resplendent lanka

This place isn't like southeast asia - it feels different. Curry particulate tickles the nose and men are plump and shouting. The trains are packed. A standing-room sweat filled rectangular prism chugging through somewhere warm with picture frame windows ever changing.

These are the guards of the buddha's tooth. From under the bodhi tree in northern india, it has been passed, smuggled, hammered, bombed, crushed, concealed in hair, diffused, drowned, swept by currents, and re-calcified, according to legend.

This is not your ordinary worship. This is aggressive spirituality. On just any old Saturday, Buddhists from Sri Lanka and afar ply their way into the upper hall of the Temple of the Tooth in order to get a glimpse, through a monk silhouetted doorway, of the gleaming, gilded tomb, in which the tooth is said to be.

 

A landscape reimagined - clipped bonsai tree tea plants set fluorescent green fire to the hillsides. Three species are present - tea, tea, and tea. Actually, the tea is interspersed with select leguminous tree species for nitrogen fixing. Upon some of the trees pepper is grown. What was once incredibly biodiverse upland moist forest was systematically cleared for the tea-time fancy of England and other such western crumpet-dipping folk. Sri Lanka has little more than 20% primary forest cover.

 

 

Small Hindi woman dot the hillsides, stooped and swiftly picking newly sprouted leaves, dropping them into the burlap on their back. Their families have often have been working on these plantations for generations.

 

Schools out - tea plantation in all directions. These kids are probably returning to the group housing for them and their parents, who both work on the plantation.

 

Pointing the way to the nearest anything.

 

Concentric ceylon crop circles 

 

 

Coming from relatively infrastructure-less French-colonial Laos, the British clearly had a different idea of colonialism. They left an incredibly intact infrastructure of railroads and roads, even university campuses. Rail travel is still quite popular (and cheap) for Sri Lankans today - complete with peanut and fried shrimp vendors roaming the cars and impromptu tambourine and back-of-the-seat percussion 

 

The beaches of the south coast were miraculous. Long stretches of perfectly tilted sand. Palm trees observe, as always, arching their unkept heads to peer onto the towel of a sun-crisped lounger or into the bucket of a returning fisherman.   

 

This was the coast of Sri Lanka hit hard by the 2004 Tsunami. Stories of carnage are commonplace. The water receded in the moments leading up to the wave - fisherman ran out to collect flapping, beached, fish. And then the waves came, reaching the second story of some of the beach side houses. These three generations sat watching the sunset on their little patch of beach, around the corner from the surfers and honeymooners.

 

A Hindi god at 6 feet tall

 

Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim religions all coexist in this island nation. This is an intricately carved ornamental entrance to a Hindu temple in Columbo.

meters of line to the chicken store....

China happens. Look around. Just look. A transition forest: jungles of cranes and rebar point towards empty skeletons of mostly-finished apartments. Go up - yaks and the elderly. The retirement homes are almost 3 miles into the sky. Moss carpeted forests and alpine lakes - don't swim in them. Don't wash. They are spirit filled lakes, and deep too.

sleeper train north from Kunming

umbrella sighting in the gorge

a brief respite

Destined for a hard wall - this major tributary to the Yangtze froths chocolate through Tiger Leaping Gorge - on its way to the largest capacity dam in the world - Three Gorges. Some of this water, circulated to the bottom of the reservoir, will help embalm villages and ancient pagodas, long covered over by a thirst for illumination and toaster ovens.

primary yangtze tributary below

shrouded

mossfall

Thickest walls - smallest windows - shafts of light have to force themselves into these traditional Tibetan abodes. The people aren't much different - they aren't warm and bubbly - the father wears a large traditional sword and knows how to tie a pig to a horse. How else do you bring your pigs to summer pasture? Courtyard out front for chickens, dogs, horses, etc. Storage for crops, wheat, drying meat, rusting equipment. Window detail is bliss.

window detail

on the yak pasture, 13600ft

These people are centered around yak - yak milk, yak cheese, yak butter tea, yak meat. A man is measured by how many yaks his family keeps. Recently, in a perverse twist of the utter, yak meat has become too expensive to eat - it fetches such a price at the market a days walk away, that it is rarely consumed by the local Tibetan herdsman. Its butter tea and porridge for the summer.

grazin'

white peaks of Sichuan

chinese foliage

Old Tibetan men and woman still living in the village are sent each summer to care for the yaks in the high summer pasture. They corral the baby yaks into the shed to protect them during the night, and lure the mother yaks close in the morning in order to milk them. The grandpa we were staying with was sick - his wound from being kicked in the side many years ago by a mother yak was acting up - it was the winds, he told us.

banking

Woman from a nearby town climb this mountain on the edge of Dali lake to pay homage to the spirits in the pagoda - they cook, pray, and chat.

modest omelet

no caption necessary

thought bubbles

The expanding froth of synthetic white bubbles is in obvious contradiction to the grimy angular tiling in this sorry excuse for a bathroom. It grows, a fractal of hygiene, erupting like a middle school baking soda volcano from a teal PVC abyss. I guess Laos’ wet season gets you quickly accustomed to wetness after a long hot dry season of general desiccation – dank bathroom stalls, mold and bacteria now colonizing the seams of a cheap tile job, just inches from your body’s own bacteria-rich seams.

