It is really difficult at times to figure out what is going on in a place far away (like Thailand for some folks) when there is a big photogenic crisis.  Great photos and great video of a protest, burning tires, or other chaos don’t always capture what is really going on.

This is especially the case with the protests and government crackdown in Bangkok.  Bangkok is a HUGE city of 12 million people.  While the protests cover several square kilometers, for most people in the city there is little direct impact.  In other places, like Chiang Mai, there is even less apparent impact.  People everywhere are aware of what is going on, and share the concerns people elsewhere in the world have for the violence and rioting that is going on in Bangkok.

But watching CNN and the BBC gives a distorted picture of what life is like (not even to get into the bias that has crept into their reporting).

However, CNNGo has had some great articles about what is going on in Thailand, behind the scenes, and for the “normal life” that most of us living in Thailand are going through daily.  It is worth a read.

Here are some excerpts from their latest article, Thailand struggles as Bangkok burns

Images of flaming tires, blood-covered bodies, armed soldiers and grenade riddled buildings may dominate local and international media these days, but in the rest of the Thailand — and even most parts of Bangkok — life is carrying on without any signs of the clashes.

That’s not to say residents aren’t suffering, particularly in the country’s major resort areas where international tourists are scarce…“It’s such a shame that travel alerts don’t always distinguish between the safe parts and the spots where snipers and tire-burners do their thing,” he says, referring to the many government advisories that warn their citizens to avoid travel not just to Bangkok, but Thailand on the whole. “Rates at four- and five-star resorts on Phuket and along the Andaman coast are likely to be fantastic for travelers in the next few months. If you’ve ever wanted a luxury holiday with all the extras, now’s the time to plan it.”

Chiang Mai: No national crisis here

Up north in Chiang Mai, where support for self-exiled former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra is prevalent, there is none of the civil unrest found in Bangkok, says long-time Chiang Mai resident and business owner Andrew Bond.

“Even the usual ongoing protest forum behind Phra Singh Temple by the UDD has been abandoned as most [red shirts] have gone to join the Bangkok group,” Bond explains. “The city is going about its business and uninformed tourists wouldn’t suspect there’s a national crisis.” … Thai Chiang Mai resident Therapat Poomstitpong agrees with Bond, saying that the only evidence he’s seen of the protests is what appears on TV screens and the front pages of the daily newspapers, but unfortunately the tourists are staying away.

“It’s sad, as there aren’t many foreign tourists. Everyone is so tired of the violence, most of us want it to stop,” the ice cream vendor says.

Jump over to their site, and check out what they’re saying.  It is a good look behind the headlines.

We sent this out as an email to our study abroad community mailing list of partner schools, faculty, alumni and others, and wanted to put it up on our blog so folks can find it if they are looking for more information.

As I’m sure all of you are aware, the on-going protests in Bangkok have turned violent, and the US State Department has issued a Travel Warning, as an update to its earlier Travel Alert.

Our spring semester ended on Friday (May 14th), and at this point there should be no impact on our upcoming fall 2010 study abroad program.  However, I wanted to update you on what we are seeing in Thailand, and to give context and/or correct some of the information that is being reported in the media.

BACKGROUND

The protestors (known as the “red shirts”/United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship or UDD) are supporters of former prime minister Taksin, who is has been convicted of corruption after he fled the country, and is now living in the Middle East. Taksin was popular with many rural farmers in the North and Northeast for his patronage and populist programs of cheap loans and health care, but was criticized for being corrupt, vote buying, and significant human rights violations.  The UDD claims the current government (brought into power through a parliamentary vote rather than direct elections) is not legitimate. Taksin is largely (but not singularly) directing the protests from abroad, and the demands of the protesters have grown to include other grievances of the rural poor.  As with all politics in Thailand, it is complex.

The protests that are in the news are centered on an area in central Bangkok, and have been going on for almost two months.  This is an area of several blocks, with shopping malls, embassies, and residential areas.  Like in other cities, in Chiang Mai there are a couple of stages up (one near the railroad station, and one in the center of the old city behind a temple), but that is about it — nothing like the protests in Bangkok, and very limited in scope and attendance (most tourists and a surprising number of residents aren’t even aware they exist).

Last week the Thai government and the UDD negotiated a reconciliation plan.  After agreeing to it, the UDD increased their demands. The government then withdrew the reconciliation plan. The UDD leadership is splintered, and many of the moderate leaders have left, leaving more radical leaders largely (but not completely) in charge.  Under increasing pressure from business leaders and middle and upper class Bangkok residents, the government moved in troops on Thursday to cordon off the protest area and not allow additional protestors to join the protests.  The government has also declared a state of emergency in several provinces (including Chiang Mai) in order to be able to respond quickly in the case of unrest in those areas.

CURRENT SITUATION

Over the last three days there has been increasing violence from both sides, with the Thai army firing tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition. The protestors are also heavily armed (it isn’t quite as one-sided as you’d think from watching CNN — the hard core protestors and other groups have weapons).

