Agrarian Ideas for a Developing World

Drought-tolerant genetically-modified corn

2012-01-26T11:10:00.001-08:00

This is an article about the first genetically modified commercial seed incorporating a "complex" trait, i.e. one controlled by multiple genes. It is Monsanto's long-awaited drought-resistant corn, which if it were effective would give some justification to the two decades and billions of dollars in public and private research spent on genetic engineering (often at the expense of conventional breeding research. This is because until now the only GM traits marketed in crops have been Bt internal insecticide, and resistance to glyphosate herbicides. Neither of these increased yields, but rather changed the amount and types of chemicals used in large-scale industrial agriculture (something that certainly has its merit, especially in the case of Bt genes that have knocked some of our most nasty, toxic pesticides out of common use). But the major GM researchers and especially private companies have always touted the future possibility of traits like drought or salt tolerance that could actually increase total world food supply, and help small farmers.

Anyway, this article argues that the new Monsanto variety actually doesn't perform any better than existing conventionally-bred varieties under drought conditions. The most interesting quote of the article pertains to the reasonable expectations for major breakthroughs via genetic engineering:

"Plants have been evolving for millions of years. I doubt that [GMO] plant breeders will be able to hit upon anything for nutrient utilization that nature already hasn't tried."

A sage voice speaking out against the hubris of quick-fix tech fetishism.

Interesting coffee project

2012-01-26T09:06:00.000-08:00

Here's a video of a USAID project that works with Colombian farmers who've returned to their land after being displaced. The project helped them to get into the high-value specialty coffees production chain, as well as providing psychosocial assessments and accompaniment for the affected communities.

Summary of Colombia's drug war

2012-01-24T14:02:00.000-08:00

This is a well-done, in-depth article tracing the course of Colombia's drug war over the 2000s. It is overly credulous of Uribe, doesn't mention the numerous human rights violations he's been indirectly linked to, and even mistakenly claims that his phone was illegally wire-tapped by the DAS security agency. The article is also overly equivocal when it compares the FARC's atrocities (modus operandi taxing narcotics and kidnapping the wealthy and police) to those of the paramilitaries (modus operandi trafficking narcotics and massacring entire villages). It also doesn't entirely follow up on its title; I'd have liked a more detailed discussion of how cracking down on the Colombian theater of the drug trade led in large part to the explosion of trafficking and violence in Mesoamerica, just as cracking down in Peru and Bolivia in the 80s and 90s led to Colombia's rise to prominence. But at any rate, it's a good primer on many aspects of the Colombian conflict.

Oscars made in a Chicago factory

2012-01-23T14:53:00.000-08:00

This is an article about how the Oscars are produced in a factory in Chicago, apparently the last remaining manufacturer of trophies in the US. It makes me proud to see high-quality industrial products coming from my city. Here's a video of the production process.

Temporary resolution to the education struggle

2012-01-22T14:58:00.000-08:00

For the past few months I've been meaning to write more about the student movement in Colombia. Late last year I wrote blogs about the proposed law to reform higher education in Colombia, and the student movement against that reform. I let the topic drop not because there were no new developments, but simply because I didn't have time to write about them.

Basically students around the country agreed to calling an academic recess, and finishing the semester later, in January. I don't know if it was a victory or a defeat, or not much of either. Especially sad was to see the student movement, which had been so united, rent into factions of official national student leaders who wanted to reconcile with the government given the fulfillment of certain demands, and other, regional groups that said they weren't satisfied with government concessions.

The campus of the university I work at had been closed for most of October, with kids camped out on the grounds. On October 31st they left, which was kind of sad, like the end of an era. That night they held a silent, peaceful march to the center of town, and then they played with trick or treaters in the main plaza. I thought this was a cool idea on their part. In general I sensed a gradual transition on the part of the student movement, from self-righteous demonstrating and even destruction, to constructive demands, conversations, programs. Perhaps the latter were always present, but the movement became better about communicating them to the public at large.

This article claimed that the whole thing was much ado about nothing, since the government had already removed the most contentious aspects of the law regarding the creation of for-profit universities. But this other article parses the privatizing spirit of the rest of the law, even without the most contentious parts of it.

In the end the government withdrew the controversial proposal to reform Ley 30, and by now students are back in classes after a long vacation. In the end I think things turned out well, and I hope students and others (me, perhaps?) will continue working towards a better, more inclusive education system. Nevertheless, whenever I see videos like this one, which is actually a pretty good summary of the students' demands, it raise my hackles. Essentially, I agree with the progressive goals of the movement, but I can't agree with their methods. I have two major problems with the student movement as it has played out in Colombia over the past year or so:

It's a movement of force. In order to fight a measure that they saw as unjust, students resorted to force in order to achieve their goals. They shut down public (read funded by the people) universities and created havoc in order to be heard. Their basic demands of allocating more funding to public universities and not allowing the market to intervene in public education seem sound to me, but they do not necessarily represent the desire of a majority of Colombians (maybe they do, maybe they don't--the students never asked anyone about it). Hence despite their claims of bringing true democracy through the streets, what the students participated in was mobocracy or yellocracy, in which not the majority but those who make the most scandal decide how the society will be. We've seen the awful effects on the US political system of granting influence to those who yell the loudest as opposed to the legitimate popular will.

Aside from this conceptual qualm of mine, the fact is that students used violence (in the form of explosives) and vandalism during their movement. Even today large swaths of Bogota retain the graffiti and broken windows that the protestors caused. Perhaps not everyone involved in the movement took part in the violence, but if the students wish to be heard as one solid block, they also have to accept responsibility for the actions of all elements forming part of the movement.

This is another point of cowardice in the movement--they insist (tacitly or explicitly) on their right to use force, but if the police use force against the students they cry injustice, or if concrete complaints are directed at student vandalism (breaking church windows, breaking windows of university buildings), they deny responsibility or claim it was the police trying to frame them. It is curious that the student movement leaders occasionally hark back to the Union Patriotica political party as an example of the type of political movement they want to become.

The UP was a party formed by the FARC guerrilla movement, whose members were subsequently executed by death squads. There's no doubt that this paramilitary elimination of a political party was a crime against humanity. But let's look at this objectively--the UP was essentially a strategy for the FARC to continue its illegal insurgent activity while also having a legitimate political branch to pursue its agenda. I don't see much difference between UP politicians, who supported and agreed with the FARC armed group and its violence, and the despicable members of the Colombian Congress who maintained ties with illegal paramilitary groups to help them pursue their agenda outside the halls of parliament. This cowardly strategy of advocating violence but then demanding treatment as good faith citizens is something I see hints of in the student movement.

In the end, I know that force is a part of political reality, perhaps especially in Colombia. I know too that if someone makes you do something (for example if students block off universities so classes can't be held), there's not much you can do about it. I accept the use of de facto force insofar as I've no other option. But it's not the way a society should work. And it's especially sad that these young students, who should be the most critical, the most apt to find a way out of Colombia's violent status quo, are just continuing the culture of imposition by force.

My second problem with the student movement, and perhaps less grave than its use of and advocacy of force, is an attitude of self-centered arrogance I sense in the students' way of doing things. The student leaders are basically part of a brotherhood of elites who talk a lot. In a country as rural as Colombia, it's a glaring omission that the student movement never mentioned the peasantry (except as a rhetorical trope to validate their leftist orthodoxy). These students are not aspiring to be farmers or to improve the lives of our poor masses. Their aspiration is that they and their peers can insert themselves into Colombia's circle of overeducated pedants that criticize the state while drawing their salary from it. I see the same yuppy kids from Bogota leading everything on the national level, though in our small town the students and the student movement are decidedly proletarian. Once again, if the student movement shows the same classist, Bogota-centric biases of the rest of society, why should I think it's going to create anything other than the next generation of leftist politicians-turned-elite-clintelists?

A good example of what I'm worried about is Gustavo Petro. This is a guy who just won the Bogota mayor's office, after dividing and discrediting his party (the Polo, the only real leftist party in Colombia) and creating his own personality-cult party. He still talks progressive, but his only real consistent value is the pursuit of his own self-glorification. I see the spark of Petro in some of these student leaders, and it worries me.

The movement calls for a complete overturn of our current society, and even a new constitution. The present constitution in Colombian was drafted in 1991 by a broad coalition of many sectors of society, including ex-guerrillas and the Communist party (and Gustavo Petro, in his more coherent days). But now the student movement is claiming that the constitution is one more rotten tool of neoliberalism. I don't know enough about the current constitution to appraise these claims, but even if the present constitution has flaws, what's to say that a new constitution would be any better? I wouldn't want to entrust my society to a bunch of 20-year-olds that, if past generations are any indication, will eventually tire of the "game" of radical social movements and just become more bourgeois, self-centered jerks.

It's perhaps natural for young people to think they have all the answers, but it's important for the rest of us to avoid such hubris. It seems that there will always be flaws in the solutions we arrive for societal problems, but it's folly to think that because of these flaws we should start from scratch. Likewise, it's never a good idea to entrust your society to a group of self-annointed (or even collectively-annointed) saviors. We've seen time and again in history that the most progressive goals can become distorted and wasted when we entrust them to one or a few fallible people, instead of a robust system of dialogue and popular decision.

Notwithstanding my aversion to charismatic political leaders, I think it will be good if the student movement begins to field candidates and undertake actions within the bounds of the existing political system, in addition to their popular protests. This is an interview with a Chilean student leader who talks about the next step being to gain power in the city councils, and perhaps eventually in national government. If student leaders become involved with elective politics, where they have to show a certain level of success (while adhering to certain rules) in order to keep on advancing with their agenda, then perhaps they will become more concrete and less violent in the actions they propose. I know it's one more example of radical movements being absorbed and coopted by the system, but I guess I'd prefer an accountable mortal working within a set of agreed-upon rules, rather than a radical demi-god spouting fire and discourse and answering to no one but his own ego.

Adventures in Peru 1: Lima from above

2012-01-17T17:38:00.000-08:00

From on high Lima doesn't look promising. Out the plane window you see miles and miles of barren grey-brown sandy mountains. They are unlike anything I've ever seen before. When we speak of deserts in the United States, we think of the Sonora with its abundant cactuses and other plant life brilliantly adapted to the sporadic but heavy rains that characterize the ecosystem, or we think of scrubby Texan brushland. Even those badlands that are truly bereft of plant life in the US often have impressive, colorful rock formations or eroded buttes or something.

But the Peruvian coastal desert has nothing. Absolutely no vegetation, because most years there is literally no rain whatsoever. I'd compare it to the rolling sand dunes of the Sahara, or the Namibian desert which, as in Peru, extends right to the seashore, but those aren't fair comparisons, because the Peruvian desert consists in real mountains. They are sandy and barren, but they are actual geological formations, and not just dunes. But they don't look like desert mountains either, those jagged creatures whose lack of vegetation cover means that the rare rainstorms that do arrive totally erode the soil away. In Peru, the absolute lack of rainfall makes the mountains into rounded, smooth lumps, as if they were mere sand dunes.

Eventually from my plane window I spot human settlements. The coastal highway is an orderly black snake surrounded by indifferent, amorphous desert, but it fares much better than the occasional groups of houses arranged hopefully into a fishbone scheme of one main street and a few side streets, all of which are merely wide lanes of unruly sand that does not stay within its assigned place in the grid pattern.

These ill-advised, isolated settlements are soon complemented by crescents of seaside highrises tiling the walls of the rocky bays. I'm sure their owners feel very elegant with their ocean views, but from above it's clear that the desert isn't planning on ceding them this space for the long term.

Now the constructed space becomes thicker, wider. There's still no vegetation, but one begins to see industrial storage tanks, ship container yards, parking lots for massive transport fleets. The city pours forth, as if bubbling up from some hidden underground source of life and abundance.

But what source of life could there possibly be here? There is absolutely no water, no plants save a few feeble, overly-optimistic attempts at irrigated lawns and crop fields. I've heard that coastal morning fog waters some plant ecosystems on the mountains, but up to now the only hints of that I've seen are dark grey mantles covering some of the mountains--perhaps dead vegetation. I don't even see the harbor that must provide the miles and miles of stacked containers I see on the land below. I have never been a fan of dry climates, and my time in Colombia has even further predisposed me to verdant, cool, wet landscapes. Here in Lima there are mountains as in Colombia, but you can't even see them because they're blocked by dust and smog. How could anybody live here, much less a city of eight million people?

The fleet of fishing boats now below the plane begins to answer my question. The Peruvian coast is the site of an upswell of cold ocean water, which feeds lots of phytoplankton at the surface, which in turn feeds anchovies, the larger fish that eat anchovies, and birds that deposit guano on the shore's rocks. Later I will find out that Lima, like the other inhabited areas of the Peruvian coast, is located where a mountain river (the Rimac, in this case) tumbles down to the ocean. For more than five thousand years, people have exploited these rivers in complex irrigation schemes that made verdant cultivated landscapes (with patches of natural floodplain forest and wetlands, too) in the middle of the desert. Lima has totally absorbed the green fields that originally attracted the Spanish (and the Wari before them, and the Lima before them) to the site, but the water that once fed fields of crops now serves the urban population's needs, and the pre-Hispanic irrigation canals still flow as "rivers" through the city's heart.

So this is my first lesson on Lima. Despite the drab, sad grey-brown aspect of the mountains around it, and indeed of most of the brick-and-concrete buildings and the sandy unpaved streets you see from the airplane, Lima's location was perfect for its first settlers. In one place they had big and small fish, natural fertilizer, and irrigated fields. Even today Peruvians of all social strata seem to consume much more fish than anyone I've seen. A plate of ceviche is tiny and expensive anywhere else in the world, but in Peru it's a generously-portioned staple at even the most basic roadside stands.

This abundance underlying an apparent barren wasteland is my first surprise in Peru, like the brightly-painted house facades that start to peek out from the drab brown landscape when your plane gets close to landing, or Lima's mild climate bathed by cool ocean breezes when you expected a hot, arid, dusty exit from the airport. After my first full day in Lima I still won't have a clear handle on what the city is all about, but the joy is in the discovery, as the city wends you back and forth between new observations and unsteady interpretations.

Agrarian prosperity in Haiti

2012-01-09T10:46:00.000-08:00

Here is a New York Times article that challenges the narrative of Haiti's having always been an economic basketcase. The authors point to the 19th century in Haiti as a time of relative prosperity arising from the system of small, intensive subsistence farms that replaced the prior slave plantation system, and they claim that Haiti should model its future development along support to smallholder farmers. I agree with this prognosis, and it's refreshing to see validated my observations and interpretations that Haitian smallholdings are actually very productive and ecologically sound.

That said, Haiti's ecological and economic decline is a bit more complex than the NYT article would make it seem. Today Haiti is still largely comprised of smallholders providing food for autoconsumption and local markets, so we can't blame the country's crises on a move away from a subsistence peasant economy or the centralization of political power. A different article I read as part of research for a documentary film gives more nuance to the NYT's blaming of ecological degradation and poverty on 20th-century economic and political trends. This other article, by Bob Corbett, claims that Haiti's 19th-century agrarian system depended in part on each peasant's having access to large amounts of land, and thus being able to move on to virgin forest when population density or land degradation lowered production. If this is true, the 19th-century system of farming in Haiti wasn't sustainable in the long term, though it was an appropriate way to organize life at the time.

This doesn't change the fact that Haiti should keep in mind the ecologically and economically sage aspects of its long agrarian history when looking to prosper and improve life in the future.

Post on Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like

2012-01-05T18:31:00.001-08:00

Here is a little satirical piece I wrote for a really great blog about the quirks of expat aid workers (Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like). I hope you like it.

Greg's Haitian Adventure 8: Back to Panama

2012-01-04T06:51:00.001-08:00

I'm finally posting the last chapter of my Haiti odyssey from this July.

The flight back from Haiti to Panama was really cold. I'd gotten used to Haiti's lowland tropical climate (which really wasn't that unbearably hot while I was there), so the stark air-conditioned plane was hard on my body. I spent the latter part of the flight with my hands tucked in my shirt to keep warm.

Once we arrived in Panama I was thankful for the brief bit of tropical stickiness I felt on the walk down the boarding chute, though this relief was quickly snuffed out when I entered the ACed airport.

After more than a month away from my family, and already a few days of travel under my belt for the return trip, I was not eager to spend another night in a strange bed. I frantically rushed about the Panama airport looking for a last-minute flight to Bogota that I might hop on instead of my scheduled flight the next day. I did indeed find a flight, but it was boarding at that moment and they wouldn't let me change my ticket on such short notice. I resigned myself to another day traveling after my brief glimmer of hope, and found an expensive shared cab outside the airport.

The cab ride was atmospheric if nothing else. I was with an English-speaking couple who talked the entire ride. The guy was fat and somewhat ethnic-looking, with a weird accent. The girl had the nasal, awful, piercing voice of certain Corn Belt suburbanites or small towners--think Roseanne Barr's TV character. In the course of their nonstop conversation that I couldn't help catching every detail of, I discovered that the guy was from Belize (hence the weird accent accompanied by obvious native-speaker comfort with the English language), and it seemed as if he were employed in some shady sector that entailed long trips through Mexico while his girlfriend waited for him in resort towns. She kept pressing to know about what went down on these trips, and he kept telling her that she knew he couldn't tell her about his work. The guy also kept joking about a Jamaican they'd met on the flight, whom he was sure was not really a farmer but rather a narcotrafficker. I mused to myself that the Belizean must think everyone was a shady narco, since he himself was.

This couple really had nothing pertinent to say, and I surmised that they had no interesting thoughts in their heads. They talked exclusively about frivolous shit, and kept referencing the same things over and over, the way you do when you're with someone you don't know but might be interested in sleeping with, and you talk uncomfortably just to fill the dead space between you. But they had been traveling together for at least a few months, if not more, and their conversation never got past the superficial. Nevertheless, it seems that empty-headed people do feel and hurt like the rest of us, because they both expressed jealousy whenever an ex-lover came up in the conversation. I guess even if you don't have profound thoughts or anything to talk about, you can love another person (or at least not like the idea of them screwing someone else).

Another thing that sprang to my mind was an existential question I've often pondered: what makes some people intellectually curious, and others not? More specifically, my wife and I have a few friends that show an interesting combination of curiosity and lack thereof. On the one hand, when they're with us, they are very interested in discussing and learning new things and thinking about how things work. But their lack of general knowledge or cultural capital makes me imagine that they aren't very intellectually curious in their other day-to-day endeavors. How could this be? When I don't know or understand something, I have like this burning need to look into it and obsess over it until I have learned about it. This is the attitude I usually see in the friends I'm thinking of. But then why don't they have an encyclopedic knowledge of the world? Maybe they sometimes turn off their minds. I think TV and iEverythings and the like must have a role in the dampening of our collective curiosity. It's easy to get distracted from the business of living and learning with so many entertainment options beckoning to us at once.

Finally the insipid couple got out of the taxi at a very elegant hotel. More evidence for a narco-related profession; how do two people who have no discernible intellectual merits, don't speak Spanish, and who have spent the past months traveling around Mexico have the money to stay in an upscale Panama City hotel?

I, on the other hand, was not bound for an elegant hotel in Panama City's endless swath of coastal luxury high-rises but rather for a hostel in the city's colonial center. There still remained a lot of posh urban landscape to pass by yet though, and I marveled at the wealth surrounding me. Who lived in these places? Where did the poor live, or even just the normal people? Perhaps much of the luxury property belongs to foreigners or out-of-towners, people who are earning in dollars and not staying much in their Panama apartments. Otherwise it's difficult for me to explain how a small Central American economy that's only come into its own recently can boast a city full of huge skyscrapers with few people walking the streets and few lights on in the windows.

Another cultural trait that sunk in for me was the Panamanian love for salsa music. The radio in the cab was sounding nonstop classic salsa, and there were ads and billboards everywhere for big-name acts in concert. Hell, this is the country where Ruben Blades is a government minister!

Finally I got to the hostel where I'd reserved a bed online a few days prior. It was nothing special--neither the ultra-chic, spiffy-clean look of a newer hostel catering to young people, nor the absolute filth and decadence of a lower grade of hostel. I checked in and went straight to bed in a room shared with maybe eight other beds. It was a bit stuffy and smelly, but it served my purposes.

The next morning I got up pretty early, showered in silence so as not to awake my hung-over hostelmates, and strolled around Panama's Old City. This is not to be confused with the original colonial city a few miles down the coast, which I believe was destroyed by some natural or martial event, and whose ruins are now preserved as a sort of park. Anyway, my hostel was on the edge of the nicer part of the Old City, where well-restored offices and hotels give way to shady, run-down ruins and tenements. In general the Old City struck me for the prevalence of normal people living normal lives there, sending their kids to school, hanging the wash out to dry, etc.

It is a much more authentic and vibrant neighborhood than Cartagena's Old Quarter in Colombia, which is now occupied almost entirely by hotels, restaurants, and foreigners. Unlike Santo Domingo's Old City though, which feels above all like just a working-class area where the buildings happen to be 500 years old, Panama's old part felt on the verge of being gentrified. As I said, regular people continued living their lives in rundown old buildings, but they seemed to me like the last tenacious resistance entrenched in hostile territory, surrounded by both severe decay and nascent gentrification, and surely soon to be pushed out of the neighborhood.

I was especially impressed by Panama City's embrace of elegant decay as a kind of art form.

There are a few churches that have been reduced by earthquakes or neglect to roofless shells bounded by their original brick walls. But instead of either refurbishing them or knocking them down to make way for other construction, they've been turned into small urban parks, with benches, cafes, and cultural events.

There are also more traditional, full-fledged garden parks, like this square.

As I walked around I had dreams of buying and rehabbing one of the houses I saw.

It was two floors, with outside balconies and a zinc roof. The house was on the edge of what I'd consider to be the Old City proper, and faced onto a park with a tumbled section of colonial defensive wall and a lot of winos lying about.

I bet in a few years the neighborhood will be a hot investment spot for wealthy foreigners with money to blow. They're already setting up free Wifi spots:

The city also seems to be trying to renovate the seaside Malecon, which is pretty run-down. I believe residents of the Old City successfully rebuffed plans to build a coastal highway, which would block the view of the ocean, but I think a lot of seaside property has remained in limbo, neither well-maintained nor definitively torn down.

