In the US for a few weeks, and got the chance to visit a local farmer’s market in Wheaton, IL. As always, a great place to see what is going on with food, agriculture and sustainability in the United States.

Lots of people there, lots of local fresh produce, artists selling crafts, small scale crafters of food (cheese, pickles, etc.) and the local color you get from this sort of community event.

Cows doing what they should be -- eating grass (from the Three Cowgirls Facebook page).

A hi-light was talking with Michelle from Three Cowgirls 100% Grass-Fed Beef (see the on the web or Facebook).  Her family has a farm in South Dakota that is a great example of the best in sustainability — family owned, organic, sustainable, and working with animals in a humane and sustainable way.

If you’ve read Omnivore’s Dilemma or seen Food, Inc. , you’ve read about the struggle small farmers have gone through to bring real food to the table — not the over industrialized products stuffed with corn and hormones that passes for food, and is correctly identified as unsustainable and ecologically harmful.

Like Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, Three Cowgirls practices farming as it should be — sequestering carbon in the soil and grasses, and working with the ecosystems of fields and grasses rather than against them. The beef doesn’t just taste better, but is higher in Omega 3s and is free of the hormones and other additives (including the effects of stress) that industrial animal production creates.

Here are some thoughts from Joe Salatin from Yes! Magazine:

I think we need to go back to localized diets, and in North America, yes, we can really grow perennials, so there would be a lot of herbivore—lamb, beef—in a diet. And our fruits and vegetables, which have a high water content, would be grown close to home, preferably in our backyards. In 1945, 40 percent of all vegetables consumed in the United States were grown in backyards.

I think a local diet would have an indigenous flair. If you’re along the coast, you’d eat more seafood. If you’re inland, you would eat more herbivore and vegetables. If you’re in Florida, you would eat more citrus. Historically, it’s not about the relationship of meat to vegetables or whatever. It’s more about, what does this area grow well with a minimum of inputs?

So we bought some steaks, happy to support a family farm practicing sustainable farming, and happy to have a chance to enjoy grass fed beef. Thanks Michelle!

UPDATE: The steaks were outstanding!

Great editorial from Ajaan Christina, who has worked with and taught at ISDSI for years.  This year she’s moved back to the States, and is still active in teaching, research and writing.

Here are a couple of key parts of the editorial.  Be sure to click through for the full article.

(CNN) — On November 7, Burma will hold elections for the first time in 20 years. Not because the military regime wants to transfer power. Instead, the military leadership hopes that by creating a democratic facade, it can improve its image and still run the country.

Since the military’s 2007 crackdown on monks’ demonstrations, the regime has faced simmering anger inside the country and growing calls for at least some degree of political reform from abroad….

The regime has concluded that as long as it holds elections, domestic and international pressure will subside. Yet the electoral process is so far from being free, fair and inclusive that many countries have already denounced it as a sham.

Read more…

Two weeks ago to start our Foundations Course, we watched a great film — 180º South — about a climber retracing the journey of two of his heroes to the tip of South American and Patagonia.

Here’s a description:

Chris Malloy’s film strikes so deeply into the heart of Patagonia’s wilderness we come to feel at home there. 180° South: Conquerors of the Useless follows Jeff Johnson as he retraces the epic 1968 journey of his heroes Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia. Along the way he gets shipwrecked off Easter Island, surfs the longest wave of his life – and prepares himself for a rare ascent of Cerro Corcovado. Jeff’s life turns when he meets up in a rainy hut with Chouinard and Tompkins who, once driven purely by a love of climbing and surfing, now value above all the experience of raw nature – and have come to Patagonia to spend their fortunes to protect it.

What we found useful in the film is the deeper story about sustainability.  Going to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) can’t help but bring up questions about sustainability. Like our own students on study abroad at ISDSI, Jeff Johnson is on a journey — getting to know interesting people, and experiencing first-hand a different way of life .

We used the film as a jumping off point to discuss sustainability and its challenges, and think that this film can be a great way to start thinking about culture and ecology — the core of what we care about at ISDSI.

Here’s the trailer:

Here are some of the questions we used for the film:

• Who are the actors / people / groups in the movie?
• What resources are they interested in / do they have a stake in?
• What is the connection to the natural world do different people / groups have?
• What key issues / questions / problems of sustainability does the film address?
• What expedition / leadership skill are demonstrated during the film?

