The elements

Wool bundled boy

in frog-eyed cap,

grunting and mooing and growling

strokes buttress roots of an urapan tree,

all moss and lichen and symbiosis.

He turns towards me,

bright obsidian eyes,

flu-rubied cheeks,

skin of quartz white

framed by sun-streaked emerald ground.

Children at risk from consumerism and corporations

This is an article from a while ago from the New York Times, which makes the argument that corporate interests threaten children.  The article highlights the examples of marketing of harmful products like junk food and psychotropic drugs to children, and government reluctance to regulate harmful chemicals.  It may be an obvious point, but until we as a society take serious measures to protect kids (and the rest of us) from corporate immorality, we need to keep harping on this point and fighting to control corporate impunity.

Third World Green Daddy 34: Service to country

From the title of this post, and as you read the first 80% of it, my readers may be wondering if I have misclassified it under the "Third World Green Daddy" category, or if it really belongs among my other threads of circuitous contemplation, self-questioning, and moralizing.  I will not be talking about cloth diapers, or eliminating toxic vapors from the living environment, or other such details of daily life lived greenly.

But I assure you that the post is correctly labeled, because the issue of our relation to the State and to the often violent world around us is certainly a part of living sustainably, perhaps the most important part.  A person can buy only Fair Trade products, use only natural building materials in his house, eat only locally-grown, organic food, and even work for worthy causes, and certainly all this is a part of living responsibly.  But unless people have explicitly engaged with the issue of their duty to their country, their neighbors, and their world, it is easy for an ostensibly green life to be little more than yet another sub-brand of self-satisfied, oblivious bourgeois life inside of a cocoon.

My recent mulling over this theme began after listening to a Pritzker military library presentation about a book called "AWOL:  The unexcused absence of America's upper classes from military service, and how it hurts our country".  The authors Frank Schaffer and Kathy Roth-Douquet, both self-professed members of America's economic and cultural elite and both with close family members serving in the military, point out that since Vietnam the upper classes in the US are less and less present in the armed forces.  They trace this state of affairs to citizens' increased ambiguity about the US's role in the world, and especially with regards to unjust wars like Vietnam.  Essentially they argue that this represents the replacement of a set of collective values and sense of duty to country with an individualized morality system, in which each person's qualms about violence or a particular policy or war take precedence over the general idea of service to country through thick and thin.

I think it's important that the authors bring up this topic.  As they point out, the US military machine exists, for better or for worse, and carries out many noble duties (airlifts to Lebanon after the 2006 Israeli invasion, policing international sea lanes) as well as ignoble boondoggles (Iraq, Afghanistan, Grenada).  Likewise, violence and force and good and evil exist in the world (though perhaps not as much as the militaristic false dichotomy-spewers would have us believe), and ignoring the ugliness in the world or refusing to take sides won't change this.  Their argument is that the nobility of military service doesn't have to do with the correctness of the cause at a given time (if it did, soldiers would hopscotch in and out of the military depending on their personal convictions about a given conflict), but rather with the idea of sacrifice, of subjecting yourself to the same fate and hardships and constraints as others of your countrymen.  In particular this last idea of sharing in collective sacrifice, and the fact that the military will continue to exist and act despite the personal misgivings of any individual, force a moral choice on each one of us.  "Principled" withdrawal from the debate doesn't exist, as withdrawal amounts to little more than allowing or even forcing others to do the dirty work of service to country.  In the worst case, a principled anti-military stance can be seen as pampered elites' scorn for the grunts who make their comfortable lives possible.

I see this especially in Colombia, where despite frequent human rights violations (which are rightly decried inside and outside of the country, though not as vociferously by the military and the right wing as they should be), the military is engaging in what I see as a perfectly legitimate pursuit, namely the securing of the national territory against illegal armed groups.  But even though the military is very clearly making daily life secure for most people (unlike in the US, where the public benefit from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is questionable if not obviously nonexistent), most of the middle class and the wealthy in Colombia avoid their obligatory military service, either through university attendance or through outright buying their way out of it, which I believe is actually legal!

So I agree with the authors' call to contemplation and self-searching for all of us regarding military service and other types of service to country.  There are, however, many details of their argument that I disagree with.