The time finally came to start making my way to the airport. Unlike the prior night, when I didn't feel comfortable navigating an unfamiliar and perhaps dangerous city, today I was to take a public bus out to my destination. The ride would cost me 25 cents US (un cuarter, as they say in Panama) as opposed to $20!

I picked up my bag at the hostel and set off on foot. From the Old City I passed through neighborhoods built in maybe the 1920s, with lots of rundown houses and small businesses like barbershops. It's how I imagine the non-colonial parts of Havana. The hand-painted signs were a far cry from the glitzy highrises I'd seen the night before. I guess this is where normal people live in Panama City. You can also see the Afro-Carribean Santeria influence in this area.

And "normal people" in Panama seem to be pretty varied. I saw people of all colors walking up and down the streets, with no clear race/class distinctions of certain colored people doing all the buying, or all the serving, or all the sweeping. I even saw a fair amount of indigenous people in colorful outfits.

I eventually got to a pedestrian street of big stores built perhaps between the 20s and 50s. There was an air of faded glamour, sooty cement facades that at one point must have been pristine white or sleek grey. The stores were mainly of the tacky variety--dollar stores, small grocers and minimarts, junky clothing. It reminded me of Uptown in Chicago, or State Street in the early 90s when it was all seedy shops selling electronics, shoes, and (bootleg?) clothes.

The bus left from a big roundabout, and the ride took about an hour 15 minutes--not much slower than the prior night's cab ride. The bus was a converted, repainted schoolbus from the US. I'd been advised to take the Metrobus, which is a more modern, unified system of municipal buses, but at the roundabout a guy pointed me to one of the shabbier buses as the right one to reach the airport. We passed first through the high-end part of town that my annoying taximates had gotten off at the night before, then through a more lower-middle-class-looking area of unremarkable cement apartment buildings, similar to much of Bogota but with more low-rise strip malls, at least along the big street our bus was plying. Eventually we reached an area dominated by warehouses and light industry, with many signs indicating a major Chinese investment presence. Finally the bus left me at a point from which I could see the airport at the other end of a sprawling vacant field I had to cross to get there.

The airport was clearly not designed to be entered by foot, and I had to pass through a lot of parking lots and driveways that I was probably supposed to be prohibited from walking over. There was, however, a nice sculptural homage to Panama's indigenous archeological heritage.

Security at the airport was fast, thorough, and amiable. It was much better than at any other airport I've been to, which tend to range from very lax to neurotically invasive. Security procedures at US airports seem to create the illusion of effectiveness by lots of aimless busy-ness and inconvenience, but ultimately they're not very thorough.

And there I was, set for the last leg of my trip home to Colombia. I settled into a chair at my gate, with my toxic but sweet Domino's pizza and chocolate chip cookie I'd bought for breakfast, and I wrote the outline for this blog post.

Goodbye Panama City. Goodbye, elegant decay.

Non-quantifiable quality of life factors

2011-12-31T16:56:00.001-08:00

Sometimes in the development sector we discuss so-called non-economic or non-quantifiable quality of life factors. These are things like fresh air or the satisfaction of growing your own food that are not adequately accounted for in purely economic analyses. Often people who advocate for such things are essentially saying that the poor should remain barefoot and backwards in order to maintain traditional values that the outside observer finds cute. Such arguments amount to "Don't expand your cash crop production--it offends my agrarian sensibilities" or "Don't move to the city, even if it means multiplying your income by 10". I perhaps lean toward such discourses, though I normally try not to let my own dogmas or personal preferences keep other people in situations with which they are not satisfied.

Anyway, today we took a group of my wife's visiting sisters and nieces and nephews to visit the same farm in Arcabuco I've profiled before. The kids marveled at the animals, the fish, the streams, and everything else that always wows me when I go there. It made me realize that despite my wife's and my occasional gripes with the poor selection of movies and restaurants in our small city, we really do benefit from many non-economic quality of life factors. Our food is fresher, we have easy access to the countryside, we derive satisfaction from working with farmers that can really use our help. The kids we took to the farm would never be able to have such an experience in their hometowns of Medellin and Bogota. All the money of these big cities can't buy a simple, free jaunt to a nearby farm to buy trout. In fact, we can even quantify the benefit of our ready access to this place; a visit to the agriculture-based theme parks just outside of Bogota and Medellin (a concept I fully support) costs 30000 pesos, or about $16US per person. So for the twelve people we took to our friend's farm, it would have cost almost $200US to get into a synthetic version of a real farm. As is, we paid like $40US for about 14 pounds of fresh-caught filleted trout, plus $11US I gave to our friend for having showed us around.

So small-town life may not be great for movie-goers or eat-out gourmands, but it's got its bright spots.

A Megapark for the Calumet region?

2011-12-27T10:15:00.001-08:00

I just saw this article recently on plans to create a massive state park peppered throughout southern Chicago's Calumet region. It would apparently cover 140000 acres in all, and represent a reclamation of what is at once one of the US's most biodiverse regions (where forest meets prairie meets coastal sand dunes meet swamp meet lake, with lots of migratory birds thrown in for good measure) and one of its most polluted (think active and abandoned factories, chemical waste dumps, municipal waste dumps, municipal sewage treatment).

This idea excites me for its size and ambition, and it would obviously be great to restore polluted brownfields into intact wetlands open to public visits. I have a soft spot in my heart for the Calumet region after living there for a while for a job I had a few years ago. But I don't know if I buy the optimistic prognosis as far as boosting tourism and creating jobs. Calumet is remote, unknown, and scary to most Chicago dwellers. Who's going to visit this park? What jobs will it create? Will the State take on more employees in these lean times?

At any rate, I look forward to hearing more about this in the near future.

Geoengineering and Brazil nuts

2011-12-24T13:58:00.001-08:00

Today I was talking with a friend about climate change and other catastrophes we humans are creating on a planetary scale. The subject came up of finding technological solutions to get us off the hook. I have in other places argued that indeed, an industrial, technological fix seems to me to be the only realistic option for getting the atmosphere's CO2 levels back down to normal, and I have proposed socially-sustainable ways of implementing large-scale carbon sequestration. Of course we will also need other, nature-based approaches to sequestering carbon, for example massive reforestation projects such as those profiled for the northern China loess plain and in Las Gaviotas, Colombia. I've also suggested agrarian reforestation projects along these lines. Anyway, I sincerely hope that humans will someday soon find a magical fix to carbon-dioxide-caused global warming, but hope is not a sound problem-solving strategy. And despite my numerous ideas and proposals to reduce global warming in our time, I'm not too hopeful about the prospects of solving this massive problem.

At any rate, our conversation also got me thinking about so-called geoengineering. This is a neologism that refers to engineering large-scale, planet-wide processes, especially in the context of combating global warming. I've heard proposals of things like seeding the oceans with iron to encourage CO2-absorbing algal blooms, or shooting aerosols into the atmosphere to reduce the solar radiation reaching (and thus heating) our planet. Such proposals seem like lethal hubris to me, the product of minds accustomed to dealing with systems far less complex than the Earth's intricate web of relations and balances. The potential negative side effects (plummeting crop yields due to reduced sunlight, massive dead zones in the ocean, etc.) are horrid, and those side effects we can foresee are surely a mere fraction of the disasters that would actually result.

An example of a system that mankind has yet to fully control is the production of Brazil nuts. Brazil nuts grow on trees scattered throughout the Amazon rainforest. Ingenuous entrepreneurs have long dreamed of producing these valuable nuts on an industrial scale in plantations, but it has never worked. Brazil nut trees in plantations tend not to produce many or any nuts. Today we understand that this is because Brazil nuts require a complex ecological web to produce fruit. The flower of the tree is pollinated only by a certain species of bee, which depends for mating on a certain species of orchid. This epiphytic orchid, in turn, grows not on Brazil nut trees but on other intact rainforest species. So what would seem like a simple operation--plant Brazil nut trees and harvest Brazil nuts--can't work without a whole series of other considerations. Even now that we know the general ecological functioning behind Brazil nut pollination, plantations of the tree are still not productive. I imagine this is because there are other factors we don't yet understand that impede our successful manipulation of the factors we do understand. So as of today, all the Brazil nuts you buy at the store have been manually harvested from wild trees in intact forests.

Anyway, if we can't even suitably control the production of a simple nut whose ecology we more or less understand, how could we expect to manage the millions of similar systems encompassed in the entire geosphere?

Third World Green Daddy 25: Thanksgiving

2011-12-23T11:04:00.000-08:00

This year we had a big Thanksgiving. Ever since we got to Colombia in late 2008, I've made a special Thanksgiving dinner every year. In Colombia they don't celebrate Thanksgiving, but among our friends and family we have sort of inserted the holiday as a major event in the year. Now everyone knows and looks forward to Thanksgiving at our house. Next year I'm thinking of introducing a football game in our local park as part of the get-together (though in my family we never played football at Thanksgiving).

I always make a big fuss for the Thanksgiving meal. Our first year I made some stuffed roasted chickens, and since then I've been gradually adding more dishes to the affair. Most of the recipes are my expatriate reconstructed version of US classics, with a twist of Andean flavor. This year I made Andean stuffed chicken, Boston baked beans, sauteed spinach, key lime pie, mashed potatoes, and corn bread. Guests brought more roast chicken, salads, cranberry sauce, green beans, and mashed squash. My corn bread turned out harder and less sweet than my usual recipe, but as such it resembled traditional US conbread even more. I was particularly proud of my home-made key lime pie.

The recipe is actually really easy--a can of condensed milk, a half-cup of lime juice, and (gasp!) five egg yolks. The real point of pride is that I made a graham-cracker-style crust from scratch. Since we don't have graham crackers in Colombia, I used the crumbs from galletas de sagu (made from the achira starch I'm studying in my job). These are delicious cookies made in Guayata, in the Tenza valley. However, their crumbly nature, combined with the awful, bumpy road into and out of Guayata, make for a lot of broken cookies. I took advantage of them to make this crust.

Here is the bed of vegetables on which my Andean chicken sat in the oven.

I arranged the photo so you can see bits of cassava, guatila (Sechium edule), four varieties of potato, cubios (Tropaeolum tuberosum), ibias (Oxalis tuberosa), ruba (Ullucus tuberosus), balu (Erythrina edulis), butternut squash, and arracacha (Arracacia xanthorriza). Hence the whole vegetable bed consists in New World crops.

The chickens and their seasonings are entirely Old World. They have celery, bread crumbs, white mushrooms, eggs, and onions in the stuffing, and a rub/baste of olive oil, curry, sage, thyme, rosemary, cilantro, and a few other things. Here's the finished product:

This year we had something like 20 people for Thanksgiving dinner. Many of them were my wife's workmates. We had a few kids running around, which really lent a nice family flavor to the event. I think many people in Bogota, especially my wife's single coworkers, don't get to spend much time in family celebrations. In our town in Boyaca, families are bigger and more people live together with their whole family. Hence before my wife moved to Bogota, we didn't realize how special our frequent family get-togethers were, and we often longed for the more modern, urbane life of the big city. But seeing and talking to my wife's coworkers, I realized that for them family get-togethers are rare, and they in turn have an overdose of late-night parties shared only with other adults.

In preparation for the explanation I always give to our guests, I read up a bit on the original Thanksgiving celebration. I know there were actually some Thanksgiving-style celebrations in Virginia before 1620, but the Plymouth Colony version is the one we've accepted as our collective heritage in the US. I really like this Thanksgiving story of the Plymouth settlers and the Massassoit Indians, and sometime I would like to read more original documents and commentaries on it. Also, the harvest celebration of native New World crops that is at the heart of Thanksgiving relates very well to the Muisca Garden project at my work.

As has often happened to me in the six years I've been living outside the States, what had seemed familiar and boring growing up now seems cool and exotic. I am rediscovering the fascinating story of Thanksgiving, the early history of our nation, the conflicts and cooperation between Europeans and Native Americans that has defined us as a people. I miss the autumn, the change of weather, all the aspects of the natural environment in the Midwest that I never appreciated as a college student longing to learn about the tropics. Above all, I miss the traditions I grew up with in the US, though my wife and I are steadily building our own traditions to guide and anchor us as a family.

Here is an interesting radio essay that my friend's big sister presented on NPR a few years ago. She too talks about creating and changing traditions, though in her case the traditions are a fusion of Nigerian and US customs.

Another part of my imported US traditions this year was what we did after Thanksgiving. I boiled down the two stripped chicken carcasses and made bouillon, which I then froze into ice cubes to use in future soups. Then I added more water to the carcasses and made a soup that lasted a few days (and that everyone in the house was sick of by the end). The interminable leftovers are an important part of Thanksgiving.

In fact, I've recently been thinking more explicitly about a sacred ethic of food. This is a term I've coined to describe a reverent, non-wasteful attitude towards food. Here would be the components of such an ethic:

Food is sacred. This means it is not to be thrown away. Even food waste (leaves, stems, trimmings, etc.) should be recycled in some form, be it composting, feeding to domestic animals, or any other creative re-use (fermenting into vodka, for example). It also means that you shouldn't overeat. When you overeat, especially when you overeat protein in the form of lots of meat, your body can't process it all, and you piss out a good deal of the nutrients consumed. This to me is equivalent to throwing away good food, or even like the ancient Roman custom of eating huge banquets, then vomiting them up to eat some more. Another conclusion that follows if we accept that food is sacred is that you should eat real food, not processed artificial food-like items (Michael Pollan has gone more into depth with this last point in his "In Defense of Food"). Just as no Catholic would consider a piece of Wonder Bread that's been mumbled over by some guy on the street to be a sacred piece of the body of Christ, no eater should consider Cheez-Its or 7-up to be real food.

Mealtime is sacred. This means food is to be eaten with others around a table, as a ritual. Food is not a mere fuel to be shoveled furtively into one's mouth, on the run or while doing other things. Food is as much a social event as a nutritive one. An implication of this is that you should eat all of what's put before you. Food is not a mere consumer good, which we are to pick and choose according to our superficial caprices or fickle fashions. All food is good, and any meal prepared by another is to be revered. So no one should pick at their food, or claim not to like certain things, especially when someone else has prepared the food as an act of love and communion.

How would such an ethic of sacred food mesh with other sustainable food movements or currents? Veganism and even strict vegetarianism are out, at least for meals prepared elsewhere, because the offense you would cause your host by being a picky eater would offset any positive ecological or moral impacts you might have by not eating animal projducts. As for sermonizing on sustainable food choices (a flaw which I am wont to display), a follower of the sacred food ethic should work to make his family or friends' choices more sustainable over time (less meat, less junk food, smaller portions), but at the moment of eating a given meal, we need to show graciousness and reverence for what others offer us, even if it doesn't meet with the sustainability seal of approval.

My wife and I have tried to live these values in our home. We don't waste food (though I've spent three years now saying I'll soon get around to composting our food scraps), and we eat our meals at table. I think this latter point has been a positive point for our son Sam. He eats really well and widely, not like some kids that refuse to eat certain things or whose parents have to chase them around the room shoving yogurt in their face. I know to some extent kids' eating habits are inborn and thus hit-or-miss, but I have to think that our marking mealtime as a special, ritual moment and serving a wide variety of real food must have something to do with Sam's healthy habits.

I don't want to be too self-righteous about our eating habits, because it's very possible that Sam will go through a picky eater phase and I'll have to retract my self-congratulation. Even I, who in my infancy and from adolescence onwards am one of the most versatile, open-minded eaters I know, went through a few years where I only or mainly ate the garbage marketed to me by the US junk food machine. Spaghetti-Os, sugary cereals, and chicken nuggets were my go-to foods, though I never spurned the vegetables my mother served at every meal. You would think this might make me more tolerant and sage around picky eaters, able to reflect on the temporality of such a situation. But I have never been a very understanding person when I see picky eaters. Frankly, I don't know how I'd manage it if Sam went through a phase where he was like that. Aside from our infant son, my wife and I are raising two teenagers that don't always eat well, and to date I have not found any way of managing or changing the situation other than sulking or making acerbic comments, neither of which is of any use. Lately though I've been reading books about childraising, so maybe by the time Sam's older they'll have helped me to figure out how to constructively manage these tricky situations!

Here is a video of a guy whose family gets three quarters of their food from the dumpsters of high-end grocery stores. He's really living the sacred ethic of food. Dumpster-diving isn't as much of an option here in Colombia, where we don't use dumpsters and where supermarket waste seems to be lower than in the US, but when we go to live in the States I think I'd get a kick out of getting good, free food from places like Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. I'd feel like I was bucking the system.

In the meanwhile, I'll keep trying to live a sacred food ethic in the context we live in.

A farm in the middle Rio Suarez region

2011-12-15T18:33:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, on the same trip when we passed by our friend's farm in Arcabuco, our final destination was my brother-in-law's farm in Santander, in the Hoya del Rio Suarez region. The area is mainly known for growing panela (solid cane molasses), but my brother-in-law has an innovative product: grass silage.

Silage is a way of preserving animal fodder for the long-term. Especially in temperate environments with marked seasons, it's always a challenge to keep livestock fed over the winter, when there's little green food available (and sometimes in the summer, when pastures dry up and die). Silage is one method among many (hay, crop stubble grazing, grain feeding, haylage, etc.) for setting aside feed during times of abundance, in order to use it in times of scarcity.

Preparing silage consists in chopping up grass or other fodder and leaving it in a tightly-sealed place. The sugars in the grass ferment up to a certain point, until they consume all the oxygen in the container and create an environment too acidic for any microbes to survive.

I believe the preparation of silage has its origin in Ireland, where the constantly-wet weather prevented the drying of hay for winter feeding. So farmers used the moisture to their advantage and prepared silage in dugout pits. Today in the US many dairy farmers raise corn for silage. They let the corn grow until it's nice and green and juicy, then chop the whole plant, leaves and stalks and ears and all, into little bits. These little bits are then compressed into upright silos or long horizontal polyethylene bags. If you see a purple tower in the rural Midwest, it's likely a glass-lined silo, while if you see a big mound covered by a black tarp and lots of tires, it's a pile of silage. The glass or plastic are to keep air out.

Here in Colombia silage isn't too common. Many places don't have a long enough dry or wet season to impair grass availability. However, as ranchers raise the density of animals on their pastures, and climate change leads to more drought and flooding, there is an increasing need for storeable animal feed. My brother-in-law Alejo is meeting that need. Indeed, the worst weather years in the rest of the country are the best business years for him!

He mainly produces silage from king grass. This is a fast-growing species of tropical grass that's high in protein, energy, and other nutrients necessary for meat and dairy cattle. My brother-in-law hires a crew of guys to cut the grass with machetes when it's two months old (the farm is too steeply sloping to use tractors or mechanized cutters). They load the 10-foot stalks into a truck and bring them back to a central processing point, where it goes through two machines linked together.

The first machine chops the grass and blows it out of a chute leading to a second machine, which packs the chopped grass into a bag. When the bag is full (weighing about 40 kg), it is pushed out of the machine, and a worker grabs it and ties it. Then the bag goes into a pile to await shipping to a buyer.

The process has undergone various changes over the past years. Initially they blew the chopped grass into a pile, then had to shovel it into a bag that they subjected to a hydraulic press. This gave way to the linking of chopping and packing machines so as to avoid the intermediate shoveling process. They also now use a heavy-gauge plastic in the bags so that clients can return the bags for reuse. When the bags get worn out after a few uses, they sell them to a guy that recycles them to make irrigation hoses. Thus the major waste product of the process has been virtually eliminated.

In the first video below my brother-in-law Alejo loads a new bag onto the packing machine, while his assistant gets a bunch of king grass ready to chop. The stuff he pours onto the grass from the white bucket is a bit of cane syrup, which helps get the fermentation process going in the bag.

In the next video the bag is full after a number of batches of king grass have been chopped and shoved into it. So Alejo takes it from the machine and to a staging area, where he'll later tie off the bag and stack it in a pile with other bags.

Most of the silage is made from king grass, but Alejo also makes cane into silage. This cane mainly comes from other farms, whose owners tell Alejo to bring his team and his machinery to their farm and harvest their cane for silage. This usually occurs when the price of panela is too low to justify the farmer's processing it as such.

However, Alejo is slowly planting cane of his own for turning into silage. Cane silage has a slightly different nutritional profile from king grass silage, so some ranchers prefer one or the other. Alejo is also branching into corn silage. Here is a field planted to the locally-adapted peasant variety of corn.

It compares very favorably to a hybrid variety he also tried planting, which hardly germinated in the farm's humid tropical conditions.

A different hybrid did fare pretty well though, as seen in the background of the next photo.

The farm doesn't only grow silage. There are also a number of cattle, some of which I partly own. We've set up a deal much like the Peul people of western Africa set up with their neighbors. Alejo takes care of the herd, for which he gets to keep the female offspring. I will keep the males, and sell them off for meat at about 2 years of age. These cattle are a Holstein-Angus mix, so they are good for both milk and meat production. We brought them to the farm young, so they could adjust to the warm climate despite their cool-weather European ancestry.

This fellow with the white face is the only male of the bunch.

He will serve as an indicator of when the cows are in heat. My brother-in-law has scarred the young bull's penis so it will grow slightly crooked. This way he will try to mount receptive females without impregnating them, and Alejo will thus know they're ready for artificial insemination.

Alejo has also branched into subsistence crops, thanks in part to my wife's and my incessant nagging that he shouldn't put all his effort into commercial products that might suffer big fluctuations in demand. Here is his chicken area, fenced in by stalks of wild grass native to the area.

The farm also has fruit trees planted long ago. There's this mandarin lime tree. It gives a sweet lime that looks and breaks apart like a mandarin orange.

I harvested a bucket full of them to make a typical treat of lemonade with panela.

There are also some wild lulo bushes. This is what they look like.

Wear gloves to pick the fruits. They're spiny!

We always eat well when we visit the farm. When we arrived this time, Alejo and his wife were making envueltos.

These consist in corn dough with cottage cheese, wrapped and cooked in corn leaves. They steamed them in a big pot cooking over a barrel fire.

Here's the finished envuelto, ready to eat

accompanied by eggs scrambled with local chorizo.

The unused corn husks go to feed the cattle.

What is a barrel fire, you ask? Basically you take a metal oil drum and fill it with sawdust.

