The earth turns to gold in the hands of the wise-Rumi, Persian mystic

My intent was to write a piece on the changing seasons. After all, it is a great time to see how your land survived the 10 feet of rain, decide whether you really want to water all those plants all summer long and begin to plan for the next possible deluge.

It was hard to concentrate. The sound of ‘bombas' from down the road announced that the fiestas of Las Delicias were entering their final day. Bulls were being rounded up in the pasture across the street. Cars whizzed by with boisterous partiers, ready for yet another round. When the seasons change in Guanacaste, the trees might lose their leaves and some animals hang out in holes. But the cultural roots are deep. The human inhabitants freshen up their foliage and hit the fiestas.

Wikipedia informs that, in fact, the word culture comes from the root "to cultivate." OK, pura vida, I'll drop the garden article and pontificate a bit about culture. Further research turned up one author who identified at least 152 separate working definitions of what ‘culture' actually means. "Ooops," it occurred then, "what about the 14 hr. deadline....?"

There are many schools of thought as to what shapes culture: who owns the means of production, it derives from the economy or  from the environment in which it evolves, the amount of energy consumed, etc. Scores of doctoral theses have been written and defended on the subject. Let's don't go there. Let's go back to the fiestas, at least in theory. For one thing, how did the cattle get here in the first place?

Contrary to popular opinion, globalization was not invented by Thomas Friedman. The Spaniards were in Central America five centuries ago figuring out how to get resources back to the motherland and the colonists fed so as to keep their empire going. Cattle had the distinct advantage of being able to transport themselves to market, whether in Guatemala or wherever there was demand for meat and leather from Guanacaste. Transport was an issue and refrigerated containers were not an option.

So the "cattle culture" developed, in a certain environment, economy and epoch. If you throw in the human desire to get together, party and give young men a chance to strut their manly stuff to young women, you end up with an enduring tradition. As the underlying cattle economy gives way to a tourism economy the fiestas still ‘work', they provide an entertainment magnet for visitors, even if the underlying conditions have changed. The shift of the local economy away from agriculture to tourism and construction has even fostered changes in cattle raising. Two of my neighbors who used to manage dairy herds and sell fresh milk and cheese, now have bulls for the fiestas.

In stark contrast to the local food movement, this shift is a move from sustenance to silliness. How long before the downturn in tourism and constructions affects the cash flow around the bullring? Students of the decline of civilizations have noticed a pattern. When the daily bread starts getting scarce, the fun, games and sophistication of culture come in a distant second to the primacy of eking out subsistence.

Nonetheless, equally important to the cattle based ‘form' of the fiestas is the interpersonal communication ‘substance' that takes place. Long before the Internet provided us with online chat rooms, the fiestas served as nodes of communication, managing to bring people together from far and wide to renew relationships, gossip, transact business and exchange information on making their living off the land. Far from the bulls and disco infernos you'll hear conversations about the last cropping season, best time to plant new live fence posts, where to find fruits that you never see in the markets and who still has seeds for crops that used to be grown but are now hard to find.

Foreigners-tourists and residents alike-whose experience of Guanacaste culture is limited to the fiestas, horse parades and bailes tipicas are at best simply scratching the surface of life in our province. Worse, they are largely blind to the original foundation of the cultural pyramid-local food production. And worst, they are missing out on secrets from the past that may well come in handy in a not-so-certain and perhaps, not-so-distant future.

As renowned gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote in 1825, "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are." Well in that case the locals are ‘maiceros'- ‘corn-people'-a derogatory term connoting ‘hillbillies', or ‘country bumpkins." They plant it, store it, and prepare it in dozens of ways. Corn has been an important part of the diet for something like 10,000 years in greater Meso-America. And that is without hybrid seed, chisel plows and a steady stream of fossil fuel based inputs whose future abundance is increasingly in doubt. It is unlikely that even given another millennium humans could come up with a more efficient-and sustainable--way of getting calories out of our soil in this region.

And it is not just corn you can hear about at fiestas. I heard the names of 12 different kinds of beans that used to be grown just in our valley. A friend located seeds for "arroz chino", an old kind of rice that takes flooding, perfect for part of his land. With the recent upsurge in food prices, many neighbors got back to work, tilling the land, growing grains and refurbishing a keystone of the culture that has not disappeared under the sands of time.

These "hicks" have a distinct advantage over their North American neighbors in the coming economic downturn. Numerous commentators in the US have remarked that the last Depression encountered lots of people still living on the land and making-do during the hard times. Furthermore, plenty of people still knew how to grow food, sharpen knives, butcher a chicken, split kindling and cook over fires. If there still exist home economics courses in the US, I guarantee you they don't teach home canning and salting away pork to cure it. Popping store-bought pizzas and cookie dough into the microwave would be about the most to expect.

Graduates of the fast food nation school of cuisine may find themselves ill prepared for a resource-diminished future that is now even predicted by staid academicians employed by agencies of the US government. Returning to the question of culture, how do you restore, renew or regenerate what has been lost, in the case of the US, for generations?

Restoring some resilience to a local food culture in Guanacaste is so much easier. The land base is available, the knowledge is here and plenty of people are still accustomed to hard physical labor. The foreign residents can play an important role by seeking out and patronizing local growers, buying locally produced eggs and dairy products, thereby increasing local demand to help spur production.

Those of us concerned about issues of sustainability have our work cut out, raising questions and exploring alternatives to the methods used by many producers. Apt is the motto at the farm project in a nearby development: "respecting the past, sowing the future."  The task is one of both identifying the old and developing new threads of sustainability, hoping that time will provide the appropriate conditions to create a new cultural icon, to weave a new tapestry of permanence on the landscape we call home.

Tom Peifer is an ecological land use consultant with 14 years experience in Guanacaste. Phone: 2658-8018.  peifer@racsa.co.cr

El Centro Verde is dedicated to sustainable land use, agriculture and development. Web site: http://www.elcentroverde.org/