PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — It’s a long way from the rainforests of
Costa Rica to the verdant slopes of Clackamas County, but it’s a
journey Chris Wille and Diane Jukofsky are on the verge of
completing.

After more than two decades of groundbreaking environmental
efforts in the Latin American nation, the couple is finally coming
home.

Not that their ongoing work with the Rainforest Alliance — a
leading worldwide environmental organization — will end. Frequent
trips to Europe, Asia, Africa and elsewhere will continue, as they
help steer exploding global efforts to preserve farms, forests and
wildlife habitat.

But instead of operating out of the Costa Rican office that grew
from just the two of them to more than 40 staff members during
their tenure, they’ll live and work in a house they are now
building that’s every bit as green as the Clackamas County
countryside surrounding them.

“Our whole lives revolve around creating things that are
sustainable,” said Jukofsky, the Rainforest Alliance’s head of
communications, marketing and education. “We want this to be a
model for all of that.”

Wood stoves on two of the house’s three floors will burn
materials gleaned from the five-acre Beavercreek property the
couple bought last year. When combined with a heat pump and
air-handler, the stoves will create a convective flow capable of
warming the entirety of the dwelling’s 2,500 square feet.

Heat that would otherwise escape up the chimney will be
circulated through channels carved beneath the main floor’s
concrete slab.

“If you can heat up a big mass like concrete,” said Wille, the
organization’s chief of sustainable agriculture, “you can keep the
house warm for days.”

The couple, joined by architect Kathy Bash and builder Robert
Wood, spent a recent afternoon laying out the house’s footprint.
They pounded in stakes marking the corners of the overlapping
rectangles that will form the living area and looked ahead to the
day, perhaps six months down the road, when the project will be
completed.

From Bash’s standpoint, the structure stands out for being equal
parts “what a home should feel like and an energy-efficient
building.”

“This used to be the bleeding edge, but now it’s really the
leading edge,” she said. “I’d like to say it’s mainstream, but it’s
not. It’s actually pretty far ahead of that.”

David Blackmon, the Umpqua Bank mortgage loan officer handling
the account, agreed.

“Their project is pretty unique,” he said. “It’s one of maybe a
handful of truly sustainable projects being built in Portland at
any one time.”

For Jukofsky, the change of place couldn’t have come at a better
time.

“Living in Costa Rica was wonderful, but I never had a sense of
roots there,” she said. “Here, I have a sense of home again.”

The couple had been gone so long that family and friends stopped
asking about a possible return date. Knowing that the Rainforest
Alliance’s Costa Rican presence is now firmly established made the
move possible, she said.

However, the transition from a subtropical environment to the
many meteorological moods of Oregon may take some time.

Temperatures in Costa Rica’s lush central valley, for instance,
rarely dip below 72 degrees or edge above 75. The long sunny season
is punctuated by a brief rainy spell, but even that predictably
provides sun-drenched mornings.

Here, by contrast, temperature swings of 40 degrees or more in a
single day aren’t considered extraordinary.

“The Oregon rains will take some getting used to,” Wille said.
On the other hand, he quipped, “This is going to be one of the last
places on Earth to have freshwater problems.”

As for their professional endeavors, the couple is convinced
that the Rainforest Alliance’s work is paying off. Increasingly,
they said, large corporations are getting the message that
consumers care where and how the products they buy are
produced.

Chiquita Bananas, for instance, worked with the alliance to help
the small farmers it buys from get their operations RFA-certified.
The company invested five years and $20 million in the effort, but
it’s paid off, Wille said — upward of 95 percent of the bananas
Chiquita sells around the world now come from RFA-certified
farms.

Obtaining Rainforest Alliance certification is no simple task.
It comes only after a company demonstrates that it, among other
things, provides decent worker housing and health care, maintains
strict control over use of pesticides and fertilizers, cleans up
any product-caused pollution, improves the health of area soils and
physically moves farm operations back from streams and rivers.

Companies that have enthusiastically signed on to the effort
include Kraft Foods, Gibson Foundation — maker of world-famous
Gibson guitars — Coca-Cola, Nestle, McDonald’s, the JM Smucker
Company and Unilever-Lipton Tea.

“I once railed about ‘big bad corporations,'” said Wille, a
self-described “old hippie.” ”But one thing that gives us hope is
that so many companies are really catching on. They drive a lot of
the world’s economy and working with them is critical if we are
going to preserve critical habitat and keep so many small farmers
in business.”

Meantime, there’s a house in Oregon to build. Wille and Jukofsky
are keeping their fingers crossed that Umpqua Bank’s green-building
program will approve their loan any day. Once that occurs, they
plan to begin construction immediately.

The new residence is meant for the long haul, they said.
Architectural drawings even stack the closets on the three floors
one on top of the other, so that an elevator can be installed when
the couples’ knees make walking the flights too arduous.

“When people ask where we’re from, I now tell them Oregon,”
Jukofsky said. “That’s pretty cool.”