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.

Making the connection

How do we understand ecology and ecosystems? Not just in the classification of species or their inter-relationships, but in the “deep knowing” that one gets from a connection with the natural world?

In a classic work by the sociologist C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, he writes about the need to be able to ask questions and pay attention to the social world:

“Method” has to do, first of all, with how to ask and answer questions with some assurance that the answers are more or less durable. “Theory” has to do, above all, with paying close attention to the words one is using, especially their degree of generality and their logical relations. The primary purpose of both is clarity of conception and economy of procedure, and most importantly just now, the release rather than the restriction of the sociological imagination.  (from C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p.178)

The methods and theory of ecology can do the same for the natural world — releasing the “ecological imagination” — connecting to and seeing the interconnections and ecological relationships of the natural world. E. O. Wilson argues that in some sense we need that connection:

[W]e are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms.  They are the matrix in which the human mind originated and is permanently rooted, and they offer the challenge and freedom innately sought.  To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained. I offer this as a formula of reenchantment to invigorate poetry and myth: mysterious and little known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit.  Splendor awaits in minute proportions. (Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia, 1984, p. 139, emphasis added)

Getting out into the natural world is hard to do for many students — college and university campuses are often urban or suburban, and the time to connect and be in nature is hard to find.  As Richard Louv has documented in Last Child in the Woods, college students are loosing that connection that previous generations had as children.  From “stranger danger” to the fears talked about on cable TV, fewer kids are let out to roam and spend time outdoors connecting.

Our society is teaching young people to avoid direct experience in nature. That lesson is delivered in schools, families, even organizations devoted to the outdoors, and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many of our communities. Our institutions, urban/suburban design, and cultural attitudes unconsciously associate nature with doom—while disassociating the outdoors from joy and solitude. Well meaning public-school systems, media, and parents are effectively scaring children straight out of the woods and fields. In the patent-or-perish environment of higher education, we see the death of natural history as the more hands-on disciplines, such as zoology, give way to more theoretical and remunerative microbiology and genetic engineering. Rapidly advancing technologies are blurring the lines between humans, other animals, and machines. The postmodern notion that reality is only a construct—that we are what we program—suggests limitless human possibilities; but as the young spend less and less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically, and this reduces the richness of human experience.

Yet, at the very moment that the bond is breaking between the young and the natural world, a growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature—in positive ways. Several of these studies suggest that thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can even be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorders and other maladies. As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.

Reducing that deficit—healing the broken bond between our young and nature—is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice demands it, but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depends upon it. The health of the earth is at stake as well. How the young respond to nature, and how they raise their own children, will shape the configurations and conditions of our cities, homes—our daily lives.  (From http://richardlouv.com/last-child-excerpt, emphasis added)

While the academic content of our courses at ISDSI is important, perhaps one of the most important and lasting things we do is allow space for students to develop their ecological imagination — seeing and knowing and understanding the connections and systems of the natural world. Giving them space and time to do this during the Expedition Field Courses is key to making the connection and reducing the nature-deficit so prevalent today. The academic content of the courses supports and broadens that connection, giving depth and meaning to what students are learning experientially. At the same time, space and time to think, reflect and write is critical if we are going to see that connection develop.

You cannot develop an ecological imagination if you’ve not spent time in the natural world.

Great new book out from Lester Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.  The book is both a call to action and a hopeful message showing what is already being done. Wind power, for example, is coming online faster than expected, and huge gains are being made in de-carbonizing our civilization. However,

The question we face is not what we need to do, because that seems rather clear to those who are analyzing the global situation. The challenge is how to do it in the time available. Unfortunately we don’t know how much time remains. Nature is the timekeeper but we cannot see the clock.

Brown clearly lays out that the multiple issues facing us (climate change, energy, etc.) eventually lead to the problem of food.  How do we balance food demand and supplies? From the start of the book:

From time to time I go back and read about earlier civilizations that declined and collapsed, trying to understand the reasons for their demise. More often than not shrinking food supplies were responsible. For the Sumerians, rising salt levels in the soil—the result of a flaw in their irrigation system—brought down wheat and barley yields and eventually the civilization itself.

For the Mayans, soil erosion exacerbated by a series of intense droughts apparently undermined their food supply and their civilization. For other early civilizations that collapsed, it was often soil erosion and the resulting shrinkage in harvests that led to their decline.