We then followed up the rest of the week with reading papers and articles related to the sustainability themes in the film. Some of the topics we focused on were:

• Consumerism
• Resource use / management
• Views of nature / people in nature
• Corporate responsibility / sustainable business
• Individual responsibility
• Local costs / distant benefits (externalities)
• Ecological footprints
• Marginalization and sustainability

So yes, it is a fun journey movie, and entertaining.  But there is a deeper message there if you think about it.

Go see it if you can.

For more information go to 18oSouth.com and for information on showings see Patagonia.com.

Students learning about fish on the Yom river.

Once again, the plan to destroy one of the last wild rivers in Thailand has come back to life — plans are in high gear to build a dam at the Kang Sua Ten rapids on the Yom river in Phrae.

We’ve run a course on the Yom for several years, Human Rights and The Environment: Rivers, Dams and Local Struggles.  A big part of the course is comparing the Mun river (already dammed and destroyed by the Thai state) and the Yom (impacted by a weir down river, but still vibrant and alive).  We paddle the river with local elders, learn about the fish and ecology of the river, and learn about their struggle to keep the river from being dammed.

The excuse for years has been that it will control flooding, or in more recent years, to prevent drought. As the villagers know, however, that is a lie. Flooding in the provinces downstream has been shown to be the result of local rainfall and poor drainage — not due to water carried down from the upper Yom. But that isn’t why they want to build the dam.

The real reason? The Yom river basin is also home to the last stand of golden teak left in Thailand — worth millions of dollars.  So whoever gets to dam the Yom not only gets to embezzle the money from the construction project (which we know from the research of Ajaan Pasuk is likely to be between 40% to 60% of the budget), but they also get the real prize — millions of dollars in rare golden teak.

The budget alone is about 11 billion Baht.

Thai pu yai (influential “big” people) seem to care only for money. They are also not stupid — they are clearly taking advantage of the political turmoil in Thailand to push through this project, hoping that people will not notice, will be too busy rebuilding their lives after the violence of May, and too busy to care and do something about it.

Some people have noticed, and now the Royal Irrigation Department is arguing for two “small” dams on the river — trying to back off, and make it sounds like it won’t destroy the river.  But it will — it will kill it, and destroy the ecology and the community.

And once the river is gone, it is gone forever.  Along with the livelihoods of the local community, the famers, young activists and others.  We know, and the community knows — just look at the Mun river after it was dammed.

The things that is most galling, of course, is that the dam is both unnecessary and won’t solve the problems it is said to solve. But the lack of scientific and empirical support has never stopped the building of a dam in Thailand before — as we see every spring as we live with and learn from the villagers impacted by the building of the Pak Mun Dam — thousands of lives and communities destroyed, fish stocks devastated along with the people who fished, all for nothing but a inefficient dam that doesn’t even pay for itself with the little electricity it does produce.

So they are doing everything they can to put another dam on the Yom.

This will destroy the lives of the community of teachers, mentors and leaders who have shared their lives, knowledge and wisdom with our instructors and students.

Our friends.

We will be doing everything we can to raise awareness about this, and hope to play a role in stopping the dam.

We’ll keep you posted.

—————–

Three articles to read:

Yom River Dam Will Devastate the Area

Sanan renews push for building of dam

Dept mulls two small dams for Yom River

Great post by Joe Romm up at ClimateProgress.org. In it, he argues that since Nobel-prize winning Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, said “I would say that from here on in, every day has to be Earth Day”, that we need to rename the day.

I don’t worry about the earth. I’m pretty certain the earth will survive the worst we can do to it. I’m very certain the earth doesn’t worry about us. I’m not alone. People got more riled up when scientists removed Pluto from the list of planets than they do when scientists warn that our greenhouse gas emissions are poised to turn the earth into a barely habitable planet…

The reason that many environmentalists fight to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the polar bears is not because they are sure that losing those things would cause the universe to become unhinged, but because they realize that humanity isn’t smart enough to know which things are linchpins for the entire ecosystem and which are not. What is the straw that breaks the camel’s back? The 100th species we wipe out? The 1,000th? For many, the safest and wisest thing to do is to try to avoid the risks entirely.

