Busy, busy, busy...

Dam in Kachin State, Burma to displace thousands

2010-02-02T15:59:00.000-08:00

Article + photography on Global Post by my friend Ryan on a massive dam project in Kachin State, northern Burma.

The dam will flood an area the size of NY city and displace thousands of Kachin villagers in order to supply China with cheap electricity.

"Authentic development" and the Pun Pun model

2009-12-11T21:06:00.000-08:00

A while back I was assigned to write an essay for my "sustainable community development class" on the following theme:

As a program officer for the Gates Foundation, your assignment is to allocate $100,000 for a development project for a rural community (pop. 5,000) in the developing world. As identified by your [participatory research] assessment team, the key issues are mounting population pressures on arable land, food insecurity, deforestation, high morbidity/mortality of [children under age 5] from infectious (especially diarrheal) disease, and a contaminated primary water source (river is contaminated with agricultural runoff-pesticides and fertilizers, grazing livestock fecal matter, and local laundry and bathing).

How will you allocate your funding? Why? Explain in detail how your project's output will extend a positive effect on other problem areas...Just to clarify, this grant is for one primary project output.

In class the profs further clarified that the assignment was to identify one major objective to address (i.e. not addressing all the challenges listed, just one, presumably in a piecemeal fashion), considering the $100k as "seed money" to pilot some project to then use to go after more money down the road.

Anyway, I wanted to take the assignment as an opportunity to evince a different approach and a different philosophy than these "development professionals" typically deal with. So I wrote some background about my views of conventional "development" and what I call "authentic development," and I used Pun Pun Farm as a case study in an alternate philosophy/approach and as an experience that has been formative for me.

So here's what I wrote...

* * *

Let me start by saying something about my fundamental beliefs regarding what constitutes authentic development.

I consider that individuals and communities can be happiest and healthiest, enjoy a strong degree of livelihood security, and minimize harmful ecological impacts by meeting the lion’s share of their basic needs (e.g. water/sanitation, energy, food, shelter, goods, medicine and heath care) through their own efforts and skills, according to local indigenous traditions, and though sustainable management and use of local resources. (cf. Hind Swaraj, or village home rule, by MK Gandhi.)

I believe this logic applies not only to “developing communities” or communities in lesser-industrialized regions, but equally to industrialized, developed, and over-developed regions like the US.

The logic of economic globalization and conventional “development” has been to create dependence: countries of the North such as the US have become dependent upon imports, and the countries of the South have become dependent upon selling their exports (e.g. agricultural commodities) on the so-called “free” market. Native production in the US has dwindled as industries move overseas leaving devastated communities and economic depression in the wake – my home region of Appalachia, the steel towns of western Pennsylvania, the abandoned farming communities of the mid-west, and the manufacturing areas in and around Detroit are examples that attest to this damage. Meanwhile farmers throughout the global South have been forcibly converted to capital- and chemical- intensive forms of agriculture and production for export; many others have been extirpated from their land and crowded into peri-urban slums as a consequence of big “development” projects and must compete against the growing hordes for scarce, underpaid, and often dangerous jobs. Their livelihoods are thus vulnerable to the vagaries of the global economy as their capacity for local self-reliance has been eroded.

The globalization of our food system, to take an example, has reached absurd proportions with devastating ecological consequences. I once went into a Safeway in Washington State and found that the apples grown locally cost nearly twice as much as apples imported 7,000 miles from New Zealand. A 2006 report (1) by the New Economics Foundation documented numerous examples of such “ecologically wasteful” trade. For example, “in 2004 the UK imported 17.2 million kilos of chocolate-covered waffles and wafers and exported 17.6 million kilos; [the UK] imported 10.2 million kilos of milk and cream from France and exported 9.9 million. The figures for the same trade with Germany were 15.5 million kilos and 17.2 million. Germany sent us 1.5 million kilos of potatoes and we sent them, yes, 1.5 million kilos of potatoes….”

One imagines jumbo-jets full of milk and potatoes passing each other in the night as they traverse the English Channel – an absurdity wrought by the “logic” of economic globalization and so-called “free trade.”

So my fundamental belief is that re-creating local economies and engendering local self-reliance among communities worldwide is integral to authentic development everywhere. Attaining this means re-building within communities the capacity for subsistence and livelihood security based primarily upon the stewardship of local resources for local consumption. It means developing knowledge of place and intimate understanding of local ecosystems. It means embracing the type of life a particular place makes possible through its natural attributes rather than forcibly refashioning everyplace into a homogeneous corporate wasteland.

Since these are my fundamental beliefs, I advocate a holistic approach to development that augments a community’s native resources – human and ecological – with an integral vision to promote local self-reliance across the multiple dimensions of basic needs. Why is a holistic approach superior to a narrow, piecemeal approach? Because cross-connections are fundamental to nature: surface water quality is strongly influenced by forestation – clear-cutting forests increases erosion and impacts water bodies. Concerns for sanitation cannot be divorced from concerns over agricultural soil productivity as nutrients must be recycled to sustain crop yields. Using the organic manures from animals and humans obviates the need for synthetic chemical fertilizers that lead to runoff and drinking water pollution. Sustainable management of forests provides sources of food, fiber, herbs and medicinals, building materials, and energy, as well as wildlife habitats, biodiversity conservation, and micro-climate stability – in perpetuity. And so on…

Local and indigenous knowledge forms, rapidly being lost because of economic globalization, “development”, “modernization,” “education,” urbanization, etc., can help us to see these linkages and explore our own interdependence with ecosystems.

The effects of economic globalization have led to overmuch specialization among individuals and communities. University education in the US, for example, is geared to produce narrowly specialized technicians. Livelihood “security” for such individuals almost always involves selling one’s labor as a specialist to a giant corporation in return for a wage that is used to purchase products to meet life’s needs manufactured and sold by other specialists at corporations. This system is inherently insecure as we become increasingly dependent upon multinational corporations to employ us and sell us all our needs for life.

In the global South, farmers are increasingly pressured to become specialized growers of cash crops in monoculture for export – a farming style that is particularly vulnerable to pest outbreaks and thus necessitates the use of dangerous chemicals and synthetic fertilizers to guarantee the single-crop yields upon which the farmers’ livelihoods are now dependent. Again this system is inherently insecure and damaging to individuals and communities. The rash of farmers’ suicides in India (2) when faced with mounting, multi-generational debt attests to the damage and insecurity industrial farming has wrought.

The solution is not to abandon specialization completely but to move in the direction of a balanced generalism. In other words, as a society we need to recapture the homesteading skills that my grandmother’s generation relied upon to live in relative abundance even during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The small farming communities of Appalachia were “poor” by monetary standards but rich in tradition, skill, and knowledge of how to make a living from the forests and fertile bottomlands of our home region. Regaining these waning skills is my prescription for communities in both the “developed” and “developing” worlds alike.

To illustrate how this transition can happen, I’ll take the case study of the Pun Pun farming community in northern Thailand. (3)

This community was built from scratch by a nearly penniless couple with a vision to create an agro-biodiversity conservation farm and sustainable living-learning center. Six years ago, Coloradoan Peggy Reents and her partner, Thai farmer Jon Jandai, bought a dilapidated hill farm on the outskirts of a remote village in mountainous northern Thailand. The land had been deforested, cropped in corn for several years until the soil was exhausted, and then abandoned to the rocks and weeds. The land was nearly worthless, so Peggy and Jo could just afford to buy about five acres. Through three seasons of mulching and composting and growing a few banana trees, Peggy and Jo slowly rehabilitated the wasted soil. They began to plant trees of the native hardwood species and fruit orchards for future agro-forestry development.

They had so little money they had to learn to make a life in ways that didn’t require money – in my mind this is the best kind of research for developing appropriate technologies and sustainable living practices that can be accessed, emulated, adapted, and improved upon by the poor (by definition, people who do not have money). They built their home from mud bricks made from the local earth and beautifully painted with local clays and pigments mixed with tapioca starch. They made their own soap and toothpaste out of local natural plants and substances. The brewed their own rice wine for celebrations. As their soils improved they were able to grow a greater portion of their own food and depend less upon the gifts of sustenance from visiting friends.

Industrial agriculture spread through Thailand while Jo was growing up in a small farming village in the eastern part of the country not far from the border with Laos. With it came hybrid seeds that would not grow without the chemical pesticides and fertilizers sold by the same agribusiness companies. The seeds were not viable after the first planting so it was no use for farmers to practice their tradition of seed saving. The local varieties of vegetables began to disappear and were replaced by a very few hybrid varieties of inferior taste and nutrition, and that were more vulnerable to pests, floods and droughts. As Jo watched the erosion of the traditional vegetable biodiversity, he decided the most important thing he could do was to save seeds and try to perpetuate the local varieties.

With their knowledge of natural earthen building and practical self-reliance born of direct experience and some hardship, Peggy and Jo began to build their vision of a seed center and sustainable living-learning center. Local Thai and hill tribe people, as well as like-minded Westerns who heard about their work, began to arrive at Pun Pun (Thai for “thousand varieties”) farm in this remote corner of SE Asia to live, work, learn and be a part of the creative effort.

The farm has developed curricula for workshops in local self-reliance and sustainability in meeting basic needs for food, shelter, natural and indigenous approaches to medicine and health, and homespun goods. My colleagues and I have endeavored to add a component of appropriate technologies in water resources to the farm’s educational curriculum. Others have supplemented with decentralized energy technologies. A cooking school showcasing traditional Thai recipes using the local farm produce has been established. Local village women teach and perform traditional therapeutic Thai massage, and the farm has hosted a number of yoga and meditation retreats.

Now, hundreds of people from all over Thailand, south/southeast Asia, and around the world visit Pun Pun each year for workshops and programs. Peggy and Jo have started an alliance of organic farmers that is spreading through the northern and northeastern parts of the country, as well as a network of seed savers. They have conducted countless workshops training villagers and groups of Buddhist monks in the techniques of natural and earthen building. Thai, hill tribe, and Western families have moved to the farm community and they are creating a home-farm-school for the children – kids from the neighboring villages will thus have an alternative to the distant English-style Thai government schools.

They have opened a successful restaurant in Chiang Mai supplied by local organic farmers that was recently written up in the New York times travel/food section. (4) They have established and helped to supply numerous market stalls for organic produce throughout the region, and are helping many farmers in their village and nearby to make the transition from chemical farming to organic and to get out of debt to the seed and chemical companies. And this year they are hosting a giant seed saving fair complete with rock bands and carnival activities and sponsored by, of all companies, the Red Bull corporation.

Peggy and Jo, along with the team of like minded folk that have assembled around them, have had an incalculably powerful transformative effect on the lives of so many. They have helped local Thai and hill tribe farmers out of penury and debt. They have helped local villagers and many visiting Westerners along the road to more sustainable, natural, simple, and enjoyable ways of living.

A recent grant of about $25,000 has allowed Pun Pun to enhance their seed saving operations. With this money they have acquired a few additional acres of land to expand seed gardens, increase their water supply and install irrigation equipment. They purchased a hand tractor and wagon to assist with planting and harvesting of rice and materials hauling. They’ve hired local villagers to help with the additional labor, and to train for the management and oversight of the seed bank and distribution system. They’ve hosted large groups of trainees in agroecology workshops. They’ve spawned another organic café in Chiang Mai, expanding the market for local farmers’ produce and generating income for the farm. They’ve facilitated school gardening programs in Chiang Mai coupled with education about the importance of saving seeds. And Jo has given many interviews to the popular television and print media in Thailand describing Pun Pun’s philosophy and practices. He’s recently completed a book on organic agriculture and seed saving written in a style and language accessible to “common” farmers and villagers (most Thai books are written in scholarly style and are read only by university people).

In short, Pun Pun has exemplified the maxim of doing a lot with a little. They’re able to accomplish this because of personal integrity and commitment to the principles of simple, natural, ecological living. Rather than employing typical life strategies that depend upon money, they’ve endeavored to minimize dependence upon money wherever possible and substitute ingenuity and creativity, and to emphasize money expenditures that truly maximize well-being and not just keeping up with fads. This philosophy provides the basis for their educational programs – what Jo calls his “brainwashing.”

What they are creating is so obviously attractive they do not need much if any conventional marketing or “PR.” So any money that comes in through grants they can make go a very long way to do a lot of good for many people.

So what would I do with $100,000 to serve the community in question? I would use it to extend the Pun Pun model of development, addressing sustainability and self-reliance through agroecology and seed saving, natural building using the local materials, decentralized appropriate technologies in energy and water resources, homespun goods and handicrafts, traditional knowledge of medicine and health practices, farm-school education for the children, and development of local businesses and cooperative cottage industries in connection with neighboring communities.

Rather than consider the $100k “seed money” to start some project to use to go after more money later, I would use it to build social infrastructure and local resources to avoid the need to get more money in the future. The aim would be to make the community self-sufficient, and to build in the capacity for the community in question to help neighboring communities on the road to local self-sufficiency and ecological sustainability.

References

1. Simms A, Moran D, Cordon C. UK Dependence Report. New Economics Foundation, 2006. www.neweconomics.org
2. See for example: 1,500 farmers commit suicide in India. The Belfast Telegraph, Wednesday, April 15, 2009. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/1500-farmers-commit-mass-suicide-in-india-1669018.html
3. www.punpunthailand.org
4. http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/asia/thailand/chiang-mai/74226/pun-pun/restaurant-detail.html

Valuing folk crop varieties for agroecology and food security

2009-10-26T14:02:00.000-07:00

Article in Bioscience Resource Project by my friend Dr. Debal Deb.

Rambling polemic #2

2009-10-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

For a class in "sustainable community development" I was recently asked to reflect on the statement by Albert Einstein that “the significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them,” and come up with three areas where major shifts in level-of-thought are required for human society to approach sustainability, well-being, etc....

So here's what I wrote.

* * * * *

What Einstein was alluding to could be called metanoia – a term which originally denoted a change in outlook after spiritual repentance but lately has been interpreted more liberally as reaching beyond existing or conventional thought structures to a deeper understanding. (Although an element of spiritual repentance is still particularly a propos in our modern circumstances.) In this essay I will identify three areas of conventional thinking that require metanoic transformation in order for human communities and society in general to approach authentic development.

Myth #1: (more) growth will save us.

A principle “sacred cow” of Western developmentality is the dictum for economic growth as a panacea to cure all ills, social and environmental. “Sustainable growth” is the primary policy goal of all Western governments and by extension the governments of lesser-developed countries living out the legacy of colonialism and its modern analog “development.” However, “sustainable growth” is what ecological economist Herman Daly has called an impossibility theorem. (3)

Indefinite growth of the human economy is impossible on a finite planet and its pursuit attempts to flout the laws of thermodynamics and ecology. More than ample evidence exists demonstrating that for some decades running the human economy has exceeded the biophysical limitations of nature to provide energy and resources and assimilate wastes emitted by the expanding human economy. (3, 4, 7) And yet, what discussion exists in mainstream media sources regarding our extant conditions of ecological overshoot – a concept that a ten-year-old of average intelligence could easily comprehend? What politician could be elected to public office on a campaign platform of “economic shrinkage”? Is this imaginable at present?

Furthermore ample evidence exists that economic growth has not alleviated poverty as was allegedly intended at the outset of the post-war period. A 2006 report by the New Economics Foundation (8) indicated that over the past several decades, out of every $100 of growth in the global economy, a mere $0.60 on average has gone to the people at the “bottom of the pyramid.” It is intuitive that rich individuals, corporations, and countries stand to gain the most from economic growth as they are in the best position to capture the benefits – “it takes money to make money” is a familiar nostrum. So it is not surprising that the rich of the world have pursued economic growth with the specious justification that growth will promote “the rising tide that lifts all boats,” despite the preponderance of evidence to the contrary.

This program has led to the conflating of “development” with “growth.” So a first step in the metanoic transformation away from an economics of “development” based upon export-led growth is making a clear rhetorical distinction between the concepts of “growth” and “development.” Put simply, growth signifies quantitative increase of the material and energy throughput of the human economy; development means qualitative increase in human well-being. (3)

At this point, growth should be opposed and in fact the process of growth reversed to a steady-state level that can be physically and ecologically sustained by the bioshpere. There is no theoretical limit to development as defined as increase in well-being. However, in our current state of global ecological overshoot, policies aimed at further increasing growth directly impact well-being in a negative way by eroding the planet’s ecological life support systems. Correcting widespread misconceptions pertaining to “growth” and “development” is a first step in the metanoic shift towards implementing an economics of authentic development.

