The Nokero bulb at night. One GREAT feature is that it turns itself off in bright light -- so you could leave it on and hanging up, and it would go on at night when it gets dark.

We just got in three Nokero solar light bulbs today, and they are amazing.  I heard about this a few weeks ago, and contacted the company and ordered three to check out.

It is a very simple design — four small solar cells collecting energy, with a NiMH battery to store the power in, and a 5 LED “bulb”.  It looks (and feels) very rugged, and super durable.  I hung it outside today, and then turned it on this evening and it is decently bright — certainly enough to read by if you need to, or carry out other jobs at night.

This would be great on our expedition field courses — just clip it to a pack or canopy of a longtail boat during the day, and hang it up at night for light. As a study abroad program working in remote areas, these look to be a great addition to our bag of tricks.

We’re going to be stress testing it over the course of the next few months, but we can already see some great applications beyond just our own expedition field courses:

• Imagine airlifting thousands of these into places hit by a natural disaster (like Haiti) where the grid is down…
• Handing them out to IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) in Burma or other war zones…
• Giving them as gifts to village host families who are away from the grid…

I’ve camped in the jungle at night, and it is REALLY dark.  Just think about how much better than trying to keep a fire burning for light one of these would be if you’re an IDP fleeing to the border?  No fire to worry about, no worries about running out of fuel, no need to buy batteries.  Getting them out there isn’t going to be easy — but it IS possible.

So we’re going to see about doing that, and maybe set up a way for folks to sponsor solar light bulbs for IDPs in Burma through ISDSI…

For more information (or to order one yourself) go to www.nokero.com.

Students learning about fish on the Yom river.

Once again, the plan to destroy one of the last wild rivers in Thailand has come back to life — plans are in high gear to build a dam at the Kang Sua Ten rapids on the Yom river in Phrae.

We’ve run a course on the Yom for several years, Human Rights and The Environment: Rivers, Dams and Local Struggles.  A big part of the course is comparing the Mun river (already dammed and destroyed by the Thai state) and the Yom (impacted by a weir down river, but still vibrant and alive).  We paddle the river with local elders, learn about the fish and ecology of the river, and learn about their struggle to keep the river from being dammed.

The excuse for years has been that it will control flooding, or in more recent years, to prevent drought. As the villagers know, however, that is a lie. Flooding in the provinces downstream has been shown to be the result of local rainfall and poor drainage — not due to water carried down from the upper Yom. But that isn’t why they want to build the dam.

The real reason? The Yom river basin is also home to the last stand of golden teak left in Thailand — worth millions of dollars.  So whoever gets to dam the Yom not only gets to embezzle the money from the construction project (which we know from the research of Ajaan Pasuk is likely to be between 40% to 60% of the budget), but they also get the real prize — millions of dollars in rare golden teak.

The budget alone is about 11 billion Baht.

Thai pu yai (influential “big” people) seem to care only for money. They are also not stupid — they are clearly taking advantage of the political turmoil in Thailand to push through this project, hoping that people will not notice, will be too busy rebuilding their lives after the violence of May, and too busy to care and do something about it.

Some people have noticed, and now the Royal Irrigation Department is arguing for two “small” dams on the river — trying to back off, and make it sounds like it won’t destroy the river.  But it will — it will kill it, and destroy the ecology and the community.

And once the river is gone, it is gone forever.  Along with the livelihoods of the local community, the famers, young activists and others.  We know, and the community knows — just look at the Mun river after it was dammed.

The things that is most galling, of course, is that the dam is both unnecessary and won’t solve the problems it is said to solve. But the lack of scientific and empirical support has never stopped the building of a dam in Thailand before — as we see every spring as we live with and learn from the villagers impacted by the building of the Pak Mun Dam — thousands of lives and communities destroyed, fish stocks devastated along with the people who fished, all for nothing but a inefficient dam that doesn’t even pay for itself with the little electricity it does produce.

So they are doing everything they can to put another dam on the Yom.

This will destroy the lives of the community of teachers, mentors and leaders who have shared their lives, knowledge and wisdom with our instructors and students.

Our friends.

We will be doing everything we can to raise awareness about this, and hope to play a role in stopping the dam.

We’ll keep you posted.

