Some straight talk on Libya

This article from the excellent Mantle blog refers to something I've long been thinking about the Libyan conflict. Essentially, it seems not to be the story of a ruthless dictator slaughtering innocent civilians, but rather of a heavily-armed insurgent uprising that has been met with force by the national government it seeks to overthrow. You may love or hate Qaddafi, and even wish he weren't in power, but it is always unwise to support a bunch of mujihadeen-esque rebels as "freedom fighters".

Sundry disillusions

There has been a big stir recently among the Chicago progressive Catholic community (all six of us) regarding Father Michael Pfleger. Pfleger is (was?) the parish priest of St. Sabina's on the mid-South Side of Chicago. For 30 years he's pastored this parish and been at the forefront of progressive causes affecting our city's and our country's black community, especially gun control in our inner cities. Often he's butted heads with the Archdiocese for things like adopting children or being too outspoken on political issues. This time might be the big one though.

The problem essentially stems from issues of church hierarchy and rules. In the Chicago Archdiocese, no priest is supposed to serve more than six years as pastor of a parish. This can be extended for another six year term, and then I believe two years after that, but then time's up, and it's time for the priest to move on to another parish. I don't know the original motivation for this rule, but it seems a sensible one to me. Catholics are supposed to follow the teachings of the Church above all, not to be devoted to whoever happens to be their parish priest. On the other hand, I know from the parishes I've been a part of that one gets attached to the parish priest, and effectively the priest serves as the most practical daily manifestation of the Church in the lives of parishioners. While theologically this personal link or preference for a given priest shouldn't be the determining factor in one's religious life, it is understandable, probably preferable, that this is how it works on the ground. Parish priests are important.

Anyway, Pfleger has served for 30 years as pastor of St. Sabina's, and the Cardinal wants to move him from there. Again, it doesn't sound like that bad of an idea. From the little I know about Sabina's and Pfleger, sometimes it seems like he's got a bit of a personality cult going on. But Pfleger claims that Cardinal George mainly wants to get him out of his politically-active role in the parish, and stow him away at an all-boys high school nearby. Pfleger is not trained to run a high school, and he feels that it would be more appropriate for that all-black school to have a black principal for the first time in its history. Most importantly for me is that Pfleger says George and the Archdiocese have never consulted with him about training and preparing a successor as pastor at St. Sabina's. If this is true, then Pfleger has a real point that the Archdiocese seems not to be playing fair. It wouldn't then be a simple case of, "The rules say there's a 14-year limit, and Pfleger's way beyond that," as George claims, but indeed an attempt to railroad Pfleger, and perhaps the faith community that he has been an important part of building.

Things really came to a head after an interview a few weeks ago with Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West, in which Pfleger claimed that if the Church moves him from St. Sabina's, he'll leave the Church. Cardinal George responded with a letter arguing that if Pfleger really feels that way, then he's already left the Church, because part of his vows is respect for Church hierarchy and orders. I think this is fair. A Catholic priest's vows do indeed have a big focus on obedience, and if Pfleger wasn't ready to assume this, he shouldn't have become a priest, or shouldn't continue to be one. Pfleger is currently suspended from pastoring, and St. Sabina's parishioners are up in arms.

The whole thing makes me really sad. Pfleger is one of the main (only) voices in Chicago's Catholic Church speaking out and living the principles of the social Gospel. While other priests go through a typical rotation of bland homilies about things like how society is de-Christianizing Christmas or granting too many human rights to gays, Pfleger is a thorn in the side of a complacent, violent, immoral world. I believe this is what Christianity is supposed to be about--challenging the status quo, insisting on respect for and solidarity with our suffering neighbors, carrying on Christ's radical defiance of the selfish, the wealthy, the powerful, the oppressor. At the same time, if Pfleger leaves the Church, he will weaken and discredit his parish and the Archdiocese.

Another issue that came up in the Pfleger interview with West and Smiley is their general disillusionment with president Obama. Here are three of the foremost voices in black progressive politics and thinking, three former Obama supporters, and all of them are totally disappointed with him as a president. They feel he's sold out his principles. I have to agree for the most part, and it makes me really sad.

This brings me to another issue relating to Obama that just disgusts me. When the White House put up the long-form Hawaiian birth certificate online, I thought it was stupid. Why would the White House pander to or try to curry the favor of the halfwits and cynics who are clamoring about Obama's not being born in the US? These are people who are obviously not won over by reason or facts or anything real, and will not be won over now that the birth certificate is online. Presumably the so-called "birthers" have an axe to grind with Obama, because he's a Democrat, or because he is (was?) a progressive, or because he's an uppity Negro, or because he's got an Arabic name. They're not worth talking to or talking about, and it's an insult to the president and the Presidency that the official White House website is now dedicating itself to urban myth-busting (for that, there already exists an excellent site, http://www.snopes.com/).

The worst part of the birth certificate "controversy" is that it confirms the worst suspicions of Smiley, West, and Pfleger: that Obama is now just one more part of a frivolous, immoral political circus. Our nation is currently being sold to bankers and corporations through Cabinet appointments and lobbyist influence, the fossil fuel basis of our economy is going to the shithouse, and the natural environment is going haywire as a result of centuries of abuse of the plant, but all that the news (and the President) sees fit to talk about are bogus political non-issues and a wedding in an empire that our ancestors shed blood to win our independence from? This is really sad, and it bodes ill for our nation and our world.

An example of this sad, cynical state of news is the following video, sent to me by a friend.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The video is from a pseudo-news show on a pseudo-news network, MSNBC. The host of the show has brought on a supposedly prominent voice in the birther movement, Orly Taitz. Why this foreign dentist with poor fashion sense and a seemingly invented accent (think Zohan mixed with Borat) should be on national TV spouting frivolous conspiracy theories is a mystery to me. Ostensibly the show's host wanted her to acknowledge the veracity of Obama's newly-released birth certificate, and as such the host would be serving the noble progressive cause of arguing with right-wing nutcases. But by having a nutcase on your show, by arguing with someone who says the Earth is flat, you're not advancing any progressive cause. You just demean yourself and your forum (though I don't know of anyone who actually thinks of MSNBC as a coherent, relevant progressive voice). Now this video and others like it circulate through the rounds of pseudonews and the blogosphere, and all of us, myself included, become part of the inane circus distracting the US from real issues.

I guess it's not so hard to understand then how Obama joined the circus too. To him and my fellow Americans, I say, "Onward and upward, daring young men on the flying trapeze!"

Third World Green Daddy Part 17: Toxic mattresses?

I tend to have allergies to a lot of things. Dust, cats, dogs, and especially synthetic stuff like plastic foam or new paint. Luckily for my profession as an agronomist, I don't get allergies when I'm outside, just in houses and buildings.

As a result of my sensitivity to synthetic substances, I try to avoid using synthetic clothes, synthetic filling for pillows, synthetic paints, composite wood materials, etc. I even had my baby's crib mattress hand-made with a cotton liner and cotton stuffing. That said, I have a negative reflex against the type of people who are always talking about how toxic and horrid all consumer products are.

