In June of 2004 I joined the Bielenberg Institute at the Edge of the Earth for Project M. Six designers headed out for the Guanacaste Province in the northwest corner of Costa Rica. With the highly esteemed Dan Jansen as our guide we set out to save this fragile ecosystem.

 

 

 

It turned out to be the wettest week in the past twenty years.

 

 

For Ten days we slugged through the Rain to discover the truest Nature of the place, and to find a way that we might save this endangered landscape. We felt as though we were part of something much larger than ourselves.

 

 

The ACG, or the Area De Guanacaste, is the single largest preserved Tropical Dryforest on the Planet. In the Tropics, it was the Dryforest that was deforested first by man. This land had seen the livestock of the Incas.

 

 

Through the effort of Dan Jansen over the past thirty-five years the area has grown to become not only a milestone for Conservation and Preservation, but for management practices and Education.

 

 

We became involved as designers because the area, and Dan, desperately needed our help for creating a lasting promational piece to encourage future endowments.

 

 

 

In Liberia we gained access to a world wholly unlike our own.It also allowed for the opportunity for many of us to practice our Spanish.

 

It was nearly a constant strem of amazement as we discovered the largely rural community. A far cry from strip malls, McMansions and Cul-de-Sacs.

 

 

 

 

A lonely picturesque horse waiting beneath a tree in what turned out to be the very best advertising that I have ever come across, for we did indeed stop.

 

Dan Jansen is an encyclopedia of knowledge about every aspect of the area. After three decades in the bush he and his partner Winnie would call no other place home.

 

 

This is one amazing sunset taken from Playa Grande on one our last days there, the clouds are beginning to break.

 

 

The infamous Witch's Rock.

 

 

A game of Futball in a town square on the way up to the Volcano.

 

 

High in the mountains Dan shows us one of his research stations where he tirelessly studies the evolution and life cycles of caterpillars.