Does our civilization face a similar fate? Until recently it did not seem possible. I resisted the idea that food shortages could also bring down our early twenty-first century global civilization. But our continuing failure to reverse the environmental trends that are undermining the world food economy forces me to conclude that if we continue with business as usual such a collapse is not only possible but likely.

This is an important point usually lost in the Global North, where over feeding (obesity) rather then food shortages are currently of concern.

Climate change, of course, is the biggest contextual threat to food supplies. As glaciers retreat the buffer they supply by slowly releasing water in the dry season will disappear. Drying (as we’ve seen in Australia already) is leading to permanent drought, dust storms, and desertification. Sea levels increasing even a small amount lead to salt intrusion.  More severe storms, like Cyclone Nargis, devastate standing crops, and their storm surge leads to even more salt being dumped into soils. Shifting rainfall patterns destroy the predictability of rain-fed agriculture. The “shift to the poles” of growing zones challenge farmers with crop yields and new weeds and pests. Demand for bio-fuels pull  land out of food production into feeding cars.

Brown lays out the issues of shifting to renewable (non-carbon) based energy, sustainable cities, poverty and overpopulation, restoration ecology and related issues. This last chapter, “Can We Mobilize Fast Enough?” he lays out our options and chances of making it.

There is much that we do not know about the future. But one thing we do know is that business as usual will not continue for much longer. Massive change is inevitable. “The death of our civilization is no longer a theory or an academic possibility; it is the road we’re on,” says Peter Goldmark, former Rockefeller Foundation president and current director of the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Can we find another road before time runs out?

The notion that our civilization is approaching its demise is not an easy concept to grasp or accept. It is difficult to imagine something we have not previously experienced. We hardly have the vocabulary, much less the experience, to discuss this prospect. We know which economic indicators to watch for signs of an economic recession, such as declining industrial output, rising unemployment, or falling consumer confidence, but we do not follow a similar set of indicators that signal civilizational collapse.

He ends with a challenge:

The choice is ours—yours and mine. We can stay with business as usual and preside over an economy that continues to destroy its natural support systems until it destroys itself, or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that changes direction, moving the world onto a path of sustained progress. The choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.

Get the book (online or hardcopy), read it, and pass it on.

(Download or purchase Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. The data the book is based on is going online, as well as other supporting information and resources.)

Fishing the commons in Trang.

We are pleased to see recognition for Elinor Ostrom’s lifetime of work on common property resource management in winning this year’s Nobel in Economics.

Her academic career addresses the myth of the inevitability of the tragedy of the commons.  The conventional (Garrett Hardin-esque) wisdom was that resources either had to be legislated by public government or privatized to protect resources from over-depletion.  Her focus is on the ways that resource user groups develop their own institutional mechanisms to govern multiple-user resources (commons) — that conventional wisdom failed to account for human innovation in the institutional realm, and that people are apparently not always as self-interested as some economic theory predicts.  This is important to ISDSI’s work, as commons (forests, fisheries, rivers) provide a large portion of the livelihood sources for many of the people our students are working with on the program.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2009/ecoadv09.pdf
describes this year’s prize.
For more on this subject, including a bibliography of over 57,000 articles about common property management, see:
http://www.iascp.org/resources.html

Great new movie out in the theaters in the US.  I’ve not seen it yet, but am working on getting a copy and hopefully we can get a screening here in Chiang Mai.  The folks involved have a deep understanding of food systems, and for anyone interested in sustainability this is really required viewing.

Several of the people in the trailer are authors we read on our courses, and this is a great fit with our course on agroecology as well as several of the other courses that link into food systems issues, such as our forests course.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

Go to the website here for the trailer and other information: http://www.foodincmovie.com/

Any movie with a bar-coded cow has to be good.

If you see it, let us know what you think in the comments!

Students entering a Karen village at the end of 8 hours trekking through the jungle and mountains of Mae Hong Son.

This week students at ISDSI are in Mae Hong Son province on our Forests course, learning about the Karen (Bak’en’yaw) and their relationship to the forested mountains that they call home. While some of the villages students will visit and live in have road access, we walk in, using the traditional trails that have, in some cases, been used for generations.

(While I’ll refer to it as “walking,” it is really some of the most difficult trekking/backpacking there is.  The landscape is very rugged, with rivers, steep terrain, muddy slopes, and thick jungle on and off trail. Some days are 8+ hours long with over a dozen river crossings in a day, so just calling it “walking” might not give the right feel to what it is really like! However, we’re doing it on foot, so “walking” it is.)