A few months ago my wife and I indulged ourselves and bought a new mattress for our bed. The old mattress had been stuffed with a mishmash of recycled polyurethane foam of indeterminate origin. Who knows how much toxic gas it seeped off, or how many little molds and mites were living in that thing (for that matter, how many bodily fluids of its previous users were still in there!). Either way, it gave me awful allergies, in addition to the fact that after a year of use it had gotten all smashed down and compacted, such that we were practically sleeping directly on the boards of the bedframe (people don't use box springs here in Colombia). Granted, that double mattress was a step up from the tiny single bed my wife and I had shared for most of our life together, but it was far from ideal.

So we splurged like $400US on a new mattress, complete with actual firm springs inside. We scouted our options at a few places, but settled on one from the mattress store directly underneath our apartment. The delivery consisted in carrying it up one flight of stairs!

Every mattress we saw, including the one we eventually bought, bragged that they contained "special treatments" against mites and fungi, so as to prevent allergies. I'm sure that mites and fungi give me allergies, but so do the chemicals, plus the latter have long-term toxic effects. The treatments had cheery-sounding trade names that didn't allow for easy identification of the actual chemicals involved, but after a fair amount of internet research I found that our new mattress was impregnated with a mix of pyrethrin insecticide and some basic organic fungicide. Both relatively mild as far as agrochemicals go, but nothing I wanted to be sleeping directly on top of, breathing in every night. And I certainly didn't want my pregnant wife undergoing nightly neurotoxin aromatherapy.

I believe that in places like the US and other countries with a sizeable minority of eco-conscious, wealthy consumers, it is possible to obtain mattresses without chemical treatments, but here in Colombia, at least in our small town, that was not an option. So we went with the mattress we liked, and had a thick cotton canvas cover made to sheath the mattress in. This was a piece of advice I'd taken from a handy website from a Canadian organization, offering less toxic alternatives to common products. The canvas cover more or less traps the toxic fumes inside, while also preventing the problem the chemical treatments are meant to address: allergy-inducing dust mites. With a thick mattress cover, dust mites can't get into the mattress, or if they do, they can't come out to bother you.

As with many of my more extreme schemes for sustainable living, my wife felt that the whole routine of making the canvas covers for the mattress and our pillows was a bit excessive. Even I was sure I was probably doing overkill. But a few days ago, after a particularly prodigious piss on the bed from our son Sam, I washed the mattress cover, and we have spent the past two nights sleeping without it as it dries on the line (we've had overcast, humid weather these days). The first night my nose started running as soon as we lied down, and I ended up waking up at 4am, tortured by my allergies. Last night wasn't so bad, but it wasn't great either. I'll be very happy to get that cover back on the mattress tonight.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that I now have some firsthand anecdotal evidence that the toxins in many mattresses really do exist in high enough doses to be noticeable. Do like I did, and cover your mattress up today!

Also on the general topic of less-toxic alternatives for common consumer products, here's a Spanish expose on different options for green baby care.

New article in Apuntes del CENES journal

My colleagues and I recently wrote an article about the fieldwork we did studying the present-day agrarian systems of a zone with important archeological patrimony in the form of ancient painted stones. It is published in the latest edition of "Apuntes del CENES". It's in English, and starts on page 99.

Greg Mortenson and international development aid

By now the story about Greg Mortenson's sins at the head of the Central Asia Institute has spread like wildfire. 60 Minutes did an expose on allegations of story fabrication and financial mismanagement on the part of the famous (co-)author of "Three Cups of Tea" and "From Stones into Schools". At the same time, an ex-collaborator of Mortenson's recently wrote a mini-book on his misdeeds.

Anyway, seeing as I can't keep up much with this sort of viral news, I only found out about the hullaballoo when my cousin sent me a Kristof Op Ed in the NYT, commenting on his confusion at the whole issue. I have not read the original Krakauer expose, nor seen the 60 minutes piece, but my interest was peaked enough to look at a New Yorker commentary on the affair by Peter Hessler.

It seems there are two major issues at play here, plus a less important third aspect. First is the question of financial mismanagement. Kristof seems to think (or wants to think) that perhaps Mortenson's sins were more due to incompetence than to avarice. He posits a guy that got into something that was outside of his competence, and too big to handle, and who has accordingly bumbled his way into financial wrongdoing. Not having read Krakauer's in-depth expose, I don't know the details of the situation, but I can see Kristof's view as plausible.

My wife and I work a lot with management of outside resources for projects of development and research, and have seen our fair share of mismanagement. Sometimes there is real, lawless greed operating, though usually in small things like a professor trying to comp himself excessively with travel costs or something. But more often the source of the problem is a mix of ignorance, financial and accounting illiteracy, and especially flaws in the structure of outside funding itself. Basically grants from government, contests, private resources, and the like involve a lot of slow bureaucracy. You often apply for funding for a given project starting on a given date, do everything right on your end, and still end up waiting because the funder doesn't comply with its own deadlines and schedules. So either you wait to start or advance on the project while the funding arrives, or you start anyway. The latter option entails either working some time without pay, or shifting finances around from other sources in the meanwhile, or a mix of both strategies. It's the second possibility, when you start temporarily shifting money around from one source to another, that you get into trouble, because usually money from a given source is legally required to be spent only on that source.

My point here is that my wife's and my experience working on development projects in a poor country has exposed us to a fair amount of financial mismanagement, and it is usually not a clear case of willful misconduct on the part of the perpetrator. Who knows if the conditions in Afghanistan are similar to those in Colombia? I would imagine so, because the funding for projects often comes from similar rich-world sources, with similar bureaucratic issues. More importantly, I don't know Mortenson's motivation or thinking in the case of his organization's financial misdeeds. Either way, the law is the law, and regardless of whether his recklessness with donated money is a result of incompetence or greed, it needs to stop. In my wife's and my case, usually the people we see doing financial no-nos are our friends and collaborators, so we give them the benefit of the doubt that they didn't mean to do wrong, but we insist that they fix their problems immediately, and we help them in doing so. In Mortenson's case we're talking about a huge charity with donations from lots of farflung strangers. So the process of fixing CAI and its finances will have to be less personal, less forgiving, and more official, and may result in some people being punished by the law.

Anyway, despite the longwinded commentary above, what interests me most actually isn't the financial side of the matter. It's the questions brought up by Hessler in his New Yorker piece. Essentially Hessler differentiates at least two types of international development work. On the one hand is the small-scale, culturally-sensitive work that he admires and ascribes to, and on the other is the bombastic celebrity philanthropy of people like Mortenson who promote big causes, big impact, and their own big fame.

On the latter point, I share Hessler's distaste with and distrust of huge-scale philanthropy. I appreciate that guys like Bono may have read a lot and studied firsthand many issues of development, but I'm not sure they should be the ones garnering all the attention or holding so much sway in discussions about international development. Even people like Jeffrey Sachs and Bill Clinton, who are perhaps more justifiably global figures in the development world, seem to be better at making big noise than making lasting development impacts. Look for example at Clinton's ineffectiveness in actually improving life in Haiti, despite his outsized pulpit and excessive influence in Haitian development. Or what ever happened to Sachs's Millenium Villages, which caused a big stir in the development world after his hagiographic autobiography, "The End of Poverty"? The Millenium Villages are still around, and seem to be doing well, but they are far from the wide-ranging, universal solution to African poverty that they were initially slated as. The STEPS center has been doing good in-depth research on this trend of celebrity philanthropy and its offshoots (like campaigns to buy consumer stuff that donates money to charity), and has more informed, nuanced contributions than I can offer.