First of all, I don't believe in a conspiracy by what they call the "cultural gatekeepers" of our society (journalists, writers, filmmakers, etc.) to disparage the military or service to the country.  It is true that most popular media pulls us towards a self-centered ignorance of the real world, but at the same time in the aftermath of September, 2001, most media outlets were criminally uncritical and unquestioning of the militarism that swept through our government and our society.  That said, I agree with the book's authors that I have rarely if ever heard the media of my era call people to service, even in the warmongering early 2000s.

Secondly, the authors argue that military service is a great cultural leveler.  Before going to his son's military graduation, author Frank Schaffer had never had much intercourse with other social, economic, and racial groups of the United States.  I appreciate his point, and it's certainly a leveler for the wealthy to put their lives on the line in battle alongside everyone else.  Indeed, on a different scale I often feel that I am somehow fulfilling a duty to the world or at least being somewhat morally coherent by living in a developing country as opposed to a wealthy one, maintaining a level of material consumption that is not so far above that of the rest of the world.  But if social leveling and exposure to other groups were the main benefits of military service, I'd advise Schaffer and anyone else living in sheltered, WASP-y exurbs to simply move somewhere else in the country where they might live alongside people of other classes and colors, and share in their triumphs and their difficulties.  I'm not sure if my family would fit into what Schaffer and author Kathy Roth-Douquet would call America's cultural elite, but either way, because of where and how we lived, there has never been an impregnable wall between us and people of other social groups.  And I never had to pick up an M-16 to achieve that sense of shared space and purpose with my fellow Chicagoans, rich and poor alike.  So this part of the authors' argument rings hollow to me.

Another thing the authors bring up that I"m not sure if I agree with has to do with military deferral and exemptions of university students to military service.  I certainly see the procedural possibility for "dodging the draft" that was created by the system of valuing university education above military service, and I also see the perverse, elitist incentives that the system created by essentially sending the uneducated classes to the meat grinder and keeping out of harm's way those privileged enough to gain entry to and pay for college.  But at the same time I believe that in many cases someone may do more for the country's well-being and even for its geopolitical strength by becoming an engineer, or a teacher, or a doctor, or an agronomist, as opposed to a soldier.  I agree that it's harmful to have an entrenched cultural separation between lower-class soldiers and upper-class professionals, but I wouldn't want all of our country's best and brightest going to blow things up in foreign countries as opposed to tending after our own domestic affairs.

My most important departure from the argument of "AWOL" is on the issue of moral agency.  I agree with the authors that there is a certain hubris and privilege to an offhanded dismissal of service to country, but I am also aware that an unquestioning devotion to the State is dangerous and often leads to evil.  Of course the example everyone uses to probe such moral issues is the Nazi Holocaust.  Was it morally acceptable for German citizens in the 1930s and 1940s to serve in the military?  I would probably say so, especially once their territory was being attacked by the Allies.  What if the young recruit were posted to invade Poland or Russia?  Well, I'd have to say that those invasions were hostile aggressions and thus wrong, but I couldn't fault the footsoldiers sent to carry them out.  What about serving in a death camp in Poland?  We know from Nuremberg that "I was just following orders" is not a valid excuse for evildoing.  The problem is that a German citizen in the 1940s wasn't given a choice as to what actions of the State he would participate in, and which ones he wouldn't.  Any objection or disobedience, even if it were a principled stand against barbarity, would likely have been met with execution.  So though it is right for Schaffer and Roth-Douquet to lament any self-righteous blanket objections to war and military service, there also has to be a place in the debate for personal moral decisions, and preferably making these moral decisions won't result in large swaths of the populace being executed for insubordination. 

I have never served in the military, and at this point in my life it looks like I never will.  This causes me quite a bit of regret and shame, for all the reasons Schaffer and Roth-Douquet say it should.  My decision not to serve was not based on a scorn for soldiers or the proletariat classes of my country.  I have friends and family who have served, and I am very proud of them and awed not only by their service but by the confidence and wisdom that this has invested them with.  But at the same time I have a profound aversion to violence, and especially in the moment when I might have been most likely to join the military, I was trying to commit to a life of certain moral ideals that would have prevented me from ever considering the imposition of violence on another person, much less another nation.  Theological arguments for just war aside, I am still frankly unable to see how it might be possible to be a follower of Christ while bearing arms, but perhaps that is merely a shortcoming of my imagination or a lack of understanding of the world's complexity.  I believe that even Gandhi prized resistance to evil above all things, even if this resistance implied the use of violence.  All this said, for each of my officer corps friends who seem to feel that their military service was a noble, enlightening experience, I also know an enlisted man who saw no spiritual or moral or civic merit to his going to Iraq for a few years to yell at scared civilians and shoot at unseen enemies.

