Each Expedition Field Course has a mid-course seminar — a chance to reflect on what is being learned, summarize, and prepare for the next phase of the expedition.  Ajaan Abram, teaching the rivers course, met the students in Nong Khai and traveled with them to the seminar site.

Students working on their posters in the guesthouse overlooking the Mekong river.

For the Rivers course, the seminar took place in the riverside town of Chiang Khan, in Loei province.  Chiang Khan used to be a sleepy town of wooden buildings built along the banks of the Mekong river, across from Laos.  Now, the old wooden buildings are being converted into guest houses, Internet cafes, and funky restaurants — as it is only a day’s drive from Bangkok. It is a great place for mid-course on Rivers, as it is half way between Issan (the Northeast of Thailand) and the Northern Thai province of Phrae, where the students paddle the Yom River (go to our maps page to see the course locations).

A street in Chiang Khan.

During the seminar the students ha a chance to talk through what they had learned from the communities of fisherfolk along the Mun river, the impact of the Pak Mun dam, as well as what they had observed on the transect of the Mekong river up from Ubonratchathani province.

Filling in the details before presenting.

Two of the key questions that were discussed were about connections and interactions taking place in and around rivers in SE Asia.

Taylor and Karen talking about the “Bangkok Monster” and its impact on the river, villagers, ecosystems and other players in resource management.

Students were asked to draw the spatial, environmental, economic and sociological connections of major players in and around the Mun River before and after the construction of the Pak Mun dam. They were also asked to reflect on transboundary interactions of players on the Mekong including the spatial, environmental, economic and sociological connections.

Jill, Emily and Kadilyn (with the Mekong river behind them).

Here are some photos of the day, along with their posters and explanatory text, to give you a feel for the course.

Exploring the connections between environmental, social and economic impacts of the Pak Mun dam.

Women in Chiang Khan selling “popia tot” (fried spring rolls).

Karen and Taylor discuss the Mekong as a chocolate river (more below).

Transboundary issues -- as water flows down the river, each user takes out some, leaving less for the downstream countries.

Vested interests of different actors in managing the Mekong river.

Motorcycle with rattan basket in front of the guesthouse.

The Mekong represented as a giant catfish — with each group trying to take a share (eat the fish).

The Mekong river as the chocolate river in the Willy Wonka factory, with each user (country) drinking from the river, the ompa-loompas as the Mekong River Commission trying to get everyone to cooperate, and consumerism floating down the river.

The village and their livelihood before the dam and “development” — with villagers self-sufficient in fish, and earning money from a very rich fishery. After, they loose their self-sufficiency and are forced to migrate to the city to work.

Sunset over the Mekong river -- Thailand on the left, Laos on the right.

This last five weeks we’ve been fortunate to have Christie Sobel here are our “artist in residence” doing illustrations for our field guides, some graphic design, and overall adding to the life at ISDSI.

In addition to the art work she was doing for ISDSI, Christie led the students in some field based drawing classes — learning how to really look at the natural world and capture it through drawings and illustrations.

Here are some of the icons for our courses that she did.

Her work is available for purchase through her website. Beautiful note cards and illustrations — we REALLY like these! Be sure to jump to http://christisobel.com/ for more!

Currently so much talking and writing is often done without conviction — without thoughtful, measured, and considered words.  As any alumni of an ISDSI program can tell you, there is a lot of writing during an ISDSI course — field notes, essays, reflections, etc. As we are teaching our students about writing and research over the last couple of weeks, we watched and discussed this poem by Taylor Mali.  It is critical to be able to write clearly, and to know how to make a cogent argument using well chosen words. Taylor Mali makes the point in a funny and profound way.

Enjoy (and thanks to film student Ronnie Bruce for the video).

This week on Wednesday the students went out for a great hands-on lesson about Thai culture, markets and food.

It is one thing to learn a language in the classroom, and quite another to learn it while trying to buy the right ingredients while you’re haggling in the market!

The students did a great job, and returned with fresh produce and other ingredients in hand to start their cooking lessons.  As anyone who has been to Thailand knows, Thai food is a key part of the culture, as is cooking and eating together.  The students (directed by their fantastic Thai language instructors) did a terrific job.

As one student said during the day’s lesson, “You know, after learning like this we’re not going to be able to go back to learning in classrooms when we get back to America.”

Here are a few photos to give you an idea of why that is so true.

Vegetable prep.

Fresh lime

Ahaan Thai! ("Thai food")

Roasting peanuts

Garlic (crushed, and the skins only partially removed if you are frying them for added taste)

Jill roasting peanuts.

Tomatos, long bean, chilli peppers, and Thai eggplant

For the end of orientation week, we went climbing at Crazy Horse, a series of limestone cliffs and caves outside of Chiang Mai.  We went with Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventures (CMRCA), a great organization that we work with and runs outstanding climbing and caving programs.

The goal of the day was to get to know each other, learn about leadership and responsibility, get outside, and start building a base of expedition skills for the semester.

Boi teaching belaying to Krissy and Lindsey.

Boom backing up Betsy belaying

Emily climbing.

Carrie "sanuk!"

Explaining safety and risk management for the tyrolean

Uan starting Lyndsey on the tyrolean

Molly crossing the tyrolean 53 meters up.

Pi Pu enjoying a day out of the normal office routine on the tyrolean traverse.

Student Ben rapelling after the tyrolean traverse

Pi Ben and Pi Pu resting in the shade (Ben may have been snoring...)

This semester we are giving each student a new book: Thailand: Travellers’ Wildlife Guide.

This is a great resource with all the most important birds, mammals, reef fish, reptiles, insects and other wildlife. We’ve been looking for something like this for a long time, and even has a good variety of insects. Lots of information on the ecology of Thailand, as well as specific habitat, etc.