On the other hand, I can't entirely reject large-scale development out of hand. If the goal of economic development is to improve as many people's lives as possible, then it's only reasonable for people to seek scale. In fact, the examples we are most aware of of successful development projects tend to be the large-scale ones. The US's rural electrification campaign, the GI Bill, the Homestead Act, these were large-scale government projects that were largely successful. Farther afield we see examples like China's impressive lifting of hundreds of millions out of abject poverty over the past decades, or Korea's transition from a poor country to a prosperous one. While the first examples are all of a country developing itself and helping its own people, the latter case of Korea, as well as other cases like the Green Revolution (which was an effective development project, despite its flaws), had important contributions from outside funders. Today much of the funding for development, even for the small-scale local development projects that Hessler and I believe in, comes from big entities like the World Bank, regional development banks, the Gates Foundation, etc. So I don't think we can totally discount the importance of "big development", though perhaps we can agree that the big actors in the development industry should focus on funding, and leave on-the-ground work to smaller, more local groups.

Another part of Hessler's commentary that I can't jump on board with is his seeming focus on personal qualities and personal motivations (this focus is also shared by Kristof in his NYT piece). Hessler posits that Mortenson is a "deeply disturbed individual", based on the recent reporting on his organizations. I don't know if this is the case or not, but frankly I don't give a damn, and I think it's a silly flaw of modern pop culture that we are always looking to psychologize celebrities we don't know (though I did much the same in a blog post some time ago on Pedro Sanchez and Jeffrey Sachs). I assume the point Hessler means to make with his assessments of Mortenson's persona is that usually the big personalities behind big charities are most interested with their own aggrandizement, to the detriment of their work. Big, grand thinking often doesn't get into details like knowing enough about a local reality to really know how to make a lasting impact there. I agree with this point, but Hessler's preachy tone and focus on cultural sensitivity sound almost like a self-righteous scolding, a paean to the humility and wisdom of Hessler and his local development-minded brethren. This detracts from what to me is the pertinent issue at hand: cultural insensitivity and a focus on heroic Western philanthropists isn't just ugly or not politically correct, but ineffective and wasteful of resources. In a sense Hessler could make the point that charities headed by people like Mortenson that focus more on book sales and fast, noticeable projects are inherently doomed to a bright, short trajectory leading to their ultimate failure. His focus on Mortenson's personal flaws distracts him from this central argument.

My last remark on the Hessler piece deals with what alternatives there are to Mortenson's model of development. The author doesn't tell us much about Rajeev Goyal, the person he starts his article with, but it seems that Goyal has implemented a number of small but very effective projects in a poor region of Nepal. This is one alternative to Mortenson's style. I would offer others--Paul Farmer's Partners in Health is an NGO that started small and local in Haiti, but has sort of joined the ranks of the international philanthropy celebrity scene. I don't know what Farmer thinks of his newfound fame, but I feel that his NGO is a good example of work that stays local and relevant in a number of places in the world, while taking advantage of growth and large-scale funding.

But I would also offer a warning. Where Mortenson's bombastic style is so culturally insensitive as to become ineffective, there are also many examples of projects that focus so much on the intangibles of "capacity-building" and "cultural sensitivity" that they too become irrelevant, basically a sort of outside-funded navel-gazing. I have often lamented the lack of hard, effective job opportunities in agricultural development (as in this essay on Kenneth Galbraith, who seems to favor the type of cultural development promoted by Hessler, as opposed to hard investments in infrastructure and buildings). Go to any development jobs site and you'll see mainly positions for things like "gender mainstreaming" or "governance". While these are important, they often deliver hazy, vacuous results, and I have met many local people in poor countries that are sick of outsiders focusing so much on these "soft" issues. They just want some cash or help to grow and market their produce!

Hessler states, "Mostly, I don’t believe that problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan stem from a lack of money or a lack of school buildings. There are deep-rooted cultural issues, as there are in any part of the developing world, where obstacles tend to be complicated and localized". To me, a dweller of the supposedly culturally-backward developing world, this seems like bullshit. Here in Colombia at least, most people's poverty has little to do with their own cultural shortcomings and more to do with large landholders and paramilitary groups that keep them from owning productive resources like land and water, or organizing themselves into unions. You could argue that Colombia's landholders and paramilitary groups are then the "complicated and localized" obstacles to which Hessler refers, but that's sort of a tautological definition of culture, whereby you can argue that everything and nothing is due to culture, from economy to politics. And the local-culture explanation of poverty is even weaker in Afghanistan. Afghanistan in the 1960s didn't seem to have any deep-rooted cultural issues preventing it from having doctors, schools, agricultural development, and the like, but everything went to shit after a series of wars involving the USSR, Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and US rent the country into pieces. So aside from the high-up power struggles since the 1970s between monarchy, Communists, and lackeys of foreign powers, I don't see what Afghanistan's deep-rooted culture has had to do with the lamentable state caused by decades of war.

No, for me, it's precisely a lack of money, a lack of land title, a lack of school buildings that makes us poor in Colombia and many other places, so Hessler's statement seems like sophistry of the same order as Mortenson's admittedly "exoticizing", "infantilizing", "disrespectful" treatment of Pakistani and Afghan culture. In this aspect both Hessler and Mortenson remind me of a group my wife worked with, which justified its own mediocrity, its own lack of results in an indigenous zone by saying that the Indians were very difficult to pin down, so much so that the work group couldn't even hold the meetings they were supposed to, much less achieve the programmed results in collaboration with the local people. Really the group was just too lazy to get out and do what they had to do; as exotic and different as the Indians were, they were more interested than anyone in sitting down with outsiders to improve their lives.

Most of all, I'm sort of surprised at Hessler's treatment of the Peace Corps. He was a volunteer in China in the 1990s, and seems to have a generally positive impression of the experience. I, on the other hand, have often felt that Peace Corps is the worst manifestation of precisely the type of large-scale, ineffective development that Hessler condemns. Peace Corps is an arm of US foreign policy, and as such can never be expected to prioritize local development above all else. It is subordinate to US aims. Beyond this, most of the Peace Corps volunteers I've met were either overly confident about their impact (mini-Greg Mortensons, if you will), or despondent and disdainful at the stupidity of local people and of the Peace Corps projects. Indeed, what is the intended utility of teaching English to people in remote villages in Chad, or sending suburban 20-year-olds with a gender studies major from Sarah Lawrence College to teach farming techniques to Vietnamese who've been farming for millennia?

Hessler seems to believe in Peace Corps's value in opening up cultures to outside influences. He claims that contact with the outside world is the most important step towards development. There are of course many definitions and ways of envisioning economic and cultural development, and I see the historical sense in Hessler's vision of contact as the doorway to development, but it's a very problematic vision. Did France develop economically thanks to its contact with other countries and cultures? If so, why did France remain a backwards feudal society during thousands of years of contact with other countries in Europe and North Africa? I would assert that the economic development of most countries had to do with industrialization (which was an autonomous invention in many cases), and a phase of conquering and pillaging other countries, which allowed an infusion of capital and raw materials. Of course contact with the outside world, for better or for worse, also played its role in the birth of new ideas and ways of organizing society in many places, but the idea that development can only arise from contact with other countries is too contentious for Hessler to throw it out as if everyone agreed on it.

