Pi Kat, businesswoman, climber and occasional ISDSI Field Instructor, climbing at Crazy Horse. (Photo credit: Josh and Dan Morris)

A core part of what we do at ISDSI is to teach students about teamwork, leadership, and decision making. We believe that part of creating a more sustainable world is equipping students with practical skills in how to work and lead, so that their passion for sustainability can be transformed into action.

A great way to combine these lessons is through the challenge of rock climbing. We are fortunate to be near a world-class climbing destination, and have helped a bit over the years to develop Crazy Horse, from crag clean-ups to trail building to some initial meetings with local officals. Crazy Horse is a community effort spearheaded by the folks at Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventures.  Each semester, ISDSI students go out to Crazy Horse to climb and have an amazing time. Josh Morris and Khaetthaleeya Uppakham (Pi Kat) have done a great job developing the crag into not only a world-class climbing destination, but also an example of how to develop a sustainable ecotourism destination. We’ve worked with both Josh and Kat, and Kat is a field instructor for ISDSI when she has time.

Climbing Magazine has featured them in an article, The Other Thailand, talking not just about the climbing, but also the history and unique development of Crazy Horse.

Leave behind Thailand’s farang-packed Tonsai, and you’ll discover Crazy Horse, a quiet crag that’s redefining sustainable tourism in Asia…

Crazy Horse Buttress rises above rice paddies 25 miles from the culturally vibrant city Chiang Mai. Named for its principal formation’s striking resemblance to an equine head, Crazy Horse comprises a cluster of 15 quiet cliffs first climbed in 1998 and now boasting 97 single-pitch and 15 multi-pitch routes. Spanning 5.6 to 5.13c, the climbs tackle everything from technical slabs, to overhanging tufas, to multi-chambered, stalactite-dripping caves — not to mention the wealth of untapped rock.

However, the cliff’s true essence lies in the tight-knit community of locals and foreigners who’ve developed it. With an emphasis on social and ecological sustainability, the motley Crazy Horse crew has endeavored to keep this a quality destination for the long haul. In fact, many climbers now hold up Crazy Horse as a case study on how climbing tourism can positively affect a foreign community. Turns out, one of the most important factors is for the locals to come to love climbing, too.

If you’re interested in sustainability, ecotourism and (of course) climbing, jump over and read “The Other Thailand.”

The last week of the Foundations course the students at ISDSI fan out over the city and study four sustainability indicators — walkability, traffic, the use/health of the Ping river, and the food systems of Chiang Mai (looking at organic food, the size of the foodshed, etc.).  The students split into four groups, and each group spends Monday planning, Tuesday and Wednesday gathering data, Thursday doing data analysis, and then Friday on a presentation.

Nikki and Jack talking about "som" (tangerines) in both supermarkets and fresh (wet) markets.

It is always fun to see what creative ways students work out to learn about sustainability in the city.  This semester the rivers group borrowed a couple of ISDSI’s sit-on-top kayaks and paddled down the Ping river, the food systems group decided to focus on oranges/tangerines as a proxy for broader food system dynamics, the traffic group looked a cars and “public” or at least “mass” transportation, and the walking group tried to figure out how difficult it was to walk in different places in the city.

Molly and Taylor discussing the challenges of walking in the city center.

The papers are here as pdf files:

• Walkability index for Chiang Mai city
• Traffic and mass transportation as a measure of sustainability for Chiang Mai
• Food systems, organics and the foodshed for tangerines (som) in Chiang Mai
• The Ping river and its connection to sustainability and the life of Chiang Mai

Krissy and her group did a great job working out the challenges of walking, and how even the idea of walking around the city is culturally mediated.

On Friday we were joined by Khun Pim Kemasingki, the editor of Chiang Mai CityLife magazine, a well known English language magazine published in Chiang Mai for almost 20 years. Khun Pim was great — having grown up in Chiang Mai she was able to add a lot of historical background, and with her position as editor, she understands the challenges of sustainability for Chiang Mai city. It was great for the students as well to get another perspective on the city, and the role of culture, language and politics in sustainability. (Also check out CityLife’s page on going carbon neutral.)

Ajaan Christina, Ajaan Mark and Khun Pim were the discussants for the presentations.

The students learned a lot about the city that is there home for this semester, got out into places tourists don’t often go, and were able to pull together research involving both social science and ecology. Well done all!