Even if I had seriously considered joining the US's military efforts, it would be hard to consider the military's results in the first decade of this century as anything short of disappointing, and hence I'm not sure how I would have felt after a stint in the armed forces. Aside from our keeping sea lanes relatively safe as we always have, our military achievements this past decade have consisted most notably in two wars waged based on flawed reasoning and the big-dick ambition of a few small-minded bureaucrats.  Iraq was never a threat to us or our allies, as was clear to any thinking person even in the heady days of the yellow-cake pseudo-intelligence.  Now thanks to us Iraq has gone from a stifling but stable and somewhat prosperous dictatorial society to an all-out ethnic civil war to what now seems a once-again (precariously) stable underdeveloped shithole.  Afghanistan and the Taliban were not responsible for any terrorist attacks on US soil, and after a decade of war there, we have not brought to justice the people involved in the World Trade Center attacks.  Instead of being brought to trial and forced to face the world as a faded, impotent shadow of himself, Osama bin Laden, one of the few guys in all these wars that can actually be considered a valid, important target for the US, was subjected to extrajudicial assassination, a course of action that's about as far as you can get from the ideals that the US is supposed to stand for.  Given all this, I don't think I would have found much meaning or nobility in serving in the military during the past decade (unless it were in the Navy, patrolling the high seas), except perhaps for the type of abstract value of service for its own sake that Schaffer and Roth-Douquet advocate.

To their great credit, the authors of "AWOL" point out that military service isn't the only valid service to country that they'd like to see more of.  They speak of the Peace Corps, Americorps, and I believe the State Department as other avenues of service that respond to the same sense of shared destiny and sacrifice for a larger cause.  That said, they also express rightful dismay that it seems these latter programs are the preferred or exclusive path for the university-educated economic elite of the US, who leave it to the middle and working classes to risk life and limb in the military.  This is not only a perpetuation of social inequality, but it also robs the military of a whole pool of people who are surely intelligent, thoughtful, and devoted, and who might help to right whatever shortcomings the military has today.  On the other hand, perhaps these non-military career tracks are the only morally defensible options to those who desire to serve their nation and their neighbors, but can't fathom their own participation in unjust wars.  I don't know what to think of this, though I think the authors are on the right track when they say that not everyone needs to serve in the military, in their opinion, but that people should at least be willing to consider it, especially people in the upper classes as a group.

For my part, I am certainly considering service in USAID someday (if they'll take me).  This would not only appeal more to the coward in me, who doesn't like the idea of getting shot at (though perhaps it's actually more dangerous to go into the world's troubled neighborhoods unarmed with USAID than armed with the military!), but it would also seem to be a more effective use of my skills as a development agronomist.  There are a lot of things about USAID that I might not wholly agree with, both on an operational level and in terms of the larger mandate the government has set for it, but I would be proud to swallow these qualms temporarily to feel like I were serving the greater mission of my country.  This is surely similar to how I'd feel if I were in the military, but again, without the ultimate moral transgression of using violence on others.  I have friends who work at State and USAID, and I respect them in much the same way I respect our soldiers.  Who knows if a future stint of service there would make me feel as if I'd done my part for the USA in the same way that soldiers do their part?  Who knows if it should?

I could even take my questioning further to ask if general service to humanity would or should count as a valid outlet for the call to service.  If one works for an NGO or a charity improving people's lives, fostering economic well-being, or fighting for the recognition of human rights, is that a service deserving of the same level of respect as service in the military?  What if that work involves putting oneself in the line of fire, both random and targeted (as all too often happens with people working to defend human rights and fight social injustice)?  Is an affiliation with a particular country a strike against moral integrity (as the interests of one country will always necessarily be at odds with the interests and the wellbeing of some other people), in which case the most moral way of obeying the call to service would be working for some non-governmental entity?  Or on the contrary, is the humanist, non-national way of doing humanitarian work too wishy-washy, too morally flaccid as compared to the definitive stands of a national body?

