Reflecting on Ecuador

One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, 'What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?'
-Rachel Carson


I just read this quote and realized this is exactly how I felt during my time in Ecuador.  Already a month has passed since I left Ecuador, and it is starting to feel like ages ago.  Sometimes I feel like it wasn't real.  I am trying to find ways to make sure that my experiences and everything I learned there stay alive in my life.  I am back at the same apartment, same job, same school, but I don't want things to be the same here after this trip.  Everything there was new and different, and I constantly felt more aware than I typically do here.  Although I would love to go back, I knew the whole time that it could be my first and last experience in Ecuador, in the cloud forest, in the rainforest, in the Andes.  I think that this 'eye opening' was one of the most valuable effects of my trip there.  It has been difficult at times to 'readjust' to life here in the US, but I think that is a really good thing, being forced to reevaluate everything here with a new perspective.  I hope that in sharing bits of my experience with other people, it can help them open their eyes a little too.  If anyone has any question about my experience there, I am more than happy to talk about it.  But I would recommend to anyone reading this to go out and have their own eye opening experience too.  And also to try to take Rachel Carson's approach anywhere, even if it may not feel new.


Flying over Miami on my way home, it looked like there were roads and buildings on every square inch of land.  It made me wonder what has been lost; what will never be seen there again.  Being in Yasuni, a biodiversity hotspot, made extinction rates that much more real. So many plant and animal species no longer exist, primarily due to habitat destruction.  Some extinction is natural, but human population levels and activities are causing astronomical extinction rates.  Habitat destruction is largely done by human hands, or man-made machines.  I'm reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring right now, describing the horrific poisoning of wildlife, plant life, and humans.  Carson was seeing this back in the 60s; I can't imagine the effects of the chemicals we are dumping into the environment now.  The tragedy isn't the fact that we will never see certain things again, but instead the ripple effects of these losses.  Every loss has side effects that we can't, or choose not to foresee.


I don't know if all this will make sense, but it's what has been on my mind recently.

View from Cotopaxi

From Sunday River, Maine