers for researchers at the University of California is actually paying for the privilege of working hard, planting and monitoring seedlings and studying the soil in Costa Rica.

If these visitors to the depleted rain forest need inspiration, they have it in a remarkable UC Irvine ecology professor, Frances Lynn Carpenter, who bought 63 acres of degraded cattle pasture land and is fueled herself by a dream, restoring some of the decimated earth as part of her extended experiment. She hopes to prevent further destruction of rain forests and perhaps lead the way for local farmers to invest quickly and economically in trees and reap a cash crop of hardwood.

It is fashionable enough to be in favor of rain forests nowadays, but to actually lend one’s free time and go at personal expense to the front lines requires a special kind of commitment.

These volunteers, some of whom reported to Coto Brutus in the southwest of Costa Rica near the Panamanian border last week, were moved to lend their energies to the project by various motives. But their special blend of idealism and pragmatism represents a welcome change in attitudes in an area where destruction of the land goes back decades. Their work holds the possibility of providing an alternative for local farmers.

Carpenter’s commitment is on an especially high level; she has redesigned her career and gone out on a limb financially to bring extra meaning to the academic commitment to teaching and research that she already had.

In this manner, the research component of a local university has taken on a special significance for one professor, and provided especially meaningful vacation plans for participating volunteers.