You leave PVC pipes in as you fill the barrel with the sawdust, so as to create a chimney from bottom to top. Then you take out the pipes, and it's ready to light.

We also cooked our trout (brought from Arcabuco) on plantain leaves over such a fire. They turned out good, with slices of lime from the farm.

I hope you enjoyed visiting my brother-in-law's farm!

Transregional poopline, another failed St. Andrews Prize proposal

2011-12-15T17:37:00.000-08:00

Transregional poopline

United States agriculture currently raises feed crops in the eastern Midwest region, and cattle on feedlots in the western Midwest. This makes economic sense in many respects, but it causes grave ecological problems. Farmers used to keep livestock on their grain farms, where the manure fed the crops that fed the animals, but we have now separated the two parts of this natural cycle. Today grain farmers must import fertility in the form of expensive synthetic fertilizers, and feedlot operators are left with a toxic amount of animal waste that no one has figured out how to dispose of in a responsible way. Greenhouse gases are emitted at both ends of the chain, in the production of synthetic fertilizers and from the anaerobic decomposition of animal waste.

Trucking the animal waste from the feedlots to the fields where it's needed is not a viable option. Because the waste comes mixed with lots of water, it is heavy and cumbersome, and it costs a lot to haul the waste hundreds of miles by truck or train to fertilize distant fields. Farmers nearer to the feedlots have often already saturated their fields with nutrients from the animal waste, and don't want any more.

The Transregional Poopline project proposes a solution to this ecological problem. If the US were to install a pipeline from animal production areas to grain production areas, we could somewhat close the nutrient cycle. Once constructed, the pipeline would use little labor or energy to move nutrient-rich liquid animal waste from feedlot states like Kansas to corn belt states like Illinois. It would operate much like the Alaskan oil pipeline, but over a much shorter distance. The liquid nature of feedlot waste, which prevents its profitable transport in vehicles, would favor transport by such a pipeline.

A pilot pipeline would run from the area of greatest feedlot concentration (around western Kansas) to the area with the highest use of synthetic fertilizers in Iowa or Illinois. Feedlots would be required to hook up to the pipeline and pump their waste away. On the other end, farmers would organize themselves into special fertilizer usage districts. From the main pipeline would branch off smaller, regional pipelines, and from there county, township, and field-level pipelines. Users would take turns applying pipeline fertilizer to their fields, and divide the cost of pipeline maintenance and operation at local, regional, and national levels.

If the pilot pipeline were successful, more lines could be incorporated, linking other livestock-producing regions (like the chicken farms of the South or the hog farms of Iowa) and other crop-producing regions (the Southern cotton belt or Michigan's orchards and vegetable fields). There could also be a line East of the Appalachians to spread North Carolina's hog waste to the farms and gardens of the Eastern seaboard and Florida.

This project would reduce pollution in the cattle feedlot areas, partially replace fossil-fuel-based fertilizers in the Corn Belt, and generally close the cycle of nutrients and organic matter between field and livestock.

Being a gay teenager

2011-12-14T17:53:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting NYT special on growing up gay. There are five videos profiling different gay teenagers and the trials and triumphs they've experienced related to their sexual orientation.

Up without smoke: the Foreclosed House Gasifier

2011-12-14T16:41:00.000-08:00

In what is becoming a yearly tradition, I once again submitted various proposals to the St. Andrews Prize for the Environment, and once again none made it past the first round. Here is an idea I call the House Gasifier:

Up without smoke: the Foreclosed House Gasifier

Blighted neighborhoods have long been plagued with vacant houses, and given the mortgage foreclosure crisis of the past years, abandoned homes are popping up even in traditionally middle-class areas. Some will eventually be resold, but most are condemned to remain unoccupied indefinitely. Abandoned houses look ugly, lower property values of surrounding homes, and serve as a den for wild and stray animals, crime ranging from prostitution and drug sales, and a target for arson.

Many houses that have been definitively abandoned are subject to asset stripping, in which the valuable components of the building (copper pipes and wires, steel structural members, and high-end countertops) are taken out and resold. While this is often illegal, it is a positive development in terms of environmental sustainability and extracting value from an otherwise frozen asset.

However, much of the construction elements of modern houses do not have resale value. Vinyl siding, asphalt shingles, drywall, and dimensional lumber are not easy to reuse. They are easily damaged by removal, and their base components do not have enough intrinsic value to justify breakdown and recycling.

The Foreclosed House Gasifier (FHG) project proposes a solution to the scourge of abandoned houses in the US, which would also reduce importation of fossil fuels for winter heating. The house gasifier combines a household-sized high-temperature gasifier, furnace, electrical generator, and a versatile chopping unit. This way neighbors that are sick of abandoned, unclaimed houses can gradually rip them down themselves. The construction debris (shingles, siding, lumber, etc.) is then loaded into the chopper and used throughout the winter in each neighbor's personal FHG unit, for household heating and electrical generation. The FHG also works with natural gas or gas oil, household waste such as paper or plastic, and wood resulting from landscape pruning, tree removal, or scavenging the forest floor for fallen limbs. This versatility is very important in the new recession-era landscape of the US, in which many municipalities are cutting down on garbage collection, foreclosed houses are the site of rampant bush and tree regrowth, and the unemployed are rediscovering skills of searching the manmade and natural environments to meet vital needs.

The design of the gasifier assures that fuel is burned cleanly. Even the toxic fumes emitted from burning vinyl or plastic waste are further combusted into harmless carbon dioxide and water.

The FHG would replace or complement the existing household furnace, plugging into the heating systems and chimney of the house, as well as the electric meter, which runs in reverse when the FHG is functioning.

The Foreclosed House Gasifier would thus get rid of ugly, unliveable houses, decrease arson and other crimes, eliminate havens for dangerous stray animals, and even lower toxic mold levels. It would make it possible to reclaim lots that were eyesores, for other uses that contribute to neighborhood development (gardens, businesses, parks, parking lots), and would decrease household environmental impact by reducing fossil fuel consumption (for heat and electricity) and landfill use.

Cheeseburger in Paradise

2011-12-13T18:01:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting article about the impracticality or indeed impossibility of making cheeseburgers except in our industrialized, post-agrarian society. Getting summer-bearing tomatoes, spring-ripe lettuce, winter-slaughtered livestock, and cheese together in one place wouldn't be very easy in the US or Europe before the age of greenhouses, international shipping, and refrigeration.

I agree with the article's central point, though there is obviously a temperate-climate bias operating here. I say this because in a mountainous equatorial climate like Colombia's, you can get wheat, meat, tomatoes, lettuce, and cheese at almost any time of year, without any industrial climate tinkering. Even pre-industrial mule transport could get your ingredients from one altitudinal climate gradient to another within a day, though in my region's cool mountain climate, we can grow all the ingredients in the same garden (even heat-loving tomatoes give some yield in our area).

Indigenous knowledge

2011-11-30T05:22:00.001-08:00

Here is a video from the Makuna, an indigenous group in the Amazon basin. It's very appropriate to what I'm working on right now, because they talk about traditional knowledge and ways of managing their environment. This is the type of information we're studying with peasant farmers in our region through the Muisca Garden project. Also, there are some cool shots of rock art around minute 7 of the video, which is another theme I've been working on recently.

Apparently the ensemble of this ethnic group's knowledge has been declared a cultural heritage treasure of humanity by UNESCO.

Homeless Youth in Chicago

2011-11-30T05:08:00.000-08:00

Here is a recent article from the New York Times about being a homeless youth in Chicago. There's also a version from the Chicago News Cooperative. The article mentions the Night Ministry and the Crib, groups my mother works with in our neighborhood, which is a hub for LGBT homeless youth.

Here is an older article that's explicitly focused on the Night Ministry and other service providers for the homeless.

Sensationalist tourism in Colombia

2011-11-29T16:16:00.000-08:00

Last week my cousin sent me a link to a tour of Colombia entitled Coffee, Coca, and Gold. It is offered by Excursionist, a high-priced members-only tour agency. The trip takes visitors to the Gold Museum in Bogota, coffee farms in Quindio, and the coral islands of Cartagena. The highlight is a visit to late druglord Pablo Escobar's sprawling, tacky ranch, Hacienda Napoles, and a personal conversation with Escobar's brother in Medellin. I assume this latter activity is the justification for the $16000US price tag.

The tour kind of pisses me off. No, not because of its offensive, sensationalist, cliched insistence on Colombia's reputation as being little more than a haven of druglords. What irritates me is that I have offered essentially the same tour (at an eighth of the price!), and have difficulty finding takers. My tour takes visitors to the Gold Museum with a personalized tour, to the sights of urbane Medellin, to a quaint, authentic coffee farm, and through Cartagena. Lodging is exclusively in boutique hotels, just as the Excursionist tour offers. I expose visitors to a wide range of Colombian history, culture, and current events. Missing from my tour is the stay on a private Caribbean houseboat, the visit to a gold mine (though I offer a lecture with emerald experts), and of course the personal contact with an Escobar. However, knowing the prices of features and accommodations (in fact, my visitors stay in the same hotel in Medellin as on the Excursionist tour, the lovely, avant-garde Art Hotel), I think the Coca, Coffee, and Gold tour is way overpriced, even taking into account the exclusive Escobar visit and houseboat lodging. I don't spite them for their high price; if they can find people willing to pay $16000 for their tour, then more the power to them. I just feel bitter that I have such trouble scrounging up tour groups when I'm offering a similar (and perhaps superior) product!

A farm in Arcabuco

2011-11-27T04:54:00.000-08:00

Recently my family and I went to get fresh trout at a friend's farm in Arcabuco, Boyaca. It's a really lovely, well-organized farm, and I wanted to share it with my readers.

Our friend's main product has traditionally been blackberry. That's how we met him; he was the supplier of fruit for our small company's jams. However, lately he's been working a lot as a tour guide at the nearby national park (Iguaque, a high-altitude lake where the Muiscas say humanity was born of a goddess and her son that emerged from the lake, bore children together, and returned to the lake as snakes). So the blackberry business is not his main focus right now. But the rest of the farm is a good example of a thriving, diverse peasant microfarm.

Behind Libardo's house there's a typical field planted to corn, beans, squash, fava, and even some young fruit trees that he's hoping will come to fruition.

We also spotted some malanga, an elephant-ear-shaped plant that produces a starchy tuber.

This tuber is grated and fried to make akra, Haitian fritters. Here in the high mountains of Colombia though, I think it's mainly cooked in soups, like a potato. I was surprised to see malanga in such a cool climate.

Around the farm's crop fields there are low electric fences.

I wonder what they're keeping out?

Guinea pigs! Our friend keeps a few of these Andean natives under a shed on his farm. They're free to roam about, and they graze just like cows.

You would think that being rodents, they would scamper off and escape, or get around the electric fence. But guinea pigs are really docile homebodies. They don't stray far or even move that much, though when they're scared they can dart off quickly like their other rodent cousins.

Speaking of rodent cousins, here's a free-range bunny. He's gotten past the electric fence somehow and into Libardo's brother's field of mar alfalfa (elephant grass), a forage grass that he cuts to feed his dairy cattle.

Here is a jolly pig in her pen.

The farm also has chickens and some regal turkeys.

Here's a good bunny that hasn't escaped anywhere. He's just grazing by a water sluice.

This sluice captures and channels a natural mountain spring on its way down to the major river. Libardo has widened two ponds in the spring, where he raises his trout.

Here is Don Libardo catching us some fish. First he throws the weighted net into the pond (pardon the sideways video, I can't correct it).

Then he hauls his catch onto shore.

Next he takes the fish from the net and puts them in a mesh bag.

Now we return to the washing shed to wash the slime off the fish. It comes out in bubbles, like soap.

The fish are dead by now; trout are fragile, and die after only a few minutes of handling out of water (unlike carp or tilapia, which can survive a lot of abuse and a fair amount of time out of water). Even so, Libardo gives the trout a final knock on the head with the back of his knife, just to make sure they're dead before he guts them.

Next he cuts a slit down the belly and removes all the entrails from the fish.

The guts go in a bucket and become a tasty treat for the dogs, cats, and pigs of the farm.

Even after removing the entrails, there's a bit of blood and gunk left in the fish. Libardo scrapes this out by hand.

Here is the finished product, beautiful trout that we'll roast the next day.

Our friend's just got to weigh it so we can pay him.

I close this post with a video overview of the farm.

The boy in the striped pajamas

2011-11-27T04:22:00.001-08:00

Recently on a bus trip from my town to Bogota, I saw the movie "The boy in the striped pajamas". For bus movie fare, it's certainly a step up from Bad Boys 2, Old Dogs, and mediocre Kevin James/Adam Sandler efforts. But I still wanted to comment on how trite and bad the film was.

The boy in the striped pajamas follows the story of an SS official's family in Nazi Germany. The official is promoted and sent (with his family) to serve as commandant of a death camp. His family is to remain within a residential compound, but his son wanders off and befriends (through an electric fence) a young boy his age interned in the camp. After various trials and travails of a German family torn between Nazi loyalty and horror at the Nazi death machine, the movie culminates with the German commandant's son entering the camp through a hole dug under the fence, dressing up as an inmate, and getting gassed with Zyklon B.

There are a number of what seem to me to be historical inaccuracies in the film, and in the end they offend me. First off, I doubt that an SS officer sent to run a death camp in a forward post like Poland (where all the death camps were) would be accompanied by his family. Secondly, I doubt that it would be so easy to dig a hole under a death camp fence that an eight-year-old boy could do it unnoticed. If it were, everyone in the camps would have escaped. I'm no expert in these things, so maybe I am mistaken my sense of how inaccurate they are. But the two things I've noted above seem pretty damn implausible.

Movies are fiction, so normally it's not a big deal if a movie has historical inaccuracies. But in this case, the creators base the entire premise of the plot on things that couldn't have been. And for what? To send a trite message that the Holocaust was bad? That the death camps dehumanized people? We already know this, and we've seen it reflected upon and treated in a million different, more artful ways than this film achieves, and without taking liberties with the facts. If you'd like good, well-informed accounts of how horrid and dehumanizing the Holocaust was for all involved, read Primo Levi, Eli Wiesel, even those Maus comic books.

Again, normally it's not too grave if a movie is inaccurate, or even trite. But the filmmakers of The boy in striped pajamas (which is based on a book written in a few days by an Irishman with apparently little sense of German language or history) took the Holocaust and used it to deliver a trite message. The millions of victims of the Holocaust (the camp inmates, the subjects living in a hellish dictatorship, the soldiers on all sides who died defending or assailing the Nazi war machine, even the architects of the Holocaust who are now surely suffering eternal torment) were and are real. The Holocaust was a real, concrete event in history that happened in a certain way, and not in any other way. To fictionalize and twist the facts of the Holocaust to deliver a filmmaker's trite message is an insult to humanity, to all of us whose present world was shaped by the Second World War (which is to say, to everyone alive today).

Exploration and metropoli in the Amazon

2011-11-23T18:29:00.000-08:00

This is a really cool video of Wade Davis, an ethnobotanist who has worked a lot in Colombia. He tells about the 16th-century Orellana expedition down the Amazon river, and the dense agricultural populations they encountered living in the forest. Davis is a foremost expert on the Amazon and the Andes, which makes it sort of surprising to hear how bad his Spanish pronunciation is!

Anyway, Davis tells about the post-Conquest change in Amazonian population patterns from dense farming villages to sparse slash-and-burn farmers and hunters. This is a field that is being investigated more and more, and we are thus reversing the old common storyline that the Amazon rainforest is and has always been a deserted, fragile area unable to support human settlement. National Geographic did a good special on the lost cities of the Amazon a while ago. That said, I feel like both Wade Davis and National Geographic sometimes get caught up in swashbuckling adventure centered on heroic explorers, as opposed to the nuanced, complex treatments of culture that they also often treat us to.

It turns out that I am currently reading a book called The Country of Cinnamon, by William Ospina, that gives a fictionalized account of the Orellana expedition. It seems to hew pretty closely to what's known of the historical facts, but it's also a great read. I feel it captures the mood of what it is to be American, to be caught between rooting for the European conqueror-heroes (our fathers?) at the same time as we lament the destruction of our maternal indigenous civilizations, and yearn for a reckoning in which the Indians will rise again. The book reads a lot like Heart of Darkness, and explores the same theme: the descent into madness of Europeans plunged into a strange new setting, with none of the rules of home to guide and bind their behavior. However, The Country of Cinnamon doesn't make the fatal flaw of assuming this is how man acts when he is alone in a place where society doesn't exist--Ospina makes it clear that the Spanish expeditionaires go mad and become barbaric not in the absence of civilized society, but because they are uncapable or unwilling to recognize the humanity and the validity of the new society they are traveling through. That is to say that unlike Conrad, who uses the Africans merely as a mystical, animal prop serving as a backdrop to Kurtz's barbarity and madness, Ospina subtly switches between (or at least recognizes the existence of) the viewpoints of the scared, brutal Spaniards, the perplexed mountain Indians accompanying the expedition, and even the scary, mysterious Amazonians who are new and unknown to Spaniard and Andean alike.

Recent cultural consumption

2011-11-20T05:56:00.000-08:00

Amidst a pretty hectic work schedule, I've been taking in a lot of culture recently. In my weekday evenings alone after work, I've been reading, watching movies from my father-in-law's impressive film collection, and generally exposing myself to lots of ideas and artistic creations.

Right now I'm reading a number of books. "The Coming Famine" by Julian Cribb is a well-researched account of the different issues that put in peril the future security of our food supply. It is pretty comprehensive, touching on limited supply of mined fertilizers, dwindling oil reserves, food wastage, lack of financing for agronomic research, increasingly scarce freshwater, and climate change, among other things. The scope is wide-reaching, and it's a good introduction for the layperson, though some (not many) of the facts and sources he quotes have more to do with talking points that have been made "real" by incessant repetition in the news, as opposed to pressing issues based on reality. I like a few aspects of his treatment in particular--his repeated insistence that people eat more plants and less meat as a way of reducing demand for grains, energy, and fertilizer; his recognition that both large-scale mechanized farming and small-scale intensive land use have important places in our world's future food supply; and his equanimous, nonradical way of dealing with the issues. If this latter is at times overly generous to certain viewpoints without much factual backing (like the 15-year-old claim that within a few years genetic modification will produce crops resistant to drought, salinity, and the like), it does enable him to make reasonable, common-sense claims without sounding like a radical (for instance his insistence on increasingly basing our diets on plants as opposed to animal products).

Another, very different book I'm reading is The Crusades through Arab Eyes, by Amin Maalouf. It's a fascinating, comprehensive historical account of the first centuries of the second millennium, with lots of intrigue, battles, atrocities, and noble behavior. It gives a complex understanding of all the actors involved in the Crusades, from Western European Crusaders and their Middle-Easternized descendants, to Turkish warlords, to decadent Byzantine rulers, to Arab subjects caught in the crossfire. There are lots of surprising alliances and betrayals among all parties, with no simple Muslim vs. Christian storyline to be found anywhere!

A book I finished recently is You and Your Adolescent, by Laurence Steinberg . As its title suggests, it talks about raising adolescents. My dad bought the book maybe twenty years ago, and I figured I'd read it to prepare for my son's teenage years, as well as for input on the two adolescents currently living with me. It's fascinating too to see what sections my dad highlighted. It seems he wanted to know how to deal with my sexual activity. If only he'd known how little success I had with the ladies as a teenager, he'd have been much less preoccupied! I notice that the new edition of the book advertised on the website covers up to 25 years of age. I realize that times are changing, but I'd like to think that by the time I was engaged to my now-wife I wasn't still an adolescent!

Another childrearing book I'm reading is called Raising Adopted Children by Lois Ruskai Melina. I am interested in adopting children, because I want a big family, but I don't feel that it's responsible to conceive lots of kids in an age when we're really pushing the limits of what our natural environment can withstand. This is another book from my dad's collection, when he and my mother were considering adopting a sibling for me. Again, it's interesting to see what information Dad highlighted in his reading. It's also funny to read about certain preoccupations that, due to my wife's and my particular living situation, don't seem like they'll be as big a problem for us. Especially "foreign" babies' looking different from the adoptive parents wouldn't be a huge problem here in Colombia, where any given family has members that look European, Asian, African, and Native American. Hell, right now my son looks like a little rosy-cheeked German baby amidst his Latino family members! Perhaps this is related to another point the book makes, that children adopted from Colombia find as much acceptance from extended family members in the US as Caucasian babies born in the States.

If you follow the links I've posted for these books, you'll notice I'm no longer linking to Amazon.com. I don't like their business model of lowering prices at the expense of worker dignity. It's not only incorrect ethically, but there's no way the US can reinforce a healthy economy if the main "growth" in productivity is achieved by making jobs intolerable and insecure and thus impoverishing our nation's consumer base. I'd rather pay a bit more for my books, and even have them arrive in two days instead of one, if it means my country will have more well-paid workers who might in turn purchase other products and services that I offer, or simply to be my neighbors in a flourishing, dignified community.

On the movie front, I've had a varied diet, too. I recently watched Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront" for the first time. I knew the "I coulda been a contender" sequence from my dad and other cultural allusions to it, but I had no idea what the rest of the film was about. It touches on the complex relations between union, mafia, and Church, with the most noble character being a fiery progressive priest urging dockworkers to stand up for their rights. Would that we saw more of that these days in the US Catholic Church!

I also watched Scorcese's Mean Streets for the first time in a long time. I remembered its bleak, lonely aesthetic, but I'd forgotten how unique and accurate that mood and the portrayal of city life is. Unlike Scorcese's other mobster flicks, Mean Streets isn't at all glamorous. It's about a group of small-change hustler friends trying to live well and live good in a decadent, decaying neighborhood. The movie's depiction of the postindustrial, post-European-immigrant urban landscape (albeit at the front end of postindustrial decline) corresponds more to the timbre of my youth in such an environment than perhaps any other film I've seen. City life for me in 1990s Chicago was neither glamorously gritty nor glamorously comfortable. The city in those days often felt like a forgotten landscape, no longer relevant in a shiny, suburban USA. Likewise the Catholic Church, which in Scorcese's 1972 New York and in the materialistic, self-centered milieu of the 1990s USA seemed like an antiquated, forgotten institution, kept alive only by a few true believers in old, empty churches, who themselves were struggling to reconcile the noble ideals of a medieval Church with the amoralism of their everyday surroundings. It's that passed-over, faded quality that Mean Streets captures so well.

