For the final field course of the semester, students spent several weeks in southern Thailand based in two very different settings. One group started in the Muslim fishing community of Baan Jao Mai in Trang province, while the other group started several hours further south in the Adang Archipelago.

While both locations provided valuable assessments of how local communities utilize marine resources, the two sites provided two very different histories and current circumstances. Students were able to compare the two sites as they became proficient at identifying a wide array of marine life as well as developed an understanding of the complex relationships between a wide array of stakeholders including locals, tourists, large scale fishing operations, and governmental agencies.

In the Adang Archipelago students camped, sea kayaked, and snorkeled in the coral reefs. By kayaking in the archipelago, students were able to gain a better understanding of the effects of currents, tides, and waves on coastal and island living and travel. Through snorkeling activities, they gained an appreciation for the diversity and fragility of coral reef ecosystems. Although this portion did not include home stays, students became acquainted with their local instructors, Pi Jaen and Pi Khan who were able to provide some insight into their native Urak Lawoi community.

Baan Jao Mai provided a very different setting as students stayed with host families and examined different ecosystems including mudflats, mangroves and seagrass. Spending a greater amount of time in the community, students were able to learn about how the community used coastal resources in the past and currently as well as how they plan to conserve and use them in the future. By spending significant time in the mangroves and mudflats near Baan Jao Mai, students observed the surprising diversity of these often ignored and neglected ecosystems.

For most students, this was their final field course followed either by a return to their home university or a January internship or research project.

Students use their activity field guides, dive slates, reef identification tablets, and the course library to complete their reef survey.

Abby dives down with her dive slate and reef guide in tow to get a closer look at the reef.

Students land their kayaks after a long kayak to Koh Adang.

Students discuss mangrove management with local instructor, Ma.

Rebecca and Mel take notes while trying not to smash the pnuematphores.

Students kayak through a mangrove channel outside of Baan Jao Mai.

Celebrating Rebecca's birthday in the field, the host moms of Baan Jao Mai made sure that there was plenty of kanome for the celebration.

Students study the seagrass near Baan Jao Mai, identifying the types of seagrass and small critters as well as searching for Dugong trails.

A school of fish near the entrance of Tam Morrakot (Emerald Cave).

We’ve had the privilege of working with a professional photographer, Josh Dick, over the last few months.  (See http://www.joshdickphoto.net/ for more of his work.)

His photo essay is on the home page of ISDSI, and we’ve worked with him to produce a series of 10 posters.  Great photos that give a good sense of way the program is like.  Good for printing or for desktop wallpapers!

The posters are high resolution, and the larger ones are suitable for either high resolution printing or large banners (e.g. vinyl for a study abroad fair, etc.)

Click on the “Large” to download the large version (about 53 MB .tif file), and “Small” to download the smaller version (about 8-18 MB .jpg file).

Large:  http://www.isdsi.org/docs/MekongPaddle.tif

Small: http://www.isdsi.org/docs/MekongPaddle.jpeg

Large: http://www.isdsi.org/docs/Karst.tif

Small: http://www.isdsi.org/docs/Karst.jpeg

Large:  http://www.isdsi.org/docs/ReefCheck.tif

Small: http://www.isdsi.org/docs/ReefCheck.jpeg

Large: http://www.isdsi.org/docs/KohLipe_Kayak.tif

Small: http://www.isdsi.org/docs/KohLipe_Kayak.jpeg

Large:  http://www.isdsi.org/docs/Snorkel_Boat.tif

Small: http://www.isdsi.org/docs/Snorkel_Boat.jpeg

Large:  http://www.isdsi.org/docs/LaosRice.tif

Small: http://www.isdsi.org/docs/LaosRice.jpeg

Large: http://www.isdsi.org/docs/KohAdang_Kayak.tif

Small: http://www.isdsi.org/docs/KohAdang_Kayak.jpeg

Large:  http://www.isdsi.org/docs/SeaGrass.tif

Small: http://www.isdsi.org/docs/SeaGrass.jpeg

Large:  http://www.isdsi.org/docs/MekongPaddle_Group.tif

Small: http://www.isdsi.org/docs/MekongPaddle_Group.jpeg

Large: http://www.isdsi.org/docs/KohRawi_Boat.tif

Small: http://www.isdsi.org/docs/KohRawi_Boat.jpeg

Congratulations to Josh Dick, a professional photographer who has been documenting the courses at ISDSI this spring.  Josh accompanied us on our Rivers and Oceans courses, and did a great job documenting the course, the ecology and the local communities we study with.

One of his photos from the Oceans course was featured in National Geographic’s “Daily Dozen” online for May, week 3.  This is Bang Gil, one of the host father’s from the village.