—————–

Three articles to read:

Yom River Dam Will Devastate the Area

Sanan renews push for building of dam

Dept mulls two small dams for Yom River

On Wednesday, we issued gear to the students for the Coastal Ecology and Culture course — masks, fins, snorkels, dry bags, PFDs (life jackets), etc. A key part of the expedition involves studies of coral reefs, sea grasses and mangroves, and sea kayaking through the marine and mangrove ecosystems. Good gear and the ability to access those environments is critical, so we make sure that the students are well equipped.

Snorkels ready for the students. Numbered (to keep track of them) and yellow (so we can spot folks in the water easily). Checking the seals, silicon mouth pieces, etc.

Fins and student uniforms. The new look at ISDSI!

Masks ready to go. We purchase new gear on a regular basis, and work with professional dive supply shops to get top end gear. It lasts longer and fits better, making field studies a lot easier.

Jack (and Riley in the background) checking the seals on their masks.

Pi Kat, businesswoman, climber and occasional ISDSI Field Instructor, climbing at Crazy Horse. (Photo credit: Josh and Dan Morris)

A core part of what we do at ISDSI is to teach students about teamwork, leadership, and decision making. We believe that part of creating a more sustainable world is equipping students with practical skills in how to work and lead, so that their passion for sustainability can be transformed into action.

A great way to combine these lessons is through the challenge of rock climbing. We are fortunate to be near a world-class climbing destination, and have helped a bit over the years to develop Crazy Horse, from crag clean-ups to trail building to some initial meetings with local officals. Crazy Horse is a community effort spearheaded by the folks at Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventures.  Each semester, ISDSI students go out to Crazy Horse to climb and have an amazing time. Josh Morris and Khaetthaleeya Uppakham (Pi Kat) have done a great job developing the crag into not only a world-class climbing destination, but also an example of how to develop a sustainable ecotourism destination. We’ve worked with both Josh and Kat, and Kat is a field instructor for ISDSI when she has time.

Climbing Magazine has featured them in an article, The Other Thailand, talking not just about the climbing, but also the history and unique development of Crazy Horse.

Leave behind Thailand’s farang-packed Tonsai, and you’ll discover Crazy Horse, a quiet crag that’s redefining sustainable tourism in Asia…

Crazy Horse Buttress rises above rice paddies 25 miles from the culturally vibrant city Chiang Mai. Named for its principal formation’s striking resemblance to an equine head, Crazy Horse comprises a cluster of 15 quiet cliffs first climbed in 1998 and now boasting 97 single-pitch and 15 multi-pitch routes. Spanning 5.6 to 5.13c, the climbs tackle everything from technical slabs, to overhanging tufas, to multi-chambered, stalactite-dripping caves — not to mention the wealth of untapped rock.

However, the cliff’s true essence lies in the tight-knit community of locals and foreigners who’ve developed it. With an emphasis on social and ecological sustainability, the motley Crazy Horse crew has endeavored to keep this a quality destination for the long haul. In fact, many climbers now hold up Crazy Horse as a case study on how climbing tourism can positively affect a foreign community. Turns out, one of the most important factors is for the locals to come to love climbing, too.

If you’re interested in sustainability, ecotourism and (of course) climbing, jump over and read “The Other Thailand.”

Great post today from our friend Chutayaves Sinthuphan (Chuta).  Khun Chuta is a Thai architect who is doing some great work on sustainable architecture here in Thailand — working on container based housing, earthen structures (adobe and cob) and other projects.

Khun Chuta was just featured on a documentary television program.

We were featured on a documentary ‘Save My Planet’ on Live Well Network about our interest in creating eco-friendly affordable income housing out of shipping containers in Thailand.

Check out the video here: LiveWell:

Next, we’ll head to the other side of the world where one man is giving old shipping containers new life. Folks in Bangkok, Thailand, might one day see an entire neighborhood of beautiful homes made from these abandoned boxes:

• There are thousands of unused shipping containers sitting in ports around the world
• The containers are usually made of the best steel money can buy
• Shipping container homes are a great way to provide affordable housing

For more of Khun Chuta’s work, see his blog at A Site Specific Experiment.

The last week of the Foundations course the students at ISDSI fan out over the city and study four sustainability indicators — walkability, traffic, the use/health of the Ping river, and the food systems of Chiang Mai (looking at organic food, the size of the foodshed, etc.).  The students split into four groups, and each group spends Monday planning, Tuesday and Wednesday gathering data, Thursday doing data analysis, and then Friday on a presentation.

