home, to home

life as a reef

less color, more gravity

how absurdly unfortunate

we live up here, with such relative lack and surplus

of these most pivotal phenomena

an inversion of such

proves both wildly inhospitable and miraculously stunning

fresh off the boat, i return to chiang mai for a final 48 hours. the last 3 weeks have been on a little archipelago 70 km off the coast of southern thailand near malaysia. The first half consisted of camping on the beach and kayaking between snorkeling sites - mooray eels, puffer and porcupine fish, sting rays, coral beds, sea snakes, anenome, starfish, urchins, nemo. Its quite a world down there, an intricate scaffold of coral filled with tiny zoozanthellae photosynthesizing at the lowest trophic level, followed up the latter by a diverse array of creatures who have their own coral reef niche. Amazing colors, absurd co-evolutionary adaptation, a place still hunted and gathered - the last true wildlife on earth the oceans are.

But its not all fun and games... the ocean acts like an absorbtive sponge respirating into and out of the atmosphere that we fill with CO2 among other things. The ocean absorbs the vast majority of our

carbon emissions - and is becoming less and less saturated with calcium carbonate as a result. This will cause problems for creatures that form shells and corals that cement calcium carbonate. Ocean acidification is really happening and will continue to occur into the future. Rising sea level temperature causes corals to release their symbiotic zoozanthellae friends causing bleaching. Unabated, life will still exist in the oceans, just not as we know it. Jellyfish may take over the world. But we could start eating them. They could be delicious hor'de'vores for future climate summits like in Copenhagen.

The Urak Lawoi people (people of the sea) have inhabited Koh Lipe, an island in the Adang Archipelago for almost a century. They traditionally relied on the reef for subsistence but have now turned to the tourist industry and small scale commercial fishing in the offseason. Things are not looking good for the local people - they are selling off or being pushed off their land by resorts, trash is piling up on the island, sewage is seeping into the groundwater threatening to leech into the reef causing an algal overgrowth, and the fishing isn't so good. Predator populations like the king mackeral and tuna are being overfished by both the Urak Lawoi and the huge Thai and Malaysian trawlers who pay the vastly underpaid national park officials to illegally fish within the park.

Darwin used the island ecosystem as a microcosm for a larger more complex ecosystem. We did the same with the situation on Koh Lipe. The island could foreshadow the island landmass of earth, also surrounded by ocean. The tragedy of the commons in full effect. Individual benefit of exploitation outweighs the collectively shared degredation. Individual altruism won't solve the problem - collective organization is needed but near impossible with the vast array of stakeholders on the island. Local people, national park, commercial trawlers, tourists, investors from the mainland, resorts, etc. The human being is only adapted to conceptualize at most maybe an 100 year time frame. Future generations have no vote. I personally was slightly upset with the past few generations... because of their treatment of the area sea turtles, dugongs (manatee like), sharks, big old fish - mainstays of a healthy coral reef, were missing. If development on Koh Lipe continues and commercial fishing keeps up the local people have no future in the area.

I am officially finished with half of my junior year!... now that I've returned from the beach island resorts, vacation is finally upon me. To the hinterlands I will go. Me and two accomplices are headed to Cambodia for a whirlwind 2 week odyssey. Merry new year, happy christmases, good solid kawanzas and belated joyous hannukahs, vuluptuous solstice moon times, live long and prosper my friends.... Odd days are upon us!

rapping it up

the intermediate disturbance theory in ecology describes a phenomenon in which a certain intermediate level of disturbance (fire, cutting, natural treefall, disease) in a community or ecosystem makes for the highest level of biodiversity - giving secondary growth species a chance to flourish under the newly freed sunlight and nutrients, overtaking the stagnant stable climax species. A similar phenomenon seems to occur in the forest of the human mind - a certain amount of disturbance, uncomfortableness or uneasiness, the new, the other, can cause a heightened diversity of ideas, perspectives, emotions.