The unrest, however, has remained limited to a few square blocks in central Bangkok. Unfortunately, that is where a lot of the diplomatic community lives, and where the US and other embassies are located. Those embassies have closed, and the US and others have moved the families living in the area to outside of Bangkok. This has been reported in the news as the US Embassy “evacuating families from Thailand” which is not correct.

The Travel Warning urges people to not go to Bangkok, and defer nonessential travel to Thailand.  This is the same advice that we have already given our students who are here, and have asked all of them as they leave Thailand to avoid Bangkok.

For the rest of Thailand, including Chiang Mai and most of Bangkok, at this point there isn’t much impact on daily life.  More TVs are on, more people listening to the radio, more people online and following Twitter reports about what is going on in Bangkok.  We have American friends living just around the corner from the protest in Bangkok, and they said life goes on pretty much as normal, even though everyone is concerned and keeping an eye on the news.

CURRENT PLANS

For ISDSI, we are saddened that both the government and UDD have resorted to violence, and hope for a quick resolution to the conflict.  Some of the grievances of the protestors are important to address, and I hope they can be untangled from the support for the former prime minister and personal vendettas of some in the UDD leadership.

At this point we don’t anticipate that this will impact our fall semester, since we don’t have courses in Bangkok, and transiting the airport in Bangkok remains safe. Many of the students departing are leaving directly from Chiang Mai International Airport via Korea or Taiwan (already the preferred routes for most people who live in Chiang Mai since it is easier), and that remains an option for students arriving in the fall.  We have a good network of information, I am a warden with the US Consulate in Chiang Mai, and we have excellent connections with communities and NGOs throughout the country.  So we will continue to monitor the situation and plan accordingly.

Please feel free to email me if you have any questions.
-Mark A. Ritchie, Ph.D., Executive Director, ISDSI

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.

Great news via Grist. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just endorsed what many scientists have been saying for a long time – to avoid a climate catastrophe we need to aim for 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not 450 as earlier determined in the IPCC report.

From AFP, “Top U.N. climate scientist backs big CO2 cuts, 350-ppm goal“:

“As chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], I cannot take a position because we do not make recommendations,” said Rajendra Pachauri when asked if he supported calls to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below 350 parts per million (ppm).

“But as a human being I am fully supportive of that goal. What is happening, and what is likely to happen, convinces me that the world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a 350 target,” he told AFP in an interview.

The article goes on to note:

Even at current CO2 levels of 385-to-390 ppm, severe impacts from climate change—rising sea levels, drought, violent storms—have started and are likely to get worse, experts say.

Many scientists also worry that carbon pollution has damaged Earth’s capacity to absorb CO2 and triggered events—the shrinking Arctic ice cap, the decay of the Greenland ice sheet, methane release from permafrost—that will drive global warming on their own.

This is very important, and it further supports the goal of 350 ppm, and while challenging, it is still (hopefully) reachable, at least from a scientific / technical standpoint, if not necessarily from a political standpoint.

Bill McKibbon at Grist notes:

When Jim Hansen and other scientists looked at phenomena like the Arctic ice melt of the last two summers, they produced new data demonstrating that 350 ppm is the bottom line. But it’s been hard to get that news out to the powers that be. So today it comes as enormous and welcome news that Pachauri, from his New Delhi office, said that 350 was the number.

For more on this see 350.org.

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…).

As I write this Monday night (Thailand time), the government is working to clear the streets, the opposition “red shirts” have issued a call to fall back to the main protest site around government house, and there are sporadic protests in the provinces.  No one really knows what is going to happen next.

It can be difficult at times like these to know what is going on, since there are so many rumors, mis-reported new stories, and unconfirmed reports. Through it all, however, day-to-day life goes on.  Today is part of the Thai New Year celebration of songkran, a water festival, and throughout most of the country people are having fun, throwing water on each other, going to local fairs, and enjoying time off from work and a relief from the heat of April.

Two excellent articles out today, not on the details of the crisis so much as the issues surrounding them. Both are well worth a read, and give a lot of good background on what is happening and why.

Philip Bowring writing an op-ed in The New York Times (What Shirt for Thailand?):

The situation is not beyond retrieval. Thailand has always flourished on pragmatic compromises, domestic and international. Ethnic homogeneity and the economic interests of a society with few big corporations but many small businessmen and independent farmers all make it unlikely that there will be widespread bloodshed.

But there remains a fundamental divide over the rules of the political game. Social divisions must be bridged if Thailand is to return to the promise of 1997, when elections and a new constitution seemed to put the nation on a path of liberal democracy.

Another good article from The Economist, “Thailand’s ugly crisis“:

Many Thais are heartily sick of the crisis and its enormous damage to the economy in terms of lost investment and tourists. Another military coup is rumoured, although it is unclear where the army’s political inclinations lie. Presumably Mr Abhisit’s days are numbered as prime minister, though who might succeed him is anyone’s guess. Mr Thaksin hopes to ride the protests and return to power. Yet with plenty of scores to settle, his would presumably be a brittle and autocratic rule at a time when reconciliation is badly needed. Fresh elections are probably the best bet, with the promise of a search for a broad political consensus for constitutional change to allow a more representative politics. For now, with violence in the streets again, Thailand teeters on the brink.