Myth #2: Urbanization is good, natural, and here to stay.

The second “sacred cow” that I would expose as a sham is the notion that the current trend in urbanization of the human population is somehow “natural,” “inevitable,” and “beneficial.”

Anyone who has spent any time in a rapidly urbanizing mega-city in Asia, Africa, or Latin America is immediately confronted with a sense of massive unfolding disaster. In Asia, where the urbanization trend is currently the strongest, inadequate infrastructure fails completely to deal with the influx tide of human bodies and the side-effects and wastes of our production and consumption. Untreated sewage flows into rivers, lakes and streams. Municipal wastes litter the landscape and leach toxic chemicals into the environment. Pollution from motor vehicles chokes the air. Over one million new people arrive in the slums and shanty-towns of urban/peri-urban areas each weak, driving up unemployment and driving down wages, increasing competition for the scarce resources of life, exacerbating overcrowding, escalating crime and violence, and generally intensifying the already hellish conditions of existence.

This process is in no way sustainable, nor is it “natural,” “inevitable,” or desirable. The vast majority of the one million people flocking to city slums each week are not choosing to do so because they long to be “modern,” or out of the “desire for a better life” as is commonly supposed by those locked into the mindset of developmentality (except perhaps as understood in the most narrow and reductionistic sense). Recent urban migrants have largely been displaced, often by force and violence, from stable rural existence by the effects of “development,” for example massive hydroelectric dam projects and gas pipelines, and by the spread of industrial (i.e. capital-, energy-, and chemical-intensive) agriculture.

But the ideas that cities are where “culture” resides, and that the “modern” effete urbanite lifestyle is natural and what ought to be emulated, are deeply entrenched in the Western developmentalist mindset. That people could be happy living rural agrarian communities with lifestyles based primarily on local production and consumption of resources is uniformly dismissed by elites – “subsistence” agriculture is everywhere denigrated; “import substitution” (i.e. local self-reliance) is a dirty word in orthodox development economics.

However, as in all cases where nothing short of a metanoic transformation will suffice to produce positive change, evidence contrary to established conventional norms is lacking or is simply ignored because it doesn’t “fit the model.” But even in the US, one of the longest and most heavily urbanized populations in the world, “the fact that most Americans live in metro areas does not mean it is because they want to live there…a recent Gallup poll asking Americans where they would prefer to live found that 24 percent wanted to live on a farm or in a rural area, with 36 percent preferring small-town life…these preferences have changed little in the last 60 years…As a result, over one-third of Americans are living in metropolitan areas even though they would prefer to live in less populated settings. The fact that the location of jobs does not match the locational preferences of people explains why more Americans don’t move to smaller cities and towns.” (1)

If people in developing countries are flocking to cities in droves, it is not because they are enthused about the “opportunities” for employment and modern enculturation that are available there. It is because their former agrarian lifestyles have been made impossible by “development.”

Lester Brown has indicated: “It is widely assumed that urbanization will continue. But this is not necessarily so. The growing scarcity of water and the high cost of the energy invested in transporting water over long distances may itself begin to constrain urban growth. For example, some 400 cities in China are already facing a chronic shortage of water.” (2)

In October of 2007, for the first time in the history of the planet, more human beings lived in cities than in rural settings. This trend of urbanization is unsustainable and has led to disaster as city life has become drastically less desirable while becoming increasingly resource-intensive. Resettlement of rural areas and re-establishment of predominantly “subsistence” lifestyles based on sustainable use of primarily local resources is the ineluctable course towards authentic development and human well-being from our present out-of-balance state. Understanding this basic fact, however, will require an Einsteinian metanoic shift, in particular among Western educated elites who have the hardest time comprehending ideas that run counter to professional training and urbane social conditioning.

Myth #3: We need more education.

Lastly I would challenge the common orthodoxy regarding the unalloyed benefits of “education.”

[The sustainable community development class professor's] current email tagline quotes Mark Twain: “Never let school interfere with your education.” This quote affirms a basic feeling that most of us “educated” folk have that school sucks. In other words, this expresses an irony that even the highly lettered often viscerally feel that school is mainly an impediment to real learning. Why then do we so unhesitatingly affirm the provision of “education” and the building of schools as noble goals in development projects?

Funding educational programs, building schools, and in particular getting more girls and young women into the classroom currently has tremendous cachet among WWLs (wealthy white liberals), and subsequently has a “sexiness” that has not gone unrecognized by the courtiers of philanthropy. However, while there is much talk about the need for increased provision of education, there is precious little discussion of substance regarding the quality of that education, or just precisely what we are advocating be taught in these schools for developing communities.

A documentary critiquing “development” in Ladakh (5) depicts children reading Wordsworth and Shakespeare in an English-style boarding school classroom. When the filmmakers visited the home village of some of the children and were invited to dinner with their families, they became ill after eating a poison weed that the schoolchildren inadvertently picked when asked by their mothers to gather vegetables for the meal.

A generation ago this never would have happened, since all Ladakhi children, having grown up on the family farm, would easily distinguish and avoid poisonous varieties of the local vegetation. Attending far-from-home Western-style boarding schools has had the effect of supplanting Ladakhi young people’s traditional knowledge – knowledge relevant to the local social and ecological context – with forms of knowledge valued by Western institutions. This is one of the more insidious effects of developmentality – an unconscious derogation and dismissal, and thus destruction, of local and indigenous knowledge forms. And yet, the fact that most Ladakhi children now attend such boarding schools is widely touted as a success by the statisticians of “development” as they tabulate increased enrollments.

Following Aldo Leopold, we are led to ask, “Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?”

David Orr has pointed out that “it is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read.” Orr notes that the destructive effects of globalization and development upon the climate, ecosystems, and traditional cultures, “is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs.” (6)

This is a clear indictment of Western globalist educational institutions, which are predicated upon the myth that our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement – what Orr identifies as “a cultural arrogance of the worst sort, [representing] a gross misreading of history and anthropology.”

So the metanoic shift called for in education must begin with a re-envisioning of what education is for. It’s conventionally held that the purpose of education is that of giving students the means for upward mobility and “success.” Thomas Merton identified this as “the mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade.” (Merton went on to admonish his students to “be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing – success.”)

TS Eliot asked, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" Much of contemporary education is comprised by a protracted cramming of all manner of disembodied facts, techniques and information (“data”) into students’ heads. Presumably this is to equip them to more effectively compete with one another and society at large in a race to accumulate status and wealth. Extension of this pedagogy to developing communities thus represents the broad-scale ensnarement even greater numbers of children and young adults into the squirrel cage as they, like us, strive for “professional success,” and to “be competitive in the global economy.” It is a likely eventuality, then, that they also will come to the conclusion that school sucks.

The metanoic shift in education thus represents a turn towards pedagogy for the development of ecological conscience and appreciation for local and indigenous knowledge systems. Education must come to be seen as a tool for students to use in the forging of their personhood, in their processes of discovery of themselves and the world, and in their understanding of their place in the greater biotic community. My experiences among the “uneducated” farming folk of South Asia suggests that they have much more to teach us than we them when it comes to redefining our educational systems around students’ development of ecological conscience, a storehouse of local knowledge, practical competence and labor skills, native intuition, and wisdom.

References

1.) Atkinson RD. Reversing rural America’s economic decline: The case for a national balanced growth strategy. Progressive Policy Institute, 2004. (http://www.ppionline.org/documents/rural_economy_0204.pdf)

2.) Brown LR. The Ecology of Cities. The Globalist, 2006. (http://www.theglobalist.com/storyid.aspx?StoryId=5638)

3.) Daly, HE. Economics in a Full World. Scientific American magazine, 2005. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=economics-in-a-full-world)

4.) Global Footprint Network. September 25 is Overshoot Day 2009. (http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/earth_overshoot_day/)

5.) International Society for Ecology and Culture. Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh (film). (www.isec.org.uk)

6.) Orr, D. What is Education For? Six myths about the foundations of modern education, and six new principles to replace them. The Learning Revolution, 1991. (http://www.davidworr.com/files/What_is_Education_For.pdf)

7.) Rockstrom et al. Special Feature: A safe operating space for humanity. Nature 461, p. 472-475, 24 September 1990. (http://www.nature.com/news/specials/planetaryboundaries/index.html)

8.) Woodward D and Simms A. Growth Isn’t Working. New Economics Foundation, 2006. (http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/uploads/hrfu5w555mzd3f55m2vqwty502022006112929.pdf)

NYT series on US toxic waters

2009-09-15T20:27:00.000-07:00

Toxic Waters: A series about the worsening pollution in American waters and regulators' response

Atrazine weed-killer in US drinking water supply

2009-08-25T08:13:00.000-07:00

See also the Huffington Post, EPA fails to inform public about weed-killer in drinking water

...and DemocracyNow's coverage of the story.

Atrazine is the most commonly detected pesticide in groundwater and surface water.

The Pesticide Info Database maintained by the Pesticide Action Network identifies atrazine as a carcinogen, suspected endocrine disruptor, and posing a very high risk for groundwater contamination. For these reasons they classify the herbicide as a "Bad Actor." See the Pesticide Info entry for atrazine for more information about its ecological and human health effects.

For more information on pesticide environmental toxicology, see the following:

Pesticides in the Nation’s Streams and Groundwater, 1992 – 2001 Report by the US Geological Survey.

Pesticide Degradates of Concern to the Drinking Water Community Report by the American Water Works Association.

The Human Toxome Project Datasets on the human body burden of hundreds of industrial chemicals and pollutants including pesticides.

Agrochemicals, Health and Environment Directory of resources from the World Health Organization.

TOXNET Toxicology Data Network A cluster of databases on toxicology and hazardous chemicals, including pesticides, gateways to search engines for both research literature on health impacts, and guidance/policymaking materials from the US National Library of Medicine.

Agricultural Health Study A study of over 89 000 people that explores the health impacts of pesticide use among farmers and their families, and among commercial pesticide applicators, in the US. Many links to papers on aspects of health risk from use of pesticides, including risks of cancers and premature mortality. National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Environment Health Sciences, USEPA.

Pesticide Safety Data Sheets Basic information on toxicology and use of pesticides. World Health Organization and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

A Shopper’s Guide to Pesticide Residues in Food by the Environmental Working Group.

Do You Know What You’re Eating? An analysis of US government data on pesticide residues in food by the Consumers Union of the US.

What’s On My Food? Guide to pesticide residues in food.

EXTOXNET The Extension Toxicology Network. A database providing a variety of information about pesticides, toxicology, and environmental chemistry. Compiled and maintained by University of California-Davis, Oregon State University, Michigan State University, and the University of Idaho.

NEW short video intro to Aq

2009-07-08T07:34:00.000-07:00

Check out the Aqueous Solutions website for a new short video introduction to our work!

Food, Inc.

2009-07-06T09:21:00.000-07:00

Food, Inc. -- Go see it.

See also The Global Food Crisis: The End of Plenty, National Geographic Magazine, June 2009.

Some days I am a preta.....

2009-06-15T20:40:00.000-07:00

Pretas = hungry ghosts, chronically frustrated spirits. Creatures with enormous bellies and tiny mouths, i.e. huge appetites and limited means for satisfying those appetites.....

Natural building workshop this July in Colorado

2009-05-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

Sign up now! Spaces are limited...

Natural Building in the mountains of CO

July 10-13, 2009

The workshop will include:

Introduction to our "compound", our vision and tour of the other strawbale house on site as well as our present project, an earthship under construction

Basic design principles for environmental citing, climatic considerations, and aesthetics

Adobe brick making

Adobe wall construction

Intros and smaller projects using other earthen building techniques including wattle-and-daub, cob, and earth bag

Earthen plasters for earthen walls and strawbale walls

Natural clay/starch paints, linseed oil, beeswax and other options for finishing sealants, etc

And more...

Evening/afternoon activities and exchanges will also be included. These include; an introduction to earthen building, introduction to Thai cooking, Thai massage, seed saving and our work in Thailand at Pun Pun organic farm, sustainable living learning center and seed center.

See www.punpunthailand.org for more info.

Meet my new gal...

2009-05-21T05:27:00.000-07:00

I need a name for 'er. Suggestions?

I was thinkin maybe "Lola," reminiscent of the sexually ambiguous character, noted for his/her surprising strength, a la The Kinks...

...or maybe "Rocinante." That was the name of Steinbeck's truck-camper, featured in the peerless work of travel writing Travels with Charley. It was also the name of Don Quixote's horse, which is where Steinbeck got the name. Incidentally, rocin in Spanish means "work horse"...

Ideas for names for my gal? Leave 'em in the comments section...

Hilarious and frightening....

2009-05-17T07:59:00.001-07:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Little Crop of Horrors

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

Jobs at Aqueous Solutions

2009-05-14T15:13:00.000-07:00

Looking for an opportunity to work internationally in water and sanitation?

Aqueous Solutions is seeking a qualified individual to serve as program coordinator for our projects in Thailand in the Burma border areas.

See www.aqsolutions.org to download a job description and information on how to apply!

This and other opportunities to work with Aqueous Solutions' research and field projects projects are listed on our Get Involved page.

Safe Haven Children's Home

2009-05-02T09:16:00.000-07:00

Aqueous Solutions completes rainwater harvesting and filter systems for Safe Haven Children’s Home - an ethnic Karen community for displaced persons, widows and orphaned children on the Thai-Burma border.

See our photo galleries for images of the community and the water systems project. (Photography courtesy of Line Ramstad...for more about Safe Haven and Karen life see also Line's blog.)

DN! spots on the economy.....

2009-04-14T07:25:00.000-07:00

Chomsky drops some science on the global economic crisis:

...and a town in central NC is ahead of the game, creating local living economies....

Line's blog rocks!

2009-03-30T06:54:00.000-07:00

My friend Line: landscape architect, people person, adopted by the Karen people of Burma/Thailand....see her blog.....

Aqueous Solutions 2008 Annual Report online

2009-03-17T03:27:00.000-07:00

The Aqueous 2008 Annual Report is now online and available for download - check it out!

And don't forget to visit our new online photo gallery!

Friedman gets it?

2009-03-09T22:09:00.000-07:00

OK, so normally I think NYT columnist Tom Friedman is a total douchebag. But check out this quote from his recent op-ed piece:

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

Holy crap. If Tom Friedman is willing to call into question this fundamental axiom in the reigning economic dogma, then (1) we really are up sh*t crick without a paddle, and (2) things may be fixin to change - and fast.

So hold on folks! If Friedman is starting to get it then we're in for a ride. When he starts preaching local (bioregional) self-reliance then we'll know we're on our way....

Read the full piece on the NYT website.

PPR in NYT! Hellz yeah!

2009-03-07T06:35:00.001-08:00

Pun Pun Restaurant written up in the travel/food section of the New York Times. Killer!

sick climbing in ton sai!

2009-03-01T02:41:00.000-08:00

Last month went rock climbing in Railay and Ton Sai in the south of Thailand. It was totally sick.

My camera's still busted, but thanks to my climbing partners, the beautiful and talented Line and Birgit (from Norway, pictured just below, Birgit on the left), we have these fantastic pics to enjoy...

Line gets strapped in to belay me on some totally manky undercling.

Has anyone got a needle and thread? Cos I am ripped! Ha!

Our climbing guide, P'Nuang. He's awesome.

Mitch Hedberg The Great

2009-01-15T03:43:00.000-08:00

Totally sweet website for downloading Mitch Hedberg recordings and memorabilia - hedburgh.com.

If you have trouble sleeping, count sheep. Do not count endangered species - you will run out!

- Mitch Hedberg

Ruminations on Appropriate Technologies and Ecological Education

2009-01-13T21:16:00.001-08:00

I recently submitted an application for a PhD program in “environmental engineering for developing communities,” wherein I’m hoping to continue my research activities in simple water purification systems.

For part of the application I had to make a statement about my professional and career goals. So I felt like I needed to say something about appropriate technologies, and an ecologically informed pedagogical philosophy. What follows is an adaptation from my personal statement, just for your potential reading enjoyment. Comments are always welcome!