So this scouring, not of an innocent landlocked tropical carpet by geopolitical resource vacuums, but of a rather unassuming smallish bathroom stall by hordes of expanding soap bubbles, was not at all unwelcome.  Cleanliness is all relative here – there is only a certain level of sterility that can be attained when one lives on a bamboo and thatch structure above molasses mud of the Mekong and a host of various domesticated (and not so domesticated) animals. And politically as well, clean is rarely any easier. A project or mandate not tarnished by streaks of greed and corruption is unheard of in these forests and hills.

And in my current Saturday eve stupor catalyzed by sticky rice and beer Laos, although wary of colonization of any sort, I silently dare these waxing half moons of increasingly incandescent bubbles to do the job that the tired Lao woman had failed to complete the night before, at this particular watering hole, in this particular capital city – if you could call it such.  Simultaneously, as my mind’s eye pans from gazing down to all around, I ask those invisible orbs that contain the force necessary to ensure that local people have a say over the future of their land and livelihoods, those bubbles that travel only along strands of shared understanding and experience, to one-day expunge the back door mining concessions and illegal logging roads from this country’s collective tiling.

siphandone: fish are people too

Siphandone: 4000 islands, it means. A place in which the fate of people and fish are inextricably tied. So, in lieu of actually strapping a person to a fish, we spent a week on a small and remote island with the intention of burdening an already exhausted krempf's catfish, in the middle of its migration upstream, with a bulky piece of technology - an extension of humanity's long arm... or antennae.  

The tag, which records light levels and electromagnetic field, will transmit data to a satellite once it detaches from the fish and allow us to track the migration route and pace of these long distance migrants. While the Mekong harbors a number of migratory fish - little is known about the migration routes. This information is critical to predict the impacts of the 11 potential main-stem Mekong hydropower dams that are being planned. 

Find out more about the project by watching this video (embedded near the middle of the web-page) that I filmed and produced: An Upstream Journey: Tagging migratory fish of the Mekong river

Not a Brazilian child

Bringing a catch back from a li trap on 3 inch diameter bamboo sections. Note: the railing is note to code.

Large basket-type fish trap

lots of water

To the market by fish-cycle

concentric fish

8kg or so

Working on a net with dad

After some beer laos and long day on the li trap

Just one of many channels of the river at sunset

rusty hammock

three generations

runaway fish ramp

smoking fish

working on a trap

if you're still out there....

Dear friends.... it has been a while, I know. If you're still out there, check out my latest (and first) cinematic production. Explosives, big fish, rapids.... its got it all. Photos from this trip and China to come.

If you are out there.... let me know, and maybe this blog will live on!

Wendell and the language of globalized capitalism

Wendell Berry, an American literary icon, scholar, farmer, just weeks ago gave the prestigious Jefferson Lecture sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. His words, which resonate in a place inside of those that recall forays into the dirt and the water, are a timely mirror in which to reflect on the state of our environment and the shift in resource valuation in our age of globalized capitalism.

Over the recent past, it has become imperative for the environmental and conservation movement to address the issue of value.  What is the value, say, in the services that the upstream watershed provides? What is the value of a carbon-dioxide breathing, oxygen emitting forest?  How much are the persistent pollination services of bees and butterflies worth to us? These may seem like abstract or cosmic questions  – but more and more, these are requiring empirical answers. And furthermore, these answers are guiding management decisions.

In a world connected by countless invisible digital strands from the densest cities to the remotest villages, we have been forced to adopt a universal language out of convenience, a way in which to represent things and concepts that can be freely translated and intercompared.  This language is economics – the almighty dollar.

Societies have forever used specific languages to express feelings and emotions, to convey thoughts, to record history, to trade and interact. Isolated groups had certain ways of saying things, conveying meaning, and codifying symbols that were attuned to their specific ways of life. Interacting or trading with communities speaking other languages required a common denominator.  Today, our global common denominator is ‘the market’. Wendell is troubled, as we all should be, when ‘the market’ “assumes the standing of ultimate power”.

The resources that once may have been protected by local community based values, by intrinsic worth and local memories, are now susceptible to evaluation based on transnational economic costs and benefits.  What was once a small forest on the edge of some rice fields holding the spirits of the ancestors is now worth a certain amount of dollars in carbon credits, or in potential rice growing profits. But there is no market price for ancestral spirit homes.