As someone who has lived in Thailand most of the last 20 years, and who has been through more than one coup d’état, it is still difficult to know what is going to happen, and how it will impact the country as a whole (the big picture) and our specific program and students (the details).

How do we figure out what is going on, and how best to respond?

There are a number of things we do in this sort of situation, and it may be helpful to share some of it, both for students, parents, partner schools, and for other faculty and/or programs who might face a similar situation.

We of course have an emergency response plan, a team of well-trained staff, and have worked out in advance what to do in a variety of scenarios. I  (Mark) am a warden with the US Consulate in Chiang Mai, so get updates directly from the Consulate when they are issued, and also know many of the consular folks as personal friends. All of our staff carry cell-phones, and when students are in-country, the phone are on 24/7 in case of an emergency. We have a list of student cell phones, parental and school emergency contacts, etc. News feeds (online and off) are monitored daily for important information, especially as concerns security and threats.  All of that is (or at least should be) routine for any study-abroad program. (You can read more about our approach to risk management at “The Objective Hazards of Culture: Risk Management in an International Setting” here as a PDF.)

The key is knowing the place with the sort of “deep knowing” David Orr talks about when referring the ecological education and knowing a river or mountain.

“…[A] course on a nearby river might require students to live on the river for a time, swim in it, canoe it, watch it in its various seasons, study its wildlife and aquatic animals, listen to it, and talk to people who live along it.  A river become…”a microcosm of the world” and a doorway to wider knowledge…there are some things that cannot be known or said about a mountain, or a forest, or a river—things too subtle or too powerful to be caught in the net of science, language, and intellect.” (p. 96, Earth In Mind: On Education, Environment And The Human Prospect, 1994)

You have to “swim” in a culture to know it deeply.

For a culture and a country, knowing the community, the normal rhythms of day-to-day life, being comfortable speaking Thai everyday with friends and acquaintances (getting inside the skin of the culture), spending a lot of time reading and talking about politics with Thai and ex-pat experts. It is in part having a network of trusted friends, both Thai and ex-pat residents (foreigners) who are themselves well connected. People you can trust, who have good judgement, and who you can ask for help, advice and trusted opinion. Moving between the academic world of the urban elite to the world of marginalized villagers (in the North, Northeast and South especially) means that we have friends who are poor farmers, fishermen and tribal people–all of whom have a different view on what is happening, and how it fits into the bigger picture. It isn’t just the opinions of a Thai political scientist that matter, but also our uncles, aunts, older brothers and sisters out in the villages who matter.

Deep knowing doesn’t tell you what is going to happen, but helps you know what to do when something does happen.

So while there is not a simple formula to calculate what is going to happen and what we should do about it, deep knowing, a cautious awareness and multiple sources of information go a long way towards helping us know what to do and what is happening. We are fortunate to have excellent students who love Thai culture and dive into the language and home-stays with gusto (even when it is hard). As they develop cultural sensitivity and awareness, strong relationships with host families, and a good understanding of how to live in Thailand, it makes our job not just much easier, but deepens our own understanding of this place as we see them struggle to create a new home.

As the articles above point out, there are some significant changes happening in Thailand, and the rural-urban gap needs to be bridged. Having close friends among the urban elite as well as the marginalized rural folk leads me to be cautiously optimistic about the eventual outcome, but concerned as well for a country and a people that we love as the problems get sorted out.

As any of you know who follow the news about Thailand, there has been a long running feud between the “yellow shirts” and the “red shirts” here–the “yellow shirts” backing the traditional elites, and the “red shirts” backing the former prime minister Thaksin (who was deposed in a coup, fled the country and was convicted of corruption).

The best background is (as is often the case) at The Economist, “No green light.”

TRAFFIC lights go from red to yellow. Thai politics goes the other way. Last year it was the “yellow shirts” of the royalist People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) who stormed the prime minister’s compound, bringing the country to its knees and forcing the government out. Now, after a few months’ calm, tens of thousands of redshirted protesters are surrounding the compound, demanding the resignation of the prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, and holding up portraits of Thaksin Shinawatra, the twice-elected prime minister deposed by the army in 2006.

As of today (Sunday, April 12) there has been a state of emergency declared in Bangkok, with various reports of protests at different intersections, etc.  This week is the start of the Thai New Year, Songkran, and our spring break.  Only one student is in Bangkok (I just spoke with her) and is headed down to the beaches with her aunt.  The rest are in Chiang Mai, where the rest of Thailand goes to celebrate Songkran.

Let’s hope that the Songkran holidays, a time of renewal and forgiveness, will help both sides to back down and back off.

(If you want to follow the news and commentary yourself, two of the best sites for up-to-the-minute news are The Bangkok Post and The Nation.)