…

I envision a career that spans academia and the non-profit/NGO sector as a researcher and educator in the natural sciences, focusing in the multidisciplinary fields of sustainability science and appropriate technologies. Briefly outlined below are the commitments that shape my intentions and motivate my pursuit of this as a career:

I am committed to the development of appropriate technologies that empower households and communities to meet their basic needs – such as that of safe drinking water – using materials that are ecologically apposite and naturally abundant. I strongly advocate techniques that engender local self-reliance and decentralized, democratic control in their creation and operation, and moreover, are conscientious of the local culture and traditions and thereby operate as means of harnessing and celebrating local wisdom and labor skills.

Furthermore, I am committed to facilitating the development of an ecological conscience and broadened cultural worldview among Western science and engineering students through holistic, multidisciplinary, and experiential approaches to education.

I also hope to continue my professional development within academia and in the non-profit/NGO arena through my work as director of science and research for Aqueous Solutions. I intend to be an integral part of the collaborative effort to develop the capacity, breadth and capabilities of Aqueous Solutions as a service organization.

Appropriate technologies

The term “appropriate technologies,” like “sustainability,” is a currently fashionable buzzword and is thereby in danger of becoming cliché. Hence I feel a certain responsibility to evince careful consideration and a more thoroughgoing approach in my research and advocacy of “appropriate technologies.”

As I understand it, an appropriate technology must at a minimum exercise propriety of scale; embody humility, caution and compassion; respect the integrity of local ecosystems and the limits implied therein; adapt itself to life rather than the reverse; and enable good work by humans in community and in place.

The need for a distinction of “appropriate” technologies arises in the first place given the justifiable skepticism felt by most people today about the capability of more and more advanced and bigger technologies to remedy the manifold social and ecological breakdowns which have themselves been brought about in large measure by the willy-nilly proliferation of powerful technologies over a vast (global) scale. This has occurred as a result of the industrial revolution and the industrial mindset. Today there is a growing skepticism of the conventional notion that science is self-correcting – a notion which has so far prompted the conventional industrial mind to the homeopathic prescription of more and better science and additional technological developments to cure the present ills originating primarily as by-products of past science and technological developments.

One of the principal characteristics of the modern industrial mind is its willingness to work on too big a scale, and thereby to put too much at risk. The worldwide overhauling of traditional and local economies to fit the narrow orthodoxy of Western corporate globalization and “free trade,” accompanied by the forceful refashioning of diverse local cultures into a global consumer monoculture, is perhaps the most obvious evidence and blatant expression of this tendency. From the perspective of human civilization, this is the equivalent of “putting all our eggs in one basket,” and thus ultimately puts all ways of life at risk through their homogenization. An “appropriate” technology, on the other hand, recognizes the extent to which as a species our ignorance exceeds our knowledge and therefore limits our ability to responsibly and harmlessly control. An appropriate technology respects the patchwork of diversity in human cultures and natural ecosystems and therefore is necessarily small in scale.

It is tempting, especially given our Western cultural biases, to seek giant “solutions” to the giant (global) ecological and social challenges facing human society today – but there is a conspicuous shortage of large-scale corrections for problems that have large-scale causes. As Kentucky farmer and author Wendell Berry has written, “our great modern powers of science, technology, and industry are always offering themselves to us with the suggestion that we know enough to use them well, that we are intelligent enough to act without limit in our own behalf.” Thus the issue of propriety of scale is typically overlooked in our super-heroic quests to “save the world.” But as author and environmentalist Bill McKibben has surmised, there almost certainly will be no “silver bullet” to take out our manifold global maladies – though perhaps many “silver buckshot,” each targeting a relatively small portion of the whole.

It is for this reason that the employment of “appropriate” technologies requires our humility of spirit – in light of the expanse of our ignorance regarding the complexity of the universe and our inability to foresee all outcomes and unwanted consequences. “Appropriate” technologies subscribe to the precautionary principle, a kind of Hippocratic oath for scientists and engineers to “first do no harm,” and to limit risk as much as possible when potentially damaging outcomes and side-effects are unforeseen and frequently unforeseeable.

The contemporary touchstones of “appropriate” and “sustainable” find their mutual support when we consider the implications of limits to our economic expansion and the scope and application of our technologies. An economic system whose health is predicated upon indefinite expansion in the context of a finite planet and ultimately restricted material and energy flows is, as ecological economist Herman Daly has frequently remarked, “an impossibility theorem.” A durable economy cannot be based upon the continually accelerated degradation of its ecological base; moreover, a technology which does not support a durable economy cannot be considered “appropriate.”

Thus an appropriate technology perforce recognizes and respects ecological limits and is preservative of ecosystem integrity. It does this by adapting itself to natural patterns rather than attempting to refashion nature to suit its own ends. Innovation under the rubric of “appropriate technology,” as Wendell Berry has written, seeks to promote “a better adaptation of the human organism to its natural habitat, [the improvement] of our fundamental relationship to the earth, [and] harmony between our human economy and the natural world.” Appropriate technologies adhere to Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, wherein “the role of Homo sapiens changes from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”

The last criterion for a technology to qualify as “appropriate” is that it enable good work by humans in community and in place. The common conviction in our society today is to justify nearly all work on narrowly economic grounds; in other words, any work one is paid for qualifies as “good work.” I would like to expand this thinking along ecological dimensions, and thus define “good work” as that which tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the land and the greater biotic community in which the work and the worker are situated. It is in this spirit that Kahlil Gibran’s Prophet concludes, “Work is love made visible.”

Ecological conscience in science and engineering education

The recognition of “ecological good work” and its pursuit as distinct from conventionally defined modes of social and material “success” thus implies the development of ecological awareness and an ecological conscience. Over the past few years I have attempted to give expression to these traits through my teaching and project work in the appropriate technologies program of the learning center at Pun Pun Organic Farm in northern Thailand. My ultimate professional aspiration is to facilitate their proliferation and development among Western university students of science and engineering.

In this vein, then, the term “environmental engineering” is deceptive in that it suggests that our surroundings – the environment – are what can and ought to be engineered and managed. But given the complexity of the planet and its living systems, “the environment” can never be safely “managed” or “engineered” by humans as one species among tens of millions. What might be managed is ourselves – our human desires, our economies, our built environments and communities, our modes of thinking about and interacting with and modifying natural systems.

I believe a similar inversion of perspective – from the outward-looking to the inward-looking – is required in contemporary education. It’s conventionally held that the purpose of education is that of giving students the means for upward mobility and success. Thomas Merton identified this as “the mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade.” (Merton went on to admonish his students to “be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing – success.”)

TS Eliot asked, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" Much of contemporary education is comprised by a protracted cramming of all manner of disembodied facts, techniques and information (“data”) into students’ heads. Presumably this is to equip them to more effectively compete with one another and society at large in a race to accumulate status and wealth. This, however, progressively impoverishes our society in terms of wisdom and reason, which Edward Abbey defined as “knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love.”

I see education as a tool for students to use in the forging of their personhood, in their processes of discovery of themselves and the world, and in their understanding of their place in the greater biotic community. The development of ecological awareness and ecological conscience as an outgrowth of the educational process is what connects knowledge and information with context – context is that which imbues information with the qualities that permit the development of sympathy, understanding, compassion and love. These characteristics in turn augment the storage of mere disembodied facts to facilitate the accretion of authentic wisdom.

Knowledge therefore carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world. My commitment as a professional educator is to imbue students with this sense of responsibility, towards their fellow humans as well as the myriad other members of Earth’s biotic community. Research and design in the field of “appropriate technologies” implies this sense of responsibility and its attendant ecological conscience and provides a situation for their cultivation and development.

Experiential education in appropriate technologies and cultural exchange

As an educator, I strive to embrace a holistic approach to learning that stresses the development of students’ worldview, philosophy of life, and connection with nature equally with technical proficiency and competence in the relevant disciplinary subject matters. Hence my approach aims to provide the requisite factual knowledge, technical tools and the scientific theoretical and conceptual comprehension within a learning environment that is conducive to students gaining key contextual understanding that situates their practical and scientific education within the complex ecological and social realities of our world.

My vision of an effective means to promote this kind of education is through the facilitation of international exchange programs between science and engineering university students and traditional, agrarian, locally self-reliant and subsistence cultures in the “developing” world. I envision myself as a mentor for university students in these potentially life-changing and transformative experiences involving international travel and working together with local communities – for example through connections with groups such as Engineers Without Borders. Such programs provide cultural exchange and opportunities for experiential education that contribute to holistic learning and the development of ecological conscience, and furthermore often profoundly affect the way students view themselves and the career decisions they face. It is my commitment as an educator to create such opportunities for students’ spiritual transformation and intellectual development.

Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben on Coal

2008-12-20T20:12:00.000-08:00

An open letter released recently from Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben...

Dear Friends,

There are moments in a nation's--and a planet's--history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are writing to say that we hope some of you will join us in Washington D.C. on Monday March 2 in order to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill.

We will be there to make several points:

- Coal-fired power is driving climate change. Our foremost climatologist, NASA's James Hansen, has demonstrated that our only hope of getting our atmosphere back to a safe level--below 350 parts per million co2--lies in stopping the use of coal to generate electricity.

- Even if climate change were not the urgent crisis that it is, we would still be burning our fossil fuels too fast, wasting too much energy and releasing too much poison into the air and water. We would still need to slow down, and to restore thrift to its old place as an economic virtue.

- Coal is filthy at its source. Much of the coal used in this country comes from West Virginia and Kentucky, where companies engage in "mountaintop removal" to get at the stuff; they leave behind a leveled wasteland, and impoverished human communities. No technology better exemplifies the out-of-control relationship between humans and the rest of creation.

- Coal smoke makes children sick. Asthma rates in urban areas near coal-fired power plants are high. Air pollution from burning coal is harmful to the health of grown-ups too, and to the health of everything that breathes, including forests.

The industry claim that there is something called "clean coal" is, put simply, a lie. But it's a lie told with tens of millions of dollars, which we do not have. We have our bodies, and we are willing to use them to make our point. We don't come to such a step lightly. We have written and testified and organized politically to make this point for many years, and while in recent months there has been real progress against new coal-fired power plants, the daily business of providing half our electricity from coal continues unabated. It's time to make clear that we can't safely run this planet on coal at all. So we feel the time has come to do more--we hear President Barack Obama's call for a movement for change that continues past election day, and we hear Nobel Laureate Al Gore's call for creative non-violence outside coal plants. As part of the international negotiations now underway on global warming, our nation will be asking China, India, and others to limit their use of coal in the future to help save the planet's atmosphere. This is a hard thing to ask, because it's their cheapest fuel. Part of our witness in March will be to say that we're willing to make some sacrifices ourselves, even if it's only a trip to the jail.

With any luck, this will be the largest such protest yet, large enough that it may provide a real spark. If you want to participate with us, you need to go through a short course of non-violence training. This will be, to the extent it depends on us, an entirely peaceful demonstration, carried out in a spirit of hope and not rancor. We will be there in our dress clothes, and ask the same of you. There will be young people, people from faith communities, people from the coal fields of Appalachia, and from the neighborhoods in Washington that get to breathe the smoke from the plant.

We will cross the legal boundary of the power plant, and we expect to be arrested. After that we have no certainty what will happen, but lawyers and such will be on hand. Our goal is not to shut the plant down for the day--it is but one of many, and anyway its operation for a day is not the point. The worldwide daily reliance on coal is the danger; this is one small step to raise awareness of that ruinous habit and hence help to break it.

Needless to say, we're not handling the logistics of this day. All the credit goes to a variety of groups, especially EnergyAction (which is bringing thousands of young people to Washington that weekend), Greenpeace, the Ruckus Society, and Rainforest Action Network. A website at that latter organization is serving as a temporary organizing hub. If you go there, you will find a place to leave your name so that we'll know you want to join us.

Thank you,

Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben

* * *

Here's a link to a recent filmed conversation between Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben.

Pun Pun Movie Available Online

2008-12-19T23:56:00.000-08:00

Check out the web documentary show Tangent - there's a two-parter on the Pun Pun Organic Farm and Seed Center in northern Thailand available for download.

Good stuff!

Aqueous Solutions Represented at Methodist Church Alternative Giving Fair

2008-12-10T20:10:00.000-08:00

Johnson Memorial United Methodist Church in Huntington, WV recently hosted an alternative giving fair. The fair allows church congregants and members of the greater community to engage with socially responsible forms of giving this holiday season.

Aqueous director of administration Sue Kearns presented a multimedia display of many of our ongoing projects for the fairgoers.

A message from Aqueous Solutions director of outreach, Tim Patterson, about opportunities for socially-responsible giving with Aqueous Solutions this holiday season...

As the financial crisis exposes the instability of economic globalization, the work of building strong, self-reliant local communities becomes more urgent than ever before.

In towns across America families are struggling to pay the mortgage and gas up the car, while villagers in India and Thailand struggle with rising food prices and dangerously contaminated water supplies.

While bankers and corporate executives clamor for government bailouts that may total over one trillion dollars, others work to reduce our dependency on a system that is broken and corrupt.

We recognize how difficult these times are for everyone, but as the holidays approach, we ask you to consider donating to Aqueous Solutions.

The work of ensuring clean drinking water supplies doesn't require billions of dollars. All AQ staff work as volunteers, and the technology we develop and implement is freely available to all.

Like any fledgling organization, however, we could not do this work without support from wonderful people who are willing to invest in a better world. A drop in the bucket can go a very long way.

Best wishes – Tim P.

There are two ways to make tax-deductible donations in support of Aqueous' work:

Give online through our fiscal sponsor, the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC). Be sure to specify Aqueous Solutions in the "Designation" field. To make a secure online contribution click on the Network for Good icon on the Aqueous Solutions website.

Or, you may send a check made out to "ISEC/Aqueous Solutions" to

ISEC
PO Box 9475
Berkeley, CA 94709 USA

If you are not concerned that your donation be tax-deductible, then you can send a check made out to "Aqueous Solutions" directly to

Aqueous Solutions
329 Wilson Ct
Huntington, WV 25701 USA

Aqueous is now also using ChipIn for quick, secure online donations that go directly for our most pressing needs – for example, key pieces of scientific field equipment. Use the widgets on the Aqueous website to make an easy, targeted contribution.

Thanks so much for your support!

Aqueous written up on Global Climate Solutions website

2008-11-14T19:55:00.000-08:00

The recently announced collaboration between Aqueous Solutions and the Belgian NGO Biochar Fund is featured in an article on the Global Climate Solutions website. This collaboration seeks to improve agricultural soils and crop yields, mitigate the effects of climate change, and provide rural developing communities with a source of safe drinking water - simultaneously.

Read more here.

Aqueous Solutions immediate needs - scientific field equipment

2008-11-08T17:27:00.001-08:00

Use ChipIn for quick and easy donations for Aqueous' most pressing needs! Thank you!

Ain't no party like my Nanna's tea party

2008-11-05T00:52:00.001-08:00

The motherflippin Rhymenocerous and the Hip-hopopotamous go head to head on this track...

Too many mutha uckas, uckin with my shi-

2008-10-26T06:02:00.000-07:00

This is how I feel most of the time.....

Heat

2008-10-24T18:27:00.000-07:00

New documentary on PBS on climate change and what we can do about it:

Frontline: Heat - A global investigation into one of the greatest crises mankind has ever faced - Can we roll back global warming?

I used to be a paperboy for this company.....

2008-10-24T01:09:00.000-07:00

Sick props from the hometown newspaper in West-By-God...

CBS News on Earthships

2008-10-13T18:09:00.000-07:00

Hey, cool! The mainstream media picking up on eco-groovy building techniques!

Watch CBS Videos Online

Pics of the earthship we've been working on in CO to come soon.......

Autumn in Jefferson, CO

2008-10-13T13:13:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Bonnie McGill for these great pics!

Peggy and Jo built this cozy cabin out of scraps and off-cuts from other projects.

Total cost to build: $13.

Exposing the Bi-Partisan Myth of Clean Coal

2008-10-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

There’s at least one topic the candidates in the US elections won’t be wrangling over: so-called “clean” coal. That’s because they all support it...

