14 Days on EARTH

It took two whole days, an uncomfortable night on an airport floor, several misplaced bags of luggage, and a rental car from Cleveland, but I’m happy to report that the group successfully made it home from Costa Rica! While we were incredibly sad to say goodbye, we look forward to bringing all the things we learned from EARTH back with us to Chatham and to Eden Hall as we start the new school year.

This course was an amazing, eye-opening experience for me. While the trip and course content was focused specifically on agriculture, really there was so much being offered, so much that we got to experience, that anyone, no matter their background or personal interests, could benefit from it. From the farmstays to the food processing lab, the banana plantation to the integrated organic farm, all of the tours and lectures that we had were captivating. During our Chatham group reflections, we realized that this trip was having a profound effect on our world view and the way we look at food and agriculture. For myself, I had never considered myself “business-minded” before and had never really put any thought into the marketing and business side of Food Studies. But after learning about EARTH’s entrepreneurship projects that are integrated into the core curriculum, I found myself fascinated by the breadth of knowledge and skills these students come away with, and how important these are to create lasting change. My fellow students on the trip commented on how their ideas of “sustainability” and “organic” were challenged after learning about EARTH’s commitment to what they simply call Responsible Agriculture, regardless of labels.

I wish that I could share with you everything that we learned, but there simply isn’t time or space here! We’ve come away with so many new interests and exciting ideas! Hopefully all of us Chatham students from the trip will get the chance to bring these into conversations as we move through our courses and as we build up the Falk School of Sustainability and Eden Hall campus. But for now, for anyone who is interested in what we’ve done, I’ll leave this video here! Hopefully it will inspire you to visit EARTH … I hear they want to make this Global Agriculture class a regular summer program!