Adventures in Ectural: Clear Nights, Beautiful Places Juliet Dana

Tonight is the first clear night, it feels like, in forever. Actually, thats not true and I know it. By some miracle, despite two straight weeks of rain, the clouds took a break for a few hours on the night of the full moon, long enough for us to drop our clothes at the beginning of the trail above our field camp and dance through the pramo at 12,000 feet. In gratitude, in celebration of a semester calling this place our home: we ran, the smiles of a million stars bouncing off our bare bodies, the brilliance of a gigantic moon catching in our hair, the red mud splashing beneath our rubber boots (the only thing we wore), our laughter echoing for miles, it seemed, along the eastern cordillera of the Ecuadorian Andes. To be precise, tonight is the third clear night in forever. Five nights ago, I streaked this high-alpine, tropical version of the Midwestern prairies that raised me. Two nights ago, the stars kept me company as I lay awake in a traditional Andean home after a full day of experiencing subsistence farming and flourishing on a steep, denuded slope. Tonight, the frogs call back and forth as I sit and write and begin to reflect. I have adventured in some breathtakingly beautiful places already in my short life, mainly on wilderness canoe trips in northern Minnesota and Canada, but most recently a summer in the Himalayas and now (what would be fall) in the highlands of Ecuador. I am currently a student on the Round River Conservation Studies program, working with the Fundacin Cordillera Tropical to understand the biology and geography of this region, adding my research to the slowly accumulating body of knowledge and fueling my fervor for this kind of service. Conservation was a rather amorphous concept to me, something I believed in the way I believe in hip replacements or bypass surgery. Without understanding, I generically trusted that, like a new hip joint, conservation could make possible a future that was otherwise bleak. My concept of conservation was linked to the preservation of the wild places I have run through, limited, really, to vast landscapes that speak to me in their greatness and uninterruption. Yet the last six months have had me opening my eyes, getting out of my canoe and looking at land where real people plow and plant and ponder and pray. These lands, too, take my breath away. They speak to me in their realities, their challenges, their lack of protection from, well, everything.

In the Andes I have run naked, I have milked cows, I have counted frogs and captured birds and castrated alpacas. I have written scientific papers, sent letters home, scattered seeds. Here, I have experienced fullness of life on a landscape scale, in a synthesized way not present to me in other places. In the Andes and in the Himalayas, conservation is more complicated than setting aside a tract of land surrounded by park guards and toll-takers. My conception of conserving this land has broadened from requiring a large space where I might lose myself for days, to finding an equilibrium point between the needs of the kind, hard-working people who live here and the ancient land they manipulate. Perhaps this is conservation: a place where I can still hear the frogs in the evening the Pristimantis riveti marking his territory and alerting the ladies with a peep and wake up to the DJ bird, the Plain-tailed Wren mixing and remixing it up from the tops of the Weinmannia trees at the forest edge. A place where I can run under the full moon through a grasscape that has nurtured humans for ten thousand years, where I must remember to be vigilant of that spiny, armored beast of a plant the Puya clava-herculis that threatens to pierce me unapologetically if I get too close. A place where the Colepatu and Huarapongo communities may continue to find food and send all of their children to school without compromising the same places where food and shelter is sought by bears and beetles and bamboo. A place we can still call beautiful, on rainy and clear nights. Terry Tempest Williams writes, We can create beauty through the dailiness of our lives, standing our ground in the places we love. To me, this is the heart of conservation. All places are beautiful where we find a way to embrace our land, living and leading by example, showing our passion and protection at the same time. I have come to understand that conservation here in the Andes will look different than in Minnesota; the land holds a different history, the people hold a different idea of daily life. But the same moon shines down on me tonight on the equator as on my family in the heartland, and we all struggle to find the equilibrium. Clear nights and rainy nights, these places are beautiful; they are conserved if we take responsibility for ourselves, if we remain a part of our landscapes, stand our ground, celebrate the skies.

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