Read my recent article on so-called "clean" coal online at Matador Change magazine.

It's Gotta Be a Bad Sign When.....

2008-10-09T19:49:00.000-07:00

National Debt Clock Runs Out of Space

In a sign of the times, the National Debt Clock in New York City has run out of digits to record the growing figure. When the national debt topped the $10 trillion point last month, the sign could not display the full amount. A larger debt clock is scheduled to be installed next year.

Here's to 'Nowtopians' Everywhere!

2008-10-08T20:35:00.000-07:00

The following, published in Orion Magazine, is adapted from Chris Carlsson's book Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today, published by AK Press. It looks like it might be a good read – check it out!

* * *

Even while capitalism continues its inexorable push to corral every square inch of the globe into its logic of money and markets, new practices are emerging that redefine politics and open up spaces of unpredictability. Instead of traditional political forms like unions or parties, people are coming together in practical projects, from urban gardening in vacant lots to the suddenly ubiquitous do-it-yourself bike shops. More and more people, recognizing the degradation inherent in business relations, are creating networks of activity that refuse the measurement of money. They depend instead on sharing skills and technological know-how within new communities, such as the biofuels co-ops that have proliferated in many cities. Networks have grown, thanks to the spread of the Internet and other telecommunications techologies, and new kinds of “families” based on shared values, alternative living arrangements, and non-economic relationships are growing within the old society.

Collectively, I call these projects “Nowtopia.” Rarely do the individual participants conceive of them in political terms; day-to-day issues about how we live, what we do, how we define and meet our needs tend to be understood as outside politics. But all Nowtopian activities are profoundly political.

The Nowtopian movement embodies a growing minority seeking emancipation from the treadmill of consumerism and overwork. Acting locally in the face of unfolding global catastrophes, friends and neighbors are redesigning many of the crucial technological foundations of modern life, like food and transportation. These redesigns are worked out through garage and backyard research-and-development programs among friends using the detritus of modern life. Our contemporary commons takes the shape of discarded bicycles and leftover deep-fryer oil, of vacant lots and open bandwidth. “Really, really free markets,” anti-commodities, and free services are imaginative products of an anti-economy provisionally under construction by freely cooperative and inventive people. They aren’t waiting for an institutional change from on high but are building the new world in the shell of the old.

These practices require sharing and mutual aid and constitute the beginnings of new kinds of communities. Because these people are engaged in creative appropriation of technologies to purposes of their own design and choice, these activities embody the (partial) transcendence of the wage-labor prison by workers who have better things to do than their jobs. They are tinkerers working in the waste streams and open spaces of late capitalism, conjuring new practices while redefining life’s purpose.

Efforts to create islands of utopia have always flourished on the margins of capitalist society, but never to the extent that a radically different way of living has been able to supplant market society’s daily life. Nowtopians, and anyone determined to free themselves from the constraints of economically defined life, face the same historic limits that have beset all previous efforts to escape. Can the emerging patterns resist the co-optation and reintegration that have absorbed past self-emancipatory movements? The new apparatus of global production helps speed up the extension of market society, but it inevitably also speeds the spread of social opposition, the sharing of experiments and alternatives. Our moment in history is at least as exhilarating as it is daunting.

Bicycling Meditation, Colorado

2008-10-05T15:24:00.000-07:00

Every bend in the road brings me new ideas; every dawn gives me fresh feelings.
- Haiku writer Matsuo Basho; quote as a paraphrase of the original in The Te of Piglet by Benjamin Hoff

My home was at Cold Mountain from the start,

Rambling among the hills, far from trouble.

Gone, and a million things leave no trace
Loosed, and it flows through galaxies
A fountain of light, into the very mind -
Not a thing, and yet it appears before me:
Now I know the pearl of the Buddha nature
Know its use: a boundless perfect sphere.

- from The Cold Mountain Poems, by Han-shan, translated by Gary Snyder

My pedal mechanism broke one evening outside of Leadville. I fixed it with some zip-ties. Zip ties are awesome, btw. I try to always have some zip ties on me in case of whatever.

This was a good-enough fix since without being able to clip in to these pedals they are basically useless. And the next day I was due to climb over Independence Pass (just shy of 12,100 ft, see below). I am a hardcore mofo but I don't think I can do that with only one leg.

The drawback with this quick-fix was that my foot was permanently affixed to the pedal - so to get out I had to undo the velco and take my shoe off. Getting back on was pretty awkward with the bike loaded down with gear - but I only fell over once, so I feel pretty good about that. And luckily I didn't crash, because if I would have, if the zip ties didn't break it probably would have ripped my leg off at the knee. But I took the descent into Aspen slow - the better to observe the fantastic scenery - and made it into the campground at Maroon Bells without incident - woo hoo!

Mount Elbert (tallest mountain in CO) - at sunset...

...in the early dawn...

...and late dawn.

Climbing to Independence Pass...

Nate met me at Maroon Bells for some sweet hiking.

The path to Han-shan's place is laughable,

A path, but no sign of cart or horse.
Converging gorges - hard to trace their twists
Jumbled cliffs - unbelievably rugged.
A thousand grasses bend with dew,
A hill of pines hums in the wind.
And now I've lost the shortcut home,
Body asking shadow, how do you keep up?

- from The Cold Mountain Poems, by Han-shan, translated by Gary Snyder

There's a naked bug at Cold Mountain
With a white body and a black head.
His hand holds two book scrolls,
One the Way and one its Power.
His shack's got no pots or oven,
He goes for a long walk with his shirt and pants askew.
But he always carries the sword of wisdom:
He means to cut down senseless craving.

- from The Cold Mountain Poems, by Han-shan, translated by Gary Snyder

As for me, I delight in the everyday Way,
Among mist-wrapped vines and rocky caves.
Here in the wilderness I am completely free,
With my friends, the white clouds, idling forever.
There are roads, but they do not reach the world;
Since I am mindless, who can rouse my thoughts?
On a bed of stone I sit, alone in the night,
While the round moon climbs up Cold Mountain.

- Han-Shan, 750, The Enlightened Heart, translated by Stephen Mitchell

Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin.

– Japhy Ryder, in The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac

In my first thirty years of life
I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.
Walked by rivers through deep green grass
Entered cities of boiling red dust.
Tried drugs, but couldn't make Immortal;
Read books and wrote poems on history.
Today I'm back at Cold Mountain:
I'll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.

- from The Cold Mountain Poems, by Han-shan, translated by Gary Snyder

Cold Mountain is a house
Without beams or walls.
The six doors left and right are open
The hall is sky blue.
The rooms all vacant and vague
The east wall beats on the west wall
At the center nothing.

...

When men see Han-shan
They all say he's crazy
And not much to look at -
Dressed in rags and hides.
They don't get what I say
And I don't talk their language.
All I can say to those I meet:
"Try and make it to Cold Mountain."

- from The Cold Mountain Poems, by Han-shan, translated by Gary Snyder

A reward for Nate and I after many miles of biking and hiking - a dip in Conundrum hot springs.

From the Taoist alchemist Ko Hung:

The contented man can be happy with what appears to be useless. He can find worthwhile occupation in forests and mountains. He stays in a small cottage and associates with the simple. He would not exchange his worn clothes for the imperial robes, nor the load on his back for a four-horse carriage. He leaves the jade in the mountains and the pearls in the sea. Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he can be happy – he knows when to stop. He does not pick the brief-blossoming flower; he does not travel the dangerous road. To him, the ten thousand possessions are dust in the wind. He sings as he travels among the green mountains.

He finds sheltering branches more comforting than red-gated mansions, the plow in his hands more rewarding than the prestige of titles and banners, fresh mountain water more satisfying than the feasts of the wealthy. He acts in true freedom. What can competition for honors mean to him? What attraction can anxiety and greed possibly hold? Through simplicity he has Tao, and from Tao, everything. He sees the light in the ‘darkness,’ the clear in the ‘cloudy,’ the speed in the ‘slowness,’ the full in the ‘empty.’ The cook creating a meal with his own hands has as much honor in his eyes as a famous singer or high official. He has no profits to gain, no salary to lose; no applause, no criticism. When he looks up, it is not in envy. When he looks down, it is not with arrogance. Many look at him, but nobody sees him. Calm and detached, he is free from all danger, a dragon hidden among men.

- Quoted in The Te of Piglet by Benjamin Hoff

My route: Jefferson -> Breckenridge -> Leadville -> Twin Lakes -> Aspen -> Maroon Bells

I’ve been reading Whitman, know what he says, "Cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots," he means that’s the attitude for the Bard, the Zen Lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars ... and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks [and on bikes!], going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures…

– Japhy Ryder, in The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac

Welcome to Colorado

2008-09-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

Folks are real friendly up here in South Park...

Smokey The Bear Sutra

2008-09-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

by Gary Snyder

***

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings--even the grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.

"In some future time, there will be a continent called America. It will have great centers of power called such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur, Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon. The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature."

"The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings of volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth. My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that future American Era I shall enter a new form; to cure the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger: and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it."

And he showed himself in his true form of

SMOKEY THE BEAR

A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and watchful.

Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;

His left paw in the mudra of Comradely Display--indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that of deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma;

Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a civilization that claims to save but often destroys;

Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the west, symbolic of the forces that guard the wilderness, which is the Natural State of the Dharma and the true path of man on Earth:

all true paths lead through mountains

With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind;

Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for everyone who loves her and trusts her;

Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs, smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism;

Indicating the task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned foods, universities, and shoes, master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.

Wrathful but calm. Austere but Comic. Smokey the Bear will Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or slander him...

HE WILL PUT THEM OUT

Thus his great Mantra:

Namah samanta vajranam chanda maharoshana Sphataya hum traka ham mam

"I DEDICATE MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSAL DIAMOND
BE THIS RAGING FURY BE DESTROYED"

And he will protect those who love the woods and rivers, Gods and animals,
hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick people, musicians,
playful women,and hopeful children:

And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, television,
or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR'S WAR SPELL:

DROWN THEIR BUTTS

CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

DROWN THEIR BUTTS

CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surely appear to put the enemy out with his vajra-shovel.

Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada.

Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick.

Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature.

Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts.

Will always have ripened blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at.

AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT

...thus we have heard...

Aqueous Solutions Vid Blurb

2008-09-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Lisa at tngnt.net for producing this....

aqsolutions.org

Charcoals: Electron Microscopy Study

2008-08-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

I worked some connections here at NC State Univ. and got a co-conspirator to scan some of the charcoal samples I brought back from Thailand with an electron microscope. SEM images are so cool!

The images just below are of charcoal made from longan wood (Dimocarpus longan). There are loads of these of these fruit trees throughout southern China, southeast Asia and the region around Pun Pun Farm. They grow them from layering and the trees never develop a strong tap root. So they have to prop the limbs up or the trees will blow over in a storm. And they have to prune them often - so it's very common to make charcoal from the prunings.

You can really see the macropore structure in some of these shots (note the scale bars at the bottom of each image...a "um" is a micro-meter, 10^-6 meter, or 1/1000 of a millimeter, for those not conversant in scientific notation).

This charcoal is made from coconut husk. It was not the best kind of coconut to made charcoal from - the thin hard shells of young coconuts. Probably charcoal made from the thick, woody shells of mature coconuts, and/or the coir would be better for our purposes. But this stuff does show some interesting surface morphology.

We would have to use TEM (transmission electron microscopy) to see the smallest pores, at the molecular scale (1 millionth of a millimeter and smaller). Then we'd actually be looking at the crystalline structure of the charcoals - that would be totally sick. But these SEM (scanning EM) images are good for getting a since of how porous charcoal materials are at the micro-level. So you can see how a couple tablespoons of this stuff can have the surface area - at the molecular level - of a football field. Plenty of space, in other words, to adsorb contaminants like nasssty pesticides!

Below is charcoal made from rice husks. It's an interesting material, but probably not very good for water filtration purposes because of its naturally high ash content from all the silica and minerals that make up the husk. Also, rice husk charcoal is not made in a kiln - husks are just piled onto a fire and allowed to smolder. So the pyrolysis is pretty low temperature, and oxygen is not well excluded - thus it doesn't develop awesome porosity/surface area and so is not a great water filtration charcoal.

But still interesting to look at in SEM - in the image, the husk on the left shows the underside, on the right the outer side of the husk. Cool eh? Very different morphology inside and out!

I had a great chat the other day with my man the electron-microscopy ninja when he brought me these images. (He snuck our samples in between runs of "official" work.) I told him about the project and our efforts to design simple/cheap systems for drinking water purification and he is down like 4 flat tires. So I will keep sending him samples and he will sneak them in all clandestine like - so more cool images to come, ha!

Renegade science is so much fun!

aqsolutions.org

Global Freshwater Scarcity

2008-08-28T09:06:00.000-07:00

Interesting article from the August Scientific American on Facing the Freshwater Crisis

Graphic showing the possible influences of population growth and climate change on water scarcity:

State of Our Soils

2008-08-27T10:35:00.000-07:00

Excellent article in the Sept. '08 National Geographic Magazine on the state of the world's agricultural soils: Our Good Earth - The future rests on the soil beneath our feet

Photo showing loss of topsoil in New Mexico from only a few decades of bad farming practices.

Stop MTR mining in West-By-God!

2008-08-21T19:14:00.000-07:00

See also recent article on Grist.org.

Check the Activist

2008-08-12T19:43:00.000-07:00

New article on D-I-Y water filtration in the Autumn '08 issue of Permaculture Activist Magazine (#69). Check it out!

Folks are catching on...

2008-08-05T11:15:00.000-07:00

...to why economic globalization is retarded.

See recent pieces in Grist and World Changing about the current globalization slowdown stemming from rising transportation costs.

Here's my prediction: look for the proliferation of some new(-ish) buzzwords - "de-globalization," "re-localization," and the like.

It really is exciting to see more folks catching on to the idea that an indefinitely expanding human economy is not a good thing - that it's the economic equivalent of "the mentality of the cancer cell," as Ed Abbey once pointed out.

My initial reaction is, like, "no duh!" And it's weird to me that folks are just now putting all this together. Veteran critics of corporate globalization will probably grind their teeth a bit with the new-seeming-ness of these conversations. But it's really a very, very good thing.

Folks are catching on, the breakdown of globalization is accelerating, and (hopefully) we're on our way to an economy modeled on ecological principles, agrarian values, and primarily local self-reliance. There are bound to be some aches and pains from the growth spurt brought on by all this, but it is overwhelmingly positive, hopeful and encouraging news.

Dumpster Diving = Super Awesome

2008-08-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

Pesticide Drift in the Central Valley, CA

2008-07-30T19:28:00.000-07:00

Read this excellent article from the recent Orion magazine on environmental justice issues associated with pesticide drift in the Central Valley of California.

Pun Pun Teaser Video

2008-07-24T19:12:00.000-07:00

My friend Lisa is the producer of this totally sick online documentary show called - tngnt ("tangent"). She filmed a bunch at Pun Pun last winter and is making a show about the farm and all the cool stuff that goes on there.

Check out the teaser/preview she's posted on tngnt while the full-length program is in the works.

Super cool!

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

2008-07-10T14:18:00.000-07:00

Super interesting article from Atlantic Monthly on the effect the internet has on our thinking processes.

I can say from personal experience that access to internet has a dramatic influence on the way I do research and thereby affects my intellectual habits. My mud hut in Thailand is a 2.5 hr bike ride to the nearest reliable, fast internet connection in Chiang Mai. So I typically save up all my internet work for weekly or fortnightly "power sessions" in my favorite internet cafe just inside the walls of the Old City.

In my hut on the farm, I write emails into Word docs which I later will cut and paste into gmail. I read all my downloaded articles in pdf, taking notes and making a list of references from these articles to chase down next time I'm hooked into the 'net.

As I cycle in to Chiang Mai, I have plenty of time to casually mull over my internet to-do list. I get into town, treat myself to a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, and then power-up on the 'net for several hours, sending emails I've written, saving incoming emails to answer later, and gathering the journal articles specified in my literature review.

In a day where most people in the West are more highly ensconced in "connectivity" than ever before - reading and answering emails on cell phones and blackberries, "texting" friends and co-workers back-and-forth at a frenetic pace, tapping wireless signals at home, in workplaces, in cafes, libraries, pubs and airports - my lack of connectivity, or rather the "inconvenience" I endure in obtaining web access actually presents some distinct advantages.