And so I find myself in an upland Karen village, Huay Tong Kaw, a three hour drive (in the one truck owned in the town of 30ish households) from Mae Hong Son. These Karen people, traditionally animist tribal people from Burma speaking the language of Bag'ken'yaw (and sometimes Thai as a second langauge), are my hosts. These people live in the hills - there is no flat land to be walked upon. Much of there land is in the national parks that have been deemed such after their settlement in them. There is constant tension between the forestry department and the villages (especially when they don't have official land title or citizenship) with arrests and forced movements attempted in the recent past. The major question of the course was the precarious debate between people and forests, biodiversity and human development.

Traditonally (and in the stereotyped view of many lowland Thais and academics) they are subsistence 'shifting cultivation' farmers. They use the method of rotational (swidden) farming: controlled burning (leave the stumps for coppicing), planting one hillside 'rai' for a year with primarily rice but also squash/pumpkin ('fuck tawng' in thai... go ahead and say it), green beans ('tooa fuck yao'... say that one too), and hot peppers. They then let the land fallow for 9 years allowing it to regenerate a secondary growth forest and return many nutrients into the biomass of the trees and shrubs, allowing it to be burned and planted again regernating the cycle.

Although this is still the major form of livelihood, the Karen people are not so simple... I will provide a partially meaningful rap about the issue (make sure to use a 'gangster rapper' type delivery when reading):

everywhere you look everything picturesque
but have you ever considered the Karen consensus?
communing with nature is great and all
until you hear that development call

think you could eat some rat or a mouse
live in a bamboo open fire pit house?
we can't be Karen for even a week
miss the kanom so bad you think you might tweak!

so whats more important the roads or the trees
the dipterocarps or feelin the breeze
on that new motocy of which you just got the keys
forget dibble sticking, ride one of these!

(kanom = snack in thai, dibbl stickin = traditonal karen courtship activity of planting the newly burned rai, karen concensus = academic paper concept on stereotype of karen lifestyle)

If that doesn't make things clear, the issue of development and roadds has changed these villages in many ways. The one dirt national park road has brought limited tourism, a cash economy link, modern helathcare, and formal education in the city for kid at the cost of debt, teenagers not learning the traditional ways, and some kinds of cultural diffusion. The villagers are not always convinced it was a good thing in many ways. Now to the villages (or 2 of 5!)



There they are! Mugaw BoonSee on the left and my Pawtee (the village liason with the government) next to her. This family brought us to harvest rice in the naw - a lowland paddy rice field that some Karen harvest instead of the traditional rai. This is a traditional time for flurting and courtship between young single Karen. Some chickens were sacrificed (animism holdover, now the village has converted to Buddhism). And there I am working on some blacksmithing... these guys convert old car suspensions into knifes and machetes for the village.















okay the next village i will take you to is nam hoo, a christian converted village of 9 households. Here is the rai I treshed rice at (pictures from the last post). On the hour long steep descent home from the rai, Pawtee would casually stop along the side of the road to cut some bamboo or get some 2nd skin layer from a papaya tree, which we later used to make rat traps that are set in the forest with some rice (what else) and cumin? I think for smell/stick. MMhhmmh delicious rat mouse.














What else happened here in nam Hoo? lets rap it out thai/english style:

ruminated gaiters all up in your face
don't look down its not a disgrace
through the intestines of a cow or a kwai
thats why they are coming back to m'young Chiang Mai

warm up, monkey, bar shaky: you name it
rumenated gaiters are the newest fashion statement
you can wear em on your legs you can wear em on you arms
so damn fly they will sound the alarm

no more gore-tex? mai pen rai
no buttons or straps? di mai? di!
thats all I gotta say bout my rumenated gaiters
k seewald on the mic i'll check ya later



















this is two of the 5 villages we backpacked between, it can do no justice to the amazingness of the trip. to end this long and arduous post, i will reward you with some pictures of the top of thailand. I climbed Doi chang Dao, the third highest peak this weekend to see a sunset and sunrise - straight out of land before time or jurrassic park. feast you eyes. thanks for reading. happy thanksgiving. - kyle