At any rate, I'll close this back-and-forth moral hand-wringing by bringing the question back to my personal life, and thus show my readers how all this pertains more directly to the Green Daddy theme.  Whatever my own shortcomings or incoherence when it comes to service to country, there can be no doubt about my wife's convictions and her corresponding actions.  In her current job and in past jobs she has worked with the government in different capacities, helping farmers to recover their economic livelihoods after eradication of their illegal coca crop.  This is of course key to bringing peace to Colombia, because the illegal armed groups that destabilize and terrorize the country depend on illicit crops for financing, and depend on a desperate peasantry in remote regions to provide them with recruits and moral legitimacy as the supposed protectors of the rural masses.  My wife's work not only implies occasional visits to war-torn regions where she is putting her life at (a hopefully minor and manageable) risk, but it also puts her in a position where she's trying to serve the country's greater interest as represented by government directives, while at the same time trying to ease the potential collateral damage on the local populations that are directly harmed by these directives.  So she is serving both country and countrymen in a very real way.  As I hinted at before, she is not in the same situations as a soldier would be, but on the other hand, she's not armed like a soldier either, so I consider her a very brave, committed person.

There are many things in the current government program that she or I might not entirely agree with.  Right now Colombia is undertaking a process they call consolidation, in which the State tries to establish a presence in remote places where it has been largely absent for decades, if not forever.  This means that aside from reestablishing military control over an area, the State sends in judiciary staff, police, public works agencies, road maintenance crews, school staff, and even tries to implement some rapid-impact economic development projects to gain the trust of its citizens.  This is a big improvement in many ways from past policies with an entirely military focus, which the country adopted for a long time in its war against insurgent groups.  That said, many of the civil administration functions in the consolidation program are initially assumed by military personnel, hence creating a de facto military government in these areas, which I'm sure local citizens feel ambiguous about after having their coca (and sometimes their food) crops, which is to say their means for survival, forcibly eliminated by that same military.  At any rate, all this is to show that despite some reservations, Caro believes in the right and the duty of the State to establish a presence, bring the rule of law, foster peace, and generally improve life in war-torn regions, and I think it is because of this that she has bravely taken a part in the process.  She speaks up about those aspects she doesn't agree with, but she doesn't simply withdraw in a self-righteous sulk when she encounters difficult ethical decisions.

So for a few days Sam and I are home alone, praying that Mom will come back safely.  It is obviously not at all as hard as the uncertainty and worry and long stretches of separation faced by military families, and I am not trying to compete to acquire some sort of merit badge for suffering caused by my spouse's service to country.  But I am nevertheless proud to be doing my part on the home front to help my adopted country, and sharing even if only a little in the sacrifices we all need to make if we are to have a lasting peace.

In the end one may decide that the State is an inherently unjust, immoral or amoral construct, and that any service to it amounts to evildoing.  One may, on the contrary, unquestioningly align one's life and interests with those of the State, and serve accordingly, finding value and moral justification in the ideal of service.  Or one may occupy one of the millions of possible gradations between these two extremes.  If any of these positions are adopted through a sincere, critical, and most importantly an ongoing assessment of the moral issues involved, I have to respect them.  But I can't accept an unthinking avoidance of the issue of service to country.

Third World Green Daddy 33: Fatherhood as Indiana Jones

A dorkier, polyester version of Indiana Jones.  Next to an edible amaranth plant.

The other night I was watching "Raiders of the Lost Ark" with my wife and kid.  I've seen the movie about a million times, but I was in the mood for it, and my wife obliged me on this rare night we had time and energy to watch a movie.  Sam watched with us, one of the first times he'd actually sat down with us to watch a movie. 

In the early scenes as Indy navigates a South American temple to steal a gold idol, my son got really excited every time Indy was onscreen. He started pointed and screaming and gesticulating, especially on the close-ups.  My wife and I decided that perhaps he thought the on-screen character was me.  Of course Harrison Ford was maybe ten years older than I am now when he shot the movie, and whatever my age, I'm no dashing movie star.  But it occurs to me that Sam has rarely seen any medium-complexioned young white guys from the US other than me, so maybe he sees light eyes and tanned skin and unkempt facial stubble and just assumes it's his old dad.  Throw in the fedora-like hat I usually wear outside, and my polyester farmer jacket (as compared to Indy's rugged leather jacket), and to a baby that sees me all the time, Harrison Ford might look pretty similar.

At any rate, this was just about the ultimate compliment to me.  I have admittedly aspired to live my life like Indiana Jones, complete with international adventures and an academic vocation that aims to understand how the ancient and modern worlds work (systems agronomy is basically like archeology applied to current, living social systems).  But I never consciously made an effort to look like him.