For example, my 'net "power sessions" are super efficient. That is to say, I spend basically no time farting around surfing the web, reading random articles, blogs and wikipedia pages, perusing You Tube videos, streaming news reports, looking up odd facts about Voltaire, etc. When I have unlimited access - "total connectivity" - I tend to waste a lot of time on junk like that. It's mildly entertaining, perhaps a little bit informative, but really not at all productive. With a time-and-web-access-restricted power session, I am on-task for the duration and so my productivity is through the roof compared to the average US office worker.

Also, if I have unlimited web access I am free to fire off email responses - often better classified as "reactions" - at will. Downloading my mail in order to read and respond later - over a period of a few days or a couple of weeks when I can take my time - engenders me to produce much more thoughtful and considerate responses. Thus the lack of connectivity permits a clarity in thought and communication that doesn't have time to arise during the instantaneous first-reaction period when I've just read an incoming email.

After more time and consideration, I write better emails - emails that respond to the actual intent of the sender and not the often erroneous first impressions - and I write emails that address all necessary topics - thus I don't have to send multiple follow up emails mentioning all the things I forgot in the first instant, appending an overlooked attachment, etc.

So I agree - unlimited web access, or the ability to plug our brains directly into the "information superhighway" over a high-speed connection any time of day or night, from a desktop, laptop, phone, PDA, or any other Blue Tooth enabled device, has its drawbacks. While the lack of "connectivity" of my adobe hut on the farm in rural northern Thailand may have its occasional drawbacks, on balance the benefits of time and space for contemplation and clarity of thought, as well as the very non-frenetic psychic environment, far outweigh the downsides. So maybe Google is making me stupid at a slightly slower rate than your average super-connected techo-geek.

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

2008-07-10T09:01:00.000-07:00

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

Wendell Berry on limits....

2008-06-30T05:29:00.000-07:00

From Harpers Magazine May '08
Faustian Economics: Hell hath no limits
by Wendell Berry

The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such :"biofuels" as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that "science will find an answer." The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

This belief was always indefensible -- the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed --- and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are "free" to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens. (Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry , but -- thank God! -- still driving.)

The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to see that limitlessness is a godly trait. We have insistently, and with relief, defined ourselves as animals or as " higher animals." But to define ourselves as animals, given our specifically human powers and desires, is to define ourselves a limitless animals -- which of course is a contradiction in terms. Any definition is a limit, which is why the God of Exodus refuses to define Himself : "I am that I am."

In keeping with our unrestrained consumptiveness, the commonly accepted basis of our economy is the supposed possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy, and limitless debt. The idea of a limitless economy implies and requires a doctrine of general human limitlessness: all are entitled to pursue without limit whatever they conceive as desirable, -- a license that classifies the most exalted Christian capitalist with the lowliest pornographer.

This fantasy of limitlessness perhaps arose from the coincidence of the Industrial Revolution with the suddenly exploitable resources of the New World -- though how the supposed limitlessness of resources can be reconciled with their exhaustion is not clear. Or perhaps it comes from the contrary apprehension of the world's "smallness," made possible by modern astronomy and high-speed transportation. Fear of the smallness of our world and its life may lead to a kind of claustrophobia and thence, with apparent reasonableness, to a desire for the "freedom" of limitlessness. But this desire, paradoxically, reduces everything. The life of this world is small to those who think it is, and the desire to enlarge it makes it smaller, and can reduce it finally to nothing.

However it came about, this credo of limitlessness clearly implies a principled wish not only for limitless possessions but also for limitless knowledge, limitless science, limitless technology, and limitless progress. And, necessarily, it must lead to limitless violence, waste, war, and destruction. That it should finally produce a crowning cult of political limitlessness is only a matter of mad logic.

The normalization of the doctrine of limitlessness has produced a sort of moral minimalism: the desire to be efficient at any cost, to be unencumbered by complexity. The minimization of neighborliness, respect, reverence, responsibility, accountability, and self-subordination -- this is the culture of which our present leaders and heroes are the spoiled children.

Our national faith so far has been: "There's always more." Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People of intelligence and ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a big machine. Thus an X marked on a paper ballot no longer fulfills our idea of voting. One problem with this state of affairs is that the work now most needing to be done -- that of neighborliness and caretaking -- cannot be done by remote control and the greatest power on the largest scale. A second problem is that the economic fantasy of limitlessness in a limited world calls fearfully into question the value of our monetary wealth, which does not reliably stand for the real wealth of land, resources, and workmanship but instead wastes and depletes it.

That human limitlessness is a fantasy means, obviously, that its life expectancy is limited. There is now a growing perception, and not just among a few experts, that we are entering a time of inescapable limits. We are not likely to be granted another world to plunder in compensation for our pillage of this one. Nor are we likely to believe much longer in our ability to outsmart, by means of science and technology, our economic stupidity. The hope that we can cure the ills of industrialism by the homeopathy of more technology seems at last to be losing status. We are, in short, coming under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.

This constraint, however, is not the condemnation it may seem. On the contrary, it returns us to our real condition and to our human heritage, from which our self-definition as limitless animals has far too long cut us off. Every cultural and religious tradition that I know about, while fully acknowledging our animal nature, defines us specifically as humans -- that is, as animals (if the word still applies) capable of living not only within natural limits but also within cultural limits, self-imposed. As earthly creatures, we live, because we must, within natural limits, which we may describe by such names as "earth" or "ecosystem" or "watershed" or "place." But as humans, we may elect to respond to this necessary placement by the self-restraints implied in neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, friendship, loyalty, and love.

In our limitless selfishness, we have tried to define "freedom," for example, as an escape from all restraint. But, as my friend Bert Hornback has explained in his book The Wisdom in Words, "free" is etymologically related to "friend." These words come from the same Indo-European root, which carries the sense of "dear" or "beloved." We set our friends free by our love for them, with the implied restraints of faithfulness or loyalty. And this suggests that our "identity" is located not in the impulse of selfhood but in deliberately maintained connections.

Thinking of our predicament has sent me back again to Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. This is a play of the Renaissance; Faustus, a man of learning, longs to possess "all Nature's treasury, " to "Ransack the ocean.../ And search all corners of the newfound world..." To assuage his thirst for knowledge and power, he deeds his soul to Lucifer, receiving in compensation for twenty-four years the services of the sub-devil Mephistophilis , nominally Faustus's slave but in fact his master. Having the subject of limitlessness in mind, I was astonished on this reading to come upon Mephistophilis's description of hell. When Faustus asks, "How comes it then that thou art out of hell?" Mephistophilis replies, "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it." And a few pages later he explains:

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, but where we {the damned} are is hell,
And where hell is must we ever be.

For those who reject heaven, hell is everywhere, and thus is limitless. For them, even the thought of heaven is hell.

It is only appropriate, then, that Mephistophilis rejects any conventional limit: "Tut, Faustus, marriage is but a ceremonial toy. If thou lovest me, think no more of it." Continuing this theme, for Faustus's pleasure the devils present a sort of pageant of the seven deadly sins, three of which -- Pride, Wrath, and Gluttony -- describe themselves as orphans, disdaining the restraints of parental or filial love.

Seventy or so years later, and with the issue of the human definition more than ever in doubt, John Milton is Book VII of Paradise Lost returns again to a consideration of our urge to know. To Adam's request to be told the story of creation, the "affable Archangel" Raphael agrees, "to answer thy desire/Of knowledge within bounds [my emphasis]...," explaining that

Knowledge is as food, and needs no less
Her temperance over appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain;
Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind.

Raphael is saying, with angelic circumlocution, that knowledge without wisdom, limitless knowledge, is not worth a fart; he is not a humorless archangel. But he also is saying that knowledge without measure, knowledge that the human mind cannot appropriately use, is mortally dangerous.

I am well aware of what I risk in bringing this language of religion into what is normally a scientific discussion. I do so because I doubt that we can define our present problems adequately, let alone solve them, without some recourse to our cultural heritage. We are, after all, trying now to deal with the failure of scientists, technicians, and politicians to "think up" a version of human continuance that is economically probable and ecologically responsible, or perhaps even imaginable. If we go back into our tradition, we are going to find a concern with religion, which at a minimum shatters the selfish context of the individual life, and thus forces a consideration of what human beings are and ought to be.

This concern persists at least as late as our Declaration of Independence, which holds as "self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...." Thus among our political roots, we have still our old preoccupation with our definition as humans, which in the Declaration is wisely assigned to our Creator; our rights and the rights of all humans are not granted by any human government but are innate, belonging to us by birth. This insistence comes not from the fear of death or even extinction but from the ancient fear that in order to survive we might become inhuman or monstrous.

And so our cultural tradition is in large part the record of our continuing effort to understand ourselves as beings specifically human: to say that, as humans, we must do certain things and we must not do certain things. We must have limits or we will cease to exist as humans; perhaps we will cease to exist, period. At times, for example, some of us humans have thought that human beings, properly so called, did not make war against civilian populations, or hold prisoners without a fair trial, or use torture for any reason.

Some of us would-be humans have thought too that we should not be free at anybody else's expense. And yet in the phrase "free market," the word "free" has come to mean unlimited economic power for some, with the necessary consequence of economic powerlessness for others. Several years ago, after I had spoken at a meeting, two earnest and obviously troubled young veterinarians approached me with a question: How could they practice veterinary medicine without serious economic damage to the farmers who were their clients? Underlying their question was the fact that for a long time veterinary help for a sheep or a pig has been likely to cost more than the animal is worth. I had to answer that, in my opinion, so long as their practice relied heavily on selling patented drugs, they had no choice, since the market for medicinal drugs was entirely controlled by the drug companies, whereas most farmers had no control at all over the market for agricultural products. My questioners were asking in effect if a predatory economy can have a beneficent result. The answer too often is No. And that is because there is an absolute discontinuity between the economy of the seller of medicines and the economy of the buyer, as there is in the health industry as a whole. The drug industry is interested in the survival of patients, we have to suppose, because surviving patients will continue to consume drugs.

It is this economy of community destruction that, wittingly or unwittingly, most scientists and technicians have served for the past two hundred years. These scientists and technicians have justified themselves by the proposition that they are the vanguard of progress, enlarging human knowledge and power, and thus they have romanticized both themselves and the predatory enterprises that they have served.

As a consequence, our great need now is for sciences and technologies of limits, of domesticity, of what Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has called "homecoming." These would be specifically human sciences and technologies, working, as the best humans always have worked, within self-imposed limits. The limits would be the accepted contexts of places, communities, and neighborhoods, both natural and human.

I know that the idea of such limitations will horrify some people, maybe most people, for we have long encouraged ourselves to feel at home on "the cutting edges" of knowledge and power or on some "frontier" of human experience. But I know too that we are talking now in the presence of much evidence that improvement by outward expansion may no longer be a good idea, if it ever was. It was not a good idea for the farmers who "leveraged" secure acreage to buy more during the 1970s. It has proved tragically to be a bad idea in a number of recent wars. If it is a good idea in the form of corporate gigantism, then we must ask, For whom? Faustus, who wants all knowledge and all the world for himself, is a man supremely lonely and finally doomed. I don't think Marlowe was kidding. I don't think Satan is kidding when he says in Paradise Lost, "Myself am Hell."

If the idea of appropriate limitation seems unacceptable to us, that may be because, like Marlowe's Faustus and Milton's Satan, we confuse limits with confinement. But that, as I think Marlowe and Milton and others were trying to tell us, is a great and potentially a fatal mistake. Satan's fault, as Milton understood it and perhaps with some sympathy, was precisely that he could not tolerate his proper limitation; he could not subordinate himself to anything whatever. Faustus's error was his unwillingness to remain "Faustus, and a man." In our age of the world it is not rare to find writers, critics, and teachers of literature, as well as scientists and technicians, who regard Satan's and Faustus's defiance as salutary and heroic.

On the contrary, our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible. For example, an ecosystem, even that of a working forest or farm, so long as it remains ecologically intact, is inexhaustible. A small place, as I know from my own experience can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure -- in addition to its difficulties -- that cannot be exhausted in a life time or in generations.

To recover from our disease of limitlessness, we will have to give up the idea that we have a right to be godlike animals, that we are potentially omniscient and omnipotent, ready to discover "the secret of the universe." We will have to start over, with a different and much older premise: the naturalness and, for creatures of limited intelligence, the necessity, of limits. We must learn again to ask how we can make the most of what we are, what we have, what we have been given. If we always have a theoretically better substitute available from somebody or someplace else, we will never make the most of anything. It is hard to make the most of one life. If we each had two lives, we would not make much of either. Or as one of my best teachers said of people in general: "They'll never be worth a damn as long as they've got two choices."

To deal with the problems, which after all are inescapable, of living with limited intelligence in a limited world, I suggest that we may have to remove some of the emphasis we have lately placed on science and technology and have a new look at the arts. For an art does not propose to enlarge itself by limitless extension but rather to enrich itself within bounds that are accepted prior to the work.

It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits. A painting, however large, must finally be bounded by a frame or a wall. A composer or playwright must reckon, at a minimum, with the capacity of an audience to sit still and pay attention. A story, once begun, must end somewhere within the limits of the writer's and the reader's memory. And of course the arts characteristically impose limits that are artificial: the five acts of a play, or the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Within these limits artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts with one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex. And probably most of us can name a painting, a piece of music, a poem or play or story that still grows in meaning and remains fresh after many years of familiarity.

We know by now that a natural ecosystem survives by the same sort of formal intricacy, ever-changing, inexhaustible, and no doubt finally unknowable. We know further that if we want to make our economic landscapes sustainably and abundantly productive, we must do so by maintaining in them a living formal complexity something like that of natural ecosystems. We can do this only by raising to the highest level our mastery of the arts of agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and , ultimately, the art of living.

It is true that insofar as scientific experiments must be conducted within carefully observed limits, scientists also are artists. But in science one experiment, whether it succeeds or fails, is logically followed by another in a theoretically infinite progression. According to the underlying myth of modern science, this progression is always replacing the smaller knowledge of the past with the larger knowledge of the present, which will be replaced by the yet larger knowledge of the future.

In the arts, by contrast, no limitless sequence of works is ever implied or looked for. No work of art is necessarily followed by a second work that is necessarily better. Given the methodologies of science, the law of gravity and the genome were bound to be discovered by somebody; the identity of the discoverer is incidental to the fact. But it appears that in the arts there are no second chances. We must assume that we had one chance each for The Divine Comedy and King Lear. If Dante and Shakespeare had died before they wrote those poems, nobody ever would have written them.

The same is true of our arts of land use, our economic arts, which are our arts of living. With these it is once-for-all. We will have no chance to redo our experiments with bad agriculture leading to soil loss. The Appalachian mountains and forests we have destroyed for coal are gone forever. It is now and forevermore too late to use thriftily the first half of the world's supply of petroleum. In the art of living we can only start again with what remains.

And so, in confronting the phenomenon of "peak oil," we are really confronting the end of our customary delusion of "more." Whichever way we turn, from now on, we are going to find a limit beyond which there will be no more. To hit these limits at top speed is not a rational choice. To start slowing down, with the idea of avoiding catastrophe, is a rational choice, and a viable one if we can recover the necessary political sanity. Of course it makes sense to consider alternative energy sources, provided they make sense. But also we will have to re-examine the economic structures of our lives, and conform them to the tolerances and limits of our earthly places. Where there is no more, our one choice is to make the most and the best of what we have.

Lessons from North Korea

2008-06-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

Great article on the failings of industrial agriculture and "developmentality" policy and economics from John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and the author of numerous articles on food policy.

More groovy Buddhism podcasts! Yay!

2008-06-16T16:33:00.000-07:00

Tibetan Buddhist scholar and author Bob Thurman has some great podcasts available for download.

He's also got a new book on the shelves: Why the Dalai Lama Matters. Check it out!

And here's a TED talk by Thurman on "Becoming Buddha - On the Web"...

On 'Vagabonding' and Responsibility

2008-06-10T08:29:00.000-07:00

A version of this essay is published at Brave New Traveler Magazine.

Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.

