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!!
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
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.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, October 2, 2009
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.
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