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.