A film I did not like very much was Pi, by Darren Aronofsky. The premise is that a number theorist genius comes close to discovering some magic number that can explain the stock market, and perhaps secret meanings in the Jewish Torah. First off, it's from 1998, when people still idiotically revered the stock market as some omniscient indicator of value, as opposed to the arbitrary, zero-sum scam driven by irrational behavior and fraudulent manipulation that the stock market has proven to be. As such, the film has us admiring the protagonist and his computer for their ability to "decipher" the stock market's daily fluctuations, as if this could create value as opposed to merely concentrating it in the hands of a few lucky gamblers. But beyond this idiosyncracy of the film's era, I disliked the frenetic, epileptic pacing and cinematography of the movie. Aronofsky has become famous for his depictions of mental breakdown, but this early effort is clumsy and over-the-top, to the point of being almost unwatchable. The filming is very deliberate, as if to say, "Look at me, I'm rapidly splicing together a lot of chaotic images and dreamlike non sequiturs. Give me the film school first prize!" Anyway, I'm glad I'm done watching it, and glad Aronofsky has refined his craft.

A much better black-and-white film with rapid-fire editing is The Battleship Potemkin, by Sergei Eisenstein. It was filmed in 1925, and is silent, with interspersed dialogue cards amidst the filmed action. But my version has a jumping musical score by Shostakovich that goes along well with the modern-style montage sequences. The film follows the mutiny of a naval crew in Tsarist Russia, and the aftermath of the mutiny and popular uprising. Apparently Eisenstein was the first to make widespread use of montage, as a way of assaulting the viewer's emotions with sensory stimuli. If propaganda were all done this gracefully and artfully, I might not mind so much living under a propagandistic regime!

Two Japanese-themed movies I've seen recently are The Last Samurai, a beautiful but ultimately incoherent homage to the warrior ethic, and Throne of Blood, by Akira Kurosawa. I am culturally literate enough to have picked up that T2hrone of Blood was a Macbeth remake, but only about 40 minutes into the film, when the lady of the manor starts trying to wash her hands of imaginary blood. The two films represent samurai warriors on their best (Last Samurai) and worst (Throne of Blood) behavior, but neither makes clear that the samurai were a class of feudal overlords whose leisure and whose battle were based on the subjection of an industrious, honest peasantry to their extortion of tribute.

My wife and I have also watched Blue and White, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski. Blue captures a depressive, cold vision of life. The protagonist is devastated by the loss of her husband and daughter in a car accident, but she and everyone else in the film is so emotionless that I can't imagine she actually liked her family that much to begin with. The film ends with a senseless montage of different characters looking wistful in blue light. White, on the other hand, is a lively, dark look at getting ahead and getting revenge, in this case on a cruel ex-wife that forces her Polish husband to flee France. It is much more plot-driven than Blue. My wife and I have yet to see Red.

One last film I want to mention is a documentary put out by National Geographic's Genographic Project. This project aims to reconstruct the history of ancient human migrations across the globe, through DNA samples from people throughout the world, especially indigenous groups that have lived in the same place for millennia. I signed up and sent in a DNA sample from my cheeks, and am waiting for the results. But in the meantime, they sent me a documentary about the project. It follows lead scientist Spencer Wells around the world as he traces mankind's earliest footsteps. In typical National Geographic style, the film oscillates between serious science and sensational adventurism, but it's a good watch.

Aside from film, I've been listening to music for the first time in a long time. On a recent night I digested a CD from Marvin Gaye's Last Concert Tour. I always love his artful tightrope walk between the carnal and the sacred. At the end of the CD, he remarks that it may be his last tour, as he's considering joining the clergy. What he didn't know is that it would be his father, the father he lauds at various moments in the concert, who would end his touring career with a gunshot to the face. I also listened to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which for me represents one of the high points of commercial hiphop music. The instrumental tracks are complex and organic, the rhymes are intelligent, and the singing is top-notch. At the same time, hearing her makes me think of my disillusion with her Fugees counterparts, Wyclef Jean and Prakazrel, whose progressive lyrics in favor of oppressed minorities in the US are diametrically opposed to their public statements in favor of the most depraved oppressors in Haiti. Odd how a left-wing person in one context becomes the most reactionary in another. I don't know Lauryn Hill's stance on Haitian politics, and I probably don't want to know it.

That's it for my culture reviews. Soon I'll also post on a few unique cultural experiences I've had lately.

Third World Green Daddy 24: our dog

2011-11-13T18:15:00.000-08:00

We have a dog, and it actually lives in our apartment in Bogota. This was not exactly a free decision on our part--a family tragedy left us with a relative's dog, and we've been taking care of it since. It is a nice dog--a golden retriever that is relatively well-behaved. Nevertheless, I don't think animals belong inside houses. It would be different if we had a farm or a yard he could live in, but we don't, so basically we've all got to deal with his copious hair everywhere. It's especially tough on my allergies, though it seems I'm becoming resistant to them.

My son loves the dog. He yanks its fur, chases it around, gives it food from the table. I guess the dog is a good companion for him, and for the other members of our household, too. This household now includes my wife, my son, me, two teenagers, the dog, and for part of every week a live-in babysitter (which I'll discuss in another post).

Anyway, for the foreseeable future the dog will be staying with us. We hire a guy to walk it early in the morning. This guy and his siblings have a dog training school. They're really serious about it, with a well-designed website and everything. I think they aspire to be a Colombian version of the Dog Whisperer.

Here is a video they posted on their website of their well-behaved charges eating Christmas dinner. It's pretty ridiculous. Our dog is the golden retriever at the lower right-hand corner.

A seed fair in Garagoa

2011-11-04T15:32:00.000-07:00

About a year ago, when my wife was still working on the ecotourism project in the Tenza Valley (I'm linking here to its snazzy finished website), we had the privilege of attending a seed fair set up by a local NGO that tries to promote local, ancestral crops in the region.

We stayed in the lovely El Encanto rural lodge, just outside of the town of Garagoa.

Upon entering the visitor is greeted by a number of traveler's palms. These are not actually palms but rather in the strelitzia family, like birds of paradise. Both are native to southern Africa, but have been spread throughout the tropics as ornamentals. I believe the traveler's palm got its name because it collects water in the leaf axils (like armpits, where the leaf stem meets the main stem), so a thirsty traveler can cut a branch and drink from it.

Another African resident of the hotel is a herd of guinea fowl. These are domestic birds that are eaten for meat. They are very territorial and protective, squawking and menacing whenever a potential threat shows up. This makes them good companions to stupid, defenseless chickens. We have our African forebears to thank for bringing this bird to the Americas.

Here is a smaller companion on the lodge grounds.

And here's a bird of paradise flower sheltered by elephant ears (neither are native to Colombia, though a variety of elephant ear has become a widespread domesticated staple for feeding pigs).

These are ginger flowers called "King's Scepter", also non-native, I'm pretty sure.

A comfortable house for the chicken flock.

Here is a specialized grill for making arepas. One arepa per little hole.

As in many mid-altitude tropical areas in Colombia, this farm is crisscrossed by small, rushing streams, with colorful bridges spanning them.

Here is a court for tejo, a classic central Colombian game. It's like horseshoes, except you throw a puck instead of a horseshoe, and the target is a metal ring in the center with a small envelope of gunpowder that explodes when you hit it.

Here is a view of the creek through a guadua bamboo grove.

The El Encanto lodge has communal areas and open cooking setups for holding big barbecues.

The goats keep the grass down.

A banana grove.

The pool

One of the independent cabins you can rent.

An evening snack of bread, cheese, and panela (molasses) water.

Not everything at the lodge is in great taste.

Anyway, aside from serving as an advertisement for the El Encanto lodge, the point of this post was to show the seed fair. The civic groups that organize these fairs set up a common theme for each one. This time the theme was corn, so everything on offer (for free!) at the fair was made from a corn base. There were cookies, fermented drinks, bread, toasted corn, arepas, and even dolls and clothing made from corn.

People from different towns and villages prepared typical dishes, and each locality had a stand with its name on a sign.

The fair took place on a rural schoolgrounds. The path leading to the place was bordered by old sisal bushes.

Who knows if they're still used to make fiber, or just cut back so they don't block the path? The school playground overlooks the amazingly beautiful landscape around the Chivor dam reservoir.

It appears that the international Slow Food movement somehow patronized the event, and there were lots of interesting informative panels to be looked at.

The above close-up makes the point that crops native to the Andean-Amazonian region (potatoes, cassava, beans, etc.) provide over a third of the world's food supply today.

A local authority from the indigenous movement made a dedication of the event, reciting prayers, singing, and offering chicha to the four directions and the earth.

After the seed fair (which this time didn't seem to have much seed exchanging going on), we passed through the main plaza of the town of Garagoa. It's not one of the more beautiful towns in the Tenza Valley, but the plaza is nice. It is home to a few massive ceiba trees. These trees are native to Africa and the Americas, and are considered sacred in both places. To this day many warm-climate towns in Colombia have hundred-year-old ceibas in their central plazas.

In the next photo you can see the scale of one of these trees compared to the sitting woman.

The Garagoa plaza is also home to the flowery ocobo trees typical of the Tenza Valley.

There is also a relatively recent statue of Pachamama, the goddess of the earth. It's an indigenous legend, and there is a highland moor in the area called the Paramo of Pachamama, but the sculpture is very Euro-styled. Even the little mohans, local spirits that live in nature, look more like European elves or something. A good example of Colombia's unique mix of European and indigenous influences.

And here's a closing image showing another cultural mix, this time between the modern plastic jug and the ancestral clay pot, both holding chicha, fermented corn beer.

Two articles: Colombia's Free Trade Agreement and the rural keys to ending the civil war

2011-11-04T07:01:00.000-07:00

Here is an article on the Free Trade Agreement recently signed between the US and Colombia. The author argues that the new treaty has few benefits for Colombia (exports will grow by 6%, while job-destroying imports will grow by 12%). It will severely undercut the nation's agricultural sector, and even compromise Colombia's national sovereignty thanks to a clause whereby foreign private companies can sue the Colombian government in a private court if they feel their earnings aren't as high as they should be.

In general, Colombia hasn't taken the proper measures to improve its competitivity on the global stage, so rushing into a free trade agreement is foolhardy, especially when Colombia already enjoyed low-tariff access to the US market for many products. Infrastructure is a particularly weak point that drags down every sector of the Colombian economy. The author summarizes that the free trade agreement is bad business for Colombia. He rips apart the Interior Minister's claim that "the best way to learn how to swim is to jump in the water," by comparing Colombia's situation to jumping into an empty pool from an Olympic-height diving platform.

Here is an article by Alejandro Reyes, expert in Colombia's land tenure issues. He identifies 5 rural issues as key to solving the country's internal conflict. They are:

insecurity in rural areas
concentration of land in few hands
informality of peasants' title to property
weak institutions and lack of government presence in rural areas
lack of rural development

Reyes claims that by addressing these five points Colombia can create a lasting return of land to its rightful peasant owners, and thus defuse the armed conflict. However, this essentially amounts to making a political decision to take land back from those who have illegally taken it. These people are well-armed and recalcitrant, so the measures Reyes recommends will not be easy.

A church to believe in

2011-10-30T07:38:00.000-07:00

Here is an article my cousin sent me recently, on a recent statement from the Vatican condemning the unregulated excesses of avarice in the current economic system. It is a heartening reminder of the Catholic Church's progressive social teaching, which calls for a preferential option for the poor. We need to hear more of this coherent, ethical thinking from churches and political leaders.

Oddly enough, the student demonstrators at my university, who are clamoring against a stupid neoliberal law that would privatize and profitize Colombia's public education system, recently desecrated a Catholic church on campus. They broke most of the windows and graffitied threatening anti-clerical messages all over the walls. While I'm not sure why we have a church on a public college campus, I was appalled at this crime, which would count as a hate crime in any nation with such a legal designation. It is especially idiotic in light of the above statement from the Vatican, and the recent history of the Church in Colombia, where it has been one of the country's most progressive voices in terms of our civil conflict and social injustice.

Food sovereignty project in Colombia

2011-10-26T20:04:00.000-07:00

Here is a cool video on food sovereignty in southwest Colombia, through the promotion of household food gardens as opposed to cash crop monocultures. We'd like to promote a similar vision with our Muisca garden project.

Food security in Colombia from IPS Inter Press Service on Vimeo.

Weakening of public education: the students strike back

2011-10-12T19:42:00.000-07:00

Over the past few weeks there has been much student foment in my little town. Students are rightly incensed at the new education law that is being proposed in Congress. As I'd reported in a prior post, the law proposes a number of things, some of which seem reasonable (like paying a portion of your post-graduation salary for a few years to fund public universities), but most of which amount to privatizing public education funds.

Anyway, a few weeks ago there was a big march to our town's center. I was initially very impressed with the student organizers. They held a rally on campus setting forth what they were protesting against and why, and maintained a peaceful order on their way out. There were no explosions or on-campus confrontations with police, unlike some past demonstrations. They even had some great music animating the whole affair.

However, my daily rounds brought me to the town center later that morning, where I quickly realized that the itchy sensation in my nose was a response to residual tear gas. It turns out the anti-riot squads in our city had dispersed the march with what many considered excessive force. I wasn't there at the moment the tear gas was fired, and by the time I arrived everything was calm except for all the coughing, red-eyed passers-by. Later in the morning there was another wave of protestors in the town square, and they seemed to be as peaceable as the group I saw leaving our school.

That said, in the second wave that I witnessed, as well as in the videos I later saw of the first wave (that eventually got tear-gassed), there were a handful of belligerent morons who, instead of participating at the center of the square, went to the far-away cordon of police and started berating them, yelling, looking for a fight.

It really pissed me off, because they detracted from what was a coherent, well-organized civic movement. Some people even allege that a murky "they" plants infiltrators in these marches to turn them violent. This might be, but I also have personally seen a number of kids who get caught up by emotion and self-aggrandizement, who see the protests as a chance to lash out and feel heroic. However, by indulging their own messiah complex these rabblerousers weaken the movement for a more just education system. The question I wish they'd ask themselves is, "Are you more interested in overturning an unjust law, or in being a hero on viral Facebook videos?"

Here's a video of a march on the same day in Bogota. The video is very stylized and really gets up your adrenaline.

I don't know if cops broke up the Bogota march that day, but the video doesn't show any violence. Something ugly that does come out clearly is the student demonstrators' scorn for the police. I understand that young people often have an innate rebellion against signs of authority like the police, and this is aggravated by a recent tragic incident in which cops shot and killed an unarmed 16-year-old in Bogota. But the spectacle is an ugly one, of flamboyantly-arrayed students heaping derision upon stoic cops that are required by their job to stay and bear it. Towards the end of the video the clown commentator is prompting a little girl to speak of her distrust for the cops and her desire to study so she won't be like them, "in uniform".

I have a number of problems with this. First off, the police aren't the only ones in uniform. The demonstrators, from the whimsically-costumed to the blase-chic fashion-conscious, are all wearing uniforms of their own. It's a mistake to think of the working-class cops as the unthinking slaves of their social context, while presuming that the students are liberated, free of internalized social constructs and ways of presenting themselves. Secondly, I cringe at the disrespect towards other human beings, reminiscent of a rampant trend of dehumanizing the "other" back home in the US. The police are people who've chosen to work defending the public interest, and while we can disagree on the different conceptions of the public interest, we should respect their work and their values. In the video, the police officers remain stolid and dignified, without brutality, while the demonstrators taunt and bully them. By taunting police officers that are obligated by their professional ethic not to react, the demonstrators are recreating, on the small, petty scale of the otherwise powerless, a dynamic of imposition and oppression. It's cowardly to torment someone who can't fight back. And when rogue officers do fight back, student society condemns them for it. Thirdly, the police force is a necessary part of a complex, modern society. They may do their job with more or less honesty or corruption, but I don't think anyone would want there to be no police, especially in a place with as much crime as Colombia. Again, I don't deny that in Colombia the police and the military have often been the perpetrators of crimes in addition to their preventers, but we need to recognize the value of the institution, just as we can value the idea of an elected Congress or a public education system, even if their present manifestation leaves much to be desired. By glossing over this fact, the demonstrators essentially enjoy the services that the police provide while refusing to work themselves as police or even to recognize the value of those services. It's an ugly attitude, marred by the classism and privileged entitlement that infest Colombian society, even among progressives who should know better.

One of my coworkers agreed with my reflections, but even his outlook reflected a certain sense of class superiority. He said that police officers hadn't been lucky enough to attend college, so it wasn't their fault that they were stuck in the job. I would applaud efforts to offer university education to more low-income people who join the police or armed forces, and in fact I think public university students shouldn't be exempt from the obligatory military service that everyone else has to do in Colombia. Right now you can get out of the service requirement by going to college and/or paying a legal fee to override your military obligation. I think that's elitist bullshit, and if more college students served in the public sector, and more police and soldiers went to college, we wouldn't have such horrid violence and misunderstanding between the two parties.

But my coworker's comment again betrays the idea that he and other college-educated people are free of extenuating social circumstances that direct their conduct, while those who go into the law and order sector are mere pawns to their economic fate. Such an attitude totally denies the possibility that people enter the military or the police out of personal conviction, a desire to serve, a sense of duty, a positive view of the institution. Likewise, the college student or graduate loses the opportunity to question his own beliefs, because he assumes that those opposed to him are unthinking automatons.

Just last week, the infamous education law was formally opened to debate in Congress. This has set off a whole new wave of student protests throughout the country. First at my university came a violent riot. I have seen a number of such riots in my years working at the university (mainly because the national government keeps trying to push assinine laws that undercut our public education system). They usually follow a pattern. A group of kids with hoods and masks starts launching home-made grenades near the entrance of the university campus. Anti-riot squads arrive, but they don't enter, because there's some law saying that police aren't supposed to enter university campuses. So there's a stylized ritual of rioters launching potent explosives and police standing by like idiots. Eventually the police get the go-ahead to enter the university, and start brutalizing masked students, who often seek refuge in classrooms and other school buildings. Tear gas flies, a few token arrests are made, and the campus ends up beat to shit, with lots of radical left-wing graffiti everywhere.

I don't have a high opinion of these riots. I think it's a way for violent kids who grew up on sugared cereals and MTV to validate their worst impulses with a pseudo-political discourse. It doesn't effect any positive change in national policy, and it does put lives at danger. My wife knew a kid who got his foot blown off at eight years of age because he was walking home from school near the university.

Anyway, the day of the riot I had gotten to work late and not particularly motivated. Finally I was getting into the swing of things when the explosions got more frequent, the tear gas started wafting by, and I had to leave the campus. It really pissed me off. There I was trying to do what I think is important work to improve life for the peasantry of our state, and a bunch of violent, stupid kids playing Rambo forced me to interrupt my work.

A few days later though, I saw a video of a kid arrested during the riot. He was sitting on the ground, sobbing pathetically in his handcuffs, saying things like, "They hit me a lot!" and, "They took my phone. I've got all my contacts in there!" I didn't feel the police had acted inappropriately. The kid didn't seem too roughed up, at least no more than what you'd reasonably expect if you were running around in disguise, launching heavy explosives at the police. What touched me was how silly and helpless he was. It reminded me that he was still a kid in many respects. My grand rational discourses debating the coherence or the justice of his political agenda assume that I'm dealing with fully-conscious adults. But the video shows a scared kid who got in deeper than he'd expected. He was some guy's son, more than a budding terrorist.

After that I adopted more of a zen-like attitude about the whole issue of riots, police, students, and the like. I can never outright approve of violence from anyone. But the political class is trying to rob the public, rob students, rob our schools, so maybe a little symbolic violence is called for. In any case, the rioters are not the same students setting up marches and discussions.

Today was a huge, coordinated nationwide student march against the law. I scolded some students that were painting the walls outside the museum I work at, and after an initial xenophobic discourse on their part questioning my right to be in their country, the students proved themselves to be really coherent, progressive, thoughtful people. Certainly compared with the hooded idiots who like to go out and blow shit up, these were responsible, respectful kids. Sure they were defacing public property, but to them the walls are a forum for public speech. I don't share this interpretation of public space, but I can accept a certain internal coherence to it.

Here's a video released by a student group from the University of Antioquia. It makes a compelling argument for a different, more human vision for education in Colombia.

There's only one problem. The video asks us to support the student movement, but how? I'd like to see more explicit instructions or advice on how we citizens can help. For example, an effective measure that we often use in the US is identifying your representatives in Congress and calling them to make your desire heard. No matter how corrupt or cynical or manipulative a politician is, if enough constituents were to call expressing their opposition to the proposed education law, the politician would have to think very hard before voting in favor of it.

It's not hard. I found a website with names of all our Senators and Congressman in Boyaca state. And an important university has a database with contact and other info for all Congresspeople. I was amazed that no student leaders I've talked to had considered pursuing efforts to educate non-students about the issue and have them call their elected representatives.

At the same time as these student demonstrations have been exploding across the country, the public worker unions have been marching against what they see as President Santos's reneging on certain campaign promises. I don't know what the exact issues are, but the president can't be feeling too in control of things right now.

Our student movement in Colombia also mirrors, on a smaller scale, what's been going on in Chile for months now. Students there have occupied schools, demanding changes to the neoliberal, highly-privatized education system. This student movement has also had waves of violence and nonviolence, but it seems to have galvanized an entire nation around the demand for a more responsive, responsible government.

All this of course coincides with the occupation of Wall Street, which unites similar demands for a government more responsive to the people than to private capital. Through it all , I find myself feeling as if I'm on the wrong side of history in two different countries! I read about the historical processes going on in New York, and wish I could contribute somehow. At the same time, I see the students mobilizing outside my work, but I'm too busy with a million other obligations to take part. Am I to be nothing more than a grumpy, apathetic mook bemoaning the student movement, like one of those complacent conservatives who watched the 1960s pass by in the US?