The movie was the first I've ever seen Sam actually watch.  He's been in the room at other times when the TV is on, but he usually isn't that interested.  With Raiders he was transfixed.  He even clapped and cheered when Indy's theme march came on as he was hijacking a Nazi truck.  This was not all to the good--I'd forgotten how violent the movie is, and frankly I don't want Sam seeing dozens of simulated deaths in the span of a mere two hours.  Furthermore, by the movie's end I noted that Sam was tired and wanted to sleep, but couldn't take his eyes off the screen to lie down.  There really is something addictive, primordial about the moving image, and I don't want Sam to get hooked as I long was.

Pritzker military library

Some years ago my cousin turned me on to podcasts from the Pritzker Military Library.  This library is in Chicago; I would love to visit when I'm once again settled in my hometown.  Anyway, I really enjoy listening to these podcasts in my free time.  They span themes from Emily Dickinson's epistolary romance with a military man, to World War II campaigns in New Guinea.  A recent podcast that has stirred my interest and even changed my thinking about history was about a book called The Dominion of War, which reinterprets US history as the gradual expansion of territorial control over North America.  It challenges the American exceptionalism vision, to present the US as just another example of an expanding empire.  Another cool podcast was about a book called Fair Play dealing with the morality of spying.  As I listened to the author talk about his book, I first lit up upon hearing his Midwestern accent, then was intrigued by the complex case studies he presented of spying, and finally concluded that I am one of those moral simplists that facilely resolves complex questions by an absolute insistence that life is sacred and killing or hurting others is wrong.

Anyway, I hope my readers check out the library's website and maybe listen to a few podcasts.

Colombia underwater

This year, as every year I've been living here in Colombia, the rainy season has brought lots of rain.  And as has happened every year, there are lots of news reports about all the damages wrought by the heavy rain.  Low-lying places flood, rivers break out of their banks, houses get swept away, roads and bridges fall apart or are covered by mudslides.  And there are lots of sad people who need help from the government.

I don't know if rains in the four years I've lived here have been that much heavier than they always have been in Colombia.  In 2011 we were in a La Nina cycle, which makes for stronger rains.  Here is an article describing the functioning of the El Nino and La Nina cycles in the Pacific.  This other article claims that the rains of 2011 weren't that much worse than the annual average, and that in fact the La Nina phenomenon of 1988/1989 was much stronger than that of 2011.  It seems that climate change is indeed producing more irregular, erratic rain patterns (drought alternating with floods), and these rain patterns are at the root of the problems I've described above.

At the same time though, I have seen very clearly that people are also acting more stupidly in how they deal with rain, weather, and the environment in general.  The hippest, fastest-growing neighborhoods in my town are those that no one has ever lived in from Muisca times to the present, because they flood every year.  They are lowlying wetlands that are best used for seasonal cattle grazing, if not as untouched natural habitat.  But despite laws prohibiting converting wetlands to constructed area, and against the common sense that should tell people that it's not wise to live in a swamp next to a river full of the town's fecal matter, these wetlands are steadily being built on.  From what I have read, it seems that the same thing is happening throughout Colombia.

So my take on the annual declaration of "disaster" is that it has less to do with unprecedented weather events (though the climate is clearly changing in our area) and more to do with stupid people building and buying in floodable wetlands or other precarious areas, and corrupt or stupid officials allowing this to go on.  One or two years ago (in that year's version of the annual weather panic-fest) a commentator in Razon Publica made more or less the same point--that when houses are built in places they shouldn't be, any weather damage they incur is the fault in part of the unscrupulous developers who build and promote the dwellings, in part the fault of the unthinking, short-sighted buyers who don't use their common sense when choosing where to live, and in part the fault of the environmental and municipal authorities that circumvent or ignore the sensible regulations that prohibit building in such areas.  And it falls to the taxpayers and the good charitable hearts to finance the repairs and reparations that are paid by the government and NGOs to people affected by stupid choices (their own and those of others).

Here is another article that says a similar thing though in more diplomatic, progressive language; people are made vulnerable to climate disaster by the economic and political system, and there is a low capacity for the type of good governance that would normally allow responsible decision-making at the official level.  The author also makes some concrete suggestions about how to give risk prevention and management an important place again in the national conversation, as well as undertaking an ecological rehabilitation of the whole country.  This next article outlines the history of irresponsible urban development in the Savanna of Bogota, and makes a strong case that almost all the recent "disasters" are entirely due to bad choices since the time of the Spanish Conquest.  This contribution from Oxfam analyzes the Colombian government response to the 2010 rain disasters from the perspective of victims' vulnerability.

