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Conservation Efforts in Nicaragua Shed Portable Light on the Pacific Coast

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Unique solar technology aids Paso Pacifico in protecting endangered sea turtles

Media Contacts:

Wendy Purnell, Paso Pacifico
1-805-643-7044
wendy@pasopacifico.org

Sheila Kennedy, Portable Light Project
1-617-442-0800
skennedy@kvarch.net

It was a chance meeting at PopTech’s annual innovation conference two years ago that sparked collaboration between California-based NGO Paso Pacífico and the Portable Light Project. At the event, Paso Pacífico Executive Director, Dr. Sarah Otterstrom, and Portable Light Project founder, Sheila Kennedy, met for the first time and considered the implications that the project’s simple, solar-powered textiles could have on Paso Pacifico’s conservation efforts in Nicaragua.

Now, just as PopTech convenes again this week, Paso Pacífico announces its launch of Portable Light technology to support the protection of endangered sea turtles and to advance young women as environmental leaders in Nicaragua.

While Portable Light Project systems have been used to benefit social and human health causes in rural areas of Mexico and Africa, Paso Pacifico takes the technology in a new direction. Utilizing locally made bags that incorporate the pliable, light-producing solar panels, the lights enable communities to protect wildlife, and also empower women in sustainable tourism and education. Sheila Kennedy notes, “This is a brilliant three-in-one design that demonstrates how mobile, clean energy can enable education, local economic development, and mitigate climate change.”

Paso Pacifico’s community rangers patrol sea turtle nesting beaches using a Portable Light equipped with a red light adapter designed by Kennedy and her team. In addition to illuminating the darkness, the bags solve a number of challenges that the rangers face. Each bag has the ability to charge cell phones, which allow those on patrol to communicate with each other and local authorities. Their use of renewable energy also eliminates wasted batteries, while providing a durable and sustainable safety measure to rangers working at night. With Portable Lights, local rangers can patrol deserted beaches, deterring poachers who would otherwise devastate imperiled species such as the Hawksbill turtle.

Paso Pacífico also aims to empower young women and girls who have historically been excluded from opportunities for environmental leadership. Paso Pacifico is providing training to young women to work as eco-tourism guides. Portable light will motivate and empower these guides as they lead sea turtle and other evening tours.

Women and girls participating in Paso Pacifico environmental education programs are also burdened with many household chores and are only able to study in the evenings. Portable Lights will be given to young girls who are eager to progress in their learning, but who live in areas without electricity. This initiative to empower women while mitigating climate change is part of the Paso Pacifico Commitment announced at the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative by Nobel Laureate Mohammed Yunus.

Kennedy summed it up when she said, “Individually owned, each bag is a portable clean power platform which expands the impacts of local conservation, that charges cell phones, provides renewable light at night for community based education and builds approaches to conservation that empower women in resource protection and sustainable enterprise development.”

Paso Pacífico is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization based in Ventura, California that works to protect Central America’s Pacific slope ecosystems. The non-profit implements projects in environmental education, sustainable agriculture, forest restoration and wildlife conservation. For more information, visit www.pasopacifico.org
The Portable Light Projectenables the world’s poorest people to create and own solar textiles, providing clean energy and light to improve education, health care and economic development, while strengthening the local craft traditions of diverse cultures and global regions. For more information, visit www.portablelight.organd to view a video of Portable Lights visit http://blip.tv/play/AfmVbI7+Bg

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This bittersweet story of a romantic marriage proposal with unintended consequences for marine life, is a good illustration of why Paso Pacifico Turtle Rangers have custom-designed red lights on their solar FLAP bags from the Portable Light Project.

A romantic marriage proposal on a Hilton Head Island beach Tuesday night had an unintended consequence — the death of about 60 federally protected loggerhead sea turtle hatchlings.

A man had placed about 150 luminarias — bags with a lit candle inside — in the shape of a heart on the beach near Palmetto Dunes, according to volunteers with the Sea Turtle Project who monitor the nests.

