Expedition: Bonaire
Many people working in the conservation field are hobbled by “do more with less” syndrome: long hours, low pay, and so many issues to work on. Finding time for continuing professional education in the field is tough. If you are working in conservation on a small island in the middle of the ocean, it’s way tougher.
Yet islands and other remote natural places are the last-best places of the world. Places of such heart-stopping beauty and unique experience that their power just can’t be crammed into the small flat screen of a phone. Bucket list places that so many of us want to visit and experience, that make your heart jump just to think about exploring them. Places that are often the last refuges for unique wildlife and cultures. Shouldn’t we make the extra effort to empower, educate and generally support the people who are caring for these natural places and everything in them?
Yes.
Sure there’s the internet for professional education. But nothing is a more powerful agent of change than authentic personal communication that conveys passion and power and optimism for the future. Nothing is more inspiring to hear than “tell me what you are dealing with and let’s figure it out some solutions together.” So much of leadership is based in personal relationships and trust. So much of conservation is based in local circumstances.
So we went to Bonaire. In keeping with one of Institute’s guiding concepts - seeking unfilled needs in conservation and filling them - we developed the Women Making Waves for Nature workshops and took them to Bonaire in 2018 and 2019. Bringing laptops and passion and listening and brainstorming.
We taught three basic level workshops and one advanced workshop for women working in conservation. This was the kick-off of the Women Making Waves for Nature program.
And what a kick-off. A total of 42 women participated in one or more workshops. We had women born on Bonaire, women who had immigrated to Bonaire from the Netherlands, the US, Colombia and other countries, and women who came over from the nearby islands of Curacao and Aruba just for the workshops. We had women with formal training and women with none. We had conservation leaders and community leaders - all talking together and working together. We had inspiration shaking the roof and the biggest bucket of that inspiration came not from us, the instructors, but from the women who were charged up by seeing so many colleagues and new friends ready to make waves. They returned to their work and their communities with new ideas, new skills, new connections and better understandings of each other to work toward sustainability on Bonaire.
“Thank you very much for leading such a great seminar!”
- Isabel Cristina Fernández Manjarrés
Isabel, gracias a ti por la inspiracion.
Of course, the women of Bonaire are not the only inspiration on this island. The landscape and oceanscape is close and ever present on a small island.
Why Start on Bonaire?
Building on the Institute’s previous international project on Bonaire, contacts there in the conservation community and a culture of strong women, Bonaire was a compelling place to start.
While much of the Caribbean’s nature has been highly altered by tourism, development, intense hurricanes and invasive species, Bonaire has been protecting its nature, both on land and in the ocean, for many years. So the ecosystems there are in good condition, relative to many other places in the Caribbean. It also lies outside the main hurricane belt meaning that hurricane damage to reefs, forests and other habitats is minimal and those habitats remain largely healthy. Which is handy, because Bonaire is also strategically situated at the initiation of large Caribbean basin currents that distribute that healthy bounty to constantly replenish other reefs and fisheries. In sum, the natural health and wealth of Bonaire’s nature serve as a source of thousands of natives species to restore other less well conserved terrestrial and marine ecosystems in the Caribbean.
Recently however, development pressure has intensified. The population of the island is expanding rapidly, as is mass tourism from cruise ships.
Read more about the importance of Bonaire’s reefs at Scientific American.