In the lower Cauca, San Jorge, and Sinu rivers on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, the ecosystem has always experienced flooding for some 8 months of the year.  The ancient Zenu people managed this phenomenon by building raised earthen platforms across thousands of hectares in order to cultivate above the water level.  This tapestry-like landscape of parallel and intersecting mounds is one of the largest, most visible human interventions in American prehistory.  In the dry season the Zenu also farmed the low channels between platforms, and in the wet season these channels served for transport and fishing.  Thus they turned annual flooding from a problem into a multi-faceted asset.  The area's modern inhabitants have not kept up this system, and are repeatedly assailed by floods that destroy their ill-advised housing.  Now there are hydroelectric dams upstream that supposedly should eliminate flooding, but this totally messes up the natural cycle of the ecosystem, and I believe there have been a few massive, uncontrollable floods (as opposed to the prior, predictable yearly flooding) due to dam failures.  So this is a large-scale, older, rural example of the same type of folly that we've seen recently in the towns of my region, Boyaca.

In our town there is a whole culture that has sprung up around this philosophy of irresponsible, flashy new construction in the mucky, shitty wetlands.  Our only modern mall is built in the floodable wetlands, and there are constantly promotional stands in the mall advertising this or that new housing development, likewise built in the wetlands.  These new developments tend to be surrounded by floodable cow pastures, so there is no outside cultural life or neighborhood dynamic to speak of.  To get anywhere or do anything, residents are totally reliant on their cars.  Hence our town in Boyaca is reproducing the stupid choices that have been made in too many towns in the US.

There are even high-rises being built on the outskirts of a town that's like an hour away, Jenesano.  This town has won tourism awards for its lovely, quaint, colonial architecture, but the stupid developers are building ugly new highrises on the banks of the (floodable) river outside of the town.  They're even putting in an artificial beach on the riverbank, though the water is pretty cold (the town is at about 7000 feet altitude!).  There's another housing development near Jenesano that recreates a poor-taste vision of an entire Mediterranean town, with its own cobblestone square and everything painted in white.  Instead of taking advantage of Jenesano's existing architecture and culture, these builders have distanced themselves physically and conceptually from what the town really is, to make a fake, tacky fantasy world.  I imagine those who buy apartments there will either live there full-time and commute hours to whatever bigger city they work in, or just use their places on the weekends.  In any case, since the construction is nowhere near the actual town center of Jenesano, the influx of new people will likely bring little benefit to local businesses, all the while messing up traffic and jacking up land values and hence taxes for everyone else.  So in this case we're looking at environmental degradation, degradation of the town's architectural and cultural heritage, increased traffic, higher taxes for local peasants, and the creation of a dependency on polluting cars just to get around.

The only upside I see in all this is that as our town expands on the wetlands, and as year after year we see photos and video of these new neighborhoods flooded in human excrement from the nearby river, my own architectural projects might be favored.  Aside from the house we've been rehabbing for ourselves, we have tentative plans to build another residence on the backside of the lot.  It is right in the center of town, near lovely parks and the vibrant central plaza, and the neighborhood is full of intact architecture that's over a hundred years old.  If we get serious about this project and other potential rehabs of old places, we could use the flooding to our advantage, stressing to potential buyers the benefits of living in the vibrant older neighborhoods up on the city's main hill, where intelligent people since before the Conquest have always chosen to live to avoid flooding and other problems.  I can guarantee them that there will never be any flooding or human excrement flowing in the streets of our neighborhood.

Another positive thing I have to say for the new construction in our town and in most Colombian towns is that it's high density.  Whereas in the US greenfields are usually converted to drab stains of one-rise buildings and acres of parking lots, in our town the new developments are mainly highrises.  Even the older, single-family dwellings built in these wetlands tend to be connected townhouses.  This means that instead of destroying five acres of wetland to house a given number of people, maybe you destroy only one acre.  And there is the potential that in the future, as more lots give way to high- and mid-rises, there can someday result a cohesive, living neighborhood instead of faceless, characterless, people-less suburban wastelands.