outa the villages

lots more to say but not right now, just returned from 3 weeks backpacking between 5 upland Karen hilltribe villages on the border of Thailand and Burma, maybe the coolest thing Ive ever done, a few moments below:

rats for dinner, derelict old telephone booths abandoned in the middle of the forest?, freshly smithed machetes, bamboo the wonder grass, rice threshing in the most beautiful cubicle known to man, puppies water buffalo chickens cows dogs cats snakes leeches lizards monkey yelps magpyes hawks (rumors about wild elephants and cattle killing big cats), enormous waterfalls, kids in the street (theres only one street), burmese cigars in the paddy fields because it is harvest time!

more to come, miss you all.
.

good tidings

Good tidings from the vast and varied metropolitan area of Chiang Mai, home to Wats, markets, and this weekends Loi Gaton (sp?) festival involving floating candles down the Mae Ping River and releasing flying cloth covered candle cubes into the night sky plus fireworks and such. We just began the theory portion of our next course: the political ecology of forests, which will and has already questioned my idea (and yours?) of national parks and environmentalism in general. These issues look a lot different from the perspective of the third world and the marginalized people that get pushed off of their native land by national parks working towards biodiversity.

Looking back on my last course, the second half of which I have not yet blogged into the bowels of the interweb, I have truly been overwhelmed with experience and information. Learning every day all day, from the Thai people that are living what we are studying, constantly on the move taking in new places and people - definintly felt an overload upon my return. I will give you the short synopsis.

After my Mae Ta blog entry and our mid course seminar, we backpacked about an hour into the hills to 2 different villages who are just beginning to practice agroforestry - integrating a diverse array of crops and useful plants into a forest on a hillside. These upland palong villagers don't have enough land and many of them are not official Thai citizens. They must farm on the hillside, battling bad soil, erosion runoff, and a whole host of other issues. UHDP, the Upland Holistic Development Project works with these villages to train them in agroforestry. We spent days touring the agroforests, evenings playing with the children in the villages, and nights talking with village headmen.

Next we headed even more north, within 15 km of Burma, past the city of Fang, to the campus of UHDP, where we learned in the many experimental plots that they produce - trying our new strategies of agriculture and animal domestication to bring into the upland villages. Some highlights:

ritualistic pig slaughter: from pig to dinner, 4 of the most traumatic hours of my life. The pig was tackled, tied up/wrestled, and my roomate was the one designated to insert the knife into the heart which produced some agonizing sounds I can only describe as gasping and gurgling. Next the skin was burnt and scraped off, the body opened up, and a crazy Thai man proceeded to drink the warm blood straight out of the diaphragm. From here crazy butchering processes took place with all of the students involved, and culminated in dinner. I wouldn't eat meat if I had to kill the animal every time... really makes you think about where your meat comes from.

natural pesticide: neem, lemongrass, and galingal crushed up and steeped in some water, sprayed onto the crops keeps the pests away

foraging: we foraged all the food we ate one lunch from the agroforest and cooked it in foraged agroproducts - bamboo vessels and banana leaves

Monday we head out to backpack for 2.5 weeks in the mountains near Mae Hong Son, between 5 different Karen tribal upland villages.

I am getting kicked off the computer - thinking of you all!!

upon my return

just returned from the uplands this afternoon... what an amazing few weeks... need some time to process, here are some visuals for now.

retroblogging

It is transition day, we are stationed at a guest house in Chiang Dao for mid-course seminar with ouir professor, surrounded by jungle laden mountains. Tomorrow we head up to the upland villages, but now I am prepared to unleash that which has never been seen in the world of blogging... the retroblog.