Above all Hessler apparently values the Peace Corps for the small-scale cultural exchanges and goodwill that occur between volunteers and local people. He's probably right--I believe this was much of what Kennedy had in mind when he founded the Corps. But most Peace Corps volunteers I've talked to have said that the experience was mostly of use to them, and much less so to the people they were supposedly helping. I'm not sure that we should be using public funds to subsidize the self-discovery of elite private school graduates on their way to an internship at a Washington Senator's office, before they go on to become lawyers that contribute no tangible net economic benefit to society as a whole. And I imagine the villagers "aided" by these Peace Corps volunteers, as much as they may like them personally, would probably rather that the US had spent the money there on an irrigation pump or a milk processing shed or something.

The last, minor issue that seems to be at play with the whole Mortenson affair is that a lot of people feel duped. This is something my mother helped me realize. She has read both of Mortenson's books (though she admits to skipping some of the longer passages of heroic mountain-climbing in "Three Cups of Tea"), and was an admirer of him. She has shared his books with many friends, and now feels betrayed by someone she believed in, as well as culpable for passing on the lie to others. The majority of people in the US are not development experts, and do not spend inordinate amounts of time like I do parsing the minutiae of development news and discourse. They are hardworking people with good hearts that would like to share the fruits of their labor with others, so aside from working in their local community, we in the US often donate to groups working abroad. There is a general awareness that different NGOs are differentially effective in administering money and creating impact where they work, and surely we're aware that all charities, like any business, engage in a certain amount of media manipulation, engineering a public image to boost donations (for what they believe is a worthy cause). Mortenson's sin for donors or admirers then was the degree of inefficiency in its work and the degree of dedication to media manipulation, both of which achieved a level that is unacceptable to most of the public. Having read Hessler's piece, and having thought more about it myself, perhaps it should be (or should have been) obvious that a charity with flashy books and a larger-than-life saint at its helm is not to be trusted (I exempt Paul Farmer and Partners in Health, whose fame seems to have arrived without their own volition). But if my mother, who is particularly savvy about development and charity work, and even I, a self-proclaimed expert on agrarian issues, were duped by Mortenson this time, who can be safe? I guess we'll know next time. Perhaps effective development work is like when Elijah goes to the mountain to hear God. God wasn't in the earthquake, or the dashing wind, or the great consuming fire, but rather a small voice, inaudible to those caught up in the big noise.

Is Sugar Toxic?

This is a detailed, well-considered article from the NYT magazine about refined sugar. It deals with the question of whether sugar is bad for us simply because it contributes to our eating too many calories, and thus to gaining weight, or if in fact sugar triggers a series of deadly effects in the human body. According to the article, there is evidence (though not entirely conclusive) that refined sugar and high-fructose corn syrup can lead to fatty liver and overproduction of insulin. Overproduction of insulin is in turn linked to cancer and heart disease, which are almost nonexistant in populations that eat little refined sugar, and very prevalent in those that eat a lot.

It's a pretty damning indictment of sugar. I ask myself if molasses or panela, essentially unrefined sugars, have the same bad effects on the body, or if the presence of other vitamins, minerals, and things like that mean that they act differently in the human body than white sugar. If panela or molasses are indeed sweeteners without all of sugar's awful effects on health, Colombia could really position itself as an important producer of these "healthy sweeteners".

Third World Green Daddy Part 16: More on reading

In the past I've written on the importance of books in our lives, and especially for the upbringing of our son Sam. I'm on a new picture book kick now, fueled by Jim Trelease and our local library.

I recently read Jim Trelease's seminal "The Read-Aloud Handbook". It was a gift from my aunt and uncle to my father when I was born. It has a lot of great insights on the value of reading aloud with kids, a few concrete tips about how to manage television in a healthy home, and a wonderful list of good books for reading aloud, arranged by book type and age level. My mother worries that I'll now do only what Trelease tells me to, instead of trusting my own instincts for childrearing. She may be right; my wife and I recently ordered Jim Trelease's new book, "The Bondage and Anal Beads Handbook", and are holding off any romantic relations until it arrives.

So Mr. Trelease has instilled me with a new enthusiasm about reading to my son Sam. Of course I was already reading to him, but mainly high-level stuff like poetry and short stories (last night I read Gordimer's "Some are born to sweet delight", a rather grim little piece about a terrorist who impregnates a girl and sends her on a plane with a hidden bomb, thus killing her, the baby, and everyone on the plane). But now Trelease has me convinced of the importance of exposing Sam also to good picture books. This, along with my family's membership to Colombia's excellent network of public libraries, has me taking out kid books like a madman. Most are in Spanish, so I have my wife read them to our son. But I just discovered that our library has maybe fifty picture books in English, too.

I wanted to share some of the books we've read lately. Anthony Brown's "Willy the Wimp" books have been a recurring favorite, with their simian fixation and subtle cultural references snuck into in the rich illustrations (posters on walls of a gorilla Che Guevara, a painting of a gorilla Mona Lisa, etc.). Eric Carle was a favorite of my childhood, with "The very hungry caterpillar" and "The mixed-up chameleon". But I've discovered now that he's got a whole huge collection of books on natural phenomena, each with a little gimmick in the book design. So the very hungry caterpillar teaches us about numbers, days of the week, and insect metamorphosis, using a book with holes in the pages. The busy spider teaches us about hard work and spider habits, using textured paints to show the spider's web. Mr. seahorse teaches us about fish life, especially species in which the male cares for the brood, through a book with some clear plastic pages that show how fish camouflage themselves. I'm liking Carle more and more, especially for his frank, mature explanations of the natural world.

I've also recently discovered a series by a Swede, Lars Klinting, that follows a beaver named Harvey as he does do-it-yourself projects. There's "Harvey the Decorator", in which Harvey carefully paints a cupboard with his friend. At the end of the book there's a how-to section on general painting guidelines, and even a color mixing chart. Likewise "Harvey the Carpenter" shows him making a toolbox, and has plans and instructions at the end of the book. There's also Harvey the Baker and Harvey the Gardener. As with Carle's work, I'm impressed that these Harvey books don't take kids as little leisurely idiots, but rather show in a mature way how kids and their parents can make real, useful items. It's very empowering for children, I think.

As we explore our library more, I'll try to post summaries of reviews of any little kid books I think are particularly special.

New Mass

Here is a NYT article on the new English-language Catholic liturgy. Apparently starting in November all Masses in English will slightly change the language used. The motivation is to bring the liturgy closer to the original Latin. So instead of translating "Dominus vobiscum/ Et cum spiritum tuum" to "The Lord be with you/ And also with you" it will go to a more literal "And with your spirit". I understand the motivation to make the liturgy more standard, more universal across cultures. Hell, often I'd even prefer for us to go back to the original Latin Tridentine Mass for everyone. But the change in language in the English Mass will be problematic. Critics say it sounds more cumbersome, less English. For me in particular, it will be really odd to change from the Mass I grew up with, the Mass I've known all my life, to a different version. Surely no bigger of a change than my mother experienced going from the pre-1960s Latin to the Novus Ordo Mass in English, but at least in that case people were going from one familiar thing (the centuries-old Latin Mass) to another familiar one (their own native tongue). This new change though will go from a familiar Mass to a new one using less natural language. My situation is particularly tough because I no longer live in the States. The Mass I regularly hear is in Spanish, so when I go back to Chicago a few weeks every year, I already have trouble remembering some prayers in English. Now I'll be really lost.

