A Karen host-mom prepares a meal in the family kitchen.

Right now our students are up in Mae Hong Son, living and learning with the Karen (Ba’ken yaw) people. A large part of the Forests Course is learning about the ecosystems of upland Northern Thailand, including how upland rotational farming as practiced by the Karen fits into that. It is a complex issue, as practices which are ecologically sustainable at low population densities face pressure with growing numbers of villagers, and as the Thai State moves to further extend control of mountain areas. (There have even been efforts to remove tribal people from the mountains by force, thwarted only by NGOs and journalists exposing what was happening.)

But it is hard to fight corrupt officials and powerful commercial interests bent on extracting the last tree, log or flower from the forest, since the Karen are marginalized by language, culture, and the remoteness of their mountain villages.

As James Fahn, author of the book Land on Fire points out, in Southeast Asia, environmental issues often have a human rights component.

That’s true in America as well.

I’ve often been struck with the similarities of marginalized mountain peoples of both Thailand and the United States, particularly in Appalachia. There, human rights violations, corrupt government officials, and powerful private interests are not only displacing already marginalized people, but literally destroying the mountains to profit, not from logs, but from coal.

A great movie has been produced by Yale 360 on mountaintop removal mining (MTR), Leveling Appalachia.

During the last two decades, mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia has destroyed or severely damaged more than a million acres of forest and buried nearly 2,000 miles of streams. Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining, a video report produced by Yale Environment 360 in collaboration with MediaStorm, focuses on the environmental and social impacts of this practice and examines the long-term effects on the region’s forests and waterways.

If ISDSI was in the United States, those are the communities our students would be living in right now.  That would be our Forests Course.

If you are in the US or not, watch Leveling Appalachia, then get involved in helping stop mountaintop removal.

At least in Thailand the trees have a chance to grow back.

Sunset over Mook Island, Trang.

How do you end a semester?  How do you end four years at college?  This year, Paul Hawken gave a fantastic commencement address at the University of Portland.  It was a great balance of challenge, reality and hope.  At our final seminar at ISDSI this spring we passed this out and I read two sections that seemed especially appropriate for students on study-abroad studying sustainability.

The reality:

[Y]ou are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing.

The hope:

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

We at ISDSI are privaledged to work with amazing, motivated, and creative students – who are committed to making a difference and changing the world for the better.

Larson B Ice Shelf collapse in 2002. (Science Daily, Oct. 16, 2006)

An important conference, Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions just concluded in Copenhagen (March 10-12), focusing on climate change and updating the most current thinking on what is going to happen.  Some other related reports and information just came out as well that are worth highlighting.

The news is not good.

Consistently as I’ve been reading and studying climate change over the last few years, it seems that the worst case scenarios are usually what happens, or in some cases are underestimates of what ends up actually happening—from open water at the North Pole to rates of glacier melt to extinction rates among vulnerable populations.  Maddeningly we’ve already lost 8 years of the United States doing nothing, and actively undermining the science and confusing the issue.  We don’t have much time left to make some radical changes.

Here are some recent headlines and a few quotes of note:

Sea levels to surge at least a metre by 2100, scientists warn at Copenhagen meeting (Grist, March 10)

“A few years ago, those of us who talked about the impact of the ice sheets were seen as extremists. Today it is recognized as the central issue,” said glaciologist Eric Rignot of the University of California at Irvine.

“The world has very little time,” IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri told the meeting after the new findings were presented.

Carbon cuts ‘only give 50/50 chance of saving planet (The Independent, March 9)

The key aim of holding the expected increase to 2C, beyond which damage to the natural world and to human society is likely to be catastrophic, is far from assured, the research suggests, even if all countries engage forthwith in a radical and enormous crash programme to slash greenhouse gas emissions – something which itself is by no means guaranteed.

If action is sluggish or non-existent, the model suggests that climate change is likely to cause almost unthinkable damage to the world; under a “business-as-usual” scenario, with no action taken at all and emissions increasing by more than 100 per cent by 2050, the end-of-the-century rise in global average temperatures is likely to be 5.5C, with a worst-case outcome of 7.1C – which would make much of life on earth impossible. “Even with drastic cuts in emissions in the next 10 years, our results project that there will only be a 50 per cent chance of keeping global temperatures rises below 2C,” said Dr Vicky Pope, the Met Office’s Head of Climate Change Advice.

Global temperatures ‘will rise 6C this century’ (Times Online, March 10)

“There is not a lot, if any, good news,” said Richardson of the emerging science. “What we know now is that we are we facing the worst case scenario.”

The warnings on temperature rise are linked to the surge in greenhouse gas emissions over the last decade. Currently humanity generates the equivalent of about 50 billion tonnes of CO2 a year through burning fossil fuels, agriculture, deforestation and other processes.

In its last report the IPCC made over-cautious assumptions about how these emissions would rise in future – and concluded it would be possible to prevent a total global temperature rise of more than 2C compared with pre-industrial times.

… John Ashton, a senior civil servant at the British Foreign Office, launched a startling attack – for a government official – on the ability of politicians to deal with climate change, or even understand it.

He said he believed politicians had still failed to grasp the seriousness of climate change – or were even prepared to bend scientific findings to purely political ends.

“Policymaking is not adapted to deal with the problem of climate change, ” said Ashton. “Politiicans often see science as just another group and that opinions based on science are just another lobby. There are also plenty of people who due to ignorance or mischief are willing to confuse the issue.”

Why the world’s top scientists underestimated how fast we’re destroying the climate (Climate Progress, March 16)

The overly optimistic predictions in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment, released in 2007, appear to have been driven, in part, by the political dynamics involved in the international effort.

“We’re looking at future climate beyond anything we’ve considered,” Chris Field, director of the global ecology department at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Chicago last month. “Actual emissions are at or above the total range of possibilities considered in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment.”

“We were too optimistic,” Field said. “There was no decrease in emissions from developed countries and the sharpest increases and overall intensity came from China and India that rely heavily on coal.”