From the Tao Te Ching, by Lao-Tzu (chapter 67)

In a recent post to The Traveler’s Notebook, traveler, journalist and eco-philosopher Tim Patterson provided a how-to guide to traveling for free (or very cheap) – a practice that could be called “vagabonding” – for which he was promptly assailed by a number of readers for advocating a kind of shiftlessness and irresponsibility.

He was nailed with all manner of epithets – called irresponsible, a “hippie,” a bum, an idealist, impractical, a “rich, privileged, arrogant hipster,” and the like. In reality, Tim was just offering some practical low-budget travel advice. As such, the vitriolic feedback he got from a number of readers is way out-of-proportion.

But why is that? What brought on this storm of denouncements?

I think I have an idea.

You see, as humans, whenever we have a strong emotional reaction to something, that’s a great opportunity to learn something about ourselves, the way our psyche works, the way our minds are wired up. When we react strongly, that’s usually an indication that some fundamental metaphysical axiom, in other words, some deeply held belief, is being challenged.

Tim’s piece giving practical low-budget travel advice struck a nerve with some folks. And my sense is that these are not oddball folks – rather they are probably fairly typical, fairly mainstream in their beliefs and attitudes.

I suggest this because one of the primary fundamental axioms held in our dominant Western “civilized” culture has to do with the importance of getting somewhere in life. From a very young age, we’re urged to “achieve” this or that, “become responsible,” and to “make something of ourselves.”

Well that’s a curious phrase, isn’t it – “make something of yourself”? Aren’t I already something? Of course, that isn’t what’s intended by the phrase – we’re meant to make something important of ourselves. And in this case important means to embody success, as understood in the conventional way.

So let’s look at this idea of success:

Stealing an illustration from Alan Watts, we ask: What’s the outcome of success in business as we know it? More business! That means more investment, more production, more stuff, more expansion, more proliferation of mostly material ticky-tacky, and to go along with all this, more bulldozing over ecosystems to make it all possible.

Now, granted, all this business – this busy-ness – has produced some technological marvels and various benefits to our lives and to society. But if one is to take a reasonably objective view, one has to ask the question, “At what cost?”

And for all our technology and busy-ness, we’ve got nuclear weapons, climate change, deforestation, a precipitous decline in biodiversity rivaled only by the extinction event that did away with the dinosaurs, GMOs, an environment full of toxic chemicals, “Reality TV,” high-density Confined Animal Feeding Operations, the largest disparity in wealth between the rich and the poor in human history, unprecedented levels of violence and social decay in our cities, etc. etc. etc., and to top it off, an economic system that itself survives by accelerating the rate of all of these forms of destruction and desecration and depravity.

Even so, a belief held very deeply by most folks in our society is that in the present, we are now better off than ever before in human history. But considering the above, I’m disinclined to be so sure about this.

But here’s how all this relates to vagabonding, and notions about “responsibility”:

Responsibility in our society means getting somewhere in life. It means making something of yourself.

There is only one requirement to be a vagabond traveler, and that is to relinquish any notion of or attachment to getting somewhere in life or of making something of oneself other that what one already is.

Being a successful vagabond traveler requires one to viscerally experience the basic realization that the conventionally held fundamental metaphysical axiom of our “civilized” culture is an illusion and is absurd. To rip off ol’ A-Dub again, “It’s like a mosquito biting an iron bull - It’s the nature of a mosquito to bite, and the nature of an iron bull to be un-bitable.”

A vagabond traveler realizes that naught but frustration, anxiety and suffering can come from blindly applying oneself to a futile task such as this. Thus a successful vagabond traveler sees the inherent emptiness in the conventional notion of success, and therefore, as is written in the Tao Te Ching, “has no fixed plans / and is not intent upon arriving.” (chapter 27)

To illustrate this emptiness, let me chart a conventional course of success.

You’re told in grade school to study hard so that you can get into a “good” college. OK, what then?

In college you study hard in order to earn a degree, and get into a good graduate school or professional program. OK, what then?

You work very hard to distinguish yourself in graduate or professional school, so that you can get a high-paying and/or prestigious job. OK, what then?

If you’re a university professor, you work very hard to get tenure. If you’re in a business of some kind, you work very hard to get a promotion, to get a raise in pay, to “climb the corporate ladder.” OK, what then?

Well, with this money and status you must live in a house and drive a car and participate in certain recreational and social activities commensurate with you income level and professional status. This is necessarily expensive and, from the planet’s perspective, most often obscenely resource intensive. OK, what then?

Perhaps along the way you marry and have children. You have to begin to put away money for (1) your own retirement, and (2) to be able to pay to send your children through this same system of studying and working to achieve the thing and make something of themselves as well, and on into the future, ad absurdum…

At the end of it all, if you’ve been clever, “responsible,” and a bit lucky, you get to retreat to the Elysian Fields of Retirement. This seems to be the goal most people in our society are working for, although what they’ll do when they get there I don’t know.

N.B.: My late grandfather, incidentally, had a bumper sticker on his truck that read “RETIRED. Don’t Ask Me To Do A Damn Thing.” And indeed, that was how he lived. And well done for him. (I mean that honestly; no sarcasm intended.)

Anyway, the point is, what’s the point of all this? Where are you trying to get by going through all this? To ask this question another way:

At what point when you have amassed X amount of personal fortune, accumulated Y amount of material possessions, and achieved Z status as ‘an upstanding member of society’ do you shout “Enough!” and commence living a life of contentment?

Looking around our society, it seems that hardly anyone has reached this point. We’ve all got that thousand-yard stare, squinting intently and with considerable anxiety at the horizon – out there, in the future, when we’ll finally have enough. Then we can relax and begin to live. (I suppose.)

This is, I think, the defining characteristic of the conventional mind in our society – never satisfied in the present, never content with what is, always grasping for something more. And we’re certainly inundated with enough marketing and advertising and PR to encourage this mindset.

You see, in a sense, the vagabond traveler is a kind of avatar for our society. She is one who has seen the inherent emptiness behind the conventional understanding of success, who has realized the futility of living a life in unending pursuit of an illusory future happiness.

The vagabond traveler embodies the realization that there is no place other than here, and there is no time other than now. So if one is going to enjoy one’s life, it has to be done in the here-and-now. If one is incapable of enjoying life in the present then one is incapable of enjoyment, period, because the present is the only time there is and “future enjoyment” does not exist.

In the Tao Te Ching (as translated by Stephen Mitchell), the word “content” appears 11 times. Here are some examples showing what Lao-Tzu was trying to tell us…

From chapter 8:
“[The Tao, or natural way] is content with the low places that people disdain.”

“When you are content to be simply yourself / and don't compare or compete / everybody will respect you.”

From chapter 30:
“Because he is content with himself / he doesn't need others' approval.”

Chapter 37:
“The Tao never does anything / yet through it all things are done.

If powerful men and women / could enter themselves in it / the whole world would be transformed / by itself, in its natural rhythms / People would be content / with their simple, everyday lives / in harmony, and free of desire.

When there is no desire / all things are at peace.”

From chapter 39:
“In harmony with the Tao / the sky is clear and spacious / the earth is solid and full / all creature flourish together / content with the way they are / endlessly repeating themselves / endlessly renewed.

When man interferes with the Tao / the sky becomes filthy / the earth becomes depleted / the equilibrium crumbles / creatures become extinct.”

Chapter 44:
“Fame or integrity: which is more important? / Money or happiness: which is more valuable? / Success of failure: which is more destructive?

If you look to others for fulfillment / you will never truly be fulfilled.
If your happiness depends on money / you will never be happy with yourself.

Be content with what you have / rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking / the whole world belongs to you.”

From chapter 65:
“If you want to learn how to govern / avoid being clever or rich.

The simplest pattern is the clearest / Content with an ordinary life / you can show all people the way / back to their own true nature.”

From chapter 80:
“If a country is governed wisely / its inhabitants will be content.
They enjoy the labor of their hands / and don't waste time inventing / labor-saving machines.”

(Of course, on the topic of travel, the Tao also says in chapter 80:

Since they dearly love their homes / they aren't interested in travel.
There may be a few wagons and boats / but these don't go anywhere….
…And even though the next country is so close / that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking / they are content to die of old age / without ever having gone to see it.”)

So what the vagabond traveler actually represents is a higher kind of responsibility – one who is more in touch with reality and the true nature of the Universe; although the typical mind will always label her as “out-of-touch,” “impractical,” and a “denier of reality.” This mis-labeling and the anger that comes with it – the anger that was showing up in several of the reactions to Tim’s post on low-budget vagabond travel – arise because the deepest Self, beneath all those layers of conventional Mind, resonates with the truth exposed and illustrated by the liberated vagabond, the free-spirited wandering ascetic. And for one strongly identified with the egoic mind and thus caught up in conventional notions of success, that resonance is frightening.

This deepest Self, this universal thing that the Hindus call Atman, has hidden itself inside each of us, playing this colossal game of hide-and-seek. This hallucination that we are “isolated centers of sensation locked up in a bag of skin” (what is indicated in Western psychological parlance by the term “ego”) - hides our true nature from ourselves. Tim’s essay on traveling for free struck such a nerve with folks because he wasn’t addressing individual egos in terms that are comfortable, but rather speaking directly to the Universal Self hidden within all of us in terms intended to draw it out and expose the ongoing illusion of our conventional lives.

This Universal Self knows full well the illusory nature of success in the conventional, egoic sense, and moves naturally to embrace the Tao of Vagabond Travel that Tim illustrates in his piece. A strong negative emotional reaction to this Tao of Travel is simply indicative of folks’ identification with the ego. And when the ego is threatened, it gets defensive - we all know what that’s like, huh!?! Who among us has never reacted angrily and all-out-of-proportion before?

So remember folks, as Lao-Tzu said:

I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.

(Tao Te Ching, chapter 67)

Don’t be too hard on yourselves. Or each other. (Which is to say the same thing.)

Open Water!

2008-06-08T12:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I swam 3k and 2k open water races, near Pinehurst, NC. I think that is the most I have ever swam in one day. Sick!

The photos were taken by my friend and benefactor Eric Elbel.

Enjoying a pre-race snack

Psyched to swim!

Contemplating the start/finish

Kate and I discuss strategy

Rounding a buoy

Kate emerges at the finish

After a long slog!

Me, Sonia and Kate ruled the 2k!

New piece on Brave New Traveler

2008-06-04T14:11:00.000-07:00

Well, I think I set a record for the fast-track to publishing this time!

A week or so ago my buddy Tim published a piece in The Traveler's Notebook called How To Travel the World For Free (Seriously).

His essay is basically an advice column for very-low-budget travel. But it has some metaphysical undertones that struck a nerve with some readers, and unleashed a heated discussion in the comments section.

If you care about the details, you can read for yourself, but basically some folks were breakin Tim's balls for being a "privileged idealistic hippy" and an "arrogant irresponsible hipster," etc.

Hipster? Man, that's low. I'm from Oakland, and that's just WRONG.

Anyway, the disproportionate negative reaction got me thinking. (uh-oh)

Why would people - ordinary people - flip out because Tim suggested to go traveling, not to worry about shit, and just let the Universe do it's groovy thing?

I got obsessed with this question (like I do), and yesterday morning I could not do anything else until I had written up some kind of answer.

So between 9:30 and 11 AM I vomited out this treatise on a kind of Taoist take on eco-travel.

I emailed my vomit to Tim, who looked it over and forwarded the vomit on to the editors of Brave New Traveler, and apparently it was vomit they could dig, because this morning there it was - my vomit published for God and everyone to read on the World Wide Web (and not just on this blog where I can put what-ev I want when-ev).

OK, so that's like maybe less then 24 hours from neuron to magazine.....is that a record? It has to be close to a record. Seriously.

So.....READ IT!

And leave comments!

The title they gave it is: The Tao of Vagabond Travel

I wrote it, but in the interest of full disclosure: the ideas aren't mine. I stole them from Alan Watts, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, and Jesus.

The Zen of Sport

2008-06-03T14:13:00.000-07:00

A lot of debates have been coming up recently over the case of Oscar Pistorius, the South African double-amputee sprinter. With the use of specially designed prosthetic leg extensions, Pistorius has been training in order to participate in the upcoming Summer Olympic Games.

The debate is over whether Oscar’s prostheses give him an unfair advantage. In January of this year, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ruled him ineligible for competitions conducted under its rules, including the 2008 Summer Olympics. This decision was recently overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, when the Court ruled that there is insufficient evidence to prove that Pistorius's prostheses give him an advantage over so-called able-bodied athletes.

Oscar’s participation in the Olympics is hotly debated by competitive athletes around the world. But I think the debate misses the point. And further, it’s completely obvious why the debate misses the point – it’s symptomatic of what I would call our misguided understanding of the purpose of sport.

You see, the question of whether Oscar’s prostheses give him an advantage is only relevant when one is placing exclusive emphasis on the purpose of sport – in this case, of sprinting – being to see who can get to the finish line first. So the whole purpose of the race is to see who can get from the starting line to the finish line in the shortest amount of time.

I realize that, to most people, this seems like the obvious and completely appropriate purpose of a sport such as sprinting, or for that matter distance running, swimming, cycling, and so on. But I happen to think it’s a terrible purpose.

You see, if the race is all about getting to the end of the race, then for the duration of the race one’s mind is somewhere else – specifically, at the finish line. One becomes obsessed with the finish line, and that particular numerical score one receives there that quantifies the time it took to arrive. This in turn determines one’s value as an athlete, and as a person, as it were.

This same attitude permeates one’s training regimen as well. If the purpose of sport is that little number one gets branded with at the finish line, the then purpose of training becomes that moment in the future where one’s value is obtained, the mark of success or failure as an athlete. Thus in all of those hours, days and weeks of training, one’s mind is never in the here and now, but rather at that singular moment sometime in the future when dreams are either realized or crushed.

I realize that this is all a perfectly “normal” attitude for competitive athletics, but it strikes me as rather perfectly morbid. With this attitude, one is completely incapable of enjoying sport. Training simply amounts to a kind of grim drudgery one undertakes in order to keep the demons of poor performance at bay. It’s a recipe for suffering and misery so far as I can tell.

Our society has this attitude towards sport because it has this attitude towards everything – life, work, career, hobbies, relationships, etc. In our society, everyone is all about getting somewhere. This seems to be the defining characteristic of what we call “civilization,” this constant desire – a longing, really – to be somewhere else, in both space and time.

I’m not sure where that somewhere is, or when it is, but it is certainly not here and now. Our society believes that the present is completely unsatisfactory, that things will be much better in the future. And so we must race to get there as soon as possible, in flight from the dreadful here-and-now.

Now I can’t imagine a better recipe for perpetual suffering, misery and anxiety! To take as a fundamental metaphysical axiom that the present is never good enough, is never right, and that things will only be enjoyable sometime in the future is a guarantee that one will be in a state of chronic anxiety until the moment of death.

But just look around and you will see that this is true of just about everyone. Most everyone seems to be in a perpetual state of sacrificing the present for the future – “If I can get into such-and-such a program in University, then I’ll have attained success…” or, “If I can get that promotion…” or, “If I could only make more money…” or, “When I can buy a new house (or car)…” or, “Once my house (or car) is paid off…” or “When I can eventually retire…”

Perhaps the most telling are the huge numbers of so-called religious people who have entirely given up on this present life, and are just kind of holding out, biding their time until they die, so that they can go to Heaven! “Yes, then the fun will begin, if we can just hunker down and endure a few more years of this mess down here on Earth…”

You see, the predominant attitude in our society is that the present is never right, is never good enough, so we must get to that better future as quickly as possible. But of course, it’s impossible to get to the future, because as soon as you find the future has arrived, you realize that once again it’s just “plain old now.”

And you can pick up and move your whole life, feeling that here – wherever you are – is a dreadful place to be. But once you’ve settled in “over there,” you look around and find that once again you are actually right back here – the same old you with the same old anxieties, albeit relocated to another geographical spot, but in fact everything’s pretty much the same.