Nikki and Jack talking about "som" (tangerines) in both supermarkets and fresh (wet) markets.

It is always fun to see what creative ways students work out to learn about sustainability in the city.  This semester the rivers group borrowed a couple of ISDSI’s sit-on-top kayaks and paddled down the Ping river, the food systems group decided to focus on oranges/tangerines as a proxy for broader food system dynamics, the traffic group looked a cars and “public” or at least “mass” transportation, and the walking group tried to figure out how difficult it was to walk in different places in the city.

Molly and Taylor discussing the challenges of walking in the city center.

The papers are here as pdf files:

• Walkability index for Chiang Mai city
• Traffic and mass transportation as a measure of sustainability for Chiang Mai
• Food systems, organics and the foodshed for tangerines (som) in Chiang Mai
• The Ping river and its connection to sustainability and the life of Chiang Mai

Krissy and her group did a great job working out the challenges of walking, and how even the idea of walking around the city is culturally mediated.

On Friday we were joined by Khun Pim Kemasingki, the editor of Chiang Mai CityLife magazine, a well known English language magazine published in Chiang Mai for almost 20 years. Khun Pim was great — having grown up in Chiang Mai she was able to add a lot of historical background, and with her position as editor, she understands the challenges of sustainability for Chiang Mai city. It was great for the students as well to get another perspective on the city, and the role of culture, language and politics in sustainability. (Also check out CityLife’s page on going carbon neutral.)

Ajaan Christina, Ajaan Mark and Khun Pim were the discussants for the presentations.

The students learned a lot about the city that is there home for this semester, got out into places tourists don’t often go, and were able to pull together research involving both social science and ecology. Well done all!

Matt explains the traffic and how it all fits together.

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 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

Scientists need a listening public

A sobering post up by Joseph Romm on the failure of scientists to communicate the realities facing us due to global warming, Publicize or perish: The scientific community is failing miserably in communicating the potential catastrophe of climate change. His post is a reprint from a special issue of Physics World on Energy, Sustainability and Climate Change. (emphasis mine)

The fate of the next 50 generations may well be determined in the next few months and years…

The International Scientific Congress on climate change held in Copenhagen in March, which was attended by 2000 scientists, concluded that “Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized.” That would mean that by 2100 there would be atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide of more than 1000 ppm, total planetary warming of 5 °C and sea-level rises probably on the high end of recent projections of 1–2 m followed by a rise of as much as 2 cm per year or more for centuries. We would also see one-third of inhabited land reaching dust bowl levels of aridity, half or more of all species becoming extinct, and the oceans increasingly becoming hot, acidic, dead zones. And if we do not change course quickly, the latest science predicts that these impacts may be irreversible for 1000 years.

That’s not good.  The problem is:

In short, the fate of perhaps the next 100 billion people to walk the Earth rests with scientists (and those who understand the science) trying to communicate the dire nature of the climate problem (and the myriad solutions available now) as well as the ability of the media, the public, opinion-makers and political leaders to understand and deal with that science.

Given the money being poured into denying climate science to protect the profits of carbon intensive industries (coal, oil, etc.), and their exploitation the false idea of “there are always two sides to every issue” we’ve got a serious problem. The same dynamic existed with the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer (money poured into creating doubt, insisting on “balance” when the science was clear there as a link, etc.).  The big difference here, however, is that the changes taking place are occurring over generations, rather than an individual’s lifespan.

People who smoke die of lung cancer at higher rates, and it is easy to see and observe first hand, even by people who don’t understand the science. You can see an uncle who you remember being young and healthy coughing, getting ill, and finally dying from lung cancer in only a few years.  The end point — death — was something that anyone could see, and see multiple times from multiple cases.

We have, however, only one earth, and it is dying. Part of dealing with a terminal illness is getting over the denial that it is really happening, because denying in some ways makes you feel superior. “The doctor’s wrong!” “I’m as strong as an ox!” “The tests aren’t reliable!”

Another stage in dealing with a terminal illness is bargaining: “It won’t be that bad!” “There will be a cure soon.” “We can deal with it once technology gets better…”

The problem isn’t just that scientists are poor communicators.  The problem is that we don’t want to listen.

(See also The Invention of Lying about Climate Change)