For more of Josh’s work, including a photo essay on the Mekong river with ISDSI and our Rivers course, jump over to http://joshdickphoto.net/

Local Chao Mai fisherman, Bang Gii, rests after hauling in the night's drift net catch. From the series "Ban Chao Mai" 2011. Malacca Strait, Thailand.

Here are a few photos from the Oceans course, Culture and Ecology of the Andaman, wrapping up the first course section focused on mangrove and seagrass ecology, and the coastal village and its efforts to conserve and sustainably use the coastal resources.

Drawing on experience with participatory rural appraisal (PRA) and other innovative approaches to learning, rather than sitting together and talking and using the whiteboard, we took an experiential and hands-on approach to review and synthesis of the material.  PRA has been used for years in village appraisals, and can produce very deep and sophisticated representations of local knowledge and systems.  So we took the approach of PRA and applied it to the course material to synthesize and analyze what the students had learned in the first module on coastal resource management.

Students broke into two groups, and were given the task of building a representation of the coastal ecology and related systems out of objects they could find on the beach.  The models had to be comprehensive, sophisticated, and be able to explain the ecosystem and stakeholder relationships that they had been reading about and experiencing first hand.  Each of the groups then had to explain their model to the other one.

We also played stakeholder and resource base charades (a good break and hilarious to see someone acting out mangrove clearing shrimp farm!), and then moved to a discussion of ranked issues and concerns in the coastal zone, using pieces of driftwood to “vote” and create histograms of each issue.

Here are some photos to give you an idea of what a creative seminar can be like when you’re not confined to a classroom, as well as a few photos from today packing the boat and heading out to the islands for the second course module.

No, it isn’t just laying around the Institute drinking herbal tea and reading poetry…

This last month as been PACKED at ISDSI.

The students finished up their course on sustainable food systems and agroecology, and are now mid-course on the political ecology of forests course.  Currently both groups are up in the mountains of Mae Hong Son Province, living with and learning from the Karen villagers.

For the instructors, they’ve been all over the world.

Last month Ajaan Laura and Ajaan Abram went to India to present and participate in a conference / workshop on sustainable agriculture and sustainable development with ECHO Asia, including local and international grassroots NGO partners.

Then, Mark and Ben went to the US to present workshops at two conferences, one at the AASHE (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education) in Denver, and the Wilderness Risk Management Conference in Colorado Springs.  At the AASHE Conference they taught a workshop on Experiential Learning and Sustainability (read more about it here) and at the WRMC they taught a workshop on International Risk Management (learn more here).  Great conferences, good visits with alumni, faculty, and prospective students.  Even with meetings every single day (including the days we flew in and out!) we managed to sneak in a couple of brief hikes up into the mountains, so it was a great trip.

Snow on the mountains in October? We must not be in Chiang Mai...

Ben barely arrived back in Chiang Mai before going down south with Pi Am and Pi Pui to check the logistics for our Oceans course that starts in a month.  We’re combining the best of the former Islands and Coastal courses (hence “Oceans”), and we need to check in with the village homestays, and confirm the logistics for the islands section of the course. Moving 30+ students, instructors, sea kayaks, and all the associated gear (snorkels, fins, tents, etc.) around Southern Thailand by train, truck and boat can be complex!

Ben, Pui and Am flew back the Chiang Mai, paused for about a day, and picked up Aaron and Ajaan Abram and left for Laos!  They are there now, and are setting up an incredible addition to the Spring Semester course on Rivers.  Rivers and trans-boundary issues are critical to resource management and sustainability in Southeast Asia, and we are now, after several years of planning, able to make the Mekong River a bigger component of the course.

They get back, and next week Ben and Mark fly to Sydney Australia for 4 days of training (see cfcnx.com to learn what we’re up to)… and get back in time to greet the students for the set up and start of Oceans!

Fun!

Earlier this summer we heard through a former student Genevieve Leet (Gigi) and from Urak Lawoi that due to the prolonged heat and warmer waters, the corals were bleaching in the Adang Archipelago where we do the Oceans course.  Gigi brought back a report, after diving several of the sites that we use for the course, and reported that about 1/3 of the corals in some areas had bleached.   She also found some anenomes had bleached as well, and took some photos to document the changes.

More from the New York Times:

Extreme Heat Bleaches Coral, and Threat Is Seen

This year’s extreme heat is putting the world’s coral reefs under such severe stress that scientists fear widespread die-offs, endangering not only the richest ecosystems in the ocean but also fisheries that feed millions of people…

What is unfolding this year is only the second known global bleaching of coral reefs. Scientists are holding out hope that this year will not be as bad, over all, as 1998, the hottest year in the historical record, when an estimated 16 percent of the world’s shallow-water reefs died. But in some places, including Thailand, the situation is looking worse than in 1998…

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the first eight months of 2010 matched 1998 as the hottest January to August period on record. High ocean temperatures are taxing the organisms most sensitive to them, the shallow-water corals that create some of the world’s most vibrant and colorful seascapes…

“It is a lot easier for oceans to heat up above the corals’ thresholds for bleaching when climate change is warming the baseline temperatures,” said C. Mark Eakin, who runs a program called Coral Reef Watch for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “If you get an event like El Niño or you just get a hot summer, it’s going to be on top of the warmest temperatures we’ve ever seen.”