This is where I part company with many environmentalists. With 6.5 billion people going to 9 billion, much of the environment is unsavable. But if we warm significantly more than 3.5°F from pre-industrial levels — and especially if we warm more than 7°F, as would be all but inevitable if we keep on our current emissions path for much longer — then the environment and climate that made modern human civilization possible will be ruined, probably for hundreds of years (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe). And that means misery for many if not most of the next 10 to 20 billion people to walk the planet…

The problem with Earth Day is it asks us to save too much ground. We need to focus. The two parts of the planet worth fighting to preserve are the soils and the glaciers.

Jump over to read his whole post about WHY soil and glaciers are important, and what new name he proposes.

It’s a good one.

As most folks who have been paying attention to the news know, there has been an on-going protest in Bangkok for about four weeks by a group known as the “red shirts” who, among other things, are opposed to the current Abhisit administration, and support Taksin, a former prime minister in exile and convicted on corruption charges. It hasn’t impacted our program at all, nor disrupted much of normal life in Thailand outside of the immediate area of the protests. Nonetheless, we thought it would be good to let people know a bit of the background, and what is happening.

It is complicated (as politics in Thailand tends to be), but over the last two years there have been ongoing protests from both the “yellow shirts”, loosely representing pro-elite and monarchist elements, and opposed to the supporters of the former prime minister Taksin. (It was the yellow shirts who briefly took over the international airport two years ago.)  The other group is the “red shirts” who support Taksin, and are largely drawn from rural working class Thais who benefited from Taksin’s patronage politics while he was in office.  The red shirts have explicitly framed it as a class conflict (which is somewhat accurate, except for the fact that Taksin is a billionaire and funds the protests) and as a pro-democracy movement (which some argue is open to debate).

Of course, the third group is everyone else, who are all mostly sick of the protests from both the reds and the yellows.

For the last four weeks the red shirts have rallied in Bangkok, and recently moved to an additional site in the heart of Bangkok’s commercial district. The Thai authorities, including Abhisit, the prime minister, met with the protestors for two days to try and work out a solution, but the red shirts refused to compromise. Over the last week, protests have occurred off and on in a few places, and the Thai authorities have been careful not to use force to try and keep things non-violent.  This has allowed the red shirts to expand their protests.

On Saturday (April 10) the Thai authorities decided to finally try and disperse the protesters from two sites, and the red shirts reacted by attacking the police and soldiers. Scores were injured on both sides, and there are reports that some have died. Eventually, in the face of the resistance of the red shirts, the Thai police and military backed down, fearing the conflict would escalate.

For us, we are hoping that both sides will find a way out of the deadlock they’ve boxed themselves into, and would be able to find a compromise that will address the concerns of the poor, and at the same time foster true democratic participation and not just autocratic rule validated by corrupt politics and vote buying.

For our program, we’ve not seen any impact since we are not in the places where the protests are. Life goes on normally in Thailand, but with more discussion and awareness of politics, development, and the complex relationships between class and democracy. That is significant. Those discussions are not just good for our students to be a part of, but are an important part of Thailand’s development overall.

Grandma Hai is a legendary figure in the struggle for human rights and rivers. She has been fighting the construction of a the Huay La Ha reservoir which put her rice paddy under water.  She’s been fighting a long time — 32 years — and has emerged as an icon of rural protest — not giving up even in the face of injustice.

Grandma Hai and Ajaan Mike talking with ISDSI students.

Over the years of doing the Rivers course we have had her as a guest speaker when she is available. She wasn’t available this year, as she’s been busy — she was just awarded an honorary master’s degree from Ramkhamhaeng University  in political science.

From the Bangkok Post article:

The grandmother was honoured after her 32-year fight for justice with the government after her paddy field in Ubon Ratchathani’s Na Tan district was damaged by the construction of the Huay La Ha reservoir which put it under water.

The government paid her 1.2 million baht in compensation for the damage last October.

“Thank you very much [for the degree]. I was really excited and delighted to see the princess,” she said. The degree was awarded by HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn.

“When I go back home, I will hang it on the wall to use it to teach all my children to fight to the death [for justice], even though we are poor,” said the 81-year-old grandmother, who has more than 160 relatives.

Honorary degrees are normally awarded to distinguished people. But Wutisak Lapcharoensap, dean of the faculty of political science, said the decision to give her the degree was due to the example she set for other people who were fighting for justice while respecting the law.

“It is a new dimension to grant an honorary degree to a human rights activist such as Grandma Hai to honour her endeavour to fight for her rights for many years,” Mr Wutisak said.

“This country has many people who fight for justice and basic human rights. Grandma Hai is a person who encourages people to realise their own rights and also reminds the government that it should be more careful before making any decision.”