So we’re a society that’s pegged our happiness and well-being and peace-of-mind on accomplishing something that’s flatly impossible and on its face patently absurd. To recall an ancient Zen proverb, we’ve become like a mosquito biting an iron bull – it’s the nature of a mosquito to bite, and the nature of an iron bull to be un-bitable. So we just stubbornly go on with this, in perpetual frustration and suffering. Is there any wonder that the pharmaceutical companies rake in billions every year selling us mood-altering drugs like Prozac? They’ve got a guaranteed market of hordes of perpetually dissatisfied, depressed and anxious people!

So we’re obsessed with getting to the finish line, and as a consequence, we’ve missed out on the whole wonderful race along the way. In other words, a tragically large proportion of us get to the end of our lives and find we haven’t lived at all, being always focused on something in the future, some place other than here and some time other than now.

And because we’re so obsessed with getting to the finish line as fast as possible, we have this morbid approach to athletics where all that matters is reducing that little number that indicates how long it took to get from A to B.

The truth is that to reduce the distance between A and B is to make B the same as A, since one is in much the same state of mind when one arrives at B as when one left A – as travel time decreases, the distinction between the two vanishes to zero. And then one finds that there’s no point in going from A to B, because “there” has effectively become “here.” What are you going to do then?

Athletics ought to take a lesson from dance, or music. When you dance, you don’t pick out a spot on the floor and devise the quickest way to get there. No, not at all – you dance, and that’s the whole point of it. Certainly not to end up somewhere as quickly as possible.

Similarly, as Zen philosopher Alan Watts liked to point out, when you go to a concert, you don’t just go to hear the finale. The point is the whole thing that’s going on as it’s going on. Otherwise, the best orchestras would be those that played the fastest, and the best composers would just write finales! Everyone would take their seats, there would be one huge crashing chord, and then everyone would get up and go home! How ridiculous!

So the point of athletics is not this business about getting to the finish line first. It’s about the race itself, and being present to that. Really we ought to weep at the finish, not because we weren’t fast enough, but because we were too fast, and now it’s all over! We ought to weep out of nostalgia for the dance of the sport.

Alas I realize that once again I’ve expressed an unpopular opinion. People will surely go on about the grim task of “training,” intently focused upon that moment in the future when all present pain and suffering will be vindicated – when one will finally clasp the golden chalice of accomplishment and in so doing make one’s ego a permanent fixture of the Universe – and in the processes miss out on the here-and-now-ness of sport and life.

Luckily for me, I’m a mediocre-at-best swimmer. This means I can swim without succumbing to the expectations of others to achieve anything – win races, set record times, or what have you. No one expects any of that from me, which makes it easier for me not to expect it from myself. Thus I can get right down to the business of grooving on swimming, of being in the moment right down inside the here-and-now of the water, of tuning into the full experience of my body – my musculature, my breathing, my stroke and kick, and this flowing-gliding kind of dance I do with the water.

I won’t get to the finish line first, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t want to get there fast – I’m having way too good a time grooving with the water to hurry this thing up.

And I think this is the attitude we ought to bring to sport and to life in general. I don’t want to ask Oscar Pistorius if he enjoys an unfair advantage. I want to ask him if he enjoys the race, if he enjoys the life process itself. Is he having an uproariously good time? That’s what I want to know. I hope he is.

Of course, they don’t give out Olympic Gold Medals to the one who’s enjoying him- or her- self the most. But with a deep sense of personal peace and satisfaction in the present moment, who needs an Olympic Gold Medal?

Un-friggin-believable

2008-06-01T07:28:00.000-07:00

Artist Chris Jordan has created these staggering, mind-bending representations of disturbing statistics about our society. The above image is 60"x90" in it's actual size, and depicts one million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours.

Go to his site and see zoomed-in versions of this and many other pieces to get the full effect! Un-friggin-believable!

Why the mainstream news media are crap

2008-05-28T13:27:00.000-07:00

Public Radio International CEO Alisa Miller gives a 4-minute TED talk with some striking graphics...

EPA's Troubled Waters

2008-05-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

An informative news piece about the contamination of our nation's waterways by pesticides, pharmaceuticals, sewage sludge, and other toxic chemicals, from the American News Project.

Lindbergh presentation transcript online

2008-05-27T09:25:00.000-07:00

A transcript with slides of my presentation to the Lindbergh Foundation Board of Directors is now online and available for download at www.aqsolutions.org, Resources page.

Agrichar...a potential "win-win-win"?

2008-05-26T07:49:00.000-07:00

Agrichar is the scientific buzzword given to a charcoal material made from the pyrolysis (heating in the absence of oxygen) of agricultural waste materials. According to this recent article from thruthout.org, the potential benefits of this material include:

* Sequester carbon captured by plants from the atmosphere into charcoal which can be buried in soil. Agrichar is recalcitrant, so this would be sinking carbon from the atmosphere into soils for decades to centuries (?) and thereby reducing CO2 forcing on climate change.

* Increase soil fertility and generally improving soil quality (drainage, aeration, nutrient availability, microorganism habitat, etc.), promoting healthier and more diverse agro-ecosystems and improving crop yields.

* Exert a positive influence over nitrogen biogeochemistry in soils, potentially leading to a reduction in the production of nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas approximately 300 times stronger than CO2.

* Provide a benign source of biofuel energy, as well as other potentially useful by-products (e.g. wood vinegar)

* Drive innovation in small scale (household- to village- scale) efficient kiln designs, for making agrichar/charcoal in a manner that's decentralized and with reduced impacts on air quality, human health, etc.

* Encourage the widespread production of charcoal materials of sufficient quality and very low cost for application in drinking water filtration systems.

This could be huge! I gotta learn more about this agrichar stuff...

More in this Nature article, for example...

And a short film from the Australian Broadcasting Company...

A post and great ensuing discussion on Grist.

The myth of clean coal

2008-05-24T09:03:00.000-07:00

Alan Watts animations

2008-05-20T19:29:00.000-07:00

Super-groovy cartoons depicting bits of Alan Watts' philosophical expositions....here. Sound files also available.

What's wrong with the food we eat

2008-05-20T14:07:00.000-07:00

Aqueous featured on Sustainable Design Update blog

2008-05-20T08:40:00.000-07:00

Aqueous recently got write-up / shout-out on the Sustainable Design Update blog...a la John Barrie, director of the Appropriate Technology Collaborative.

Kickin it at the Ritz

2008-05-16T13:09:00.000-07:00

So, way back in March, I lived for almost a month on my bicycle. Panniers on the front and back full of 60 pounds of food and camping equipment and bike repair sundries, I toured the Gila Wilderness of southwestern New Mexico. (Photos here, in case you don't remember.)

At the end of March I got the sad news that my granpa had died. So I hauled ass home to WV for the funeral and to spend time with the fam. One thing that came out of the trip home was that I inherited my grandpa's truck, which otherwise would just fall into complete disuse. I had no wheels, and the truck has a camper top, so I thought, "Perfect! I could live in that!"

That idea got the expected response from friends and family, accustomed to, as it were, conventional house living. But from the perspective of a dude who just lived a whole month out of a pair of bicycle panniers (I didn't even have a tent - just a tarp, ground pad and sleeping bag), moving into a pickup truck was like moving into the Ritz Carlton.

So I loaded up the '85 powder blue Chevy S-10 decorated with rust spots and primer artwork all up and down the sides and rolled into Raleigh, NC for my summer gig as a "Visiting Research Scientist" at NC State U with the intention of pulling up somewhere in a State Park or off-the-beaten-track stand of pine trees, firing up the Coleman stove, and makin myself a nice little life, livin in the back of the truck and bicycle commuting all over the Research Triangle area.

I dialed up my college buddy Eric on my way into town to let him know I'd be in the area for a few months, and that we oughta hang out, go running, relive the glory days of College, etc.

Of course Eric, being Eric, said, "You're livin in Raleigh? In a truck? Screw that, you can live at my house!"

So I moved into Eric's place, which is a super nice townhouse out by the airport. I got my own room, even my own bathroom. He's got a great kitchen, a deck, even an exercise room. When I moved in, I had to say to myself, "Man, after livin in a pickup truck, this is like moving into the Ritz Carlton!"

And then just today, courtesy of the bash thrown by the foundation that's giving me a grant for the water filtration project work, I grabbed a few necessary items out of my room at Eric's house, chucked them into the back of the powder blue '85 Chevy S-10 with the rust spots, primer artwork and camper top, and trundled down I-85 South to the very upscale Buckhead district of Atlanta, and moved into the Ritz Carlton.

Don't that just beat all?

Another anecdote that confirms my theory that the Universe is a fundamentally groovy place.

The '85 powder blue Chevy S-10 keeping the luxury cars company in the lot outside the Ritz.

Upcoming water filtration gig in Apex, NC

2008-05-12T13:17:00.000-07:00

Planning to be in central North Carolina end of this month?

Saturday May 31 - Town of Apex, North Carolina Conservation Days
Information and workshops on sustainable energy, local food systems and organic gardening, and conserving land and water resources. I'll make a presentation on Aqueous Solutions' research and projects, and demonstrate how to make a five-gallon bucket filter for potable rooftop harvested rainwater.

More information at: www.apexnc.org

Tao wisdom 'n shit for my peeps

2008-05-11T08:55:00.000-07:00

This is so cool - a very vernacular interpretation of the Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu...available in pdf form here.

Author Ron Hogan's aim was to provide a common-sense version of the Tao without the high-minded-ancient-Chinese-sage pretension displayed in many translations.

As a teaser, here's the first stanza from verse 20:

Don't spend too much time
thinking about stupid shit.
Why should you care
if people agree or disagree with you?
Why should you care
if others find you attractive or not?
Why should you care
about things that worry others?
Call bullshit on all that.

Ha! I love it.

People's Grocery

2008-05-09T07:36:00.000-07:00

Very nice short video on a local food / food justice program in Oakland...

See also the Global Oneness Project.

Monsanto = super uncool

2008-05-09T04:27:00.000-07:00

Great article from a recent Vanity Fair on why Monsanto is evil.

Top 8 reasons why Monsanto sucks...

* Their hired goons are jerks to farmers

* Patenting life forms

* Makers of Roundup and Roundup Ready GMOs (active ingredient in Roundup: glyphosate, which causes kidney problems and reproductive difficulties)

* Monopoly in the seed biz; prevents farmers from saving seed

* Sues farmers whose fields get polluted with Monsanto's seeds/genes, and wins

* Legacy of toxic chemical pollutants: PCBs, dioxin, Agent Orange; these chemicals and their by-products have poisoned the air, soil, streams, rivers and people of WV (from the plant in Nitro, WV)

* Pushes the use of its artificial growth hormone for cows - rBGH, or rBST - even though it's very bad for the cows and potentially harmful to people who drink the milk. Among other disorders, rBST can cause mastitis in cows, an udder infection in which bacteria and pus may be pumped out with the milk. If dairies that do not treat their cows with rBST label their products "rBST free" or something like that, Monsanto sues them. Because of Monsanto, now labels that say "rBST" free have to also include a disclaimer that "no evidence has been shown of harm from this artificial hormone." But there are few scientific studies of this possible harm, and most of them have been performed by Monsanto.

* revolving door between Monsanto execs and US gov't, including FDA and EPA

The Gospel of Consumption

2008-05-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

Very well done article from the May/June 2008 issue of Orion Magazine on how we, as a society, have come to work more and more, and consume more and more, and yet are less happy and healthy for it.

Alan Watts droppin science

2008-05-04T08:35:00.000-07:00

Alan Watts rules. Check out this short monologue...

A couple of minutes in, he says, "the difficulty is, to borrow an old ancient Chinese saying, 'When the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.' In other words, something is wrong with the way we think. And while that is there, everything we do will be a mess..."

Similarly, Chapter 29 of the Tao Te Ching:

Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?
I do not believe it can be done.

The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it.
If you try to hold it, you will lose it.

So sometimes things are ahead and sometimes they are behind;
Sometimes breathing is hard, sometimes it comes easily;
Sometimes there is strength and sometimes weakness;
Sometimes one is up and sometimes down.

Therefore the sage avoids extremes, excesses, and complacency.

If we do not first transform our minds, transform the way we think about ourselves, the world, God, the Universe, everything, we'll just continue to muck up everything we put our hands to. You see ecological breakdown, you see unhappy people, you see failing political and economic systems: this is what I mean.

Likewise, in the words of Sri Ramana Maharshi: Wanting to reform the world without discovering one's true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.

Jesus said something similar:

First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

The outward journey and the inward journey are the same journey.

More philosophical Alan Watts goodies on podcast.

Ashevillage blog totally happenin

2008-05-04T08:31:00.000-07:00

Check out the Ashevillage Institute blog...very groovy.

Ashevillage is a sustainability and self-reliant living education center in Asheville, NC. The people there are super cool - you should go visit, maybe take one of their workshops.

See also

http://www.ashevillage.org/

and

http://kleiwerks.org/

Word up.

Interactive Travel Magazine

2008-05-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

Attention travelers, current and prospective: Matador has recently launched a huge interactive travel website.

There's all kind of cool stuff up there - check it out.

DIY Bucket Filter

2008-04-30T05:09:00.000-07:00

Plans to build your own water filter out of a five-gallon bucket are now available from the Aqueous Solutions website, Resources page.

These small units are great if you want to drink harvested rainwater but are concerned about contamination from air pollution or roofing materials such as asphalt shingles.

We've made it real easy for ya: you can print out the paper and take it to the hardware store. All the parts and tools you need are listed along with photographs and approximate costs. You should be able to get everything from the hardware store except perhaps the charcoal - there you might need to go to an aquarium supply shop, or order filter carbon in bulk over the internet.

This design should cost less than $90 to build, and will provide sufficient drinking water to a household of 5 people for up to 6 months (or about 500 gallons).

For more information on rainwater harvesting, see Brad Lancaster's site.

Photo courtesy Valli Smith.

The Future

2008-04-24T19:29:00.000-07:00

These ten succinct specifications by J. H. Kunstler say it all.

Bu-ya!

A Ninja for All Things Water

2008-04-24T19:24:00.000-07:00

Cannot more strongly recommend to check out Brad Lancaster - resident of Tucson, AZ and certified water resources ninja. His work defines the genre of rainwater harvesting and maximum eco-usage of greywater for irrigation etc.

His site: http://www.harvestingrainwater.com

He is cool. Buy his book!

A Reflection on the Tao

2008-04-17T05:01:00.000-07:00

From the Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu

(Chapter 22, translation by Stephen Mitchell)

If you want to become whole,
let yourself be partial.
If you want to become straight,
let yourself be crooked.
If you want to become full,
let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn,
let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything,
give everything up.

The Master, residing in the Tao
sets an example for all beings.
Because he doesn't display himself,
people can see his light.
Because he has nothing to prove,
people can trust his words.
Because he doesn't know who he is,
people recognize themselves in him.
Because he has no goal in mind,
everything he does succeeds.

When the ancient Masters said,
"If you want to be given everything,
give everything up,"
they weren't using empty phrases.
Only in being lived by the Tao
can you be truly yourself.

***

I have heard stuff like this before this before, from another source:

Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.

Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic.

For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?"

That's Jesus. What he's referring to is non-attachment - in this case practicing non-attachment even when it comes to your own life. Zen philosopher Alan Watts had this to say on the topic...

Nirvana is the goal of Buddhism...the word means 'blow out,' [or] 'breathe out,' because if you try to hold your breath, and in Indian thought, breath -prana- is the life principle - if you try to hold on to life, you lose it. You can't hold your breath and stay alive; it becomes extremely uncomfortable to hold onto your breath.

And so in exactly the same way, it becomes extremely uncomfortable to spend all your time holding on to your life. What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do. They spend enormous efforts on maintaining a certain standard of living, which is a great deal of trouble. You know, you get a nice house in the suburbs, and the first thing you do is you plant a lawn. You've gotta get out and mow the damn thing all the time, and you buy expensive this-that and soon you're all involved in mortgages, and instead of being able to walk out into the garden and enjoy, you sit at your desk and look at your books, filling out this and that and the other and paying bills and answering letters. What a lot of rot! But you see, that is holding onto life. So, translated into colloquial American, nirvana is 'whew!' 'Cause if you let your breath go, it'll come back. So nirvana is not annihilation, it's not disappearance into a sort of undifferentiated void. Nirvana is the state of being let go. It is a state of consciousness, and a state of--you might call it-- being, here and now in this life.