Years ago when we were first working with the villages of the areas to design and set up the course, the villagers expected that we would, like tourists, drive to the villages and then go on day hikes. However, as we talked about our goals of having students learn about their lives, how they as a group of villages form a wider community, and how we wanted to understand the traditions and history of the Karen people, the idea of walking between villages was born.

Walking has a lot of advantages over using a jeep to access the villages.

• Walking slows things down. You notice the birdsong, the small changes of humidity and temperature, and the pace of life in the mountains more.  You see things at a slow walking pace you cannot see in a vehicle.
• Walking gives our village teachers a chance to talk about specific rivers, forests or habitat that are important to them, that we wouldn’t see otherwise.  It also gives us a chance to get to know them and see how comfortable they are in the forest that is a part of their home.
• Walking helps us learn about how far apart the villages really are.  It is easy to zone out on a long ride in a truck, but when you’ve spent 8 hours walking from one village to the next through jungles, rivers and rugged terrain, you REALLY understand the distance!
• Walking allows time for reflection.  There are plenty of times when you need all your attention on the task at hand (like a difficult river crossing or a steep trail), but walking through the forest allows time to think and connect and process what you’re learning.
• Walking through a landscape allows a deeper connection to it than is possible when driving encased in glass and steel.  You know in a very visceral way how high a village is on the mountain, what the forest is like, and how the streams form and cascade down the mountainside.

David Orr in his book Earth in Mind talks about the importance of living in and learning from a landscape.  Walking is one of the best ways to do that.

Today is Earth Day, a day to focus on the environment and our increasingly damaged biosphere.  Folks will be blogging about it, kids doing projects in schools, big public events, beach clean-ups, etc. That’s all good, but not enough. The news on the earth is not good, and getting worse. Singing fun songs and putting in compact fluorescent light bulbs isn’t going to do it.  We need to move to a post-carbon economy as fast as possible.

Australian bushfires. (REUTERS/Mick Tsikas)

Following climate science for several years can get depressing, as every worst case scenario turns out to not be bad enough.  The catastrophic changes are coming faster and harder than expected, bigger hurricanes, faster glacier melting, collapsing ice sheets, massive bush fires in Australia, etc. It isn’t taking 100 years to see the changes–we’re seeing them now. Meanwhile, the oil companies and their enablers have spent millions confusing the issue and introducing doubt about the anthropogenic causes of climate change, while pumping millions of years worth of carbon sequestered in the earth’s crust into the atmosphere.  They’ve been very successful at introducing false doubt, as today Treehugger reports that only 35% of US voters believe global warming is caused by human activity.

I’ve been struggling to understand why people cannot get their head around the science, or doubt that introducing gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere wouldn’t have an impact on the climate. Even with most Americans’ scientific illiteracy and the successful campaign by the oil and coal companies to confuse the issue, why do so many people not accept anthropogenic climate change?  I’m beginning to think that it may be psychological–along the lines of the stages of grief when someone finds out they have a terminal disease.  The first stage is denial.  One psychiatrist has addressed this, as well as her profession’s responsibility:

Our Moral Obligation to Act

As practitioners we help people to face reality. We chip away at their denial knowing it can be a cover for behaviors that destroy their lives. When they see the world more clearly, we urge them to take charge – warning of the dangers of being passive…

Lethal global overheating – strike the innocuous sounding “global warming” – is not something that may happen in the next century or even mid-century – it is happening now.

Scientists aren’t helping, as pointed out in this from the Guardian:

Far from over-playing their hand to swell their research coffers, scientists have been toning down their message in an attempt to avoid public despair and inaction.

Just 7% of the 261 experts surveyed (200 of whom were researchers in climate science or related fields) said they thought governments would succeed in restricting global warming to 2C. Nearly two-fifths thought this target was impossible and 46% thought a 3 to 4C rise by the end of the century was most likely.

A 3 or 4C rise might not sound much but the climatic shifts accompanying it would be massive. At 3C one to four billion extra people would face water shortages and 150 to 550 million more people would be at risk of hunger. With an extra degree of warming on top of that, seven million to 300 million would be put at risk of coastal flooding due to sea level rise.