This pattern stands in contrast to another town north of Bogota called Chia.  Chia is one of the most awful places I've ever been.  Some decades ago it became known as the hot place for uppity people from Bogota to move to, in the typical pattern of a US suburb.  But there has been no planning whatsoever to its settlement, not even the paltry practices common in US suburbs.  As a result, many houses are hooked up to septic systems instead of centralized sewers, the roads are made of the bumpy gravel and dirt they were back when the area was rural, and there is no organized management of the annual flooding (this area is also in a wetland).  There are only a few highways running through the whole town, with no side roads coming off them.  So there are always horrendous traffic jams, since everything is totally car-dependent and there are no alternate routes to get anywhere.  And I'd say about 2/3 of the lots in the area are still undeveloped pastures, most with cheerful signs about imminent construction projects.  What will the place be like when there are three times as many people, with no side roads or sewage treatment?  And these people are supposedly the most educated creme de la creme of Colombian society!  The one thing positive I can say about Chia is that there are lots of bike lanes.  So maybe once they reach critical mass in car traffic, all the new arrivals will just ride their bikes. Here is an article analyzing the model of urbanization that has prevailed in the wetlands of the Bogota Savanna, which includes Chia.

Anyway, because this blog is ostensibly dedicated to agrarian ideas and not only agrarian complaints and harrumphing, here are the measures I would implement in my town and in any other to mitigate damage from the heavy rains that, whether "normal" or not, seem to be arriving every year.  First would be responsible dredging of our rivers.  Last year after the heavy rains our town implemented a major dredging project, but instead of just deepening the rivers, they also stripped all the grass and trees from the banks.  This has led to riverbank erosion, which ultimately fills in the riverbed again and increases flooding.  So the dredging I'd propose would consist in dredging just the river bottom, coupled with piling rocks in strategic places to slow down rushing water.  Another component that I think is necessary is reforestation upstream in the watershed.  I have to imagine that part of the reason rivers rise more these days after heavy rains is that there's less native vegetation on the hillsides to slow down water, improve soil infiltration, and thus portion out the river flow over a matter of days and not hours.  Throughout the department of Boyaca there has been a constant trend over the past century of replacing native brushland and forests with crop fields and pastures.  A third component that is necessary is to recuperate the wetlands, in our town and all along Boyaca's major rivers.  Instead of filling them in, we should preserve them and even reconvert non-native pastures back to the wetland vegetation they originally sported.  If we have functional wetlands to buffer river overflows, there won't be so much flooding in other places.  The fourth idea I have is a system of deep tunnels, as Chicago has to control river overflows and general water excesses.  In the case of Boyaca, most towns wouldn't need to drill to deep bedrock, but rather just punch big reservoirs into the hillsides every so often to collect gutter rainwater.  Like the wetlands, this would buffer and slow down the big water releases that lead to flooding.  Lastly, I recommend a more household-scale version of this.  In my new house we've got a system whereby we can store up to 8 cubic meters (8000 liters or about 2000 gallons) of rainwater in our tanks, then use them for our household needs like showering, toilet flushing, etc.  Obviously if a rain hits when the tanks are already pretty full, we won't divert much of the rainwater from the city's sewage system, but if every house had a few thousand liters' worth of rainwater storage capacity, we could again slow down the massive runoff and sewer charging that happens under heavy rains.  Likewise, by using rainwater instead of city water for most of our household needs, we're not adding yet more water to the city drainage system and the watershed in general.

Ode to my phone

This is my cellular phone.  I've had it for a few years in Colombia, after my first two phones conked out quickly.  When I bought the current phone, it was already maybe third-hand.  I got it from a somewhat shady operator in a wholesale/contraband district of Bogotá.  The phone has served me very well, and has in fact outlasted a number of outer plastic replacement casings and various chargers.  Its only flaw is that the plug jack for charging the phone seems to have accumulated some gunk and rust that prevented easy charging.  This problem has been solved by a trip to a local phone repair stand, where a woman scrubbed out the jack with a toothbrush and some sort of solvent.  While I was waiting for her to finish, another customer with a higher-end but easily-broken phone complimented me on my humble device.  She said that my model of Nokia phone was the most rugged, functional phone out there.  In fact, I've heard that my model of phone is often victim to robberies here in Bogotá, because it has a relatively high resale value despite its old vintage.