Matt explains the traffic and how it all fits together.

Laurie explaining the role of the Ping river in urban sustainability

This past week ISDSI students fanned out across the city collecting and analyzing data to develop sustainability indicators for Chiang Mai city. This was a great exercise in experiential learning and they were able to apply their Thai language skills as well as knowledge of the city and sustainability issues in general.

Early in the week, we had two activists with the Rak Baan Rak Muang group come and talk with the students, sharing about their struggle to make Chiang Mai more sustainable. (Read more about them here.)

The 33 students were divided into 8 groups, with a group of 4 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon.  They focused on four key issues: traffic, walkability, the availability of organic vegetables and the Ping river.

Monday was spent planning their studies, with Tuesday and Wednesday focused on data collection.  Thursday was a frenzied day of data analysis and preparing posters for Friday’s presentation and poster session.  The Friday poster session was organized like those at a professional conference, with all eight posters up, time to browse and look at the posters. Each group then presented their methods, findings, and questions for further research.

The focus of the exercise was twofold.  First, to give the students a chance to apply what they have been studying for the last five weeks — from Thai language to knowledge about sustainability and Thai society. The second goal was to gather some useful data about what is going on in Chiang Mai. The research the students did will be given to the Rak Baan Rak Muang group so it can be used in helping make a more sustainable city.

Rapid surveys like this can be very valuable for getting a sense of what is going on in an area (a city, village or landscape), and the students did a terrific job figuring out indicators and collecting the data. The studies are exploratory, not definitive, and so provide a good starting point for further research and generating more questions for follow-up studies later on.

Each study is available below as a PDF file:

Organic Produce, Organic Markets

Walkability 1, Walkability 2

River Use and Access, Urban/Suburban River Health

Traffic Composition, Traffic Flow

After a couple of days (and a late night) of entering over 700 ISBN numbers, ISDSI’s library collection is online!

We’ve been wanting to do this for a long time to make our library more accesible for students, instructors, researchers, NGO workers and community members in Chiang Mai, Thailand and Southeast Asia more generally.  We’ve invested a lot of money in getting good quality books and reference materials, and hope that this will make it easier for folks to search our holdings, see what we have, and be able to borrow books for thier own studies, research or work in sustainability.

To jump to our collection, go to http://www.librarything.com/catalog/isdsi.  You can also go to our Resources page where you can click on the right sidebar to get to the list.

Once at the list, you can browse by collection, or show all collections to sort and sift through the books.  There is also an excellent search function – so if you know what you are looking for you can see if we have it.

If you’re in Chiang Mai and looking for good books on ecology, agriculture, sustainability and other topics, feel free to stop by! Our library is available most days from 9 AM to 5 PM, Monday through Friday.

Special thanks to the folks at LibraryThing for providing the software and community of other users!  If you have a small (or large) collection of books, it is a great way to manage it online (sort of like Gmail for books…).

Just finished our ISDSI Retreat with students and staff up at Mok Faa waterfall, part of the Doi Pui/Doi Suthep National Park.  This semester we focused on really minimizing the activities during the retreat to allow lots of free time, time to go swim in the waterfall, take a nap, and just get to know each other.  We did a couple of sessions on risk and responsibility, how to respond to an emergency in the field, and how to develop good judgment–activities designed to be fun, interactive, working as teams, and learning some good lessons that will be useful later.

The waterfall at Mok Faa is cool and flows year-round.  We’ll see if it manages to do it this year.

Dry fields north of Chiang Mai.

Hot season is starting early.  Usually it isn’t until March that the weather is this hot, but it started a couple of weeks ago.  We’ve still got cool nights, but the days are getting hot.  The dry weather is allowing people to burn leaves, grass, and whatever it is they want to. While bad air quality is usually blamed on “tribal people” (like most things), from what we can see it is mostly urban burning and burning in the lowland fields as they prepare to plant their dry season crop of soy or garlic.  Dust from construction of roads (and ever popular activity) also is a big factor.

Every year there is a point where you can’t see the mountains around Chiang Mai, and last week you couldn’t see them.  This week seems a bit better, but it is still getting bad.  There is a lot of talk that it is dryer than last year, and there are concerns about forest fires. We’re also wondering how low the Yom river will be this year when we paddle it.  Usually it never goes dry in the section we paddle, but there are often low parts where we have to do some hauling of the boats.

We’ll know soon enough.