As usual, Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a great post up I would encourage you to read, Let’s Dump “Earth Day”:

Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves

With 6.5 billion people going to 9 billion, much of the environment is unsavable. But if we warm significantly more than 2°C from pre-industrial levels — and especially if we warm more than 4°C, 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…

We have fiddled like Nero for far too long to save the whole earth or all of its species. Now we need a World War II scale effort just to cut our losses and save what matters most. So let’s call it Triage Day. And if worse comes to worst — yes, if worse comes to worst — at least future generations won’t have to change the name again.

We’re poorly adapted as a species to responding to slow moving threats with a long time horizon and no immediate impact on us.  We need to move beyond “Earth Day” and kids singing the Earth Day Rap to real changes, real movement, and a full-on effort to avert disaster.  Just ask an Aussie who got burned out in the fires last month.

If you’re interested in the science, the two best blogs are Climate Progress and Real Climate, both written by some of the top scientific experts on climate.  Dig into the links, especially the posts and links to the evidence for climate change and current revisions on how fast things are happening.

Just so this post isn’t all bad news, I’ll end on a light note with a great look at marketing Earth Day to kids:

Annie, Rebecca and a friend on the Mun River

The Rivers Course ended just before break, and I wanted to spend a bit of time following up on my earlier post about prepping for the course, and give folks an insight into some of the students’ take on the course.

The course starts in Nong Po village in Ubon Ratchathani province, along the Mun River.  This is the site of the Pak Mun Dam, which has wreaked destruction on the local ecologies and communities.  The families we stayed with were no exception.  Couragous, hard working, and up against the collapse of their traditional source of income, livelyhood and meaning.  They opened their homes and hearts and welcomed us in, teaching about the rivers, fish and fishing, and their struggle against the dam and the hope that it will someday be decomissioned.  Everyone has children who have left to work in Bangkok and send money home, as fishing no longer provides the income or protein that it used to.

Throughout the stay many community members remarked on how glad they were that the students were there to learn.  There is a lot of empowerment that happens when you get to tell your story, and while we as instructors and students don’t have the power to open the gates of the dam, we can listen.  It is a challenge–especially for American’s–to just listen and be with people, and not “do” something. However, that listening to stories, standing with people is, as local activist Khun Suwit said, the most important thing students can do, as it builds community globally, person by person, connection by connection.

After the time in the village, we travelled up the Mekong river for a few days, and then to the village of Don Chai in Phrea. Here the local activists have (so far) blocked the construction of the dam on the Yom river, saving both their homes and the last stand of golden teak in Thailand from being innundated by the dam. Meeting with village elders as well as the young activists was inspiring–old and young joined in keeping their river alive, and their homes safe. It isn’t a stuggle that is easy or over, as they pointed out that they need to keep vigilant and be aware of the many ways the government is working to push through the dam (and get the chance to log the millions of dollars worth of teak), building a road to the proposed dam site, etc.

Paw Sang'uan talking about fish catches on the Yom river.

We then spent the next week paddling down the river with the community, fishing, camping, and learning about ecology and the rich and healthy ecosystem that the Yom river supports. Yet even the Yom, as healthy as it is, has a dam downstream of the area we were, and the large fish that used to migrate up river are gone.  The local communities have a fish conservation area that serves to keep the surviving native fish populations healthy, but that too would be wiped out if the dam is ever built. It was fun, challenging, and a striking reminder of what was lost on the Mun.

During Expedition Field Courses at ISDSI students keep a journal and write essays about what they are learning.  A number used them as inspiration for their blogs.  Here are a few short excerpts from the some of the students. I’d encourage you to jump to the blogs and read about the course, its impact and their reflections on what they learned.

Acadia wrote about the blessing from the villagers of Nong Po:

I can count my blessings on one hand. To be exact, there are 26 of them currently encircling my wrist. Twenty-six thin white strings, a knot tied at the center of each. As these blessings were bestowed more than three weeks ago, they are frayed and rather brown, a situation that prompted my host mom to hint it might be time to cut them off. I can’t bring myself to do this just yet…

[In the village] The oldest of my host sisters hurried over with a huge, heartbreaking smile and deftly blessed me with her slender little brown fingers. Before she left, she turned over my hand to the roll the ends of the thread softly along the tender skin of my inner wrist until they curled and twisted with the ends of other strings. Something about that simple touch, the whispered prayers, the sincere smile made me never want to forget the moment. I tried to look at each person who came to me and burn their face into my memory forever. The experience was so human. To feel that the entire village was behind my well-being made me feel more whole.