For-profit universities

Here is an interesting visual explanation of the problems inherent in for-profit (often online) colleges in the US. They get public money, but it goes to private profit, and their driving incentive doesn't have to be excellence in education or providing a service to strengthen our nation, but rather simply profit. This is particularly a propos, because here in Colombia the government is considering a reform of the higher education system, which in part would involve allowing for-profit universities (which are currently illegal) and making more public funds accessible to private universities. Of course such a move would be a further insult to our already-struggling higher education system in Colombia, and would be a good way to assure our continued mediocrity and poverty as a society. I don't know why people don't get this, whether in Colombia or in the US. When you ransack the public sector and public goods like education, it is a bad thing for the country as a whole. Even those who may profit in the short term will have to live in a crappier, poorer, more decadent country. What good is all the money in the world if your surroundings and your neighbors are all shitty, dangerous, and miserable?

Nuclear dictatorship

Here is a good treatment by Raj Patel of nuclear energy. While I used to think nuclear power could be a good part of a low-carbon energy strategy, I have recently been thinking otherwise. I now feel like nuclear power is a real liability, not just because of the recent tragedy of Fukushima, but because I've become more convinced of the concrete possibility that many of today's institutions of modern, prosperous life may be on their way out of existence.

Many of the world's nuclear reactors are located near sea level, so as sea level rises over the next few decades, the reactors would corrode and leach radioactive material into the ocean. I don't know if all the nuclear reactors' radioactivity, spread throughout the ocean, would in the end render the oceans forever unusable for humans and wildlife, or simply become so diluted as to resemble existing background levels of radiation. But even in this latter, "better" scenario, it seems irresponsible to use this power source today, if we can't guarantee the responsible, safe management of its waste for the next few thousands or millions or years (which we can't). So my concern with nuclear power isn't so much the demonstrable short-term deaths directly attributable or not to radiation poisoning, but rather the long-term dangers that we haven't even pondered, much less come up with a credible way of managing.

Perhaps if we could forever count on the conditions prevailing in the world during the latter half of the 20th century, conditions of relative prosperity and stable governance, we might be able to claim that we could manage nuclear waste. But it is a real possibility that much of the world order will at some point in the future collapse or at least change to the point where we won't have large, centralized bodies to regulate and manage nuclear waste. If a coal plant were left to rot and fester in a post-government world, it wouldn't be a big deal. If on the other hand it were a nuclear plant, just leaving it be would lead to radioactive leaks and explosions. This is why Dmitry Orlov has said that nuclear energy is even more dangerous than nuclear weapons. For him, nuclear weapons are like a gun laying around, that may or may not have a responsible owner. But nuclear energy is like heating your house by burning bullets, claiming all the while that everything is under control (until of course it gets out of hand).

On top of the possibility that in the future we won't have a reliable regulation structure for nuclear power, even with our current, supposedly responsible governments, most countries have been unable to do anything with nuclear waste. In the US, and I imagine in lots of other places, most nuclear waste (spent fuel rods that are no longer useful for electricity generation but that remain radioactive) is simply kept stored in pools on site at the nuclear reactor that produced it. There are ideas to create waste disposal (really storage) sites in underground caves or mines, but this has not yet materialized in the US. Another possibility would be to build breeder reactors, which as I understand them re-use nuclear waste to generate more electricity, and keep fissioning the radioactive elements until they become inert lead or something similar. But in both of these cases, there's much concern about transporting nuclear waste (which could be stolen and turned into weapons) to a centralized, known site. I believe this is why nothing gets done on the matter.

So my proposal is that, at least when it comes to nuclear waste disposal, countries should implement dictatorships. It seems that the vacillations and short attention span of democracy are not conducive to dealing with problems of million-year lifespans, so we should have an iron-fisted nuclear czar, with a lifelong appointment to set up a long-term solution to nuclear waste disposal. Only once we have a viable solution (or at least a stable rug under which to sweep the problem) can we even think of considering nuclear power as a realistic, somewhat responsible option.

Third World Green Daddy Part 15: Subcultures and adolescence in small-city Colombia

Last night my wife and I started watching the 1997 Bruce Willis film, "The Fifth Element". We haven't finished it yet, but my initial impressions are that it belongs to a school of European films that are long on striking images, arrogant coolness, and smooth moves, but short on content and character development. I'm thinking Run Lola Run, or the Matrix (which isn't European, but has the same feel). I guess these films aren't any more vapid than the typical US action fare--in fact, they are certainly more thought-out and artistic than most US flicks--but their pretension to be something more than mindless lowbrow entertainment always annoys me. In the case of "The Fifth Element", the acting is horrible (what can you say when Willis is the best actor in a cast?), and for all the stunning, imaginative visuals, what less imaginative setting could the director choose than New York City? Setting a film in New York City is cinematographic shorthand for "I want to seem cutting-edge and informed, but I'm not, so I'll just associate my film with the place whose residents think they're more cutting-edge and informed than anyone else".

Anyway, the movie's excess of attitude overlying a lack of depth helped me to gel some ideas that have been flitting around in my head, ideas relating to teenage subcultures. My wife and I are exposed to lots of adolescents and young adults in our mid-sized city in central Colombia. Through my stepdaughter, her friends and schoolmates, my nephew and his friends, our work at the local university, and our friends that also have teenage kids, we come into contact with a lot of young people, both in our town and the surrounding towns, and even in Bogota. Something that has stricken me ever since we settled in Colombia two years ago is the prevalence of so-called "urban subcultures". It seems that a large proportion of the youngsters in our life are either emo, or punk, or goth, or metal, or hip-hoppers, or rastas, or ska, or SHARP skinheads, or neo-Nazis, or some other sordid identification group based mainly on musical taste and fashion style. Even when we drive by a seemingly normal group of kids, the teenagers we're with are quick to inform us that they are preps, or hooligan fans of a certain soccer team, or belong to some group of thieves or graffiti artists/vandals.

A few things strike and concern me about this. First off, I worry that kids lose their identity in these groups. They are no longer Cesar, or Javier, or Marcela, but rather "one of the skinheads" or "that emo kid". They become circumscribed in the music they are allowed to listen to, the clothes they can wear, the friends they can have, and life becomes one big silly costume party, everyone wearing outlandish clothes to identify themselves in a pre-packaged category, instead of relying on the strength of their own character to set them apart. Of course all young people naturally separate themselves into somewhat exclusive groups of like-minded friends, and tend to lose some of their identity in these groups, but the urban subculture explosion seems like an extreme example. Even though I firmly believe in the value of the collective, that people shouldn't be islands unto themselves, I'd like to think that the individual still counts for something. For instance, recently we saw a rather generic-looking kid walking down the street in a town we were visiting. A friend of my nephew's remarked, "Can you imagine if I went out with a kid like that?" Did she mean that she couldn't mix with someone who was just himself, who didn't wear a costume? Who knows, that kid could have been a brilliant guy, or an iconoclast, or a kind soul, or a really fascinating personality.

