13/08/2026
Costa Rica has had a lasting effect on me.
We travelled there at a strange moment for me personally. Events following the earthquakes in Venezuela had unfolded just before we left, and with so much of my family history, identity and sense of home tied to that part of the world, I was conscious of the privilege of being away with my family while people elsewhere in the region were living through something very different.
Perhaps that made me more attentive while I was there.
One of the things I noticed again and again was the relationship people seemed to have with the natural world.
Costa Rica is astonishingly beautiful, of course. Forest, ocean, wildlife, volcanoes, extraordinary biodiversity everywhere you look.
What interested me just as much was the sense of care around it.
There seemed to be a pride in protecting what belongs to everyone. In understanding the ecosystems around them. In treating nature as something you are part of and have a responsibility towards.
I learned that this relationship is cultivated from childhood. Environmental education and sustainable development are embedded through Costa Rica’s education system, with children learning about biodiversity, conservation, sustainability and their relationship with the natural world from an early age.
And it made me think about something much bigger.
We tend to care for what we have learned to notice.
If children grow up learning the names of things, understanding how ecosystems depend on one another and recognising that their own choices have consequences, perhaps stewardship becomes less of an initiative and more of a way of seeing.
(Continued in comments)