After the degree, what else did Grandma Hi want?

“I need to see all Thai people love each other and live in harmony,” she said.

“If there is a unity in the country, our beloved King will be glad and live long for over a thousand years.”

Grandma Hai blessing Lindsay in the Isaan "sai siin" ceremony.

There are some great articles online about Grandma Hai.

Check out Stand Up and Fight:

When you lose your land because of a government development project, you can’t farm and thus lose your security in life. Then you try many many ways to solve your problems, but sometimes your neighbors, local authorities, the head of your village, and other people are still not interested and don’t give a damn. What would you do? How would you do it?

A great article on the Prime Minister giving her a compensation check:

Wearing a brown sarong, dark blue long-sleeved shirt and white flowers in her hair, Hai Khanjantha knew yesterday was her happiest day.

Grandma Hai was up early in the morning to prepare for her meeting with Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, who travelled from Bangkok to hand over a compensation cheque for 1.2 million baht to her.

In return, she gave an unfinished bamboo basket to the prime minister, saying it represented the many problems of the poor still to be addressed by his government.

Well done Grandma!

This coming week the Copenhagen summit will be going on, from December 7-18.  The goal of this summit is to follow up on the work done during the Kyoto agreements, and to try and limit global warming.

The stakes are incredibly high.  Pressure, slander and huge amounts of money and disinformation are being thrown in the way of any binding agreements, as oil companies and their allies try again to introduce doubt into the debate (hacking into scientists’ private email and distorting what they said is just part of it).

The science is clear, settled, and overwhelming. If drastic cuts are not made in global emissions of CO2 and other gasses that contribute to global warming, we are headed towards a global catastrophe. We are already seeing massive changes due to anthropogenic climate change, and it is only going to get worse.  Feedback loops in climate are making even the worst case scenarios of only a couple of years look like underestimates of how bad it can get.  And it will get very very bad.

If we can get back to 350 ppm CO2 (we’re around 384 now), there is hope.  It will be a benefit to our economies to move away from oil, and the opportunity for business for clean and renewable energy and technologies are huge.

But the challenge is significant.

I’ve included here a tracker showing real time what the negotiations are working towards. Below that are some good links to learn more.

Let’s hope history is made in the next few days, or future generations will point to this time as an opportunity lost.

Homepage for the conference: http://en.cop15.dk/

One of our students coming in the spring, Taylor Cantril, is at Copenhagen.  He mentioned in the comments several blogs worth noting, especially deppcopenhagen.wordpress.com and thecopenhagenquestions.wordpress.com

Good summary and detailed current report on the state of the science and current situation: Copenhagen Diagnosis

The best online discussion of the science is at Real Climate.  This includes links to basic science information (see these lectures which are particularly good).

The best discussion of the politics around climate change from the perspective of an engaged and passionate scientist is at Climate Progress.

Van Jones, Yale Law School graduate and veteran human rights / environmental activist.

The New York Times and Greenwire is reporting that author and activist Van Jones will be serve as a special advisor to the White House on green jobs, enterprse and innovation.

Jones, 40, will work within the Council on Environmental Quality, which coordinates President Obama’s climate, energy and other environmental policy initiatives with federal agencies.

“Van Jones has been a strong voice for green jobs, and we look forward to having him work with departments and agencies to advance the president’s agenda of creating 21st century jobs that improve energy efficiency and utilize renewable resources,” CEQ Chairwoman Nancy Sutley said in a written statement last night.

This is GREAT new for creating a more sustainable future.  Now that we have a president who respects science and understands the reality of climate change and the huge sustainability challenge we face, this is exactly the sort of appointment people in the sustainabilty/green movement have been hoping for.

I was fortunate to be able to hear Van Jones speak at the 2009 AASHE conference, and he was amazing.  He gave an impassioned talk on why seeminging simple things like insulating houses are so critical and could be revolutionary. With a solid grasp of the science and data on how much energy is wasted in the US, as well as the data on the jobs that would be created, his admonition to pick up a caulk gun and work was met with a standing ovation. He REALLY gets it, and having him advising the current White House is one of the most hopeful things I’ve heard in a long time. He’s well known for calling to “green the ghetto first” and the financial and energy savings from just working on energy savings could be huge. The potential for enourmous job creation is especially valuable given the current economic crisis in the US.

via TreeHugger. Jump to their posting for more information on Van Jones