Swine flu fever

I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but here in Santa Cruz swine flu hysteria is everywhere. A couple of weeks ago they closed down all the places where groups could congregate, like movie theatres and clubs. I had to wait two whole weeks to see Harry Potter (and all that anticipation made it even more disappointing), and when I did finally get to see it this weekend, they tried to hand me a face mask and force hand sanitizer on me as I walked in the theatre. People are walking around everywhere with face masks, I feel like I’m in some overblown epidemic movie.

Assuming that swine flu doesn’t get me in the next 24 hours, I am heading out for my last big trip to the field. Tomorrow we go to Comarapa, an area where Natura has begun working with a few communities. The way that Natura applies Payments for Environmental Services in the field is that they create a fund, with contributions from the municipality and from Natura, along with funding that comes from a small percentage added to the water bill of the downstream water users – the idea is that over time it will be fully funded by the water users who are benefiting from the conservation. With this fund, upstream land users are compensated based on the number of hectares they conserve. In Los Negros, where I visited my second week here, landowners are compensated with bee boxes and training in apiculture. The idea is that they are compensated with a project that reinforces the goal of conservation, and is a long-term income-generating investment. In each area where Natura works, they meet with the communities to decide what project is most appropriate to serve as compensation – fruit trees, sustainable timber extraction, etc. In Comarapa, where I am going tomorrow, the work is a little different, but the idea is the same – that the fund is used to pay for the provision of environmental services. The water fund has been used there to buy certain tracts of land that are important to conserve to protect the water supply, rather than paid to individual landowners in exchange for changes in their land use.

We’ll be interviewing all the families in three communities, trying not only to get some information on those communities that may be interesting for Natura, but also trying to see whether our survey works so we can make it perfect for the final run. It’s all very exciting.