I write all this because I think an important part of sustainable living is buying and using rugged, long-lasting electronic devices. This way you are neither generating lots of electronic landfill waste, nor are you contributing as much to the consumerist juggernaut that eats up natural resources and devours your hard-earned cash.  I don't have many electronics except for my phone and my laptop, but both have lasted for years.  This is not entirely thanks to product quality or personal virtue; in order to keep your electronics running for a long time, you also need a supporting cast of local craftsmen who are willing and able to repair the devices.  I am lucky enough to have such repair places in my town and in Bogotá.  For instance, I have fixed problems with my computer's keyboard, power supply, fans, etc., and have even upgraded from 1MB to 4MB of RAM.  I have heard and recall from personal experience that in many US towns it's hard to find someone who will fix and maintain your electrical and electronic devices.  If your society's imperative is compulsive consumption and waste, it's hard to be a good boy.

May Day and farm pictures

Today is May Day.  It is originally a pagan celebration of the coming of spring, but in the past 120 years or so has come to be a day to celebrate and honor the workers of the world.  In the US, our worker holiday is in September, and is called Labor Day.  This is despite (or because of) the fact that the May 1st workers' holiday has its origin in the United States, in fact in my city of origin, Chicago.  May 1st was the original date set in 1886 for workers to achieve an 8-hour workday.  After a series of strikes, there was a rally May 4th to protest police violence.  This worker meeting was held on the near West Side of Chicago, to be presided over by a number of German-born anarchists.  The meeting ended in tragedy when someone (perhaps an infiltrated provocateur) threw a homemade bomb at approaching police.  There followed a lot of gunfire, and then kangaroo court trials for 9 worker leaders, many of whom hadn't even been present at the rally.

I did a video report on the Haymarket riot, as the affair came to be called, for my 6th grade Chicago History Fair project.  Maybe someday I'll post the whole thing, in its embarassing pre-teen entirety, to this blog.

At any rate, today in Bogotá there will surely be lots of marches and such, especially as the day overlaps with the recently burgeoning student movement.  I'm no longer big on political marches--I think they're more the ambit of young people, who are big on visible, dramatic displays.  My time for that has past; I think my last march was against the Iraq war the day we invaded in 2003.  Expressing our indignation made us feel vindicated in our objections, but it didn't seem to do much to end the war (that would take some 8 years before the rest of the US public and its leaders figured out what my dumb, 20-year-old ass knew back in March of 2003).

So as my contribution to the workers' movement, I will offer the work I did this weekend.  My student aids and I spent most of Saturday and all of Sunday (well into the fortunately moonlit night) planting achira seed (actually rhizome pieces) in an experimental field in Guayatá, Colombia.  We sorted the seed,




weighed a sample of seed from each variety,




marked our field with stakes and string,

(I'd spent two mornings the prior week tying light-colored knots at intervals of every 90 cm along a neon-colored string)




opened holes in the field (it had been roughly plowed by oxen a few weeks before), and planted each seed 90 cm apart with a bit of compost.






Here is a hole I opened, with black compost in the bottom, ready for planting.  Note the pink string that we used as a guide.




Here are the rows of posts at one end of the misty evening field, marking the rows of different varieties.



I didn't get any good photos of me working in the field, because I was the one taking pictures.  But I assure you that digging 500 holes in two days with a pickaxe is hard work! Here's me at the end of the second day.




Here are some photos of the "bamboo" variety of achira, which has small, compound leaves very different from achira's normal banana-like foliage, and rhizomes that grow down into the ground instead of horizontally below the surface.  I'm convinced this may be a variety or even a new species hitherto unknown to science.




Note the wide variation in size and shape of the rhizomes.

 Here are some termite friends bustling about their mound, which is like an upturned iron sphere in the midst of the plowed field.  It's full of fertile organic matter from all the plants they've eaten and pooped out.

 Here is a pretty flower common to rural Guayatá.  It yields a shallot-like bulb that I'm planning on trying to cook and eat sometime soon.

 The field of achira we planted this weekend is part of our Huerta Muisca project.  We will be comparing the yield, nutritional content, and general agronomic performance of 4 different varieties of achira, a local root crop from which peasants extract starch for home use and commercial sale.  The hope is that by giving this serious scientific treatment to an otherwise-neglected crop, we can help small farmers to increase their yields and thus their income and subsistence consumption.  In time I'd also like to work on lowering their production and processing costs, which are what farmers cite as their main constraints in this particular crop.  Who knows if our project will actually help improve life for farmers, but that's the idea, and for this I consecrate my work this weekend to the workers of the world.

On a somewhat related note, my brother- and father-in-law are harvesting their first batch of corn silage, a new addition to their existing grass-based silage operations.  Here is a photo of the high corn ready to cut.