sunday around town

to all my fellow onesie-wearers.... I've found our Asian brothren.

week one

How does one make a leap? This first week I have spent in large part wondering that, wondering how such a shocking life change can occur in the bowels of an airplane, between tarmacs of burnt rubber, in a dazed stupor of flights and baggage and ticket windows and bad breath. How does massive change happen? How can the inertia of life-as-we-know-it business-as-usual be funneled down a new channel? Is the change preconceived and considered in its painful excruciating specific details? No, to make massive change we must idealize to some extent. We must trust in the positives, the benefits, we must forego incubating the anxieties and worries that plague any decision. We must, in the end, imagine ourselves into it.



It has been a challenging transition, to begin to try to make a life here in this land. The mekong runs high and muddy now, sunsets drool over the towering rain clouds upstream, vegetable and noodle stands insulate the corners of any intersection from the assortment of wheeled things... some more stable than others.



My first week of work proved both eciting and mundane, high and low. Major projects that WWF is focused on here included sustainable hydropower, carbon forest credits to prevent deforestation, and species conservation. The Mekong is remarkably productive - with millions of people relying on it for subsistence. Damns on the river jeopardize the ability of the numerous species of migrating fish to reproduce upstream, and then return downriver. The wet season dry season equilibrium is precisely atuned to these reproductive behaviors that have evolved over so many million years.

The idea of the western industrialized world outsourcing their conservation to the third world is abstract, indirect, and a bit suspicious. The fact is though, tons and tons of carbon are sequestered every year by the productive forest of the tropics. Keeping these intact is imperative for our future on this planet. Local people and their growing rural populations rely on these forests for their livelihood though - so figuring out a just system for allocating the wealth that could be gained by quantifying and selling the carbon credits stored in these Southeast Asian forests is a huge mind boggling project.

Things are getting easier here. Finding a house and mobility options. Remembering my thai language (which most people understand) and picking up the lao slowly. Hope you are well, miss you big time. -kyle

Laos bound

As I depart this country to live in a new tropical city, I leave you with some fitting words from Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses (365-366). Gibreel, a son caught between the India of his birth and the England of his colonial heritage, imagines 'tropicalizing' a more western, higher latitude city - in this case London.

"Gibreel enumerated the benefits of the proposed metamorphosis of London into a tropical city: increased moral definition, institution of a national siesta, development of vidid and expansive patters of behaviour among the populace, higher-quality popular music, new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, banyans with hanging beards). Improved street-life, outrageously coloured flowers (magenta, vermilion, neon-green), spider-monkeys in the oaks. A new mass market for domestic air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito coils and sprays... higher emphasis on ball-control among professional footballers, the traditional and soulless English commitment to 'high workrate' having been rendered obsolete by the heat. Religious fervour, political ferment, renewal of interest in the intelligentsia. No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love. Emergence of new social values: friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old folks' homes, emphasis on the extended family. Spicier food; the use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon."

If this fits or not, we shall see. Will let you know as soon as possible.

-k