Furthermore, I don't even know how I might contribute to either movement. Perhaps when I get back from my vacation next week I'll try to get in touch with the student movement at my university. I think I might make a valuable contribution, as a somewhat conservative outsider who can point out the logical weaknesses of their arguments and demands, and thus strengthen their platform so they can reach and gain the sympathy of the non-radical, non-student masses of our town.

Pop culture reflections

2011-10-11T04:40:00.000-07:00

In my slow and somewhat pathetic efforts to learn Chinese, I've been trying to watch Chinese movies. Thus far I've only found Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, though my father-in-law also has another Ang Lee movie, Eat Drink Man Woman, which I believe is also in Mandarin. Anyway, last night I was goofing around on the internet, and I learned that Taiwan-born Ang Lee did his undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, my alma mater. So that made me proud. Another famous international alumni is Rafael Correa, Ecuador's president. He's known as a leftist, but his economic and social policies seem pretty well-thought and rational to me, as compared to Latin America's other prominent left-wing presidents, who are more interested in making a polemical show than making intelligent policy. Could his conservative temper be a product of his time at UIUC?

Recently on a bus to Bogota I saw Rush Hour, the 1998 "black people and Chinese people are different, hahaha" classic collaboration between Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. Pretty stupid, but I was thrilled that with my two words of spoken Chinese I was able to pick out that the Chinese language parts of the movie were in Mandarin, even though the characters were supposed to be from Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong. A bit of cinematographic laziness really made my day.

Lastly, in my infrequent television viewing with my wife, we sometimes see ads for a show called "Taboo". It's a production of the National Geographic channel, which is frankly quite sordid and tacky, a far cry from the magazine. The TV channel seems to focus on violence and sensationalism, with Maya prophecies, man-eating animals, and the like. Anyway, the Taboo show apparently focuses on other cultures that depart from Western standards about sex, food, etc. The show also looks at individuals who challenge the mores of their own cultures. However, this latter seems to consist mainly in people with profligate tattoos, obsessive piercing, or permanent body modifications like forking tongues or adding horns to their heads. These things don't seem very taboo to me, just innovative manifestations of the consumerism and neurosis that plague most everyone else in the West, too. Whether you've got to have the latest Louis Vuitton bag, or the newest iPhone, or a million piercings in your anus, you're just one more unhealthy consumer defining yourself by the stuff you obtain and not by the things you do or the thoughts you think or the beliefs you hold. And whenever I see the TV ad for the Latin American edition of the Taboo show, I must to myself that the only really taboo thing to do in our context would be to advocate coherently and forcefully for land reform or social justice. The oligarchs and paramilitaries couldn't give a damn if our continent's comfortable city dwellers tattoo their eyeballs or whatever--the real untouchable subject is creating a more just society for everyone. Do that and you'll be the most taboo, far-out cat around, not to mention having to fear for your life. Those who have followed this course of action have often been priests, not normally known for their radical social perspectives. They usually end up dead (Oscar Romero, Camilo Restrepo Torres, the priest who just got killed in Marmato) or exiled (Jean-Bertrand Aristide).

Measuring development impacts

2011-10-08T10:44:00.001-07:00

Here's a rather long but interesting presentation from a guy who works in lion conservation in Tanzania. Basically he and his colleagues realized at some point that nature conservation is very difficult if human poverty persists. So they proposed setting up a grid to follow human development indicators (education levels, childhood malnutrition, etc.) in 250 villages. They take baseline measurements in each village, and then repeat the same measurements every two years. They don't propose development projects themselves, but rather use their periodic measurements to assess the impacts of the different development projects that come and go in any given village.

I like this idea, because instead of starting yet another ambitious yet unproven development project, they are dedicated to measuring the efficacy of different approaches. Their biennial measurements serve as a standardized reference to compare any given development project. With time they will be able to indicate what approaches have been effective in improving human life, and which approaches are ineffective

It's not as glorious or heroic as Bono or Jeffrey Sachs declaring some huge, romantic, plan, but it's a lot more useful in the end.

Colombia rural: razones para la esperanza

2011-10-05T16:21:00.000-07:00

The UNDP recently released a report on rural Colombia. It has a lot of interesting findings (among them that Colombia's population is 31% rural as opposed to the accepted figure of 25%), and refocuses attention on the importance of supporting rural livelihoods to advance development and peace in Colombia. I've just read summaries, such as this one by the author of the report (Called "Colombia rural: razones para la esperanza"), but I look forward to reading the whole thing. Essentially it discusses a structural crisis in rural Colombia, based on inequality, lack of access to land, inefficient production systems, and isolation from the State and markets. These conditions fuel and are worsened by the armed conflict. The report advocates a Transformative Rural Reform that improves the profitability and lessens the environmental impact of farming, increases institutional presence and controls armed conflict, and most importantly that changes the unjust, inefficient structure of land ownership. Without such a reform, Colombia can never advance economically or socially.

A website for direct sale of meat, poultry, and cheese

2011-09-30T14:52:00.000-07:00

This is a cool website of a company based in Wisconsin that links consumers with producers of animal products. I'm happy it exists, proud it's from Wisconsin, and interested in participating someday when I'm living back in the US.

Homage to Wendell Berry

2011-09-29T08:11:00.000-07:00

This is an article by Michael Pollan paying homage to Wendell Berry. Since the 1960s and 70s, Berry has been insisting on the need for an agrarian ethic that links the way we eat to the way we farm to the way we live and die. Pollan rightly points to Berry as the spiritual father of those of us who have become concerned about food and farming in the past few years. And to think, if I found it difficult to be an advocate for sustainable food systems in the early 2000s, when our nation was more concerned with dot coms and terrorism than with the ecological and social ramifications of how we farm, or if I was often frustrated in 2005 when I was trying to run a community garden a year or two before the public at large knew or gave a damn about urban farming, how patient must Berry be to have been a voice in the wilderness for forty years before anyone paid much mind?

A return to our old model of farm price supports

2011-09-26T19:43:00.000-07:00

Here is the link to a new report by the National Farmers' Union outlining new policy directions for future farm bills. Essentially they call for the government to support and stabilize commodity prices, instead of paying farmers the difference between market price and fair price. This is something I've advocated in past posts; such a change in farm policy would stabilize price and supply of commodities for the US and for the rest of the world, which would be good for consumers and producers. Those who would suffer are the grain traders, who thrive on volatile prices, and the food processors that profit from artificially-low commodity prices. I wouldn't shed many tears for these last two groups.

Legacy of the Alliance for Progress

2011-09-26T19:34:00.000-07:00

Here is a quick article discussing the Alliance for Progress, a well-intentioned and initially effective US plan in the 1960s to invest in economic development in Latin America. The article laments the corruption of the plan in the 1960s that converted it from an ambitious Marshall Plan-type affair that left countries with political autonomy, into a tool to fight Communism in the hemisphere. The article rightly points out that nowadays much of the US diplomatic and development presence in Latin America is dedicated to ineffectual efforts in the War on Drugs (though it is incorrect to point to Plan Colombia as a current example, as it ended some years ago). I also like the shout-out to Bogota's Kennedy neighborhood, which was set up as a build-it-yourself neighborhood with infrastructure contributions from the US. As I understand, families were given parcels of land on a grid of streets and infrastructure, and each family built its own house with its own labor and resources. My wife's parents met there as children.

Blows against impunity

2011-09-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

Recently a major player in the administration of ex-president Alvaro Uribe was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Jorge Noguera, ex-head of the DAS (like Colombia's FBI), was convicted of working with illegal paramilitary groups and illegally wiretapping Colombian citizens (human rights advocates, union leaders, even judges). Noguera is only the latest in a growing chain of officials in the Uribe government who are being sent to prison. This is aside from a number of imprisoned paramilitary bosses who claim to have worked with Uribe in the past. Until now, Uribe has not been tried for anything, but the legal decisions are touching people closer and closer to the ex-president.

In similar news, here is an article about the legal basis for prosecuting Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials for crimes against humanity perpetrated in the course of the War on Terror.

Greg's Colombian house part 2

2011-09-23T09:52:00.000-07:00

Here is the long-awaited next installment of my guest post series on my buddy's blog, Nickhaus. In it, I write about the process of sealing the deal on the purchase of our new house in Colombia last year. If you missed the past installments, here's Nick's intro of me, and here's my first post on our getting the idea to buy the new house.

Eyes Wide Shut

2011-09-20T18:10:00.001-07:00

I just watched Kubrick's film, "Eyes Wide Shut". Of course the film bears Kubrick's crisp, hard-hitting visuals and cuts throughout. But what surprised me is that I actually liked it. I'd often considered Stanley Kubrick a sort of pedantic director, more interested in stunning cinematography and experimental, unorthodox storytelling than in interesting his audience. And the subject matter of "Eyes Wide Shut" is a bunch of malcontent rich New Yorkers, never a topic that grabs my attention. Indeed, I often found myself wondering as I watched the movie how much natural gas or heating oil the characters must be using to keep their apartments at comfortable temperatures in the middle of winter.

But between its scenes of satanic sex cult orgies and Tom Cruise's spending most of the movie with his signature look of confused intensity, like an Irish Setter that's just caught a whiff of pheasant, the movie did a good job of depicting some elements of real human relationships. Uncertainty, jealousy, boredom, love, lust, they are all shown as they happen in real life, not in some souped-up phony movie world. And the stumbling, deliberate dialogue (often augmented because the characters are under the influence of estupifacients, feels real and leaves the viewer impatiently waiting to see what the next word, the next phrase will be.

The movie ends with a sweet (if somewhat out of the blue and glib) affirmation of love, of marriage, of forgiveness and acceptance of certain frailties in those we love. And a recognition of the importance of lovemaking in the whole equation.

Article on economics and culture

2011-09-12T12:38:00.000-07:00

This is an article in Spanish calling for more consideration of culture and morality in our economic life. The author reminds us that, in addition to the mechanisms of a market economy, Adam Smith also wrote a book on the moral values necessary to create a decent life for everyone. Most interestingly, the article's author differentiates economically productive jobs from destructive, or perverse jobs. For instance, a hitman is paid to provide a service, but whatever wealth and wellbeing he (or his patron) acquires by killing another is always far less than the wealth and wellbeing lost by the victim and his or her family. Hence we see an example in which a job or an economic sector doesn't contribute to society's net wellbeing, but rather detracts from it.

Third World Green Daddy 23: National matters

2011-09-11T07:03:00.001-07:00

The past few weeks have brought me in very direct contact with both the difficulties and the little joys of a life and an identity forged between two nations.

Back around March, I had to run a number of errands relating to nationality, visas, migration, etc. Most importantly, I had to register my son Sam as a US citizen. He was born here in Colombia, which means he'll never be president of the US (though he can become Senator or President in Colombia, which seems like a more lucrative proposition anyway). But by dint of his father's being a US citizen, he has a right to citizenship too.

After some research on the US embassy website, I learned that I had to file for something called a Consular Report of Birth Abroad for Sam. This entailed my signing some formats, and somehow proving that I'd lived in the US for more than five years since the age of 14 or something. I could have proven this by showing my old passports, which would give an idea of when I was and wasn't in the US. I packed the passport I'd had since the age of 17, but the day of our appointment at the embassy, I couldn't find the damn thing! I searched and searched frantically, and cursed my forgetfulness. Well after our embassy visit, I discovered the passport just where I thought it had been. I guess in my frenetic search I'd overlooked it.

Aside from this passport, I'd brought to Bogota some old college transcripts and things like that, which allowed me to account for four years spent in the US in my adulthood. I hoped they wouldn't give me problems for that fifth year, but in any case I was prepared to present my heavy Chicago accent and knowledge of local Chicagoland television (ITT technical institute, Victory Auto Wreckers, Empire carpets) from the early 90s as proof that I'd endured a long childhood in the deep Midwest.

The procedure at the embassy was pretty pain-free. We presented all the forms we'd filled out, plus Sam's birth certificate, our marriage certificate, and a few other things. That was enough to get Sam's citizenship certificate, his US passport, and his social security card. They told me to come back in a week for the certificate and passport, and the SS card would arrive to my US address in the mail. We're still waiting for the Social Security card after 7 months, though by the time Sam's 60 the Republicans will most likely have tied the system to offtrack betting results or something, so it won't be worth much.

I was really happy to make Sam a US citizen. Despite the best efforts of our businesses and our politicians during these three decades of my life, there remain some things about the US that are worth believing in. It's my homeland, with a history filled with things to be proud of, and also plenty of shameful things that good people fought to change. In my handling of all the paperwork to make Sam a citizen, I recalled some people I'd met while I was living in Spain, people I'll refer to as the elite supernationals. These are that set of (often European) kids who've grown up between about a million nationalities. I grew up in a pretty well-educated, middle-class environs in Chicago, but before going to Madrid, I'd never met this type of person before. What's a typical supernational elite? Her dad is a Czech educated in Britain, her mom a Frenchwoman of Moroccan descent, the kid grew up in Marbella in Spain, while the parents shuttle between EU offices in Brussels. They speak a bunch of languages, know a lot of places, but don't feel profoundly tied to any one culture. Such people might even be hard-pressed to define what their culture is. They have a perfect US accent when they speak English, but don't get references to "What's Happening Now" or deep dish pizza. I don't want my son to be like that. I want him to know his two homelands, not just a standardized understanding of a regionless bourgeois construct of the US or Colombia, but specifically I want him to know, to be a part of the Midwestern US and Boyaca. I want him to know local cultural quirks, eat our food, pray our prayers, sing our songs, etc. Sam's not going to any private Alliance Francaise school or something to be around a bunch of other rootless, effete supernationals.

As part of my program to sufficiently Americanize Sam, I've been singing him lots of classic pop songs from my mother's time.

I grew up with Lollipop and Mr. Sandman from the Chordettes, who were a staple of my mother's youth and consequently of the rural Wisconsin bar we frequented when I was a kid. I've also recently learned the lyrics to My Prayer by the Ink Spots. In newer fare, I'm endeavoring to master the words to this modern country song by Josh Turner.

I was exposed to this song during a year of college in which my work at a grain elevator exposed me to lots of pop country music, and my living in Central Illinois afforded me plenty of opportunities to be around that scene if I so chose. I really love Turner's basso profundo, his earnest lyrics, and his acoustic instrumentation, which is surprisingly rare in most of the trite shit on country radio these days.

At the same time I was getting Sam's US nationality in order, I also had to renew my Colombian visa. Since I married Caro, I'd been on what's called a temporary spouse visa. It was valid for two years, so it was now time to renew it. Normally I'd renew it for another year, then I'd be eligible for what's called qualified residency. After being a qualified resident for a few years, you can apply for Colombian nationality. Initially I'd never considered becoming a Colombian national. What would the benefit be? Increased strip searches at the airport, more direct exposure to corrupt politicians and organized crime? But as I've come to love this new country, I've changed my position slightly. Indeed, if the US undergoes a few more hearty rounds of credit default scams and massive breakdowns in the political process, a US passport may be the one that draws suspicion and sideways glances at airports abroad.

Anyway, I had to renew my visa. Thanks to my having sired Sam, a Colombian national, I had the right to leapfrog directly to my qualified residency. I thought this was kind of cool. I had contributed one more (brilliant, beautiful) head to the strength of the Colombian nation, so I think it's right I should be recognized as more than just a transient passing through. But because in the next few years my wife and I are thinking of moving to the States for a while, I didn't start the qualified residency process. I understood (perhaps mistakenly) that my leaving Colombia for a few years would interrupt my residency period, so I figured it wasn't worth it to start the process.

As I flitted about Bogota making these diplomatic rounds, I felt really excited, special. For one, the visa office is located in one of the lovelier, more upscale neighborhoods of the city, and I was admittedly dazzled by the tree-lined streets, the sleek skyscrapers, the delicious restaurants. I often pooh-pooh these rich, pretentious, insulated neighborhoods, but they really are well-planned, nice places to live. I also combined my errands with a meeting at a potential employer's office, a national agrochemical company. In the end not much came of this meeting, but again, I felt like a bigshot to be meeting with a CEO. Now that I think of it, I don't believe I'd ever met a CEO before that!

But more importantly I was exhilarated by the assertion of these different parts of my identity. Proud to confer my US citizenship on my son, with plans of one day introducing him to my place of birth and showing him a place he'll always belong, by mere dint of who his father is. But I was also proud to be accepted and recognized in this other country I've decided to make my home.

Land reform not happening in Colombia

2011-09-08T10:26:00.000-07:00

Here is a disheartening article by an important progressive Colombian senator, detailing how, despite grand claims and much fanfare (and an admittedly ambitious and inspiring set of proposed laws), the current presidential administration in Colombia has actually done even less than its predecessors in terms of granting and titling land to small farmers. What a shame.

Priest murdered in Colombian gold-mining town

2011-09-07T21:05:00.000-07:00

A while ago I posted a video about gold mining in Colombia, and the video focused a fair amount on the town of Marmato, where a big mining company wanted to buy out all the artesanal miners and level the town by mountaintop removal mining. A few days ago, a priest from that town who'd been a vocal opponent of the big company's project was murdered. The mining company, Gran Colombia Gold, has spoken out against the murder, and presumably claims that it had nothing to do with the pressure the company had allegedly been putting on the priest.

"The war on Africa's family farmers"

2011-09-02T13:33:00.000-07:00

Here's an article from Joan Baxter on the mercantilized, foreign-run future that some large international development agencies and lots of corporations have in mind for Africa. Her writing is essentially a condemnation of the vision of the World Bank, AGRA, and the institutional and sovereign wealth fund investors that are increasingly interested in massive grabs for African land.

Baxter makes a point (though in language that could be misconstrued as overly romanticizing African peasant life, which is admittedly difficult and deprived of many material comforts) that I've often made--the autonomous family farming life is in almost all cases vastly superior for a farmer than the wage laborer's life. A farmer-landowner has control over his or her local resources, which include water, farmed food, gathered food, firewood, herbal medicines, etc. The economic value (not to mention the social safety net, cultural traditions, and ecology integrity) generated by a smallholder-owned hectare is usually much greater than that produced from a mechanized, industrially-farmed hectare.

If we take a hypothetical situation in which 1000 families are farming 1000 hectares, and a company buys or otherwise appropriates the land in order to establish a palm oil or rubber plantation, the total annual economic value generated by 1000 hectares of rubber can't compare to the value generated by 1000 small, diversified plots. On top of this, plantation agriculture is less intensive in labor than small family farms, so the new company will always employ fewer than the 1000 families that originally occupied the land. In this situation you'd be left with less total wealth generated from a given amount of land, less employment, and usually what little wealth that is generated by the plantation is spirited away to whatever far-off city the owner lives in (Lagos, Sao Paulo, Paris...)

Anyway, Baxter rightly points out, in her article and a comment afterwards, that many urban economists (and oligarchs, and whoever else wants to get people off of small farms) depict farming as hard, degrading work. It's certainly hard physically, though no more so than working in a factory, or hustling to shine shoes, or especially working as a laborer on an agricultural plantation. And farmwork is only degrading if the income generated by it is too low to carry on a dignified life. But in this case, the real solution would be to help farmers to do what they need to to increase their income, not to displace them from their land.

Many cynical interested parties, and even well-meaning intellectuals like Jeffrey Sachs in his book "The End of Poverty", pull this classic bait and switch. They present an image of backbreaking farm labor under a sweltering sun, which serves to justify some neoliberal agenda that would ostensibly get people away from this difficult work. However, they aren't presenting the image of a hard-luck farmer in order to genuinely improve life for him or her, but rather to disparage farming in general, and push another agenda. In Sachs's case the counterproposal is work in textile factories, which is certainly a different kind of work than farm labor. But in the case of land grabbers who would develop huge employee-staffed plantations, the bait and switch is obviously a cynical emotional manipulation. Their alternative, better life for the small farmer working hard in her field would be...working hard in the same field, but as a landless laborer!

Third World Green Daddy 22: Working Dad

2011-09-01T11:48:00.000-07:00

As soon as I got back from Haiti in late July, I had to start a new job. More than a year ago, my wife and I wrote a grant proposal for a project called the Muisca Garden project. With our town's archeological museum, we would study the crops used by the Muisca people who lived in our region before the Spanish, and try to promote these crops in the present day as a way of improving nutrition and income for our state. We had spent a lot of time and effort writing that proposal, and were amazed when, after much delay in the process, we were selected to be funded by Colombia's equivalent of the National Science Foundation! I would be the coordinator of the project's agricultural component, in which we would study ten ancient crops and promote them through demonstration plots and through controlled experiments with different varieties of one of those crops, achira.

Achira or sagu (Canna indica) is a tuber-forming plant, somewhat related to bananas. It is native to the middle to high Andes, where from the dawn of agriculture people have consumed it cooked or extracted its starch to make things like cakes and cookies. Today it is rarely cultivated in the Andes, and in fact its major uses are in Vietnam, where farmers extract the starch to make glass noodles, and in the flower gardens of Europe and the US, where achira hybrids give the showy flowers we know as Canna. The proposal of the Muisca Garden project is to experiment with different varieties of achira to evaluate things like yield, fiber content, starch, pest resistance, and whatever else farmers tell us is important for them.

Aside from my agronomic component, the Muisca Garden project has a social sciences aspect, and a forensic archeology aspect. The social sciences group will review original conquistador sources and more recent academic texts to better understand agriculture in general as a cultural process, and specifically Muisca agricultural practice. The biology and archeology teams will analyze phytoliths, microscopic silicon bodies that plants leave behind when they die. By analyzing these phytoliths in the plaque found on the teeth of Muisca mummies, we can better know what plants the Muiscas were eating.

In fact, I haven't yet started working much in earnest on this project. Another project came up that is more urgent, and I have been dedicated most of my time to being the field coordinator. This project is called the Four Provinces. Our museum was contracted by the state government to carry out inventories and registries of the archeological heritage sites in four towns of Boyaca. So every week we spend four or five days in one of these towns, doing fieldwork. The typical registry consists in taking GPS coordinates of each archeological site, filling out standard sheets about what the site consists of, its state of preservation, etc., taking professional photos of the sites, and marking each one with a standardized number. The novel aspect that we bring is to perform an agrarian diagnostic in the area surrounding the archeological sites. Through days of observation, interviews, and economic calculations, we come to understand how people are farming and what their income is like, which gives us guidelines as to the economic ability of local people to participate in preserving the archeological heritage sites.