After the proposal, the visiting couple apparently retired to their rental home without extinguishing the lights. An estimated 60 baby sea turtles emerged from a nearby nest a short time later and became disoriented.

Story via Ocean Sentry.

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We look forward to attending the Clinton Global Initiative later this month where we’ll be recognized for our work empowering women and supporting sustainable agriculture.

A relatively young organization founded by women, we launched our environmental programs in communities throughout the Rivas province of Nicaragua, with no thought for the gender of our participants. Over time it has become apparent that the success of Paso Pacifico’s projects hinges on the generous participation and concentrated effort of the women in various communities where we work.
For example, for two years Paso Pacifico has worked to mitigate climate-change by planting over a quarter of a million native trees. Tree nurseries were established by the community at large, but it was the women who developed techniques to germinate the seeds of rare trees, continuously weeded the seedlings, and who carefully planted the trees to avoid root damage. This reduction in greenhouse gases is the direct result of the actions of women.
Last year, Paso Pacifico initiated a program to train rural community tour guides. When the program began, the young women in the group lacked the confidence to speak publicly, but over time they proved to be more active in training activities than their male counterparts. Today, the young women are excellent guides and are poised to build a successful eco-tourism business. Other rural women who own fledgling eco-tourism businesses such as hostels, private reserves, and restaurants are also eager to strengthen their entrepenuerial skills.
Paso Pacifico also provides training and materials for gardens that include fruit trees and diverse vegetable crops. Women have been the ones to take advantage of these efforts and have been successful enough that there is now an opportunity for excess crops to be sold for profit. Empowering women to earn income from sustainable agriculture will ensure benefits for the environment and communities.
To leverage our resources and ensure the continued success of our mission, we have begun to shift our focus to directly benefit women and strengthen their role in our programs. We have also begun to raise awareness that organizations and movements, at multiple political and social scales, benefit from the leadership and dedicated work of women.

As stewards of scarce natural resources, educators of a globally-conscious generation, and entrepreneurs driving local business, the women of rural Nicaragua play a pivotal role in the future of their region. We strengthen Nicaraguan women and girls as leaders in environmental sustainability by introducing new technology and market-based approaches in resource protection and sustainable development. We also build capacity through education and training in sustainable tourism, resource management, and organizational leadership.

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We’re pleased to be joining forces with the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Leon (UNAN-Leon) in Nicaragua. We’ll be working together to do conservation work, conduct research, and provide internship opportunities for students.

To celebrate our new partnership, they’re joining us to help coordinate Nicaragua’s 2nd annual International Coastal Cleanup Day, covering 12 km of beaches along the Pacific coast.

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Paso Pacifico and the Red de Reservas Silvestres Privadas have officially joined forces to help to guide our partnership and strengthen Paso Pacifico’s commitment to supporting the Private Reserve Network.

We are very fortunate to be partnering with such a valuable organization and its members.

Please check out the website for the Red de Reservas Silvestres Privadas when you have a chance. You will be amazed at how the membership has grown!

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We are thrilled that our partners at the Portable Light Project are INDEX Award finalists. The INDEX Award is one of the most significant awards for designs that improve life.

We’ve just put our new solar FLAP bags from the Portable Light Project to work in the field.

Sloan Kuyper from the Portable Light Project
teaches turtle rangers about his team’s product.
Turtle Rangers at La Flor
show off their new solar FLAP bags.

These solar FLAP bags each have a red light adapter for night time monitoring of important turtle nesting beaches. The red light units, custom designed to replace white light for our turtle rangers, allow us to patrol the beaches at night without disorienting the turtle hatchlings who rely on moonlight to guide them to sea.

These adaptable solar textile kits enable people with no access to electricity to use traditional weaving and sewing techniques to create clothing, blankets, and bags that harvest energy from sunlight. Weighing only 340 grams, a 4-watt solar textile can easily be carried and charges in 3 hours, corresponding to 8 hours of light.