10/6/09: I find myself perched atop the stoop - a red varnished wooden staircase... wait wait wait.... I can't lie to you all. I am no longer on the stoop. It was suh an idealic place to find myself with the gleaming moon and cacauphonous crickets and all... but upon my mission to brush my teeth prior to writing I was intercepted by some freshly steamed taro (I think). Purple and soft and sweet potato tasting, my KuhnMa was bagging it in preperation for her 3 AM trip to the market in Chiang Mai tomorrow. There she will sell the taro along with an abundance of fresh organic produce to Chiang Mai urbanites. The taro sucked me in, no doubt, but what kept me?
Well, my KuhnPaw was utilizing the piece of technology still most relevant in this village of 1000 families, the television. Although they cook most of their meals on an open fire, my family has a TV. And on that TV was the infamous Thai soap opera. Think green screens, drama, and bad fight scenes all in a language you barely understand!
So now, I am not on the stoop overlooking the boxes of organic produce from the farm ready for the market tomorrow or the raised wooden skeleton structures in my yard for storing and drying bamboo shoots or the many dogs roaming the street or the two concrete cylinder fish hatcheries down in the backyard. Instead I am in bed... in the hallway of the tiny second story, surrounded by a mosquito net.
Yes you guessed it, we are in Mae Ta, a small village south of Chiang Mai, situated in an intermontane basin. After being lured into high external input babycorn monocropping for a frozen dinner across the world, they have made an epic reversal, with a third of the village subscribing to the co-op, producting organic agriculture and living a much higher quality of life. Most of the families we are staying with have climbed out of the fertilizer debt, recovered from the health issues that go along with chemical farming, and taken control of their agricultural susbsistence. The farms are gorgeous, dense polycultures planted within the forest without any pestecides or herbecides or artificial fertilizer. They use co-cropping and biodiversity and natural pesticides like smelly plants (basil works well). The co-op provides loans when needed and keeps the money local. The farm we visited today had 100+ edible species on it - that is 100 more than many commodity farms in the west which are growing food for not humans but machines and animals. The first few years after the switch are highly labor intensive, but after that you have a diverse, resilient, fertile farm which often yields more than a monocrop.
But what is most astounding is how much the farmers know about it all. We followed Paw Pot aroudn like ducklings as he stopped at every niche to smell and taste the plant and describe (through a translator usually) the beneficial characteristics of the species.
I live with one of these families. Using the squat toilet, taking cold bucket showers, sipping rice whiskey, eating mass quantities of home grown sticky rice - these are just some of the trivialities of everyday life. These are a free people, free from the colonialism of mainstream agriculture. They can work when they want and rest when they need to, and have all they need on their trees and in their land. Tomorrow we will go out to the farm with KuhnPaw to do some pickin. and who knows what else. Thinking of everyone back homeway.

does the new silk burn?

greetings fellow earthlings! it has been a while, mostly due to the changing lifestyle that has accompanied my transition into chiang mai city. for the last week I have lived with three other ISDSI students in an eighth floor apartment overlooking chiang mai. we have redesigned it to optimize lounging ability and decorative inconsistencies. I was dropped off by my host family last weekend and of course within the first 2 hours of independence I was phoned by my host mom to check up on me no less than 3 times. it has been a tough transition for my mother of 1 month to let me go. I will be back to visit no doubt though.

I have had my hands full... agroecology class began this week. We have studied food systems and the colonialism of big agriculture thats rules many of our eating choices. The vertigal integration of these companies is just absurd. They own the hybrid crop seeds, the selective pesticides and herbicides, the irrigation systems, the transport systems, the processing, the marketing and the selling. Farmers are in a never ending cycle of high input chemicals and low yields are forced into dispair. There are tragic trends in farmer suicide rates skyrocketing around the world since the 'green' revolution a few decades ago. It comes down to an issue of scale, disconnecting the normal person with their food system. Thailand is in many ways following the industrialized agriculture ways of the west, except in some innovative places.

These are the places we are heading on Monday when our first field course begins. We will live in two villages for a week+ each, one upland and one lowland - in Mae Ta and at the UHDP (upland holistic development project) learning first hand about sustainable agriculture in Thailand. This will involve homestays, work in the rice fields, pig slaughtering, and who knows what else.

