hydro-post

Rain has been pounding the rooftops these last few days, dark skies envelop even the brightest colored temples, turning them black and white, like the old silent film they could be featured in.  Downpours have nicely coincided with my trip home from work, allowing me to observe some interesting local customs concerning rainfall.  Lao people have funny ways of staying dry. They motorbike around with umbrellas in one hand, feet tucked up into the center of the motorbike to prevent the inevitable.  Brightly colored plastic ponchos take flight like capes behind some.  Others just drive really fast, apparently subscribing to the philosophy that they can out-scooter even the wettest rain.

Buddhist lent is coming to an end, and that means boat racing here in Vientiane.  Teams are practicing rowing their brightly colored massive wooden hand-carved boats in preparation for the big day, next month.  I made my way out to a village where some friends were practicing to survey the scene.  On the shore, the whole village came out to watch the spectacle - foreign and Lao women rowing a big traditional boat up and down the Mekong.  Eating grilled river snail and canned Beer Lao, I tried to carry on conversations about the most simple things with the gaggles of village boys who showed up to the Saturday entertainment.  We had some laughs.

Also paid a visit to a funny relic called Buddha Park.  An hours drive from Vientiane in a small grass field next to the Mekong, there exists moss covered concrete giants. Images from Buddhism and Hinduism are scattered throughout the garden, with a strange onion shaped orb that can be ascended through a series of semi-functional stairwells inside.  Makes me consider that universal human desire to create - to extrude into possibility the chaotic free stuff of this world, mash it together into a semblance of a form, and aim it towards the cosmos. To erect such shadow-casting objects is to live on into the lives of those future humans who must, as they stand before the creation, wonder what was gyrating through the mind of the creator.

In the next month or so, Laos and the region will be transitioning into the cool, dry season. I am moving into a more permanent residence tomorrow with three other PiA fellows... a balcony-laden strangely partitioned abode in a nice Laos neighborhood. Time is picking up pace.  My being is no metronome these days, some days are months, some weeks are seconds. Just about (what I am told is) a month into my new life in Laos, and things make a bit more sense. Hope fall is upon you, but not literally.




Love, kyle.

dual nature

Asia, Southeast Asia, Laos... a place rife with dualities and juxtapositions. Hallowed cultures, dating back to rice empires won and lost, colonial histories still trickling through the seams of society, and a governmental focus on developing to keep up with the demanding economies of the western world. These all happen in tandem, overlapping and intertwining to make a complex fabric of interactions that is easy to get wrapped up in.

Got myself a motorbike, the standard vehicle of the masses here, a 110cc Kolao. Independent mobility is a beautiful thing. Spent the weekend driving through the outskirts of town and countryside, talking to grandmas and children and whoever will speak slowly enough and forgive my terrible tone usage. Spent a day at a 'waterfall' which was more of a few enhanced rapids where Lao families sip Beer Lao and eat sticky rice while taking a dip.



In other news, I want to dedicate this thought to the life of Nell the dog, a truly significant part of the childhood of both Eli and I. I still remember those autumn afternoons running her through her worm-hole plastic tube in our backyard, and waltzing her around our kitchen floor, arm outstretched. She certainly got us through some hard dog-woe times, and in part inspired us to get one of our own. Watching her grow old reminded me of an old wise woman, who had shared with us some secrets about life that we would never have otherwise known.

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

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