Orr visited the rain forest in Costa Rica

Thirty years ago this week, a Jay County High School teacher had returned from a two-week trip to Costa Rica.

The Aug. 7, 1993, edition of The Commercial Review featured a story about Dan Orr’s trip and what he had learned with a group of 22 other Indiana teachers.

“It was just overwhelming,” said Orr, a biology and environmental science teacher at JCHS. “You could stay for years and years and decades and decades and still feel like you don’t know too awfully much.

“It was like going on a safari, but not taking a gun, taking a camera instead.”

He made the trip through a program sponsored by the Indianapolis Zoo and IUPUI.

It started with a three-hour boat ride to Tortuguero, a small village on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast less than 30 miles from the border with Nicaragua. It was a breeding ground for the endangered green-back turtle. Guides, who were the only ones with flashlights, led tours down the beach in an effort to spot the reptiles

“So there we were, a group of adults holding hands and following along in the dark,” Orr said. “It was kind of a stumble and a bumble process because there was a lot of driftwood.”

But they finally saw a turtle come to shore to lay its eggs.

His journey also involved experiencing the near-constant rainfall — “We were continually wet,” he said — and learning in depth about the relationships between plants and animals such as the sloth and certain types of algae.

His take-away from the trip was that the rain forests need to be protected.

“It’s important to try to do all we can to preserve the vital aspects of our total global ecosystems,” he said. “And the more we cut away at the rain forest, the greater the impact will be on global warming, and on biodiversity.”