My second worry is that most of these subcultures are imported from the US or the UK. Why are Colombian youth slavishly following the styles of another place and another time when here in Colombia we've got so much home-grown diversity? In Colombia we have devotees of salsa, cumbia, reggaeton, vallenato, carranga, traditional ballads, Colombianized norteno, and countless other regional musical styles. We have Catholics, Protestants, atheists, neoliberals, Marxists, narcos, right-wingers, insurgents, rural, urban, rich, poor, a whole plethora of different and often conflicting identities. Why do so many young people in our cities relate more to foreign identities than to our own range of possibilities? What makes the foreign more interesting and valid?

I think the answer lies with commercialization and globalization as lived today. We are all post-moderns and consumers now, which means we question and often scorn traditional culture and ways of doing things, while voraciously and unquestioningly taking up the new, the imported, the bought. A kid surrounded by Boyaca's simple peasant culture of wool, beer, carranga music, and potatoes is told by his TV, by his teachers, by the ads plastered everywhere, that he should reject the culture and the lifeways of his family and his ancestors, and adopt a flashy new way of living (based of course on consuming the products sold by those who are promoting such a change). The end result is not more individual choice or freedom, or an escape from a culture that suffocates individuality, but rather the exchange of one culture, with its respective restrictions and richness, for another. The problem is that the old culture has lasted and given meaning to generations of people, of villages, of an entire region, while the new culture is already starting to self-destruct after only a few decades, under the strain of its rampant consumerism, easy pleasure, and violence. So it's not a neutral exchange of one culture for another, but of a rich, evolving, robust culture for a cut-rate, superficial, unstable one. Just as natural fruit juice or corn beer have sustained healthy bodies for centuries, while Pepsi and Coke are creating a series of fatal health epidemics after less than a century of existence, traditional Boyaca village culture has given meaning and fulfillment to people's lives for a long time, while punk, ska, or rap are just a flash in the pan. These latter types of music and subcultures don't even last one lifetime, as kids usually take them up for a few years in their youth and then drop them. But what will happen if enough kids adopt foreign culture and consumption habits long enough to lose their own traditional culture? Will these imported trends be able to sustain the bodies and souls of our people as the old ways did? I think not. Expand this consumerist culture over a whole country or a whole globe, and what may seem like an expansion of his cultural options to an individual kid in a Boyaca town, becomes a global cultural impoverishment, as we replace our world of millions of vital places and diverse local traditions with a uniform, consumerist world where kids from Angola to Alaska will have only a limited set of pre-determined options of how to live: ska, punk, metal, or hiphop.

The last problem I have with the proliferation of the so-called "urban subcultures" is that so many of them are based in large part on violence and delinquency. I see in these young people a love of the sordid, the same type of thinking that in the rap culture of my youth affixed some sort of noble value to living amidst decay and decadence. I imagine this has something to do with my prior point of replacing traditional cultures with the new. In the absence of strong traditions that have evolved over centuries to more or less regulate and harmonize social life, kids seek meaning in these new cheapened traditions, which are immature and haven't yet figured out how to manage sex, drugs, violence, and excess in general. If they're not exposed to the profound meaning of millenarian lifeways, the analog kids look for is cheap, extreme thrills, which are ultimately unsustainable and self-destructive.

I can understand to some extent this fascination with thrills and illicit pursuits. I not only shared it as a young listener of early 90s gangster rap, learning avidly about the different signs and colors of the major Chicago gangs, but I also engaged in sordid activities like selling pirated movies when I was a kid. But it is dysfunctional to think that ugly things like crime, violence, gangs, and drugs, are good. I luckily grew out of it, but surely there are lots of kids whose adolescent fixation on the illegal turns into an adult vocation in crime and violence. Especially here in Colombia, where we've been suffering from over a hundred years of on-and-off barbarities, glorifying violence isn't new, or cool, or radical, or original. It's the most retrograde, awful aspect of our oppressive status quo, and it's heartbreaking to see a new generation baptized into it. So we see young kids rejecting most of traditional culture (village festivals, music, food, clothes, religion) but holding on to the worst demons of our nature.

Lest I sound like a nostalgic old-timer instinctively rejecting the new, let me make a few caveats. First off, I understand that young people in all eras and places have struggled to identify themselves as they become adults, and because of this they will latch onto one or a series of identities that are often in conflict with their traditional upbringing. In my youth in Chicago, our "subcultures" and identities were often more linked to ethnicity. In my high school, a constant question your freshman year was, "What are you?" meaning what ethnic background do you have. I'm sure anthropologists would say that ethnic identities are no less artificial and constructed than the skas or punks of this generation, but at least for me it seemed more normal to see Indians self-identifying as Indians, Polish as Polish, Mexicans as Mexicans, etc. Of course I had a tough time in this system, as a white kid growing up in a bizarre little black enclave in an otherwise white zone of a black city, but it never would have occurred to me to just make up an identity dependent more on musical taste than ethnic background. In fact, a classmate in my high school was into superska or some such obscure musical genre and corresponding culture, and I was just sort of bewildered by him. I hadn't seen anything like it before.

My other caveat is that evidently not all kids are into these subcultures. When I walk around our city, most young people I see are dressed more or less within the bounds of what I'd consider normal, without a costume getup. Lots of schoolkids dress in a standard uniform, and the university kids often just wear whatever they found in the dresser that day. Indeed, my past post on traditional dancing in Tenza shows that there are plenty of young people that are interested in their heritage, that keep their traditional customs alive through dance and music. So perhaps the trend of violent imported youth subcultures only represents a small part of the kids in Colombia, and it just so happens that many of the youngsters I'm surrounded by are involved with them.

At any rate, it doesn't help to just gripe about the perdition of today's youth. For a long time now, my wife and I have been wanting to start up some kind of center for young people. My vision is that it would offer some mix of book learning and help with school, hands-on training and work opportunities, and pure leisure activities like a band practice space or chess or things like that. Young adults in our town don't have many options open to them. They spend all day in school or on the street, and there are few job opportunities, not to mention a lack of healthy leisure activities. A center such as we're thinking would give kids something to do now, as well as training them for gainful employment and healthy living in the future. And in the meanwhile, maybe they'd feel less need to recur to the consumerism, violence, and slavish groupthink typical of the urban subcultures.

Good sense from Santos

It seems that Juan Manuel Santos, our right-of-center president here in Colombia, has been throwing around some good ideas regarding Haiti: get the UN's MINUSTAH military mission out of Haiti, and have a stronger role for civilians, engineers, and development work in its stead.

A new president for Haiti

Well, in the run-off voting for Haiti's presidential election, Michel Martelly (known also by his stage name, Sweet Mickey) has won the presidency. He has been tied to far-right-wing groups, the types of people that approved of the coups d'etat in 1991 and 2004. Here is an article about the low voter turnout in the Haitian presidential election.

More on gold mining

This is an article from El Salvador about the negative effects a proposed gold mine would have on local water supplies.