In Thailand, “there some signs of recovery in places,” said James True, a biologist at Prince of Songkla University. But in other spots, he said, corals were hit so hard that it was not clear young polyps would be available from nearby areas to repopulate dead reefs.

We expected that eventually the reefs at our study sites would be hit with the impact of global warming.  We just didn’t expect it this soon.

From what we have heard, we think that the archipelago is one of the places where we will see recovery.  Studying this change will be an important part of the course this semester.

Two weeks ago to start our Foundations Course, we watched a great film — 180º South — about a climber retracing the journey of two of his heroes to the tip of South American and Patagonia.

Here’s a description:

Chris Malloy’s film strikes so deeply into the heart of Patagonia’s wilderness we come to feel at home there. 180° South: Conquerors of the Useless follows Jeff Johnson as he retraces the epic 1968 journey of his heroes Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia. Along the way he gets shipwrecked off Easter Island, surfs the longest wave of his life – and prepares himself for a rare ascent of Cerro Corcovado. Jeff’s life turns when he meets up in a rainy hut with Chouinard and Tompkins who, once driven purely by a love of climbing and surfing, now value above all the experience of raw nature – and have come to Patagonia to spend their fortunes to protect it.

What we found useful in the film is the deeper story about sustainability.  Going to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) can’t help but bring up questions about sustainability. Like our own students on study abroad at ISDSI, Jeff Johnson is on a journey — getting to know interesting people, and experiencing first-hand a different way of life .

We used the film as a jumping off point to discuss sustainability and its challenges, and think that this film can be a great way to start thinking about culture and ecology — the core of what we care about at ISDSI.

Here’s the trailer:

Here are some of the questions we used for the film:

• Who are the actors / people / groups in the movie?
• What resources are they interested in / do they have a stake in?
• What is the connection to the natural world do different people / groups have?
• What key issues / questions / problems of sustainability does the film address?
• What expedition / leadership skill are demonstrated during the film?

We then followed up the rest of the week with reading papers and articles related to the sustainability themes in the film. Some of the topics we focused on were:

• Consumerism
• Resource use / management
• Views of nature / people in nature
• Corporate responsibility / sustainable business
• Individual responsibility
• Local costs / distant benefits (externalities)
• Ecological footprints
• Marginalization and sustainability

So yes, it is a fun journey movie, and entertaining.  But there is a deeper message there if you think about it.

Go see it if you can.

For more information go to 18oSouth.com and for information on showings see Patagonia.com.

One of the most hidden and potentially dangerous impacts of global warming is the impact on the oceans.  Life in the oceans can go on without terrestrial life, but without the oceans, life on land would be impossible.  Phytoplankton in the ocean are responsible for half of the planet’s oxygen. To survive, they depend on the pH of the ocean being the one they’ve adapted to.  Ocean pH has been about the same for more than 20 million years.

And we’re changing it — faster than the organisms in the ocean can adapt.

This is a key issue we talk about on our Coasts and Islands course, but is a hard topic to explain and teach about.  Here is a great  film out from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC.org) on ocean acidification and its impact on climate and life in the oceans.

ACID TEST, a film produced by NRDC, was made to raise awareness about the largely unknown problem of ocean acidification, which poses a fundamental challenge to life in the seas and the health of the entire planet. Like global warming, ocean acidification stems from the increase of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Highly recommended!  You can jump to their webpage for more information and background, including in-depth discussions of the science.

Jeremy, Rebecca and Jonathan with their host families (Bang I'et, Ma' and A'Lee). From Jeremey's blog.

The students are back from the coastal course – sea kayaking through mangroves, skin diving reefs, camping on the beach, and living with host families in a small fishing village on the coast of Trang. While we had a few big storms, the weather was good overall, and it was a great course – the students really got into the material, worked (and played) hard, and learned a lot. A highlight of the course, and a great capstone to the semester, is staying with the host families in this mostly Muslim fishing village. The families are amazing, their hospitality humbling, creating a very real connection between the students and their families.