From the publisher:

Thailand holds a special place in the minds of the world’s nature-lovers as a paradise of splendid tropical forests, untrammeled ocean beaches, and spectacular underwater coral grottos. Nature travellers to Thailand want to experience these stunning habitats and catch glimpses of exotic wildlife-gibbons and elephants, hornbills and storks, gliding lizards and cobras, brightly colored reef fishes and marine invertebrates. In this book is all the information you need to find, identify, and learn about Thailand’s magnificent animal and plant life.

• Identifying and location information on the most frequently seen animals.
• Full-color illustrations of nearly 600 of Thailand’s most common insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and coral fish.
• Up-to-date information on the ecology, behavior, and conservation of the animals.
• Information on Thailand’s habitats and on the most common plants you will encounter.

Brief descriptions of Thailand’s most frequently visited parks and reserves.

Easy-to-carry, entertainingly written, beautifully illustrated - you will want to have this book as constant companion on your journey.

About the Authors

David L. Pearson is a research professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He is co-author of The New Key to Ecuador and the Galapagos and of Ecuador in this series.

Les Beletsky is a professional wildlife biologist and former university zoology teacher. Prior to taking up writing wildlife guides, he conducted many years of field research into the ecology and behavior of birds. He is the author of numerous books, including Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Peru in this series.

Even if you’re not in Thailand, this is a good introduction to the ecology and wildlife of Thailand. Highly recommended!

That said, from our research and experience we feel that the information on farming in the tropics and human impact presents a unsophisticated understanding of the complex ethno-ecological relationships in Thailand and Southeast Asia. That isn’t the focus of the book, however, so it is still a valuable resource on the wildlife.

We’ve found a few errors (not unusual in a book of this size and complexity).  We’ll update this list as we find more.

Errata:

p. 19: The metric conversion for fan palm is incorrect. They list “3 m, 30 ft, tall” and 3 m and 30 ft are not the same, so one is wrong.

p. 35: The labels for breadfruit and jackfruit are switched.

p. 382: The information on behavior, habitat and numbers on dugong is incorrect. The Phuket Marine Biological Institute estimates from aerial surveys that there are between 100 and 130 individuals, not “40″. Dugongs are mostly observed in the sea grass beds off of Muk and Libong Islands, not “the mouth of the Trang river”.  Dugong do not feed on “green algae and other seaweeds, usually in areas of rocky outcroppings.” Dugong feed on sea grasses in large sea grass beds off the islands (sea grass is a true vascular plant, not a form of algae). Finally, dugongs do not “rest by day in deep water; by night, feeds underwater in shallow coastal waters.”  They do rest in deep water, but dugong feeding is based on the tides, not the sun.  They come in to feed on sea grasses during high tides, and retreat to deep water to rest at low tide.  For more on dugongs, see Dugong: Status Report and Action Plans for Countries and Territories by UNEP, or Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dugong.

Here’s the link to Amazon.

(Thanks to Binney and Tim from Kalamazoo College for spotting it on Amazon and showing us a copy!)

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.

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

Learning about forest ecology firsthand.

Seth Godin has a great post up today about learning versus schooling, Education at the crossroads.  Good food for thought.

School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is ‘getting it’. It’s the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn’t care about workbooks or long checklists.

For a while, smart people thought that school was organized to encourage learning. For a long time, though, people in the know have realized that they are fundamentally different activities.

Seth’s got a good point, which I would modify a bit.  Schools are not necessarily organized around encouraging learning in the sense of “getting it.”  The good ones, however are organized around learning.  I think the distinction might be better if understood between good schools (where real learning is happening) and others that just push student through.  If all that is happening is testing, then clearly there is a problem!

His primary point, however, is the distinction between scarcity and abundance in education.

MIT and Stanford are starting to make classes available for free online. The marginal cost of this is pretty close to zero, so it’s easy for them to share. Abundant education is easy to access and offers motivated individuals a chance to learn.

Scarcity comes from things like accreditation, admissions policies or small classrooms.

For us at ISDSI, we have an inherent scarcity for our semester programs - we can can only take so many students a semester, based on class size and how many students our partners in the villages we work in can accomodate.  Recognizing that not all the students who would like to come can come, we’re in the process of exploring ways in which to share classes, experiences and our understanding of culture and ecology in Thailand.  As one step in that direction this last year we put all of our syllabi online, and are now exploring video, photos essays and other options for sharing what we’eve learned. We hope to have some lessons and other materials up over the next year.  If you have ideas of things you’d like to see or learn about, let us know in the comments!

Sustainability has a long history in SE Asia

Good overview of the growing importance of sustainability in higher education by Jillian Berman in USA Today, “College students are flocking to sustainability degrees, careers.”

Several schools are mentioned, as is AASHE (The Associate for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education).  Both undergraduate programs, graduate programs, majors, minors and other initiatives are surging in popularity.  I know that last year at the AASHE conference it had grown enourmously from the first one I attended six years ago - from 300-400 people to close to 1,800 participants, 400 presenters and 130 exhibitors!

This growth in interest is across the board - from undergraduate majors, to MBAs, architecture degrees to student life. Not content to just focus on sustainability in the classroom, there is a lot going on outside the classroom as well - with campus organic gardens, LEED certified buildings, recycling, etc.

What is most exciting about this is that the initiatives are largely student driven - as students get together to push the (sometimes reluctant) school administrators for more green / sustainable initiatives on-campus.

We’ve noticed the trend ourselves - we’ve got a record number of students enrolled this fall, and are seeing the students who do come have a deeper understanding of sustainability issues than in the past. It is enourmously encouraging to see the growth over the last 10 years at ISDSI, as sustainability has moved increasingly to the center of higher education!