Here's a followup article on the proposed Santurban mine I've written about recently. Now that the Greystar company's environmental license will clearly not be granted for mining in the fragile paramo ecosystem, the question is what their next move might be. It is possible that the company would simply alter its plans to do all the mining and extraction just outside of the officially-delimited paramo zone. This would obviously lead to the same problems of water contamination and ecosystem destruction that were the concern with the initial proposal. Because the paramo forms an interdependent, coherent system with the lower-altitude Andean forest ecosystems, and the major cities of Santander department depend on water that flows down from the paramo through these other areas, the only ecologically viable solution is to keep mining out of the entire area. The article posits a system of payment for environmental services, whereby the residents of these cities that depend on the water would pay the people and towns that live in the fragile paramo ecosystem, in return for the latters' keeping the ecosystem and its water healthy and clean. I believe this is what New York City does with the Adirondack areas from which the city derives its drinking water.

Straight talk about fossil fuels

Here is a grim forecast from James Kunstler of the future availability of fossil fuels in the US, and hence our ability to continue living in the wasteful way that we do.

Corn seed in Kenya

This is a video from the insightful STEPS center. It gets viewpoints from different people in the formal and informal seed provision sectors. It is a good way to learn about the complexities inherent in seed systems, especially when private companies and government are involved. The takeaway message for me is that seed varieties developed and provided by government and private researchers have an important role to play in improving food security in Africa, but that the important role of farmer-breeders must be acknowledged in seed policy. One way of doing this would be to make researcher-developed seed varieties available to peasant seed producers, and to allow these peasant producers to further adapt and market these varieties. That way you get a healthy mix of the higher yield of officially-developed varieties, with the local adaptation and hardiness of local varieties.

Seeds and sustainability: Maize Pathways in Kenya from STEPS Centre on Vimeo.

Development organizations in militarized settings

This is a good article from the World Policy Institute about the implications of placing development workers in conflict zones. The author draws her lessons from Afghanistan, but the message is valid anywhere--when outside development agencies are present in a complex conflict zone, they are inherently tied to the conflict. They cannot pretend to be neutral actors, but must rather be explicit about their loyalties and their agendas. Otherwise they are sitting ducks to become victims of the violence, and furthermore their interventions can't be that effective.

Advice from a Chinese economist

This is an interview with Justin Yifu Lin, the World Bank's chief economist. His background in both capitalist and Marxist economy gives him an interesting perspective on things. While he is wisely hesitant to transpose the Chinese experience in its entirety to other contexts (and vice versa), I would say his major theme is that stimulus-style government investments in infrastructure (roads, trains, etc.) is a good policy for economic development. It creates present growth through big public works projects, and future productivity from the useful infrastructure itself.

Shutting out the real world

This is an article about how higher-income Indians attempt and succeed in shutting out the hustle, bustle, and poverty of the rest of their country. I've never been to India, but the author' s description makes me think of people in Bogota's wealthy parts, who are essentially unfamiliar with the rest of their country, in all its excitement and diversity. Or people from the US that never venture into the central cities in whose suburbs they live, or who know about rural life only from the silly caricatures presented in bad movies and sitcoms written by coastal snobs.

USAID's review of food security and nutrition effects of agricultural development projects

This is a report from USAID's Infant and Young Child Nutrition program. It reviews case studies of many different development project, and analyzes what types of projects are most likely to improve food security in general, and specifically child nutrition. They've also published a shorter fact sheet summarizing their findings. Here is what the report found to ensure positive food security effects of projects:

"1. These effects are often unclear at the outset and require explicit modeling and/or
measurement. Such measurement is most useful if it assesses the effects of the intervention
on the food security of population groups found to be food insecure at the outset of the
project. (Further improving the food security levels of households already relatively food
secure should be given lower priority.)
2. Increasing employment of unemployed and under-employed population groups is likely to
translate into reduced food insecurity.
3. The effects on food security of agricultural policies or interventions that affect food prices
are likely to depend on whether rural households are net sellers or net purchasers of those
food commodities.
4. The effect on food security of cash crop production is likely to depend on whether the land
and labor utilized are in surplus and on the extent of variability in the supply prices of basic
food crops.
5. The effect of agricultural interventions on food security is likely to be more positive if the
interventions focus on those agricultural tasks normally undertaken by women, if they
increase intercropping, increase small-scale agricultural processing, and increase the
production of food disproportionately consumed by food-insecure households.
6. Agricultural interventions that displace labor through large-scale mechanization are more
likely to have negative food security effects."

And here is what they found in terms of child malnutrition effects:

"The review suggests that positive and significant nutrition impacts are most likely to occur from
agricultural interventions when (1) household members regularly consume the food commodity
being produced, (2) the intervention includes explicit nutrition counseling, (3) the intervention
includes home gardens, and/or (4) the project introduces micronutrient-rich plant varieties."

These insights will come in handy with a few projects I'm about to start working on.

Health of the agroecosystem, the body, and the mind

A few weeks ago I had to go to Bogota for some administrative errands regarding my immigration status and a job opportunity. I went alone, as my wife had to stay in our hometown for some important meetings and other work.

The busride into Bogota takes one through the Savanna of Bogota, a flat area of drained wetlands perched high in the Eastern Andes. The region is home to a series of drab highway towns, plastic greenhouses for rose production, and wide expanses of grazing land on what used to be marshes. It's not very inspiring, though it is an important agricultural zone for Colombia.

At one point we had to stop for a military checkpoint. Babyfaced soldiers doing their two years of obligatory service came onto the bus and took everyone's ID to check them against their database of insurgents and terrorists. Anyway, the stop happened to be right next to a field where a few dairy cattle were grazing. They were accompanied by a few egrets and sparrows, hopping about and eating bugs out of the cows' shit and even right off the cows themselves. It was a lovely agroecological demonstration. The big ruminants eat the grass, and are accompanied by birds that keep the cows and the grass clean and healthy. You see the same thing in Africa, with birds perched atop grazing rhinos. So here in this manmade ecosystem, we have a mimicry or even a recreation of natural phenomena.

This was a fitting little revery for me, given that one of my reasons for this trip to Bogota was to attend a speech on agroecology at the National University, given by the famous agroecology guru Miguel Altieri. Altieri is a Chilean-born professor of agroecology at the University of California. I mentioned him in a (slightly critical) post I wrote last year. In general, I admire his insights, and though I somewhat lament his highly political rhetoric, I appreciate that someone like him is working in the otherwise conservative, ethically-compromised world of US agricultural universities.

However, his speech was somewhat disappointing. It's not that I already knew most of what he talked about--that's to be expected if I'm a specialist in agroecology and he's giving a presentation for a more general audience. No, it was his politicized, anti-US tone.

Agroecology can mean a number of different things. It can refer to a scientific field dedicated to studying the interactions and dynamics occurring within an agricultural ecosystem. In this sense you can study agroecology even on chemically-dependent, industrial farmland. Another meaning of agroecology describes a type of agriculture practiced in tune with ecological principles. Practitioners of this agroecology are sustainable or organic farmers that strive to minimize use of synthetic chemicals by reproducing natural dynamics on their farms. The last big definition of agroecology for me refers to the political promotion of this sustainable model of farming. That is to say that in this case agroecology can refer not to a farming system itself or a scientific field, but to an ideological movement.