Although it has been refreshing to have some farang (thai for white people) time in the city, I am itching to get into the field. Sometimes it feels like I could be in any city in the world - there are malls and western restaraunts and 7-11's and the works here - sometimes that feeling doesn't sit well. With the monoculture of farms and land comes the monoculture of the mind!

Tidpbits:

1.)Mai (rising tone) mai (low tone) mai (falling tone) mai (high tone). In Thai this means "does the new silk burn?".

2.)There is a texas sized trash heap floating in the pacific ocean.... watch out.

weekend update

Weekend update... for Friday class we went on a jungle trek up Doi Sutep, the major mountain overlooking Chiang Mai. On this mountain resides the second most important temple in Thai Buddhism. Our trek involved waterfalls, buddhist monasteries hidden in the clouds, and of course, leeches. I was clean, although some of my classmates were not so lucky... or maybe they just don't contain the genetic mutation of leech resistant pheremones like myself. Either way, the temple on top is gorgeous... very ornate with the classic gold and red... when it is not fogged in there is a vista view of all of Chiang Mai valley. Legend has it a monk released an elephant on the mountain and its final resting point decided the placement of the temple.

Saturday my tentative plans to stay near home and relax were vetoed by the grandmas (the two sisters of my Kuhn-yai) and so we went out to lunch and visited some hot springs in the hills. Sunday consisted of monkeys riding tricycles and snakes being smooched and whatnot. Pretty standard.

The final week of the homestay and foundations class is upon us. Saturday we will move into dorms and Monday begin Agroecology, which starts here in Chiang Mai for a week and then brings us into the mountains to live in two different villages for three weeks. Should definitely be a change of pace. It will be hard to leave here... already some teary-eyed farewell discussions have taken place with Memee. Alas, every kid has to grow up.

Last week in class we talked a lot about the progression of human scientific thought... from the parts to the whole. From Aristotle's forms and Descartes breaking down of the whole into parts came Newton's physical laws. This was progressed by the Romantics with a more aesthetic view of the whole which turned towards 19th century vitalism, theorizing that the whole is greater in some way than the sum of its parts. This leads to systems thinking and organismic biology of the 20th century... which brings us to the deep ecology of today. The idea that ecology, rather than physics, that a deep sense of our placement within the biotic community, could be the new universal scientific field. This is the notion that land and flora and fauna and ecosystems have value in their own right besides their benefits and relation to humans. This was prophesied largely in Aldo Leopold's 1949 Sand County Almanac. His land ethic called for our relation to the land to change in these kinds of ways. He hoped for just as our prohibition of slavery outlawed the purely economic view of social relationships, the land ethic would similarly let us surpass our purely economic notions of land management and use.

The next few days, inspired by Chiang Mai citizens who are protesting Bangkok's central plan for the expansion of roadways in Chiang Mai, we are working on some sustainability indicator research projects around the city. My group will go out tomorrow and begin work on assesing and indexing the 'walkability' of Chiang Mai through a complex system of algorithms... actually more like a tape measure and a GPS unit and some frogger type traffic dodging ability.

From the end of my street as the sun set tonight an orange aura, pocketed between the curved lines of Doi Sutep and an amorphous cloud blob jutting above it, tinged the still water that bathes the rice stalks beside the road. Goodnight all.

scroll with me

A common feeling of mine is the desire for those people that I care about to see what I am seeing. I feel helpless trying to explain or even remotely verbalize the feelings and sights that surround me each day. So I invite you to scroll with me on a vertically formatted trip through some of the past few weeks.