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In Nicaragua, Portable Light in a locally made pack enables villagers to have light for community education and work at night as conservationists protecting turtle nests. In South Africa, tuberculosis/HIV patients can use Portable Light in a blanket to generate power for their families as they are cured by exposure to sunlight. The ability to charge cell phones with Portable Light enables people to benefit from connectivity to mobile technology that is transforming health care, business, and education in the developing world. Renewable light extends useful time at night, creating unprecedented opportunities to study and work to improve household incomes. Family health is improved by reducing the need to burn fuels for light, reducing deforestation, and kin can link solar textiles in a clean energy network for community projects.”

This new application of technology is helping us create local jobs in conservation, enabling Nicaraguans to put their expertise to use for the betterment of global biodiversity.

Please cast your vote to help the Portable Light Project win the People’s Choice Award.

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NOVA: Hunting the Hidden Dimension

Paso Pacifico founder, ecologist Sarah Otterstrom,
ponders our carbon sequestration projects.

Bill Enquist, a plant ecologist at the University of Arizona, is using fractals to further understanding of forests and how they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to help regulating the Earth’s climate. Enquist and his team of scientists are working in forest reserves in the Guanacaste Province in Costa Rica, which borders the area where we work in Rivas, Nicaragua. Their explorations of trees and forests is fascinating, and has a lot of implications for our Return to Forest project to mitigate climate change a few miles north.

BRIAN ENQUIST: If you look at the xforest, it, basically, breathes. And if we understand the total amount of carbon dioxide that’s coming into these trees within this forest, we can then better understand how this forest then, ultimately, regulates the total amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
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CHRISTINA LAMANNA (Santa Fe Institute): So, if we know the amount of carbon dioxide that one leaf is able to take in, then, hopefully, using the fractal branching rule, we can know how much carbon dioxide the entire tree is taking in
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BRIAN ENQUIST: We’re going to census this forest. We’re going to be measuring the diameter at the base of the trees, ranging all the way from the largest trees down to the smallest trees. And in that way we can then sample the distribution of sizes within the forest.
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NARRATOR: Even though the forest may appear random and chaotic, the team believes it actually has a structure, one that, amazingly, is almost identical to the fractal structure of the tree they have just cut down.

JAMES BROWN: The beautiful thing is that the distribution of the sizes of individual trees in the forest appears to exactly match the distribution of the sizes of individual branches within a single tree.
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BRIAN ENQUIST: By analyzing the fractal patterns within the forest, that then enables us to do something that we haven’t really been able to do before: have, then, a mathematical basis to then predict how the forest as a whole takes in carbon dioxide. And ultimately, that’s important for understanding what may happen with global climate change.
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NARRATOR: For generations, scientists believed that the wildness of nature could not be defined by mathematics. But fractal geometry is leading to a whole new understanding, revealing an underlying order governed by simple mathematical rules.

GEOFFREY WEST: What I thought of in my hikes through forests, that, you know, it’s just a bunch of trees of different sizes, big ones here, small ones there, looking like it’s sort of some arbitrary chaotic mess, actually has an extraordinary structure.

NARRATOR: A structure that can be mapped out and measured using fractal geometry.

BRIAN ENQUIST: What’s absolutely amazing is that you can translate what you see in the natural world in the language of mathematics. And I can’t think of anything more beautiful than that.

Read the full transcript or order the DVD on the NOVA website at PBS.org.

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We’re getting excited to welcome our friends from the Portable Light Project to Nicaragua. They’re bringing customized solar FLAP units for use on the turtle nesting beaches.

These special units, created just for us, will be mounted to these bags (pictured at right). Each unit will emit a red light, rather than a white light, to ensure that they don’t disorient turtle hatchlings who follow the moonlight to sea.

We’re grateful to Sheila Kennedy, whom we met at Pop!Tech last year, for her work designing these, and her team for their help orchestrating this project.

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Yesterday was a good day. We recovered the stolen turtle transmitter without police intervention. This, of course, is partly due to the fact that the stolen device was still transmitting its location. Fortunately, though, we also had conflict resolution training and experience on our side. Once our staff explained the transmitter’s value for conservation and for sea turtles, the device was returned. Everyone is at peace and we have our $3000 satellite transmitter to affix to Karen again — or perhaps to another turtle.

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