In essence, we have a translation problem. We are watering our valuations of certain resources down to a basic unit that fails to capture the complexity and the nuance of human value. “Actual value of some things”, Wendell remarks, “exceeds human ability to calculate or measure, and therefore must be considered absolute”.

So can society come up with a better way in which to value what our economy is rooted in?  It may not be possible for the peoples of the world to come to an agreement on what should be valued and for how much. But it seems that we have settled; we have adopted the most simplistic way to compare a finished product to the raw part of an ecosystem that it once played a part in.  

What is lost in translation may be more than we think. Wendell Berry sees a future only by returning affection to “the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods”.  Returning affection to everyday life - affection to the simplest parts of life and our economy - affection to the mundane - to the way we pour our tea to the way we wash our clothes to the way we interact with human and non-human neighbors.

a new year in burma

The pagoda: Soft bells shuttering in the evening breeze resonate from the tops of each gilded tower. Shoeless, we walk hypnotized around and through what could seem to be an out of control gold stupa trip. Incense burn, stooped men recite prayers they've known since childhood, gongs gong, and bats flutter under a starry April sky here at Shwedagon Pagoda, the religious center of Buddhist life in the largest city in Burma.

The temples: Bogon, the seat of an ancient capital. Stupas in various stages of disrepair litter the Irrawaddy floodplain here. History is literally extruded from the ground all around us. Shards of ancient pottery, a secret staircase leading to a panoramic view, Buddha images perched among guano and darkness. This is an auspicious place.

The drive: thumb sore from feverish rolling up and down of the passenger seat window in this small stuffy Burmese taxi. Young smirking children, hidden behind piles of stones or parked rusty trucks leap out ready to fling buckets of water onto and into unsuspecting cars and motorbikes. It is the Buddhist New Year, which means water festival, which means the few days of the year where all can revel in hydrological mischief.

We are cruising up the western edge of the Shan plateau, bound for the (still) idyllic, (once) colonial mountain retreat town of Kalaw in western Shan State. Once past 3000 feet high, pine trees take over and wash the hillsides with green and brown needles. This place feels halfway between southeast Asia and India - tiny tea shops selling samosas fortify each street corner.

The trek: landscape is more of a crust. Dessicated rolling hills - a patchwork of burnt red and orange and brown geometrically abutting one another. Terraces where there will soon be rice. The whole of the landscape between Kalaw and Inlay Lake was groomed by a human touch. Ox carts create perfect till lines through soon to be vegetable patches. The Anthropocene is upon us, here as much as anywhere else.

We walk along limestone cliffs and past men leading water buffaloes between rice terraces. A village dog adopts us, accompanying us for both days of walking. Local woman, brushing long grey hair soon to be covered by traditional head scarves, invite us in for green tea and spongy sugar cane rice disks.

The villages are tidy and serene, far from the drunken punk rock water hose stages of the cities. Few chickens and ducks litter the alleyways of the 3 street town. I sat in a slumped food coma, sweating in some rays of afternoon light, while the local medicine woman, at whose house we were resting, counts beads and repeats soft Buddhist prayers beside her snoozing young daughters.

As the sun droops over the hills, we reach the monastery that is our place of rest for the evening. Micro-monks - small children in small maroon robes rove the place - doing chores and playing games and staring intently in front of the head monk. The monastery is hollow, with old dark red floorboards and lofty ceilings. Something that has existed as is for years and will continue to. 

The lake: a sunbaked skim over Inlay Lake, a giant volcano-caused body of water in Shan State, draining into the Mekong watershed. Fishing communities live on the lake - in it, above it. Front porch staircases are partially removable for the rising lake levels in the rainy season. This is some kind of Venice of Asia. Men practice a graceful leg rowing technique to free up hands for fishing. Floating gardens soak up light above and water below.

The city: we get to the train station on the outskirts of town trying to buy tickets. The only foreigners in sight... they don't now what to do with us. Eventually we are escorted into the office, where rusty old British equipment monitor the position of incoming trains with tiny blinking and flashing lights.  After some funny conversation with an English speaking Burmese gentleman who happened to be on his way as well, the narrow gauge canary orange cars pull up. Riders race to load and unload their wares and bags of produce before the train creaks forward.

Yangon is pulsing with sweaty tropical energy. Only weeks ago, the first free election in decades occurred here and around the country - finally winning for Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League of Democracy 43 of the possible 45 free legislative seats. People are excited, inspired... life is changing fast for them. After years of being closed and quieted, pushed aside by the military regime, they suddenly feel that have some voice. It seems not loud or brash, but humbly hopeful and inspired. Many people wear Suu Kyi's pin on their shirt, they bring up the recent political visits from Hillary Clinton and David Cameron, they can see a path towards a life of expanded potential. They feel connected, relevant, like new citizens of a vast world that they have until now been totally excluded from.