Thus far we've done fieldwork in three of our four villages. In Ramiriqui, an important Muisca capital, we catalogued different rock paintings and massive carved monolithic columns, as well as a remote cave where the chief of Sogamoso used to come to sacrifice parrots, who would then take spoken messages to the gods.

Here is a monolithic column in a field:

And another one that's been "improved" by the construction of a hideous sculpture around it.

The sculpture gives the idea that the column was carved not by an advanced civilization of our Muisca ancestors, but rather by 9-foot-tall ogres.

Another column in Ramiriqui has been repurposed by a school to plant its flagpole. All things considered, it seems to me like a reverent modern-day use of the archeological patrimony.

The local culture in Ramiriqui is interesting. A favorite breakfast staple is goat's head soup, complete with a chunk of jaw to gnaw on.

In Mongua, a freezing, wet coal town, we marveled at lifelike statues in the village museum.

As well as some of the more realistic rock paintings I've seen in our region. Here's what seems to be a deerhunting party.

In Sachica we found hundreds of meters of natural cliffs with areas of dense rock paintings.

Each town has its own social dynamic, too. Part of Ramiriqui has an organized irrigation district, and the farmers there are generally wealthy (though dependent on lots of pesticides). The other part has no irrigation, and the people's poverty means they probably wouldn't be able to help much with protecting the painted stones. We recommend improvement of farm incomes and the establishment of a tourist circuit around the paintings. Mongua is a mining town, and as such has largely abandoned agriculture. We came to understand the economics of local artisan coal mines, and it seems that the biggest problem for the rock paintings of Mongua is that no one lives in the countryside anymore to protect them. On the other hand, the town's statues are held in a little museum that could stand a lot of improvement in its infrastructure and presentation. In Sachica there is a rock quarry that arrived maybe ten meters away from the painted cliff face before being shut down by the state environmental authorities. There is also a recent irrigation channel that has eroded the riverbank bordering the rock paintings. Here the channel has eroded away so much that they patched it with tubes strung through the air.

We've had lots of adventures in the process of our fieldwork. In Ramiriqui we slipped and slid down a muddy slope leading to the mouth of a cave. In Mongua we faced an impromptu lynch mob when we tried to take the glass covers off the museum cases in order to better photograph the statues. In Sachica we scrambled from rock to rock along the shore of a raging river, before finding a rickety bridge and solid ground. In particular, this last adventure was very stupid and pointless, and I was thankful no one got hurt. Here I am afterwards on the bridge we finally reached, giving a sheepish thumbs-up.

I've settled into a routine in these weeks. We usually work in the field from Wednesday to Sunday, then I go to Bogota to be with my family for a few days. The change is always drastic and difficult. I go from wide-ranging academic inquiry and freewheeling adventures in the outback, to the worries of city life, debts, bills, doctor appointments, household repairs. Then every time I have to leave Bogota I feel like I'm leaving real life and family love, for a monotone, solitary existence. Before I leave I hold Samuel and Caro a lot, and feel awful, like when a loved one dies or a girlfriend breaks up with you. Of course Sam doesn't understand that I'm leaving, and then when I finally return he takes a while to get used to me. After the initial shock though, I feel happy to set off on new adventures. Out there in the field, exploring ancient sites and present-day agricultural landscapes, I feel like Indiana Jones!

I'm getting used to this new routine. It's not ideal; I'd like to see my wife and child more than a few days a week. Once the Four Provinces project wraps up I'll have more flexibility and free time, and once Sam is a bit bigger I'll be able to take him home with me sometimes. For the present though, this is the life I have to get used to, my new life as a working Dad.

Agroindustry as entry point for big pharma

2011-08-29T18:48:00.000-07:00

This is a scary, well-reasoned article that argues that the biotech industry is not involved in agriculture as an end in itself, but rather as a jumping-off point to create private, propietary technological processes while aided by lots of public money. The end goal would be to create advanced biotech pharmaceutical innovations (organs for transplant, medical proteins, etc.) for the high-end medical consumermarket. Pursuing advances in a given field in order to realize high profits isn't bad in and of itself. But compromising and manipulating the agriculture upon which humanity's well-being depends in order to achieve private gain is a real sin.

Greg's Haitian Adventure 7: Loving and Leaving Haiti

2011-08-29T04:54:00.000-07:00

As my time in Haiti came to an end, I realized how much I love the country. This may not come as a surprise to the objective outside observer. I return time and again to Haiti, I keep up with its history and current events, I am constantly worrying about people there, I am an avid student of the country's culture. But in the day-to-day rush of working there for a month, being consumed and sometimes frustrated by the demands of my job, I hadn't simply laid back and enjoyed being there, at least not consciously.

My last weekend changed this. I began saying my farewells to different people I'd shared the past month with, and I closed up my professional commitments. I felt like I'd done my job well, which I think allowed me to relax and take in the surroundings a bit. And what surroundings! Here are some photos from the roof of my little dwelling. There were avocadoes and mangoes hanging tantalizingly, ready for the picking.

Even a few cacao pods.

I began reading about development issues in Haiti, no longer with my obsessive, grave quest for guidance and practical direction in my profession, but rather as an intrigued student of Haiti and the developing world, someone interested in learning and really understanding things. I was once again an enthusiast for the subject, and not just a cynical practitioner. I hadn't felt this way for years, I guess since I stopped merely reading about Third World development and started living it. I'm happy now to be living and working amidst the things that have always interested and concerned me, but it's also important to step back sometimes and recall the wonder of these things that matter to you, that fascinate you.

This last weekend also coincided with a big Vodou festival in Plaine du Nord, a town near Cap Haitien. It was the annual feast day of Saint James the Greater. This is the apostle James, one of the first selected by Jesus. As I understand it, after Christ's death and resurrection, James wandered the Roman Empire preaching, which is why he's often represented in icons as a wandering wayfarer, bearing a staff topped by a calabash gourd. Upon his death, the legend is that his remains were taken by a barbarian queen and floated in a stone boat to an unknown locale in Iberia. I don't know how much if any of this story is taken from the Acts of the Apostles. Anyway, James's burial site remained unknown for centuries, until one day in the Middle Ages a shepherd saw a star that led him through Spain, to a particular field, much as the three kings had been guided to Bethlehem. This field was James's burial site, and became a town called Santiago de Compostela, “Saint James of the field of the star”. To this day the city is one of the four holiest places in Catholicism (I believe the others are Jerusalem, Rome, and another town in northern Spain that I've been to but whose name I forget).

Anyway, Saint James is later said to have appeared in visions inspiring the Spanish to reconquer Iberia from the Moors. This is why this wandering, peaceful saint is also commonly represented as a late Medieval knight on horseback, trampling and spearing swarthy heathens underfoot.

It is this image that Haitians venerate in Plaine du Nord in late July. For you see, this is not only Saint James (Saint Jacques in French), but a representation of Ogun Feray, the Vodou spirit of war, of iron, of valor, of freedom from slavery.

It is the same Ogun as is (I believe) represented in this statue from Benin.

The translocation of Vodou spirits onto Catholic images is common. Slaves were forcibly converted to Catholicism, but they found a sort of loophole in which they could venerate their spirits while appearing to venerate Catholic saints. Thus the image of Saint Patrick with snakes at his feet is really Danbala, the spirit of snakes.

Different iterations of the Virgin Mary are really Ezili in her different manifestations of love, fertility, and rage. It is Saint Jacques/Ogun Feray that inspired and possessed Dessalines in the final throes against the French in 1803.

So the Vodou festival at the end of my Haiti sojourn gave me an opportunity to remember a bit of what I know about Vodou, and to explain it to my coworkers. Once again I was stepping away from the day-to-day of Haiti to recall the fascinating things about the culture, as seen by a student. When I commented this to my wife, she laughed and told me that when she first met me, one of her overriding impressions was that I was a lover of Haiti. She was happy I'd realized that once again.

The festival itself was bustling and chaotic. We got to the town early in the afternoon. Initially it seemed like a yearly village party anywhere else in the world.

Lots of music blaring from houses, cars, and stages, stalls selling food, drink, and trinkets, sweaty bodies packed together on streets and in arriving trucks and buses. At one point a dude was bothering some people in our group as we were drinking a beer. Some of the girls thought he was trying to push up on them or otherwise take advantage of them, so they stuck me on him. But the guy was just a drunk musician that wanted to talk, in that rambling, boring way universal to drunks. Sometimes the preconception that there's this insurmountable cultural gap between Haitians and foreigners prevents us from seeing the honest, innocent motivation behind certain acts. I politely humored him for a half hour until we left.

There was another shady guy who seemed to be following us the whole time. I don't know how he thought that a 6-foot-three guy wearing a bright yellow shirt might trail us unnoticed, but he kept following my group. As long as I was with everyone I didn't worry about them, but when I split off from the main group with a few others, I warned another tall, burly companion to keep an eye on the guy. Apparently the rest of my group indeed hadn't noticed the guy, height and yellow shirt and all!

This fellow never caused any problem, and very possibly had no ill designs on our group. Something I've found often in Haiti is that just as the basest, most cynical mentalities can find expression in acts of crime or cheating or dishonesty, sometimes Haitians are inexplicably generous and decent. Just like anywhere else, people in Haiti can be really nice or really mean, but the manifestations seem to me more extreme than I've seen elsewhere in the world. So it's perfectly plausible that Mr. Tall Yellow Shirt was concerned about the safety of a bunch of foreigners and wanted to tail us to protect us, or that he was interested in hearing our English, or some other innocent aim like that.

I was reminded of a story my boss Hector told me that explained how he fell in love with Haiti. He was in college and was finishing up perhaps his second visit to the country. He still hadn't mastered the language, and was tentative about whether he would become more involved in work in Haiti or not. During the final days of a month spent helping to fix up a hospital building (hanging doors, wiring electricity, etc.), he'd been really disillusioned when some young guys that had been working all month with his team stole a bunch of their equipment. How could they be so cold-hearted as to steal from people they'd shared laughter, work, and beers with? Around the same time, Hector had ordered a big traditional drum from a master artisan. He pressed on the artisan that his flight would leave Tuesday, so the drum had to be ready by Monday. But when Monday and then Tuesday rolled around, there was no drum in sight. As my friend was leaving for the airport, a few kids came running up and said the drum would be ready the next day. It would be too late, and Hector would simply lose the money he'd fronted for the drum. It was another disillusionment.

A few months later, back at college and probably glad to be shut of Haiti forever, Hector got a phone call from his mother in rural Virginia. She wanted to know if he'd ordered a drum, because there was a Haitian dude at her house with a drum for Hector. It turns out the artisan had brought the drum along on his first trip ever to the US. He was probably headed for New Jersey, but he'd carried the damn drum on the flight, and then all the way to Virginia. He'd not only not cheated Hector, he'd gone out of his way to give him this special, cumbersome drum. From then on Hector was hooked. The extremes of generosity and cruelty in Haiti, the vitality of day-to-day life as created by its people, make for an intensely-lived existence, a true sucking of life's marrow. Hector has lived in Haiti for almost six years now, a fifth of his life!

Anyway, back to the Vodou ceremony. If you look closely you start to see differences from any other village festival. Many of the vendors are selling perfume, rum, candles, prayer books. These are things you buy to then offer to a spirit. Many people are dressed in traditional dresses in bright red and blue, two important Vodou colors, especially for Ogun Feray.

Sprinkled throughout the town there are occasional altars covered in people and offerings.

And if you follow the river of people, you arrive to the Basilica.

Basically Plaine du Nord has a big mud pool under a painted ceiba tree.

Both are sacred, and as I understand people refer to them as the Basilica. I believe that if you make a request to Ogun at this mud pool, it will be granted, and the next year you have to go and make an offering of gratitude, either by throwing it into the pool or giving it to the musicians playing frenetically around the pool.

The more serious devotees bathe in this disgusting mix of mud, water, and surely a bit of feces, garbage, broken glass, etc.

There are a few guys that stand in the mud the whole time, attending to these bathers, giving them puffs of cigarettes or drags of liquor.

The whole theology of the thing is not entirely clear to me. In general, Vodou has no rigid orthodoxy. I have read a lot of books explaining the different spirits, their roles, their powers, their representations, their equivalent names in Kreyol, French, and original African names. But in my limited direct contact with the practice of Vodou, I am increasingly convinced that the neat categories and explanations I read in books are idealized academic systematizations. Day-to-day Vodou practice seems not to follow these rules and order. A colleague of mine had also read some about Vodou, and asked people questions along these explicit academic lines. She was universally met with vague responses that seemed to refute her premises. There is no Vodou Pope to say what is acceptable, what is orthodox or not. And I imagine that as more Haitians convert to Christian sects that are intolerant of Vodou, explicit theology becomes less important or known to many Haitians, but the belief in the raw power of Saint Jacques or Ezili or whoever remains. At any rate, I was not able to get much explanation of what was occurring in the festival, beyond the idea that you ask for something and it will be granted, after which you must offer a repayment of gratitude. The experience was nevertheless very moving and impressive. Here's a video I shot with my impressions that night.

Aside from the Vodou ceremony, I was to MC a traditional Vodou dance presentation at our residential compound in my last days in Haiti. The manager of the compound had started scheduling really fun events on the weekends, with barbecued burgers and Haitian food, and occasionally dance troupes. A few weeks before a twoubadou group had come.

They had an amazing musical ensemble, and great, raw dancing. Check out these clips from a dance in which one guy is inspired and possessed by the spirit, stumbling around drunkenly and infecting others, who begin dancing wildly too.

This was the group I was to MC for this time.

The week prior another group had come. They were more polished in some respects, with glossy outfits and an English-speaking troupe leader.

But their production didn't seem as spirited and authentic as the other group. One thing that was cool was that the troupe leader was really effeminate, like a Haitian Liberace.

I thought it was nice that someone like him could find a niche to work and flourish in in a society that isn't too flexible on gender identity. I had wondered in meetings with farmers if certain guys were gay, and if so, how it would be to be a gay Haitian farmer.

Anyway, the group I MCed for on my last weekend put on another excellent show. I was moved by the music, moved by the common Afro-descendent roots that run through all of our national cultures in the New World. I thought I would like my son to learn Afro-Colombian dances as a way of connecting to this part of his heritage. In Bogota and probably in Chicago there are cultural groups that teach kids traditional dances and put on occasional shows. Along with basketball, Chinese, and piano, I think I'll push my kid to learn traditional dances from different parts of the US and Colombia. Those will be the things I force on him and he'll thank me for later!

When the day came to leave Cap Haitien, I wasn't too sad or nostalgic. I'd had a good time, done good work, and bid my adieus, all the while rediscovering my love for Haiti. I took a few last photos of the educational farm I'd been working on, then headed out to the airport.

In fact, as I waited in the Okap airport to head to Port-au-Prince, I was just anxious to get back home to my wife and kid. I was not thrilled that I still had two days to go, in PAP and then Panama, before seeing my family.

My old buddy Darilus picked me up at the airport in Port-au-Prince. We drove in his taxi to his place. A few years ago I helped him to buy a pickup truck to serve as a taptap, Haiti's de facto public transport buses. After some initial mechanical problems, the business was going well, until the earthquake, when the truck got beat up pretty bad. Darilus spent months trying to keep it going, but the repairs ate up most of his profits. So he traded it in for a smaller car, a taxi that ran decently. Nevertheless, I was shocked to see how shoddy the taxi was, too. It had a broken windshield, a hotwired ignition, the engine was weak. He's hoping to save some money and get a newer model. I hope it's sooner rather than later.

We drove from the airport through Delmas. I didn't see much if any earthquake damage; we were on flat ground far from the epicenter. There were however sprawling displaced persons camps in most of the large open spaces around town. When we got to the historic Bel Air neighborhood, I started to see more and more fallen houses. By no means entire blocks, but occasional holes in the urban fabric, vacant lots piled with rubble. As we got farther into the center of town, there were more fallen houses, but still not the majority. It seems that construction was not as shoddy in Port-au-Prince as many would claim (especially concrete company-funded NGOs that want everyone to use their ready-mix or their equipment). Later that night I'd talk with a friend working in disaster prevention, who explained more to me about the nexus of soil type, slope, building foundations, construction technique, and location with respect to the Leogane epicenter. Most of the damage in PAP occurred in places like Martissant, which combined conditions of lots of poorly-built houses on steep, denuded slopes, with proximity to the epicenter. So the story is a bit more nuanced than “Haitians construct poorly”. As we advanced up the mountainside to Petionville later on, I saw huge slums perched precariously on steep slopes, where there was no visible earthquake damage. My friend explained that much of that area is solid limestone bedrock, so somehow the vibrations of the earthquake were dampened or something. But Petionville, relatively untouched this time, is on a major fault line, so they may be next up for a big tragedy.

As Darilus and I drove through the true center of town, near the Champ Mars, I marveled at my intrepid youth. Almost ten years ago I walked this whole area frequently, going from the center of town to my host's place in Canape Vert (which suffered widespread earthquake damage). I don't think I took inordinate risks or anything, but I walked long, grueling treks around Port-au-Prince, navigated successfully areas that are now forgotten and foreign to me. They zoomed by now in the car, but I thought of what a haul it would be on foot. I was happy to be in the car this time. Have I become soft and lazy?

I also marveled at the Champ Mars itself. Most of the surrounding buildings were in fine shape, but I saw firsthand the now-famous image of the National Palace collapsed in on itself. Also, much of the erstwhile park was now a massive refugee camp. The National Museum did maintain its modernist subterranean construction and landscaped gardens, but everywhere else was tarps and tents.

Eventually we got to Darilus's place. It's in a glum, ugly building in an undamaged part of Carrefour Feuilles. His room is reached at the end of a long, narrow, dark hall. There isn't much in the way of locks anywhere—I think everyone knows everyone in the neighborhood, and keeps an eye out for robbery. My friend's room itself is really nicely-appointed. He has a stereo system, a fridge, a TV, a comfy bed, a clean carpet, a fan.

Almost round-the-clock electricity, a pleasant interior temperature. I've always considered Port-au-Prince harsh and ugly and exhausting, especially compared to the idyllic countryside, and certainly no one would consider it the lap of luxury to live in a single small room. But after seeing Darilus's room, I better understand the pull of the capital. My friend has been able to work, to study, to live more or less comfortably with constant power and water. None of this would be possible in his rural home area, such as it is now. Of course he still returns there weekly, and in fact the owner of the building he lives in is from the town. So there's still a strong tie to the countryside, but I can see how Darilus and thousands of others like him come to PAP to form a burgeoning prole-working-class, with a humble but steadily-rising quality of life. It all reminds me of the massive urbanization Dickens described in his day, surely with a lot of desperation, but also with a definite, visible trend to upward mobility, at least for the lucky ones.

After seeing my buddy's place, we continued on to a dinner date in Petionville. Petionville has always been the reserve of Haiti's wealthy, but in the past it had always seemed like a still relatively crappy, rundown place to me. The restaurants weren't good, the hotels mediocre, and everything shut down early at night, making for sad walks down streets of endless high walls. This time though it was more bustling than I remembered, looking more like a trendy or artsy neighborhood of a Colombian city like Cali. Still not too luxurious, but more or less recognizable for a bourgeois urbanite from anywhere else in the world, especially the developing tropical world.

However, my friend Susan's place, where we were to dine that night, was still beyond Petionville, on the road to Kenscoff, with its cool mountain clime. The ride there looked a lot more like ultra-exclusive European housing developments. High walls, modern apartment towers, lots of stone paving and verdant hedges. I began to understand what people meant when they talked about the wealth of Petionville. I also marveled that so many expats should live high up here but work below in the city. It had taken us more than an hour to get here. I couldn't imagine it at rush hour!

Finally we got to my friend's place. It was a lovely, well-constructed apartment building. Susan's apartment was the most luxurious, huge, well-built dwelling I'd ever seen in Haiti. It contrasted starkly with where I'd been staying in Okap, which despite belonging to a wealthy family, was rundown, poorly-built, poorly maintained. Susan's place had high quality floor tile evenly laid, carefully-designed kitchen and bathrooms with functioning hot and cold water, the works. It looked like a modern, big apartment anywhere else in the world. There was even AC, though it was never necessary, because the cooler mountain clime, the abundant surrounding vegetation, and the smart design of the building made for a comfortable temperature at all times.

My friend Darilus was to dine with us there, but he was worried about the logistics of getting back home, so he left early. That left Susan, her husband, and me to talk about the old days. They had met each other, and I them, years ago in the village of Fondwa. They were both volunteers, he with a decidedly more agrarian bent to his work, and they fell in love. To this day, I believe their main language of communication is Kreyol, since neither is as fluent in the native tongue of the other.

Anyway, I reviewed what they'd been through in the past nine years. We'd kept up sporadic contact, and even seen each other in Chicago in 2005, but I wanted to catch up and get the full story of what they'd been up to since our shared pastoral in Haiti in 2002. I learned about Susan's return to the US and months of aimless drifting, unsure of what to pursue after her intense living and loving in Haiti. She eventually studied a masters degree and went to work for a few years in a big NGO in Washington. Before my present visit she'd just gotten back from a stint working in Afghanistan, a high-stress environment she describes as toxic for the unhealthy, self-destructive practices and bad behavior taken up by many expat aid workers there.

Susan's husband, on the other hand, had accompanied her in the US while she studied. He worked in a few small agricultural enterprises during those years, which I really admire, because I as a US citizen agronomist was never able to find gainful employment in agriculture that didn't involve working for input supplier oligopolies or output purchaser oligopolies. Susan's husband then studied a masters degree in his native Europe, seeing as I later did that a career in ag development would be impossible without a higher degree. After that he worked for NGOs in DC alongside Susan, and branched out of agriculture into other sectors. Finally his work brought him back to Haiti, and now that Susan had returned from Afghanistan, they could be together again for the first time in a long time!

I really admire them. Obviously for their personal qualities, which drew me to them in the first place, but now I'm also in awe at the important positions they hold at important development NGOs. While I'm happy in my career track as something of a freelance development agronomist, and I don't think I'd like being involved in a long-term position with a big NGO (though I would like the money and stability!), I aspire to the standard my friends have set. They're all groweds up and sophisticated. They've studied hard and now have high-level posts, decent pay, fascinating lives. They are able to work for organizations that sometimes display flawed priorities or frustrating bureaucracy, but they've maintained their commitment to the poor and the marginalized. Susan and her husband are progressive, passionate voices that surely improve the organizations they work for. Meanwhile, they read my silly rambling on this blog and think I'm much more principled than I really am!