Altieri's speech at the National University in Bogota that night was mainly of the ideological bent. He condemned the ills visited upon the world by corporate agribusiness, and articulated principles and models to combat or at least circumvent the industrial model of agriculture. I agreed with basically all of Altieri's precepts, but I had come to hear about the latest developments and ideas in the field of agroecology (as defined by my first two definitions), not a leftist political indoctrination. Furthermore, Altieri's tone was often one of populist pandering, targeting an external enemy to build a fleeting solidarity among an audience of diverse people. In this case, the external enemies were big corporations, the US, and the wealthy Northern countries in general. Again, all of the professor's arguments were sound. It is indeed the US and Europe that consume the world's resources at an unsustainable rate, it is indeed these countries that have caused today's climate crisis, it is indeed they who often proselytize and bully other countries to adopt socially and ecologically unsustainable models. It would have been entirely appropriate for a scientific conference to hone in on these realities and make prescriptions to fix them. But the hostile, polemical tone Altieri adopted was not at all fitting.

More than this, I was stricken by a real contradiction. If Altieri so despises the US and its way of life (which he has every right to do), why has he lived there most of his life? Indeed, I believe he's lived there longer than I have! I understand if in the 1980s, when his academic career really took off, he preferred to be in the academically-advanced US and not in the Pinochet cryptofascist backwater of his homeland, Chile. But today a major university in Chile or any other Latin American country could offer him the same prestige, the same academic platform, even the same salary, as in the US. So if the US is intolerably unsustainable and consumeristic, if Altieri's desire is for more solidarity with the Third World, why is he living in the US? It's an especially funny contradiction given my own status as a rather intolerant, conservative US citizen who has nevertheless decided to follow his conscience and live in solidarity with the people of the rural Third World. I would say that to be coherent, Altieri should either move back to help us here in the impoverished global South, or tone down his anti-North rhetoric a bit if he plans on staying and sitting pretty up there in California. Furthermore, it seems dishonest that in his English-language writing he adopt a milder tone so as not to offend his gringo colleagues, while in a Latin audience he's all sturm und drang, condemning and demonizing those same gringo colleagues.

I mentioned this to my wife that night. In her wonderful sincerity she asked me if I'd talked to Altieri about the contradiction. Of course I hadn't--that would be rude and confrontational. "Hey, if you're so damn radical and pro-Latin America, what are you doing in the US?" But I would like to have been able to ask him about it, in a non-threatening, respectful way. Who knows--maybe he desperately wants to return to Chile, but his wife is from the US and doesn't want to move. As one who's crossed borders for love, I'd certainly understand that!

Anyway, apart from the speech, that night we founded the SOCCA, the Colombian Scientific Society of Agroecology, a chapter of the pan-Latin American SOCLA. Again, I noticed a certain irony when all the candidates for the SOCCA presidency were from Bogota and its environs, while I, the gringo imperialist, was the only one in the crowd that actually lived in the impoverished rural provinces we were supposedly trying to improve. It's as if in Colombia we replicate marginalization and inequality even in our fora for progressive change. Either way, I'm excited about SOCCA. I think it can be a real tool for bringing agroecological research and advocacy to the mainstream in our country.

That weekend I went from contemplating the health of agriculture systems to lamenting the ill health of my own body and mind. We went to my family-in-law's farm a few hours from our town. It is located in the beautiful Rio Suarez region, known for its mild climate and sweets made from panela (unrefined cane molasses). I always enjoy going there, though I also feel pangs of melancholy, because I wish my wife and I could live there and start our own farm. This time though, I spent a miserable weekend at the farm.

I believe my riding the public bus and staying in our somewhat humid house in Bogota predisposed me to an attack from allergies or a cold or something. Since my wife and I got a car a year ago, I haven't ridden much on the public bus from our town to Bogota. It's a nice bus that I used to ride a fair amount. The problem is that it's got recycled air, like on a plane. I'd forgotten that I used to feel a bit sick for a day or two after I rode that bus, and perhaps since I'd fallen out of the habit, I was even more susceptible. Anyway, we went to the farm just a day after I got back from Bogota, so I spent that night and the next day in bed, agonizing. I hardly even got a chance to see the heifers I'd bought with my brother-in-law,


or the chicken pen he's set up,



or the little blue-eyed puppy my wife and I were the proud long-distance owners of (we pay for his upkeep, but he stays on the farm so as not to upset my allergies at home).



By the time we left the farm to return home, I was physically and mentally exhausted. I was pissed off at being sick, and pissed at myself for having gone along to the farm this time instead of following my gut instinct to stay home. But the car ride back home soothed me, body and soul.

We have a CD player in our car, and we have a CD my wife burned with songs from different English-language and Latin American artists. So to make me feel better, my wife put on Cat Stevens, one of our favorites. I was stricken by the diversity and range of his music. He uses gradations and variations in so many dimensions. In a given song he might rise from a whisper to a full-throated bellow, and he incorporates instruments from mandolins to harpsichords to Wurlitzer organs to his trademark acoustic guitar. The themes of the songs range from death to dreams to peace to father-son relationships, even the tangled emotional mess of "The first cut is the deepest", where Stevens sings of being torn between his present love and the memories of his first love. On "Father and Son" he sings the song in two registers, baritone and tenor, to differentiate a dad and his son singing their respective woes. In general Stevens takes advantage of so many dimensions of music--volume, register, tempo, lyrics, instrumentation. You don't see this in much pop music. Cat's music is like a well-defined agroecosystem, diverse and complex in many intertwined, complementary aspects that give it stability and resilience. Very different from my stepdaughter's punk music, which uses few notes, one (loud) volume range, the same instruments all the time, and dwells on the same sick subjects. Ibidem for much rap, country, or other popular music, which seem to shun complexity, like a monoculture field of chemical-dependent corn (Autotune would be the over-applied nitrogen fertilizer, in this analogy).

Then we also listened to the ingenious Joe Arroyo, one of Colombia's finest musical talents. His music is always unabashedly Afro-Caribbean, but he experiments with instruments, themes, and especially rythms, almost always slightly altering the clave beat that underlies most Caribbean fare. Arroyo even sings a song in a naive phonetic rendering of Wolof, in homage to a Senegalese salsa singer.

So by weekend's end, when we'd arrived home, I'd come to terms with agroecology's polemical mouthpiece Miguel Altieri, and I'd recovered my own physical health and even regained a certain peace of mind. As in a healthy agroecosystem, a blessed, balanced life isn't entirely free of setbacks, but it's able to bounce back from any imbalance, supported by the beautiful people, settings, and music that surround and sustain it.

Chinese environmental lessons for Africa

A while ago I linked to a video called "Hope for a changing climate", profiling human interventions that can regenerate landscapes. Today I found this article by the creator of that video, John D. Liu, going into more depth about his experiences in China and his work in Africa. I especially like his out-of-the-box view that China, in addition to its longstanding status as the poster child of environmental destruction, can become a model for the whole world as to how to mitigate negative human impacts on the environment, and even to regenerate the natural ecosystem.

Bob Herbert's diagnosis

This is a recent NYT opinion piece about some of the structural problems we're facing in the US. The author hones in on gaping inequality, lack of jobs, and disproportionate political influence of the wealthy. I think he about sums up what's going wrong in the US right now, and why times seem so grim and unpromising.