Jonathan, commenting on a village meeting:

We then asked them questions.

Q: Are there fewer fish now than before the dam was built?
A: Yes. There used to be more fish. And bigger fish. There used to be over 200 species of fish. Now there are 50 species. In one rainy season, they used to catch over 1000 kg of fish. Now they only catch 40 kg.

Q: How can you survive with so few fish?
A: We can’t.

Q: Since many of your livelihoods centered around the fish in the river, what do you do for food or money now?
A: We send our children to work in factories in Bangkok. They send money home.

Q: How many of you have children in Bangkok?
A: All the hands go up.

Q: How many of you have several children in Bangkok?
A: All the hands stay up.

The meeting progressed like this. We kept getting deeper and deeper into the impacts this dam has had on the community. One fisherman said he used to have a good life before the dam was built. He was a wealthy man with fish to feed his family and even more fish to sell. But now he is poor. He has been made poor. He has no rice fields or gardens to grow vegetables- he relied on the longevity of that river… There is no more money left to spent on protest- the next generation of young people is all working in other cities, and the youngest know nothing of their parents’ struggles.

It was at this point in the meeting that one of the villagers stood up and asked us a question.

What are we going to do about it?
Did we just come to study them and leave? They shared their struggle with us. What are we going to do with that?

We were stunned silent, at a loss for an answer, and that was basically how the meeting ended. We had come to love these villagers and they were gracious to us. They shared what they had with us and we listened to them tell their story. Even though they aren’t sure if we can help them (i’m sure all of us will try), by us being there and sitting at their feet, we validated them. They were thankful and so were we. It was an intense and touching experience to become apart of the community of Nong Po.

Rebecca, on the village and the river:

I’m trying to be quiet more often. To listen more fully. To pay attention to silent spaces.

This time studying river ecosystems and issues having to do with human rights has set before me an incredible narrative, of the relationship between humans and their environment, a connection that holds both sorrow and joy. I’m not quite sure how to share this through a blog post, but I’ll try.

In Thai, the word for river is “Meh Nam,” which literally translates as “Mother Water.” This reality, one of life bound up in the river, was humbly evident in the two communities that we stayed over the past two weeks….

Nawg Poh today is a place lacking a generation, where young adults have been forced to leave and search for work elsewhere. Most move to Bangkok or other larger cities, as wage laborers and migrant construction workers. The people of Nawg Poh (mostly grandparents and grandchildren) expressed their mourning not only for the river, but also for their culture and way of life.

Ally:

Why am I here? That is a question I have been thinking about constantly the past few weeks. These thoughts started after the community meeting and was heightened at the mid-block seminar. I definitely did not know what I was getting into when I applied fro this semester. I didn’t know that I would be in a village that has been directly affected by the building of the dams, or even see and experience human rights/earth rights abused first hand. I didn’t know that each community that I will be staying with will take a piece of my heart. I didn’t think that I would be struggling over issues that villagers have been experiencing for many years. I didn’t know it would be this difficult!

I definitely felt a huge sense of guilt. I felt like I needed to do something, but didn’t quite know just what it was. The seminar definitely helped channel my thoughts and understand that I have already done a lot. Just by sitting there and listening to the stories of the villagers and participating in their culture was a way to empower the community. Hopefully, I have showed them that someone cares about their village and what has happened to them. Maybe I even gave them a sense of hope and dignity. I struggle with this. Is it just a cop out to say that I did all I could by listening to their stories? They even said themselves that they are tired and can’t think of anything else to do. I think the only way that I can truly grasp this idea is by figuring it out myself with the right of participation…

This course was not extremely difficult in material content, but the emotional impact of this course was and still is difficult to fully comprehend. Each place I went I feel like I left with a new connection. The family in Nong Bo said that I am always welcome, and the Paws and other activists on the Yom River were amazing to get to know and have actually become our friends. My life has been affected by these people, and I don’t think they will ever know to what degree. Pi Kan (Don Chai activist) said at the end of our trip that we have experienced a learning experience that goes both ways. I just hope that the people we were with got as umch out of spending time with us as we got out of spending a month with them. My hope is that we were able to empower them, give them hope, and support for their struggle.

For some great photos of the course, check out Jeremy’s blog (that is his photo of Pa Sanguan above, and the photo of Annie and Reb is from Reb’s blog).