Mok Fah waterfall. On the diirt road below you a subway system of tiny red ants creates a halfpipe crossing the road/desert. In another place on the path the team has abducted a helpless worm, and carry his wriggling body away both gracefully and efficiently, up and over sand cliffs, and into the brush, slowed by no obstacle. Your distractions have masked the light mist overtaking your constant sweaty state. You look up to realize that ahead, past the badly translated english subtitles of the precariously placed thai signs is a most massive waterfall plunging out of the dense tropical bush into a sandy pool. Of course you swim, and as you get closer to the falling wall of water you realize that the name waterfall is only partly fitting, for much of the water in the hurricane dropzone area can be seen defying gravity and heading back up, away from the sweaty tourists. The Thais see the jungle as a place of numerous and sometimes dangerous spirits.

The commute into Chaing Mai. The yellow song tauw into the city is full, of course. So you hop on the back bumper runner thing and hold on to the roof rack, watching vehicles filled with hooded people or heavy objects precariously balanced on top pass by. It is misting this morning, but the distant sketches of mountains can be seen. The sociology of Thailand is very different than that of which I have culturally absorbed back home. In Thailand, the laws are... well... semi-important. No one will let you out into traffic as a common courtesy, and they may not stop if they hit you. This is a country of relationships. For those people who are strangers to you, you have no direct moral or social obligation. But those people wkho mae it into your 'circle of concern', they are taken care of... and you will take care of them... all according to a social ballet of hierarchical relationships based on age, gender, social standing, education, and wealth. I feel so advantaged to have been fused into the circle of concern of my host family and their friends, it will be hard returning to tourist status.

Talapia fish farm. You are in the murk up to your chest, and if your shoes didnt have straps on them they would be engulfed and annexed by the mud bottom. The net is rolled up to gather all the fish into one corner. There you reach in with your net and pull out 2, 3, sometimes 4 wriggling 8 to 14 inch talapia. Indigenous to the Nile River system, they are a great fish for harvesting due to their love of phytoplankton, their rapid growth (0 to 750 grams in 7 months), and their minimal bone structure. So you grab the front end with your gloved hand, pry open the mouth, prop the gill open with your thumb, and attempt to empty the female's mouth of eggs. These are collected and incubated into fry which will be sold to local farmers on a kind of micro loan system. These fish can jump though, and some frisky individuals jump the net, hit you in the chest, and swim off into the murk.

Twelve thousand two hundred and fifty monks recieving alms after some Buddhist chanting in the sub district of Doi Saket where I live.

Picture this: The side of road is dark, a swaying red blinking light can be seen ahead. Elephants need taillights too in the night.

life story

Birthed out of a cramped tube into a sterile brightly lit people-center only to be tagged and given documents legitimizing my existence, I was arbitrarily taken back to a home. With no handle on the language or customs, I must have sounded similar to an infant, waving my hands and making unintelligible sounds as my one year old brother Trunk likes to do. My eating habits were similarly ridiculous as I attempted to decipher the Thai fork backhoe, spoon dump-truck technique. After going to bed very early and waking up before the sun I was dressed and potty trained by my most sweet and loving parents. That first week I could barely stand on my own under the oppressive heat and humidity. Yes, a Thai homestay is nothing more than a rebirth of sorts, a compressed simulacrum of the stages of my last 20 years on earth.

I am happy to report that my Thai infancy is over, and now I sound like a 3 or 4 year old when I speak. I am considerably more acquainted with the foods, flawlessly opening no-longer-mysterious juicy fruit orbs by myself and eating rice at least three times a day. I am getting accustomed to the climate and the routine of the Thai day... I am even old enough to go to school on my own now. This commute consists of an hour long combo package of bike riding, taxi/truck riding, and public bus cruising throughout the greater Chiang Mai area.



















I can see what is going to happen though. With only three weeks left of my childhood here, I will soon be off to higher (elevation) education. Into the mountains I will go, away from my loving family, only to return to Chiang Mai one week out of every month. My worried Thai parents will call me and check up on me, for my mother is deathly afraid that I will forget about them and never come back during the next few months to visit. Another repeat of childhood in America... once I finally reach the peak of my abilities to express myself I will be whisked away to other adventures.
















I miss everyone at home, hope school and other endeavors are going well. Love kyle.... or just ky in Thailand.