Good advice for living!

The poverty of growth

2008-04-15T18:10:00.000-07:00

Nice short talk by Bill McKibben on why economic growth is a losing proposition...

Bummer of the day (year? century?)

2008-04-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

A study by the Environmental Working Group finds 21 different pesticides in umbilical cord blood, including 14 agrichemicals banned or heavily restricted in the US...bad actors like DDT, chlordane, dieldrin...read the full report.

Yeah, that's a colossal bummer. What can we do? Here's one helpful thing: A Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce.

Health care in the US

2008-04-09T19:24:00.000-07:00

Man, health care in this country has really gone downhill. I went to the doctor the other day, all he did was suck blood from my neck. Don't go see Dr. Acula.

Aqueous Solutions awarded prestigious Lindbergh Foundation grant

2008-04-06T17:51:00.000-07:00

Totally sweet news...this year I'll receive a grant from the Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation to develop charcoal filtration technologies for removal of pesticides and other harmful chemicals from drinking water.

Each year, the Lindbergh Foundation presents grants to individuals "whose research projects will make important contributions toward improving the quality of life by balancing technological advancements and the preservation of our environment."

The award totals $10,580 - a symbolic figure representing the cost of the "Spirit of St. Louis" airplane in which Charles Lindbergh completed the first trans-Atlantic flight, from New York to Paris, in 1927.

I plan to use the award money to advance Aqueous Solutions' laboratory research activities, undertaken in collaboration with scientists and engineers at North Carolina State University, the University of California-Berkeley, and Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand.

The grant will also further the design and testing of a prototype water filtration system under development at Pun Pun Organic Farm in northern Thailand.

Plus, I'll be honored at this year's Lindbergh Award Celebration, to be held in May in Atlanta, GA, where I'll make a presentation on Aqueous Solutions' research and projects to the Foundation's Board of Directors.

How cool is that?

The Gila

2008-03-28T21:25:00.000-07:00

In wildness is the preservation of the world.
- Henry David Thoreau

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.
- Edward Abbey

One of the many dramatic oxbows cut by the action of the mighty Gila over ages.

After the climb from Gila Hot Springs to the overlook at Copperas Peak - 2,500 ft of climbing in only 7 miles! With 60 lbs of camping gear and food lashed to my bike, slogging up this climb during the mid-day peak of the psychadelic New Mexico sun redefined for me the concept of "relentless"!

I spent plenty of time exploring the Gila - looking for, and finding, hot springs, looking for, and not finding, arrowheads, surveying flood damage, identifying plant species here and there, rockhounding, etc.

Moonlit cholla cacti (Opuntia spp.) - living specimens and skeletons of dead chollas.

Cholla fruits.

Red yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora).

Thin-leafed yucca (Yucca glauca); its many uses by the Pueblo Indians of the region include making soap from its root, hence its common name "soapweed."

Any idea what this is? The brilliantly textured and colored bark of Pinus ponderosa, up close and personal.

The claw of a great horned owl. This venerable creature seemed to have died in the air and dropped right out of the sky - cause of death unknown.

A view from above the Sapillo Creek Canyon. Notice the dramatic variation in vegetation on the south facing (right) versus north facing (left) hill slopes.

I felt a deep reverence and awe among the grave sycamores, denuded by winter, that lined the floor of lower Sapillo Creek Canyon.

Cycling to the Florida Mountains, southeast of Deming, NM; road's eye view.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved--as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds--because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there--important, that is, simply as an idea.
- Wallace Stegner, 1960

On retreat

2008-03-14T19:21:00.000-07:00

Taking a much needed break from project work and "civilization" in general...bike camping in New Mexico's Gila Wilderness.

Will be back in action in early April, based in Raleigh, NC.

Aqueous Solutions 2007 Annual Report online

2008-03-05T14:55:00.000-08:00

The 2007 Annual Report is now available for download from the Aqueous Solutions website, Resources page.

Erratum

2008-02-10T19:51:00.000-08:00

It turns out Derek Wall did not visit Basudha in person, but downloaded some of Debal Deb's work from the website of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies.

My misunderstanding, and apologies...

JK

Simple Field Tests for Water Quality

2008-01-27T04:39:00.000-08:00

We’ve been performing some quick and inexpensive tests on the water sources around Pun Pun Farm to assess water quality. Three parameters of concern when designing the water treatment system are turbidity, dissolved iron concentration, and microbial contamination.

Turbidity

Turbidity (cloudiness owing to suspended solids and/or organic matter) in the source water may cause clogging of sand and charcoal filtration units. Turbidity also reduces transmittance of UV light through water and thus markedly reduces the effectiveness of UV disinfection.

There are several ways of quantifying turbidity in water, the most common being some measure of the attenuation (reduction in strength) of light as it passes through a column of water. Electronic turbidity meters are the most precise; however, they are expensive. A turbidity tube is inexpensive and easy to construct, and provides an approximate measurement of turbidity with sufficient accuracy for field water quality assessments.

To measure turbidity, sample water is slowly added to the tube and the depth (in cm) recorded when the target disk at the bottom of the tube becomes invisible.

Dissolved iron

Excess iron in water used for drinking, cooking and washing imparts unappealing color and taste, and reduces the effectiveness of UV disinfection by impairing transmittance of UV light through water. If the amount of iron in a water supply is above the US EPA and World Health Organization guideline of 0.3 mg/l (0.3 ppm), the water can cause staining of laundry or discoloration of faucets and basins. However, even high concentrations of iron are not considered a health problem.

The water treatment system at Pun Pun Farm will incorporate a slow sand filter to precipitate excess iron from solution.

Microbial contaminants

We’re using the simple hydrogen sulfide (H2S) test to detect the presence of fecal coliforms in water samples from around the farm. Hydrogen sulfide-producing microorganisms are often associated with fecal coliforms, and thus indicate that a water source may be contaminated with human or animal feces.

The test is inexpensive and simple to administer – a microbial growth medium and iron source are added to the water sample and the sample is incubated at around 30 Celsius for 24 – 48 hours. If the hydrogen sulfide-producing indicator organisms are present, then the H2S they produce will combine with iron to form iron sulfide, an insoluble black precipitate. If no H2S-producing microbes are present the sample will remain clear yellow over the 48-hour incubation period.

This test does not detect fecal coliforms directly but responds simply to the presence of H2S. There are a variety of biological and geochemical processes that may result in the presence of H2S to the sample, giving false positive results for the test. Also, the test does not distinguish between fecal coliforms originating from the digestive tracts of animals versus humans. However, given the broad scope of the test and its sensitivity, a negative test result lends strong confidence that the water source in question is free of fecal contamination.

The water treatment system at Pun Pun Farm will use a combination of a slow sand filter and disinfection by germicidal ultraviolet light to neutralize the threat of biological contamination of the community’s drinking water.

You can find more detail about these methods for DIY water quality testing on the Aqueous Solutions website, where our technical paper Simple Field Tests for Water Quality is available for download from the Resources page.

Derek Wall visits Basudha

2008-01-27T03:50:00.000-08:00

Please see Erratum above...

Derek Wall is the Principal Male Speaker of the Green Party of England and Wales, and recently visited my friend Debal Deb at his agricultural biodiversity research and conservation center (called Basudha, Bengali for Earth-Mother) in West Bengal, India.

Apparently Debal was as inspirational for Derek as he has been for me. Derek blogged an account of his visit to Basudha and quoted at length from my article that appeared on this blog last fall.

Read Derek's post about Debal and Basudha on his blog Another Green World.

And the post from this blog about my visit with Debal: Agricultural biodiversity conservation in West Bengal.

Aquaduct wins first prize in "Innovate Or Die" contest

2008-01-24T03:07:00.000-08:00

Someone has managed to combine two of my biggest interests: biking and water purification.

The Aquaduct is pedal powered vehicle that transports, filters, and stores water for the developing world. A peristaltic pump attached to the pedal crank draws water from a large tank, through a filter, to a smaller clean tank. The clean tank is removable and closed for contamination-free home storage and use. A clutch engages and disengages the drive belt from the pedal crank, enabling the rider to filter the water while traveling or while stationary.

The Aquaduct is the winning entry in the Innovate or Die contest put on by Google and Specialized. The contest challenge was to build a pedal powered machine that has environmental impact. See the website www.innovate-or-die.com for more details.

The only way I can see to improve upon this would be to add a fermentation tank so that the water can be made into beer.

How to cut bottles for building decoration

2008-01-14T02:29:00.000-08:00

First, fill the bottle you want to cut with water to the depth at which you want the cut. (Note: clean water works too!)

Next, attach a wire with a bit of cloth or wick material around it at the water level.

Soak the cloth with kerosene.

Burn the cloth...

When the fire goes out, the glass should have cracked owing to the temperature difference across the glass from inside to outside.

With practice you can reliably get clean cuts right where you want them.
Photos courtesy Tai Power Seeff (taipowerseeff.com).

Nature rulez

2008-01-13T00:33:00.000-08:00

Photos courtesy Tai Power Seeff. See more of Tai's incredible photography at taipowerseeff.com

Pun Pun kids having fun in the mud

2008-01-13T00:10:00.000-08:00

Photos courtesy Tai Power Seeff. See more of Tai's incredible photography at taipowerseeff.com

Pesticide News

2007-12-22T21:23:00.000-08:00

The newest editions of two of AqueousSolutions' papers are available for download from the Aqueous website, on the Resources page: Pesticide Use in Thailand and the US: Ecological and Human Health Effects, and Agrichemicals of Concern in Northern Thailand.

These docs are jam packed full of all kinds of factoids, tid-bits and statistics you don't wanna know about the insane degree to which we're poisoning ourselves and our environments with toxic agri-chemicals.

Some highlights from the reports:

At latest count, out of the 58 pesticide products we've identified as commonly used in Thailand and in our region here in the north around Pun Pun Farm in particular...

32 are moderately to highly acutely toxic to humans
14 are possible human carcinogens, and 9 are known human carcinogens
15 are cholinesterase inhibitors (indicating neurotoxicity)
19 are suspected endocrine disruptors
8 are reproductive or developmental toxins
30 are classified as "Bad Actors" by the Pesticide Action Network
and 19 represent known or potential threats to groundwater contamination.

Our big emphasis at AqueousSolutions is to develop drinking water purification systems that are DIY (Do-It-Yourself) and affordable to most people in the world. Well check this out:

A 1988 report estimated that nearly one-half of the ground water and well water in the United States is or has the potential to be contaminated by pesticides. A 1992 report calculated that if monitoring and cleanup activities were carried out in the US such that all pesticide-contaminated groundwater were cleared of pesticides before human consumption, the total cost would be approximately $1.8 billion annually.

I'll have to run some number and do some back-of-the-envelope calculations before I can say this definitively, but the chances are very good that our designs for cheap, DIY water filtration systems could provide safe water for folks in the US for way, way, way less than $1.8 billion a year.

www.aqsolutions.org

Ecological Monkprints

2007-12-18T00:52:00.000-08:00

Recently I gave a talk to a class of monks taught by my friend Joanne at Muhachulalongkorn University, Chiang Mai campus called:

"The Footprint of a Monk: Sustainability and living the good life in Thailand and around the world"

It was a blast! The monks were super into it.

Now all the monks are stoked to come out to Pun Pun and learn adobe building and organic gardening.

As part of the talk we watched this short film, The Story of Stuff. It's really excellent. You should watch it right now!

Bamboo - plant of a jillion uses

2007-12-13T18:59:00.000-08:00

Here's a new one: the bambulance...a bamboo ambulance in Kenya.

Taking issue with micro-lending

2007-12-12T18:53:00.000-08:00

Another of my controversial essays has been published on Brave New Traveler and is stirring up quite a discussion.

It looks at the concept of micro-lending, which has become a kind of fad in development circles in recent years. The basic idea is to give small loans to people in the "developing" world to encourage them as entrepreneurs.

It sounds nice, and like I say it's a popular thing to talk about today. But the evidence is not so clear about the benefits of micro-lending. Globalization critic Helena Norberg-Hodge of the International Society for Ecology and Culture, for instance, has remarked that on the whole, micro-loans have not been effective for alleviating poverty; rather they have encouraged more migration from the country to the cities (which is to say the slums).

Have a look at my essay, which the BNT editors have entitled Hand-up or Handout? The Case Against Micro-loans and register your comments in the burgeoning discussion.

Bamboo Olympics

2007-12-09T21:22:00.000-08:00

Pi Jo scored a humongous load of free bamboo the other day. We had a helluva good time unloading the truck and throwing the poles into the pond. (Soaking in water preserves the bamboo.)

We had a contest to see who could launch the huge poles the furthest. It was the Thai version of the Scottish Highlanders' caber-toss. Of course Pi Jeni won, since he's got Lahu Hill Tribe Power! The regular Thais just can't hang with the hill tribers, let alone a skinny West-By-God-Virginia HillBilly like me.

Anyway, once the poles were all in the water the real fun began sorting out the pile so that the poles could all be at least partially submerged. Thanks to Pun Pun Intern Tai Power Seef for photographing our antics...

Pi Krit displaying some bamboo balancing skills.

Michel mastered the float.

The kids watch the fun.

See more of Tai's amazing photography at her website.

Give the gift of safe drinking water this holiday season

2007-12-09T21:08:00.000-08:00

Our drinking water supplies are under threat.

The heavy application of chemical pesticides now practiced in agricultural zones around the globe has caused serious damage to ecosystems and constitutes a grave threat to human health. Exposure to pesticides can cause diseases of the endocrine and reproductive systems, neurological disorders, and cancer, among a panoply of other poisonous effects.

Nowhere is the threat to human health posed by pesticides more pronounced than in 'developing' countries such as Thailand and India, where lax or non-existent regulations permit the intensive application of many chemicals deemed too hazardous to human health and the environment for use in the West. In Thailand, for example, poisonous agrichemical runoff has contaminated over 86% of surface waters – waters that serve as the main source of drinking water for most of the rural population.

At AqueousSolutions, we're developing rugged, elegantly simple, low-cost water filtration systems that can be constructed using locally abundant materials by just about anyone, just about anywhere in the world to reduce the threat of exposure to hazardous agrichemicals in drinking water.

Currently we're working with several communities throughout Asia to deploy and monitor a number of prototype drinking water filtration systems, while our research team is performing laboratory experiments to test the effectiveness of different system designs. Our aim is to make freely available the experimental datasets, design specifications and other technical how-to information that will aid people worldwide in designing and building their own water filtration systems.

At AqueousSolutions, we strongly believe in putting the power to ensure drinking water safety into the hands of households and communities, in effort to promote a significant measure of local self-reliance in meeting this most crucial human need.

Aqueous is run by a committed all-volunteer staff, and is currently funded 100% out of our own pockets. Therefore, any donations we receive translate directly into significant advances in our projects.

This holiday season, as an alternative to the usual frenzy of shopping and consumerism, please consider supporting our work to help communities throughout the world ensure the safety of their drinking water by making a tax-deductible donation.

Your contribution makes a huge difference:

• A donation of $25 can purchase parts, tools and other equipment for constructing treatment systems.

• A donation of $50 provides for one germicidal ultraviolet lamp unit, a critical part of the water purification system that neutralizes biological contaminants such as waterborne bacteria.

• A donation of $100 provides for the installation of one full treatment system, including a charcoal filtration unit for removing pesticides and one germicidal ultraviolet UV unit for biological decontamination. One such system can provide safe drinking water to a community of up to 30 people.

• A donation of $250 provides immense support for offsetting the thttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifravel and research expenses incurred by our all-volunteer staff. For example, one round-trip airfare from the US to Thailand costs over US$1,000. Currently, all of Aqueous' research and field work is funded 100% out-of-pocket.

Feel free visit our website - www.aqsolutions.org - to learn more about our research and projects.

Please send your tax-deductible donation by check made out to:

"ISEC/AqueousSolutions" (N.B. "ISEC" stands for the International Society for Ecology and Culture, Aqueous' parent 501-C3 organization and fiscal sponsor.)

to

ISEC USA
PO Box 9475
Berkeley
CA 94709 USA

You may also donate by PayPal through our website, though currently we are unable to offer tax-deductible status to donations received this way.

Thank you for your support!

– the AqueousSolutions team