For the students of the Wooster Summer in Ecuador program, the summer never really ended.† After their experience in Ecuador, the student participants have been inspired to take what they learned and give back to The College of Wooster community.
Led by Dr. Lyn Loveless, professor of biology, the Wooster Summer in Ecuador program consisted of a course in the spring of 2010 focusing on conservation biology in the tropics.
Topics of study included development issues in Ecuador, resource conservation, biodiversity and natural habitat protection.
In the summer, the class spent three weeks in Ecuador, visiting several different locations, including Quito, the Intag Cloud Forest Reserve and Santa Rosa.
When the students returned to campus in the fall of 2010, they reunited for an Ecuadorian dinner.
Afterwards, they were inspired to plan a campus-wide dinner to share their own experiences and teach the campus community about conservation efforts in Ecuador.
The students hope to host the dinner some time this coming April, and they are currently planning it with the business office and the Ambassadors program.
They would like to make the dinner a fundraiser for a conservation group in Ecuador, but are still exploring different options and organizations.
Ideally, the dinner would be held in the same time frame as two upcoming seminars featuring speakers with knowledge of Ecuadorian conservation efforts.
One speaker is Rudy Geliss, an ornithologist that traveled with the group in Ecuador, and the other is Douglas McMeekin, founder of the Yachana Foundation, an organization that works to provide education and options for sustainable living in the Amazon region of Ecuador.
In addition to hosting the dinner and speakers, the students will decorate the Lowry art wall the week before spring break.
The art wall will feature pictures and insights from their trip, as well as information about conservation organizations and efforts in Ecuador, such as the Yasuni Initiative.
According to Sarah Uschak ’11, this initiative allows people to buy carbon credits in order to prevent the extraction of oil in Ecuador.
The students visited the Yasuni National Park during their field experience.
The students also plan to host screenings of several films that they watched during their class.
If they can obtain the rights to the film, the next screening will be of “Under Rich Earth,” a film about copper mining in Ecuador.
Last Wednesday the students screened “Crude,” a documentary about a lawsuit filed by some Ecuadorians against the oil company Chevron. The students saw much of the damage portrayed in the film firsthand.
“All of the damage, oh it was horrible, in their backyards, in the riversÖWe saw the flare pits from the oil refineries, we could even see in some places oily, rainbow looking water and it was really apparent that these people were being so negatively influenced by the oil companies coming in,” said Uschak.
For Uschak, the film and her field experience also shed light on another significant effect of oil companies in Ecuador: they have caused division among the Ecuadorian people.
Some Ecuadorian citizens support the oil companies because they bring in jobs, education and medical care, while others oppose the companies because of the harm they cause to the natural environment and the health risk they pose to Ecuadorian people.
As the experiences of the students show, understanding conservation efforts requires both a biological and a cultural lens.