Here are some highlights from the student blogs:

From Acadia:

As we came back to our guesthouse on Ko Mook from snorkelling off Ko Chu-ah, the tide was very low, exposing the extensive mud flats offshore of Ko Mook. Our boats went in as far as they could and we walked the rest of the way in to the island. While a long pier juts out a little ways down along the road to remedy (partially) this problem, it is not used much by local residents. Instead, they walk and haul their catch sometimes 150 yards, preferring to leave their boats cradled in the soft intertidal zone. Thinking about another extreme, NYC, where every shoreline has been extended with landfill and concrete piers, it seems in many ways the villagers on Ko Mook have got it right.

The night before, students reflected on how people here seem to have stronger relationships with natural cycles and phenomena than we do in the U.S. This has been a recurring theme throughout my time here in Thailand. In part because of the favorable climate, folks are able to incorporate a lot of outdoor space into their primary living area and seem to like this set-up despite the bugs and rain and critters passing through. Nature still has the upper hand in the local community on Ko Mook, as well. Low season for the tourism industry occurs during the monsoon season when the channel is too choppy for the island’s small boats to safely transport visitors. On a stormy day, the fishermen stay on shore and talk with their friends or do chores around the house rather than brave the elements as larger trawlers are able to do. Women follow the tides out and collect clams on the mud flats, only one example of how intimately their lives are tied to the moon cycle.

Both Jeremy and Jonathan posted some great photos on their blogs of the course.

Here are a couple of photos of the different type of sea kayaking we do on the course from Jonathan:

Crossing from the mainland to Mook Island.

Paddling through the mangroves.

Here are some photos from Jeremy:

Anna, Bang I'et and Pi Toto listening to Bang Hed talk about community forests and mangroves.

Ma' roasts cashews fresh off the tree.

In Thailand, as in much of the world, more time is required to catch fewer and fewer fish.

Alanna Mitchell’s book, Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis,  lays out in clear language the multiple challenges that are facing the oceans, from oxygen depleted dead zones, to the acidification of the oceans, to the crashing of the global fish stocks. Part travel writing, part investigative reporting, Sea Sick follows Mitchell around the world talking with scientists and seeing the crisis of the oceans first-hand.

We’ve been looking for a good book that we can use on our Coastal course as well as the Islands course. Mitchell’s book is perfect for what we needed — a book with the big picture, and lots of links into the primary literature.  So, for example, while reading about her visit to Halifax and discussions with scientists studying the crisis of global fisheries, we also read the journal articles that those scientists have written (such as Worm, Boris, et. al., “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services,” Science, Vol. 314, November 2006).

Here are some excerpts (from the book’s page online).

The ocean is built to withstand change. It has layers of safeguards that the atmosphere and the land systems do not, and yet even these are being breached. It is a larger and more serious problem than atmospheric change.

However, we are not hearing much about it, or about the implications for life on the planet–not just human life and civilisation, but life in general. We hear from time to time about overfishing, or about the cities that would flood if the sea level rose, or about coral bleaching, but rarely everything put together…

About 250 million years ago, during the time known as the Great Dying at the end of the Permian period–the biggest mass extinction the world has yet known–the ocean’s oxygen ran out. There are a couple of theories about why this happened, but a leading candidate is that the surface layer warmed up enough and became salty enough to disturb the currents. Currents feed oxygen from the atmosphere into the ocean and move nutrients around. When the oxygen vanished, most life on land and in the sea–more than 90 per cent of the species then alive–died.

The point of the story, [Flannery] said, is that it is clear that the ocean contains the switch of life. Not land, nor the atmosphere. The ocean. And that switch can be flipped off.

We know it’s happened in the past, he told me. We just don’t know the trigger.

As the book makes clear, we may have pulled the trigger without realizing it.

A few good points from the book:

• The ocean produces half the oxygen we breath.  In other words, every other breath comes from the ocean.
• 99 percent of the living space on the planet is the ocean.
• Most of us have a “terrestrial bias” and really mostly think about only the very surface of the ocean (when we think about it at all).
• If all terrestrial life ceased, the life in the oceans would go on.  If life in the oceans ceased,  terrestrial life would also cease.

The book provided the basis for some great discussions.  One of the main things that kept coming up over and over again was the question of WHY.  Why do students grow up in school studying the destruction of the rainforest, and for most of the students, this was the first time they had read about the crisis facing the oceans? Their own experience proved Mitchell’s point of terrestrial bias.

Today, the students are down in Trang, Southern Thailand, camping on the beach and sea kayaking through the mangroves.  The next few days will be spent padding and diving, learning about mangroves, sea grasses and reefs. Tomorrow requires a crossing to Koh Muk, and paying attention to wind, tides and currents will be key. In just over a week, they will paddle down the coast to a small Muslim fishing village, and spend the remainder of the course learning from their host families about the crisis of the oceans Mitchell writes about, and what one small Thai community is doing to help conserve the mangrove and sea grasses, and make a difference in the future of the oceans.

This is a great book. Get it, read it, and pass it on to someone else to read.