Catching up with my old friends made me reflect on my life of the last nine years, since I first went to Haiti. That was a third of a lifetime ago! I've gone through a lot since then. By the end of that first visit to Haiti in 2002, after my sophomore year of university, I was disillusioned with the country, disillusioned that the rural poor and the Third World in general didn't conform to the noble, idealized image I'd created from books and such. I returned to the States in that summer of 2002, after a stopover in Paris to visit a girlfriend that was no longer very interested in me. It was too late to reenter school for that semester—I'd planned on spending six months in Haiti, but my frustration and an ailing uncle back home cut my trip to two months. So I spent the semester in Chicago, weekly visiting Beloit to care for my uncle, working nights at a sleazy porn theater, rehabbing my mother's kitchen, accompanied by radio rumblings of impending war with Iraq. In early 2003 I returned to college in Urbana, living in a tent in a friend's uninsulated attic. I led a tour to Haiti over spring break, and spent the semester working for the U of I chemistry department, which eliminated my tuition obligations and gave me some spending money.

My senior year of school I reunited with the Paris girlfriend, and had a pleasant last year. The summer of 2004 I studied sustainable farming in North Carolina, then went on a study trip of corporate agriculture in Brazil. After that I worked a lonely October shoveling grain at a Champaign grain elevator, then returned to my parents' house and worked at a bar. 2005 was spent mainly in Altgeld Gardens, the Chicago housing project where I ran a community gardening program, but that ended abruptly amid allegations of corruption and internecine strife. By that point I'd been out of college for a year and a half, and felt like I'd never find an agricultural development job without a masters degree. But finding the right degree would take time, during which in any case I'd have to work some dead-end job. So I decided to work my unavoidable dead-end job in Spain as I searched for a good postgraduate program. At least that way I'd be able to learn a new language, experience a new culture. So from late 2005 to the middle of 2006 I worked teaching English in Spain, and I got pretty good at Spanish. I also found and was accepted to a good masters program called Agris Mundus, which conformed precisely to my aspirations of learning about the social angle of farming systems.

The middle of 2006 was wild and carefree. I'd broken up with the Paris girlfriend during a trip to Morocco we'd designated for that purpose. The trip was filled with medieval cities, mosques, French colonial chic, and lots of shouting matches. I spent the summer back in Chicago, working again at my old bar haunts. This time was full of parties and a happiness that I was going on to study what I loved. I think it was much like the moment of life in which many of my current Haiti expat colleagues find themselves. They've been out of college for a few years, and are finding a place for themselves between youngster fun and meaningful work. In August of 2006, I headed off to Europe to start my masters degree.

Agris Mundus started off with an orientation in Montpellier, France, after which I had a month free before starting classes in Madrid. I went on a train trip around Germany, to the lesser-visited corners. It was a cold, melancholy September, with few fellow tourists about. In general a time for learning about history (I visited the towns of Marx, of Charlemagne, of the 1848 revolts, of the popular movement of 1989), and being alone. After that I started a fun year in Madrid of studying abstruse concepts, partying a fair amount, and eventually meeting my future wife. From there she and I went on to spend a sweltering summer in Montpellier, brushing up on our French, staying at farms, hiking through beautiful Mediterranean villages, and getting ready for the upcoming school year.

France was challenging for me. I loved what we were learning, and I loved many things about Montpellier's food, daily life, its culture. But being a foreigner in France, especially a foreigner like me, is not easy. We were constantly met with intolerance of our way of doing things, and I spent the better part of most days in a frothing fury over rude treatment, inefficient systems, and suffocating bureaucracy. Summer of 2008 was spent doing thesis work, I in Benin in Africa, and Caro in Laos studying opium eradication. We were happily reunited in Paris after four months apart, and I got to see my first-ever Indiana Jones film in a theater! The next two months were spent assembling theses that got hammered by our jury, and we were thrilled to get out of France with degree in hand!

Since late 2008 we've been in Colombia. I spent some months in Chicago to be with my father in his last days, and then I was back to Colombia to get married and establish a new life. I spent 2009 trying to make ends meet by organizing tours to Colombia, and my wife and I started a jam business, which we've since put on the backburner but which we aspire to revive very soon. In general I was often frustrated that despite what I considered to be a good knowledge base and lots of ability, I was not able to find steady gainful employment. Most of 2010 I spent as a house husband. I kept things clean, made meals, and started my blog in my free time. I also frequently accompanied my wife in her work in the Tenza Valley, but I also started to get jobs here and there, and to feel fulfilled professionally. I eventually got to the point I'm at now, where I am happy with and even prefer being a self-employed freelancer in the field of agricultural development. 2010 also saw us buying and starting to rehab a house of our own. And of course the defining event of the year was Caro's pregnancy and the birth in December of our wonderful son.

I recounted all this to my hosts in Petionville, and felt good to review all the different experiences, people, and places I'd been through in the past decade. Much of my own account of my recent life transpired during dinner (a delicious pasta with white wine sauce), after which I also did a fair share of showing Susan and her husband photos of my son. That night I had my first hot shower in a long time, which was so uncomfortable that I switched to cold water, and then I slept immediately and soundly.

The next morning I had the house to myself, and hours to kill until my afternoon flight to Panama. I felt like doing something leisurely, different from my routine of the last month, so I decided to watch a movie on my hosts' TV/DVD setup. Susan's husband has a lot of good movies, particularly documentaries on topics of development, poverty, and the like. But I wanted something less serious, less real. So I plugged in a French action flick called “Secret Agents”.

Secret Agents is a pretty cool movie. It's typical action, espionage, slick takes and not much character development. But there's a European flair, a sophistication you don't see in US action flicks. For instance, the entire action-packed opening sequence, perhaps some ten minutes, has no dialogue. There are a bunch of dudes chasing this other guy, but we don't know who anyone is, why they're doing what they're doing, nothing. It can appeal to a wide audience, regardless of language. From there on the action continues for two hours, with parachute drops, high-speed chases, underwater operations, undercover burglaries. Allegiances change, things are not as they seem. I was surprised not to understand a lot of the French. I guess it's been a while since I've been exposed to the language spoken in rapid fire. But I still understood what the film was about. Also very European was the star, Vincent Cassell, a funny-looking, elfish guy who would never be a star in the US, and his wife, the sensuous older Monica Bellucci, who also wouldn't be cast as a hot spy vixen in the US.

After my movie it was time to meet up again with Darilus and his cousin for a lunch at the Hotel Kinam, an elegant place in Petionville. It is a really classy hotel in an old gingerbread building. I had conch in tomato sauce, a typical Haitian dish. The bill was steep, but I wanted to treat my buddy to a nice meal as a thank-you for all his help getting around and established in Haiti.

From there we went to the airport again. It is striking in Petionville to see high-end hotels and restaurants looking onto what used to be landscaped plazas that are now converted into packed refugee camps. An extreme and jarring example of the injustices still present in Haiti.

Back in the airport, I was stricken once more by impatience. That night I'd have a layover in Panama City, which meant yet another day away from home, away from my family. At the same time, it also offered a brief chance to discover a new country and culture.

Third World Green Daddy 21: Magic Formula

2011-08-28T08:36:00.000-07:00

A few months ago Sam had a big development in his eating habits. He'd always been a voracious eater, and in fact he'd already started eating things other than breastmilk. But one day we were returning from a long trip somewhere or other, and his appetite simply exceeded his mother's milk supply at that moment. My wife Caro had been working long, hectic hours, traveling a lot in the closing months of the ecotourism project she was coordinating in the Valle de Tenza region.

It seems that that particular day her personal stress and Sam's massive appetite met head-on. The baby wanted more milk than Caro could give, and became furious with hunger. He started hollering and screaming like a madman, and at that moment we took a strategic decision we'd been mulling over as a possibility for some time. As soon as we got back to our hometown, we stopped at a pharmacy and got some infant formula for the baby.

We had thought before that if Caro's milk supply or her schedule ever impinged on her ability to feed Sam exclusively breastmilk, we could buy formula as a complement to, if not a total replacement for, mother's milk. It isn't an ideal solution, because the limits of the unknown in nutritional science (as in any science) mean that no matter how much they fine-tune infant formula to approximate human milk, it will never be as good. There will always be minor compounds in mother's milk that elude our best efforts to replicate it exactly, so it will always be better to go with mother's milk.

Until that moment, Caro's and my work schedule had allowed us to keep Sam on pure breastmilk. For almost three months our health plan had given my wife paid leave, so she could be at home and relax with the baby (though she still ended up having to do a lot of work from home during this time). After her leave was up, Caro worked days at our local university, expressing her milk in the morning and evening with our nifty electrical breast pump, which provided enough bottles to feed the baby between the times she was home. Caro returned to the house for lunch, and could always come home from her work nearby if there was any need. Even when she had to go to spend a few days in the field, her work environment was flexible enough that Sam and I could accompany her, and thus she could keep him fed even during important meetings. But the day of our long trip, Sam's pressing hunger forced our hand, and we started a new era of infant formula. It will surely not be the last synthetic invention we introduce Sam to. My apologies to Nicholas Kristof, who admonishes us Third World types to stick exclusively to breast milk.

Even after the fateful day (during which my mom happened to be present, and was I think surprised at our resorting to formula given our generally pro-natural stance on childrearing), Sam continued to eat mainly breastmilk. As before, when Caro felt her milk supply getting low, I'd prepare lots of hot panela (molasses) water with milk and fennel, which is a common Colombian remedy for increasing breastmilk. Only rarely would we (or the babysitter, whom I'll talk about in another post) open the metal tin to spoon out four dollops of sticky powder to mix with four ounces of boiled water. The infant formula thus represented a valuable insurance policy, a rarely-used backup option that nevertheless gave us the peace of mind of knowing that Sam would never go hungry.

Formula was not without its drawbacks. We noticed that it seemed to constipate Sam, or otherwise give him digestive problems. If we gave him formula right before bedtime, he'd spend much of the night grunting and straining to poop or fart or something. Again, despite the best efforts of nutritional science, it seems that synthetic infant milk just isn't the same as human breastmilk. It also seemed as if certain brands of formula were less digestible than others, and like a little dog changing brands of kibble, Sammy got gassy and irritable when we couldn't find our typical brand (Wyeth S-26, I believe) at the pharmacy and had to buy another.

Recently my wife has moved to Bogota for a few months as she works in a short-term gig at the UN. This move has entailed a lot of stress for everyone, as Caro and I had to move out of our hometown apartment, divide our stuff between the house rehab in our hometown, my in-laws' house where I'm staying these days, Caro's sister's house in Bogota, and finally the new apartment. Caro had to find a Bogota school to accept my daughter-in-law for the last four months of high school, all while working a more typical 9-5 job far from the house. Amid all this, tragedy struck with the illness and eventual death of a close family member. Caro spent over a week running to and from the hospital, hardly sleeping.

All these factors conspired to drastically lower my wife's milk supply. All the fennel and molasses in the world can't make up for a sever lack of sleep and monumental amounts of stress. This leads to a vicious cycle, as Sam gets frustrated at not getting milk from the breast, and either loses interest, which frustrates Caro, or wakes up hungry and screaming at night, which exhausts Caro. His nascent teeth also at times lower his desire for breastmilk, and he prefers to drink from a bottle.

For the weeks since then, Sam has been mainly dependent on his formula for his sustenance, increasingly complemented by real food. I'm not talking furtive spoonfuls of strained, boiled guava mash. Sam eats half plates-full of paella, lentils, yogurt, crackers, whole fruits, potatoes, water, even olives in vinegar! When he does eat guava now, we spoon the flesh directly out of the fruit and give it to him, seeds and all.

Another drawback that's come up now with the formula is the cost. For a month's supply of Sam's heavy consumption, we're spending upwards of $30US. It may not seem like a lot, but we sure notice it on our tight budget.

Recently though, breastmilk has been making a comeback. I have undertaken a revitalization campaign for Caro's milk supply. Those of you who know me personally can imagine how intense and annoyingly single-minded I am about this. I have been plying Caro with fennel-molasses-milk, and enforcing a two-to-three-times-daily pumping routine, even when Caro's long work hours make her tired and unenthusiastic about the Milk Augmentation Campaign, as I call it in my more Maoist moments. It's also important for Sam to try to breastfeed, even when not much milk comes out, because it stimulates the glands to produce more. My implementing the campaign is made the more difficult by the fact that I am only in Bogota with Caro and Sam some two or three days a week. The rest of the time I am in far-flung rural villages in Boyaca, working on two big projects. I'll write more about this new professional situation in a future post.

Despite my being far away, Caro humors my obsession by heeding my phone requests for frequent breast feeding and pumping. It seems the campaign is working. Caro's milk supply is steadily increasing, and Sam is slowly consuming more milk and less formula. A recent doctor visit confirmed our belief that it's important to keep giving Sam breastmilk, even if in small doses. We're hoping we can continue breastfeeding until a year of age or so, when Caro and probably Sam will be happy to be done with this phase of their lives. Even in her moments of low milk supply, Caro was able to maintain the closeness and shared warmth with Sam through things like holding him close at bedtime as he fell asleep. At this point she doesn't feel as if breastfeeding is the only path to that emotive bond, and by the time Sam's a year old, it won't be that important nutritionally, either. We have friends here in Colombia whose work schedules have permitted them to continue breastfeeding to two years of age and beyond, and in some cases it frankly gets a bit pathological, like a reluctance to let the kid advance to the next stage of life.

Whatever our personal preferences in the matter, I don't see Sam breastfeeding beyond this first year. As the title of this blog series indicates, sometimes our green childrearing aspirations must give way to the Third World reality of our having to work long hours in multiple jobs to make ends meet. We always try to navigate these two poles as best we can, and I think that's what makes our life interesting and worthwhile.

Food reserves

2011-08-22T12:11:00.001-07:00

This is a well-researched article by Sophia Murphy about food reserves. She touches on the history of food reserves, different reasons for them and models to implement them, and their potential use in a future of volatile prices. I learned a lot reading this.

Articles on agroecology

2011-08-22T11:42:00.000-07:00

I recently linked to a Journal of Peasant Studies article by Miguel Altieri and Victor Toledo about a rising agroecological revolution in Latin America. I wanted to give another special shout-out to this paper, because it critiques the vision of sustainable or fair-trade agriculture that hinges on exporting luxury products. Here's a direct quote: "Niche (organic and/or fair trade) markets for the rich in the North exhibit the same problems of any agro-export scheme that does not prioritize food sovereignty (defined here as the right of people to produce, distribute and consume healthy food in and near their territory in an ecologically sustainable manner), often perpetuating dependence and at times hunger."

I had criticized Altieri in a past post precisely for what I felt was his advocacy of keeping Third World peasants poor but ecologically friendly, and providing environmentally-friendly luxury goods like chocolate and coffee for rich-world consumers. I still feel that the article of his I was referring to when I made this critique does tend towards this vision, especially in its concluding paragraphs, but I respect Altieri more intellectually after having read the new article in the Journal of Peasant Studies.

In this post I also want to link to two older papers I'm currently reading by Frederick Buttel and A. Wezel et al. reviewing different conceptions of agroecology. Buttel touches especially on agroecology in the US and land-grant universities, while Wezel et al. have a broader historical and geographical focus.

Prescriptions for a difficult future

2011-08-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

Here is a harsh assessment by JH Kunstler of the US's current economic and political juncture. But beyond the cynicism he offers some hopeful guidelines for a future economy: revitalized agriculture and small local industry. He rightly asserts that the future economy cannot be based on marketing, video games, outsourcing, golf courses, or any of the things that have defined our pseudo-economy for some years now.

A take on the England riots

2011-08-16T12:09:00.000-07:00

I don't know much about the recent rioting in London and elsewhere in the UK, and I certainly don't pretend to understand it. Here though is the take of a writer from the Nation, who feels the rioting in England (and elsewhere in Europe) is linked to the increasing inequality and political rape of the people by elites.

Economic lessons from China for Africa

2011-08-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

This is a brief opinion piece by Calestous Juma, a sometimes-cheerleader of Chinese incursion in Africa. He argues that China's rapid economic growth and improvement in quality of life offers lessons for African countries, even as China now tries to make land and resource deals with these countries. Something Juma doesn't mention (neither do others who look to developed European, American, or Asian economies as an example for development of Africa) is that China and all other countries that are prosperous today developed without much development aid or outside investment. There were no land grabs by outside countries in late-20th-century China, few outside investors coming in (at least not during the first stages of China's upward swoop), no humanitarian sector trying to shape China's government and economy. In fact, the early 20th century in which there was a lot of outside influence in the Chinese economy was one of the darker, more backwards moments in the country's history.

Furthermore, since the middle of the century, China has been such a powerful player in world politics that it can operate with relative autonomy regarding trade, social, and monetary policies. None of these factors are true of African countries today. So I don't see how China, or France, or the US, or Japan, or any other country that developed relatively autonomously can offer many lessons to Africa, especially if these countries are now intervening (interfering?) in Africa's development in a way they themselves were never touched during their own historical drive to prosperity.

Saying China's search for resources and markets is a way of helping Africa sounds a lot like France's claims that its colonial experiments were a civilizing force for the continent. I don't mean to make a strict comparison of Chinese economic expansion abroad to colonialism, because this would be facile and not very accurate. But let's not pretend that China's pursuit of its own self-interest is some sort of enlightening force in Africa.

Third World Green Daddy Part 20: The diaper issue

2011-08-07T11:07:00.001-07:00

My boy is seven and a half months old now, and he's starting to shit like a big boy. On his pot (after much dramatic grunting and farting to tell us when he's ready), solid, once a day. This is to say that he's on his way to not using diapers anymore, which makes me think it's finally time for me to finish up and post a blog on Sam's diapers.

A few months before Sam was born, I started worrying about the diaper issue. My wife Caro and I didn't want the cost, and especially the environmental damage of disposable diapers. We couldn't fathom buying an expensive pack of diapers every week, and contributing day by day, diaper by diaper, to filling up landfills with a toxic, non-decomposing mix of plastic, paper, and poop.

Surprisingly (or not), there is actually a lot of discussion on the Internet regarding disposable diapers. Those in favor cite their convenience. The arguments of the cloth-diaper crowd are summarized by Autumn Beck, who runs the All About Cloth Diapering blog. She cites three reasons for using cloth diapers as opposed to disposables: health, environment, and cost. She also gives a primer on the different cloth diapering systems.

The issue of toxicity is important to consider with any product your children are exposed to. Much has been made of the potentially toxic effects of sodium polyacrylate, the drying agent used in disposable diapers. There are those who say it is highly toxic, and those who shrug off such concerns. If we look at the material safety data sheet (sort of a summary of risks) for sodium polyacrylate, we see that it's a skin irritant, but doesn't seem to be highly toxic. However, the MSDS for the acrylic acid from which sodium polyacrylate is synthesized (and which we can assume will remain unreacted at low levels in a typical batch of sodium polyacrylate) indicates that it is an acute irritant, and there are reasons to believe that long-term exposure (like having it next to your baby's crotch for a year or so) can have nasty effects. Beyond this, the bleaching and other industrial processes for making disposable diapers can leave traces of dioxin, one of the most toxic substances known to man. While you're probably not going to notice any major, immediate harm to your child by using disposable diapers, I'd go for avoiding needless exposure to these chemicals if you can.

Anyway, I think that the most common reason people in the US use cloth diapers might be this health issue. We tend to have an individualistic, consumerist mentality, whereby what hurts us or ours is more important than what hurts others or the collective. My wife and I tend to value the collective pretty highly though, so for us the most important factor in favor of cloth diapers is environmental. Disposable diapers are a mix of different materials (mainly wood cellulose, plastic, and chemical absorbents) that use a lot of resources (water, petroleum, land, fertilizer) to produce. The individual components of a diaper wouldn't present much of a disposal problem, but when you mix paper, plastic, reactive chemicals, and piss and shit, the end product is impossible to biodegrade, recycle, or even incinerate. This means that the diaper your kid uses for a few hours will last hundreds or thousands of years in a landfill or the ocean. In our small town, with poorly-designed open pit landfills, the disposal issue is especially troubling, because pathogens would leach out of our kid's shit into the local waterways every time it rains.

The last issue is cost. This one is sort of a wash, because cloth diapers cost a lot up-front (at least if you're using the pre-tailored ones instead of square cloths that you fold into a plastic outer liner). Also, cloth diapers must be washed and dried, which adds to your weekly laundry time, and uses water and electricity. However, in the long-run cloth diapers are a sight cheaper than disposables. Once you've bought them, you don't need to make store trips or pay weekly for diapers. In our case, we spent a little under a thousand dollars for a whole bunch of diapers, and haven't invested anything since other than time, soap, and water, all of which are cheap. At an average clip of $15US a week for disposable diapers, after a year and a half we'd break even with the initial cloth investment, and from then on disposables would be the pricier choice. It seems that our Sam is on track to stop using diapers pretty early, so the disposable route might have been cheaper in his case, but we'll still have his old cloth diapers for any future kids.

I recognize that something like disposable diapers have their reason for existing. For many people, a diaper that you can quickly put on your kid, then take off and throw away when it's soiled, is a big convenience. Disposable diapers obviously have their drawbacks in that they use a lot of resources to produce and don't biodegrade, as well as costing more cash money than cloth diapers. Like many manufactured products, I'd say that disposable diapers are good for people who work long hours outside the home and/or don't feel too bad about creating a lot of solid landfill waste.

Often green parents are seen as somehow elitist. Of course it's easy to caricature the seemingly boundless worries of someone who's conscious of the ecological and health effects of many aspects of modern society. But green parents don't seem so ridiculous if we consider their conduct as an outgrowth of concern for their wellbeing and that of their children. Yes, everyone in the world today is probably exposed to toxic substances, and most people's existence entails some damage to the environment. But then doesn't it make sense for us to try as much as possible to reduce our exposure to harmful substances and situations, as well as reducing our destruction of the environment that sustains us?

With that philosophical context out of the way, I'll describe the logistics of our using cloth diapers. I must admit that for the first few weeks of Sam's life we used disposables, because he was so tiny we didn't know if the cloth ones would fit him. But since then it's been basically all cloth, all the time.

Here's a sampling of the different styles of diaper we bought, front and back.

From left to right we've got: Babyland cheap-ass diapers with a polyester insert, bought new on eBay from a manufacturer in Singapore. They're cheap, lightweight, and work pretty well (though after a while they build up some sort of residue that you have to rinse the hell out of with vinegar to get them absorbent again). Next is the BumGenius Flip diaper, a plastic outer cover with a thick, ultra-absorbent synthetic insert. I bought this new at an online store, as I also bought the Bumgenius organic cotton all-in-one diaper, pictured below.
Bumgenius seems to be the Porsche of cloth diapers. They're pricey, but they work well and come in nice colors.

To the right of the Flip is a wool outer cover,

with a normal cloth diaper like the ones my mother used when I was a baby (of which we still have three that my son now uses!). The modern twist is the Snappi fastener, a little rubber strip with plastic hooks that obviates the need for safety pins.

To the right of that is another Bumgenius offering I got on clearance from their online store. Here is a photo of all those diapers stuffed with their liners and seen from inside:

Note also the plastic diaper cover under the diapered stuffed animal.

Below are two photos of another brand called Kushies. I also got these on eBay, not used but not new. Those of you who know me well won't be surprised to learn that it was my first time using eBay. I actually got pretty into the whole thing, bidding on the diapers, waiting to see if I was outbid, calculating what price I could go up to and still get a better deal than buying them new. The Kushies inner towels are cotton, with an unattractive outer plastic layer. The cotton makes them very absorbent (also slow to dry after a wash), and they come in sizes. This is a disadvantage compared to other diapers that are adjustable as your child grows, but on the other hand the Kushies still fit Sam well, while many of the supposedly one-size-fits-all diapers are now getting small for him.

Above are two photos of different diapers, liners, and cloths hanging out to dry behind our house. When we first got the diapers (and before our son was born) I washed them a number of times with and without soap and hot water. The idea of this is to break down the fibers a bit (especially with cotton, which has natural water-repelling oils) so they'll be more absorbent. My son was born during our area's dry season, so it was easy for me to do so many washes and dries in short order. Most of our clothes we hang in an indoor patio, where they dry in a day, but the heft of the diapers demands more drying. This is why we usually hang diapers outside to dry in the wind and sun, the latter of which also totally removes shit stains. When I first started reading about cloth diapers, I assumed they would always retain some brown stains. I mean, when you're young and you occasionally have poop smears in your undies, they never come out. I was skeptical when cloth diaper enthusiasts insisted otherwise. But I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the washer followed by the sun really does get out all the stains!

What about washing Sam after waste processes? We usually just wash his ass off in the sink when he poops. This is tricky in Bogota, where the water is ice-cold, but he doesn't seem to mind. When we are traveling we pack some store-bought handy-wipes, and sometimes even disposable diapers, but we rarely use either. In fact, if we need a handy-wipe in the house, we've come up with an innovative Third World Green solution:

These are scraps cut from old shirts of mine.

When my undershirts get embarassingly ripped and worn and holey, I do a little show where I hum "Thus Spake Zarathustra" and rip my shirt apart at the climax. From there it's just a bit of handy scissors-work until we've got a nice supply of handy-wipes. Wet with water and use.

Okay, the 500 lb. gorilla in the room is "How do you deal with the diapers? Is it really disgusting?" Not really. Basically we have a pile of clean diapers. When Sam soils his diaper, we take it off, rinse his butt, and change him to a new one. We take the dirty diaper to a plastic bucket and throw it in there (removing the inner towel if necessary).

Handling this dirty diaper is no more or less disgusting than dealing with a soiled disposable. We keep filling that (sealed) plastic bucket for two-four days, depending on how our clean diaper supply is looking. When it's full and we need to do a wash, we dump the contents of the bucket into the wash machine, fill it with water and non-chlorine bleach, and let the diapers soak overnight. The next morning we drain the water and do a regular wash with cold water. The diapers come out nice and clean, and any that still have shit stains we hang in the sun, which bleaches them in a matter of hours.

So there's the poop on cloth diapers. As I said, I've been meaning to post this since December, but never got around to it until now. I guess I just felt strangled by the pressure of writing a comprehensive bit about cloth diapers.

Ode to Bogota

2011-08-07T09:08:00.000-07:00

I have written often and forcefully about my dislike of many things about Bogota. It is crowded, polluted, pretentious. But since I've gotten back from my Haiti trip two weeks ago, I've had to spend a lot of time in Bogota as my wife gets set up in a temporary job here, and I must begrudgingly acknowledge that the city is growing on me. Its bustle, its industry, and frankly its architectural beauty can't be denied, and these are the things that make for a great city.

I have realized that Bogota belongs to the ranks of the great grey cities of the world. The most typical examples are Madrid and Buenos Aires, and of course Paris, which all grey cities are trying to imitate. My definition of a great grey city is very particular, and perhaps not very coherent. Basically I use the term to refer to those elegant, tragically beautiful Latinate cities that are filled with lots of early-20th century architecture. Of course Berlin, Chicago, and most other major European and US cities of the industrial age are known for their early-20th century architecture, Beaux Arts and Deco styles, wide boulevards, etc. And most such cities are suitably grey and overcast to create an elegantly sad ambiance. But I think the Romance culture is a key part of my definition of a great grey city. Paris is dramatically Romance, in its language, its chic style, the physical beauty and blase ennui of its people. And it is grey, from the limestone buildings to the steely Seine to the misty, cool, cloudy air.

Actually, Madrid is one of the sunniest cities in the world, but I still consider it a great grey city for its beautiful-yet-cold boulevards and early-20th century buildings, and the Clasically tragic existential malaise of its people. Buenos Aires has its sunny moments too, and gets hotter than hell in the summer (like Madrid), but the beautiful, neurotic Latin people combine with the Paris-style buildings and boulevards to add it to the ranks of the great and the grey.

In its own way, Bogota outdoes them all for greatness and greyness. It is literally cool and grey all year round in terms of weather, the people are bustling, discontent, professional, elegant, bored, rude. The proletariat is grey too, not grey like sleek wool suits and tailored skirts, but simple and frank and industrious, like the Madrid cafeteria class. There are deep green parks, wide boulevards (often with an Andean creek running down the center), and lots of architecture from the early 20th century. Often these buildings tend more towards English imitations, steep-roofed Georgian manor houses crammed into dense city blocks, but the end effect is similar to Paris's mix of Gothic and Nouveau. Furthermore, Bogota feels more authentic and gritty than Paris or Madrid or even Buenos Aires. There is no feigned decadence here; that dilapidated mansion with the roof caving in and dogs and hobos living behind the boarded-up windows is for real, not some iconoclastic decorating job by bohemian bourgeois artists from the Marais.

Of course not all of Bogota is grey early-1900s. Just like the other great grey cities, our capital has old colonial areas of low whitewashed adobe houses, high-rise financial districts of glass and steel, and huge swathes of mid-late-20th-century functional brick apartment towers and single-family rowhouses. Much of the city's residential periphery reminds one of the newer parts of European cities--boring but dense, well-designed mass-produced neighborhoods.

So that's my reluctant ode to Bogota. It is elegant and cold seen from afar, but its neighborhoods pulse with children playing in streets and parks, bums recycling, dogs being walked (or running wild), and nondescript bars at most corners, where local people create their own scene with no other aspiration than to enjoy one another's company. Those who want fun tropical chaos should look to Cali or Medellin for their kicks, the respective Seville and Barcelona to Bogota's Madrid. But for a world-class city of cool Euro-style culture and big decisions made behind reflective glass, Bogota is the place to be in Colombia.

Via Campesina at the World Food Security Committee

2011-08-06T07:30:00.000-07:00

I recently learned that farmer and civil society organizations like the Via Campesina now have a structured participation in the FAO's food security committee. This is a good thing, because they add nuance to the viewpoints of governments, industry, and international organizations. Anyway, here's a statement that Via Campesina contributed to the process of defining guidelines for responsible use of land and natural resources. They understandably stress the primordial importance of peasant farming for feeding the world today and tomorrow, which implies that corporate landgrabbing is not good for peasant or the rest of us, and that countries must work for agrarian reform to help strengthen the capacities of the peasantry to feed the world.

Article on foodie nostalgia

2011-08-04T14:31:00.000-07:00

This is an article by Brent Cunningham entitled "Pastoral Romance", discussing the tinge of foggy nostalgia that imbues much discourse about food system reform in the US. Its central point is that we need to engage more realistically with the food practices of our past in order to appreciate what should or can change about the present food system. This is fair, but much of the argument relies on casting all "foodies" as hyper-bourgeois coastal types, and painting the hard labor of farming as something universally despised by real farmers. None of this jibes well with my Midwestern upbringing, which involved a diet dominated by delicious, unpretentious homemade meals prepared by my mother, who worked at a far-away professional job 50-60 hours a week.

Cunningham's argument also doesn't jibe with the fact that most farmers get out of farming not because of the aversion to hard work that the author details, but because they are forced out by economic hardship. My great uncle is a typical case; he worked most of his life as an agricultural engineer, but for retirement returned to the farm he grew up on. He is not a foodie, or effete, or bourgeois, or even particularly socially progressive. He farms wheat and milo maize and sorghum sudangrass and raises beef cattle in West Texas. He got out of farming because it wasn't profitable enough, but now that his livelihood doesn't depend on it, he's returned out of love for the agrarian life, 12-hour workdays included.

In my life as an agronomist and sometimes-agricultural-laborer, I've constantly run into people who are trying to stay in farming because they love it so much, even though economic reality conspires to force them out. I've seen this in Illinois's corn country, dairy operations in Wisconsin, and farms small and large in poorer tropical countries. Even in Haiti, where farming is about as hard as it gets, surveys have indicated that many of the urban unemployed would love to farm if they could make a decent living at it.

I particularly disagree with the author's generally negative characterization of farming. Sure, there are plenty of people who find physical labor unpleasant. In fact, it often seems like much of the US fits this description. Much of the US also is overweight, unemployed, and addicted to various chemical substances. Just as no one is trumpeting the common-sense wisdom displayed by these other self-destructive practices, an aversion to hard work (which perhaps underlies our current fat, broke, dope fiend predicament) is something to be condemned and remedied, not something to be used as from-the-horse's-mouth evidence that the current food system is somehow on the right track. Perhaps the author is correct that many ex-farmers got out because they "wanted things to be easier". But now we're at a point where things are so much "easier" that people have nothing to do but watch TV and bemoan their empty lives. So maybe hard work has something meaningful, even ennobling about it, despite the griping of people culturally conditioned to despise work.

Another error is the author's assertion that "America will not revert to a nation of family farms". In fact, most US farms are still family farms. They may measure upwards of 1000 acres, but the labor comes from the immediate family. I'm not talking about small organic hobby farms, but big, industrial grain and livestock operations.

This continued prevalence of family farms also gives the lie to Cunningham's claim that most agricultural production is and has always been based on exploitation of others. Today as in the past, most US farms don't hire labor, and the only people being exploited are the farmers themselves, who have been sold out by the USDA ever since 1986, when it switched its focus from stabilizing commodity production and price to driving production up and prices down in order to benefit food processors and speculators. Yes, places like Florida or California rely on lots of (underpaid) outside labor, but most of the US's farmland is taken up not by fruit groves or vegetable farms but rather by wheat, soy, corn, and rangeland.

To summarize, I can appreciate Cunningham's desire for less bourgeois silliness and more historical understanding in the movement to change our food system. Likewise, the author is correct that there can and must be a happy coexistence possible between natural and industrial food, between meals from scratch and eating out, between rural life and hip urban foody-ism. But there is no doubt that our food system must change if we are to resolve our nation's health problems, social disintegration, economic woes, and oppressive labor practices. No amount of glib, work-averse grandmothers can paper over the fundamental need for change in how we produce and consume our food.

Colombia-US free trade agreement

2011-08-03T07:38:00.000-07:00

Here is a thoughtful article from the IATP about the US-Colombia free trade agreement, and its inherent problems.

Gold mining in Colombia

2011-07-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

This is a well-investigated report by Al Jazeera on gold mining in Colombia.

Greg's Haitian adventure part 6: Markets and Mass

2011-07-27T14:40:00.000-07:00

One of my routines during my time in Haiti was going to the market every Saturday with my coworker, Eyleen. We would stock up on the week's produce for our collective living quarters. I enjoyed seeing all the great fruits and vegetables at the market--it reminded me of the fresh market back home in Colombia.

As with the market in Port-au-Prince, Cap Haitien's market is housed in a large structure of red iron grillwork, I-beam columns, and red zinc roofs.

Also like the PAP market, Cap Haitien's market spills out from the central building and occupies the surrounding streets. There are whole sections of streets dedicated to dry goods, salt fish, fruits, root vegetables, roasted cashews, etc.

As in my hometown in Colombia, fresh goods are sold by lot, as opposed to weight. The vendors have their goods grouped into fours or fives, and they give you a price for the lot.

For things like pineapples, you buy by the individual fruit, after looking it over (the yellow passionfruit in the background is grouped by lot).

Usually the price for foreigners starts too high, so my colleague always had to haggle it down. Finally you hand over the money, and the transaction is done (the basket in the photo is filled with raw cashews).

We would always leave the market bearing multiple sacks loaded with fruits and veggies.

We'd also go to the nearby grocery store afterwards to get imported packaged stuff.

One Saturday early in my stay we also went to the tourist market. It was very different from Port-au-Prince's tourist market, which is based in the same building as the produce market, and specializes mainly in intricate authentic Vodou stuff. Okap's tourist market is in a separate location from the main market, on the waterfront. My colleagues had said it was depressingly abandoned, and vendors were overbearing, but I didn't find that to be the case. Apparently, until the fall of Duvalier in 1986, large cruise ships stopped weekly at the tourist market to buy crafts and souvenirs. No more. Anyway, I got a bunch of stuff there.

A dress for my wife, which I later realized was sort of big and formless. Maybe with a ribbon at the waist it'll look nice.

This is a map of Haiti and a globe of the world. My friend actually got it later in PAP, but I'll include it here.

The following is perhaps the most interesting gift I found. I asked the vendor if it was Legba, the spirit of the crossroads. He said yes, which doesn't actually mean much, since Haitians trying to sell things will say yes to just about anything a foreigner asks.

What's under that barrel?

Is that... Let's see the profile.

Boing!

We also got some dolls of women dressed in ceremonial regalia.

Hand-embroidered napkins.

A few rattles.

A wooden duck for my mother.

Haitian honey.

And a cream liquor drink, like a hazelnut Bailey's.

Later on, my friend gave me a jar of home-grown coffee, roasted at his family's farm.

As you can see, Haiti has a lot to offer in terms of artisanry and crafts.

So Saturdays were usually spent at the market. Sundays I went to 7am Mass. It was always a beautiful, stirring service, clocking in at the two hours or so typical of Haitian Masses. A friend of mine marveled that anywhere you go in the world, regardless of language or culture, Mass is always from 30 minutes to an hour. But in Haiti (and in Benin), the service lasts about double that. It's mainly due to the heavy dose of singing. Most of the major prayers (the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo, the Sanctus, etc.) are sung, not just spoken. This adds five to ten minutes for each prayer, so it's easy to see how the Mass gets stretched out. These songs are not just any songs, either. In the church I went to, which was linked to a Salesian mission, there was a full band, with African drum, modern drum battery, trumpet, keyboard, electric guitar, and bass guitar, in addition to a well-trained choir. The one time I went that they didn't have a full band, they still had an expert drummer on the big traditional drum, who was able to coax out sounds from that drum that ranged from sharp pops to deep thumps to a whistling sound, like when you blow on a bottle.

I got the impression that the congregation of that church was more or less middle class. Some families drove to Mass, and people seemed literate, bilingual, and nonplussed at seeing a foreigner. In fact, one time the priest was a white guy, Italian judging by his accent. The congregation did a few typical things I've seen at other Haitian Catholic churches. Many people brought their own Bibles, and before the readings the reader would give a little mini-homily and make a big point of announcing the chapters of the reading so everyone could follow along in their Bibles. In fact, one time the priest finished Mass with an exhortation to respect the core content of the Catholic rite, to refrain from too many innovations. I assume this refers to the mini-homilies delivered by laypeople before Mass and before each reading, and probably other tendencies I didn't even pick up on. I bet this reminder from the priest was meant to maintain the distinction between Haiti's native Catholicism and the Protestant denominations that have been expanding over the past few decades.

I want to talk a bit more about this influx of Protestantism to Haiti (and much of what I have to say applies to the rest of Latin America). It distresses me, because it implies drastic changes in (and loss of) local culture, which has a strong Catholic basis. Furthermore, Protestant evangelizing in Catholic countries represents to me a profound lack of respect. If Catholic missionaries arrived en masse to Alabama or eastern Texas to try to turn Evangelicals from the errors of their ways, local people would rightly tell them to buzz off. If the point of evangelizing is to bring people to Christ, then that means you don't need to go to places that are already Christian! To do otherwise is to imply that some denominations of Christianity aren't really Christian, which is especially incoherent if the denomination in question has been pondering and purifying the concept of Christianity for fifteen hundred more years than the evangelizing newcomers.

But beyond theological disputes, which are ultimately fruitless and acrimonious, I am distressed that the Protestant influx in places like Haiti and Colombia often bring ugly cultural traits along with it, traits that theoretically have nothing to do with one faith or another, and that should in fact be purged from the lives of any Christian. I'm talking about materialism, consumerism, shallowness of thought. To me it seems that the way many new denominations have "marketed" themselves to Latin Americans is by associating themselves with economic progress, modernity, Western-style suburban consumer culture. The new churches aren't just importing Baptist ideas, or Pentecostal practice, or Adventist interpretations--they're importing 20th-century postmodern US culture. It's as if converts are buying a new consumer product, whose shiny novelty will supplant the boring old cultural and faith traditions that have sustained local people for generations. A number of people even asked me during my stay in Haiti if I'd been "converted yet", as if it were the new thing to do, like upgrading your Kindle. Everybody's doing it! Well as my mother says in the face of frustration with the Catholic Church, "I'm leaving the dance with the same date I came with". Furthermore, from at least the time of St. Augustine, the great thinkers have understood that conversion isn't a one-time, fickle change. It's a lifelong process of growth and contemplation, regardless of what faith you practice.

Granted, I can't take blame away from the Catholic Church in Haiti for not working more to maintain the faithful. Many villages in Haiti have a Catholic church, an Adventist one, a Baptist one, and a number of other innovative denominations. That is to say that the Catholicism that supposedly represents 70% of the populace is no more present on the ground than other churches. It wouldn't of course make sense for the Catholics to put more than one church in a given parish, but still, I'm sure they could provide more services, providing for both spiritual and material needs. Maybe the Church just took for granted that all Haitians were de facto Catholics, and so it didn't take measures to hold onto them.

At the same time, the Catholic Church is indeed very present in terms of major infrastructure in Haiti. More of the big clinics, orphanages, schools, and other projects associated with wellbeing and development are run by the Catholic Church than by other churches. The Adventists do have an admirable development agency that is a world leader in on-the-ground, effective development work, but most other denominations stick to preaching and making noise. For instance, there is a church just above where I was living that blasted out wailing and hollering and growling and singing and crying over a speaker system, for most of every day. I always asked myself if those people didn't have to make a living, and more importantly, if all their racket was about Christ, or more about themselves.

Sometimes I think that the problem is precisely that the Catholic Church in Haiti has focused more on providing for the poor and helping the needy, as opposed to hollering and drawing attention and cache. Aside from the Catholic church in the plaza of every town, the most visible presence of the Church is in the clinics and schools it runs. If that's the case, I guess I'd rather the Church stick to what it's doing, helping the least among us instead of just trying to "grow the organization".

Plastic bottle construction

2011-07-26T10:12:00.000-07:00

My cousin recently sent me this page on constructing with soil-filled plastic bottles. I had seen similar things before based on stuffing plastic bottles with plastic garbage, but it seemed excessively labor-intensive to me. This soil-filling idea could solve that if one had an organized system for funneling sand or dirt into bottles, but if you're doing that and mortaring them together, why not just form adobe blocks or cob walls, which save you the effort of filling bottles? Either way, it's an interesting aesthetic, and a good way to divert some flow of plastic to our landfills, incinerators, and oceans.

The middle class in different countries

2011-07-24T08:26:00.000-07:00

This is a fascinating series of three articles from the World Policy Journal, looking at middle-class life in Liberia, Indonesia, and the Netherlands. The dynamic economic and social changes going on in the developing world really interest me, especially since my wife and I now form part of the broadly-defined group of middle-class people in developing countries, muddling forward between bourgeois consumption patterns and a humble, subsistence lifestyle, between prestigious international jobs and self-started cottage industries. That said, it distresses me that the conception of the middle class found in these articles, and in the general perception of the public writ large, has an exclusively urban, professional slant. Obviously a good deal of the growth in the middle class can and will come from urban professionals, but there's more to the story than that.

I have met rural farmers and entrepreneurs in places like Colombia, Benin, and Haiti who are employing successful strategies to improve their family's economic security and comfort, which in turn allows them to send their children to school, buy more consumer goods, employ more people, etc. As is the case in the World Policy Journal's Liberia profile, these farmers in mud houses without electricity may not hew to our conception of the middle class. But it is precisely such farmers that have been the vanguard in the increased prosperity of every nation that we consider developed today. In the US, France, Japan, and now China, the rural majority begins to innovate and generally increase productivity, and it is this that allows for a diversification of the economy into industry and services, as well as providing a raised rural standard of living that conforms to our Western conceptions of middle classdom. In the majority-rural countries that still comprise most of our world's population, we ignore this ascendant rural bourgeoisie at our own peril, as it is upon them that the general development of these countries will depend. Furthermore, in a future of widespread resource scarcity, we will no longer have the abundant petroleum that enables the current extent of megacities and huge professional service sectors. Even more than is already the case, the world's collective economic fate will hinge on the state of agriculture and our rural masses.