I recently did an assignment for Yale Environment 360reporting on Sweden’s forestry industry. I was excited to see the country, where “my people” are from, and which is regarded as the greenest in the world. For these reasons I already felt proud, but my purpose there would turn out to give me pause.
The trip made it clear that the country’s forestry model, which Sweden likes to say is the most sustainable forestry system in the world, does not work. Federal regulations on logging were replaced in 1993 by an act requiring that every logging operation balance production with conservation, allowing companies to be their own bosses and operate under a “freedom with responsibility” framework.
Earlier this summer the Swedish Forest Agency revealed that over a third of all the recent cutting activities, 37%, violated the tenets of the model by prioritizing production over conservation. That is perhaps not surprising: voluntary programs like this rarely work, no matter what country you’re from.
Swedes identify strongly with nature and polls show that they prioritize conservation and recreation over logging by a long shot. However, there’s a big disconnect between sentiment and action and between the built and natural environments, exacerbated by the great distance between the country’s main population centers in the south and the logging tracts of the north.
One sunny afternoon in Stockholm I asked Dr. Ulf Swenson about this. We sat on a bench outside his lab at the Swedish Museum of Natural History where he works as a senior research scientist and had a buoyant conversation, but his face clouded when the talk turned to the logging in the north. A recent visit there left him “terrified by how little forest was left.”
That’s a pity, because this is where most of the country’s oldest and richest natural forests are, and where much of Europe’s biodiversity calls home. In order to meet their production goals, though, forestry companies are pushing aggressively into these areas and the loss of biodiversity is increasing. Perhaps the Swedes’ high level of trust in each other, which has been extended to these companies via the forestry model, is being betrayed when it comes to the trees.
While there I also joined an excursion of “biodiversity hunters,” folks with varying biology backgrounds from Ph.D.s to students, who search for rare species of plants and animals whose presence can keep forestlands from being logged. Several of them were from Helsinki, interestingly. They told me that they’d given up on preventing the loss of Finland’s forests and instead work here, where there is still a chance to save a significant portion of the region’s natural boreal forests and intact biodiversity.
I go into much more detail on the specific problems in the Yale piece (which was subsequently picked up by National Geographic), which is also resplendent with damning quotes not only from conservationists but also logging company reps and official sources, one of which is a high official in the country’s version of the EPA, who calls the Swedish forestry model hopelessly naïve.
But you’ll perhaps get an even better feel for the issues and the landscape by watching this quick video interview with two conservationists in the northern county of Jamtland, and from the images I’ve collected on my website:
It was great to see where my people come from, even if it was to break a rather unpleasant story. But it’s a huge question: if the so-called greenest country in the world can’t do forestry sustainably, who can?
~~~
Erik Hoffner is a freelance photojournalist and Outreach Coordinator for the award-winning magazine, Orion. His work appears in Earth Island Journal, Grist, and The Sun. He is also an editorial board member of Terrain.org.
People judge risk badly. We worry too much about minor hazards and are nonchalant about more serious ones. We’re especially inept at judging chronic long-term risks – like climate change.
Insurance is a major part of how we deal with risk – can it lead us to more viable ways to address climate issues? The picture is mixed.
When we manage risk by buying insurance, we endure the slow, small pain of insurance premiums in exchange for a big compensation should something ugly happen. The insurers profit from our lack of knowledge about risk. Buying insurance goes against the grain, but paying our premiums gives us a little more security against fires, earthquakes, business interruption, and the numerous other events against which we can buy an insurance product.
Insurers review their policies annually and change their terms if they see a change in the probabilities. When no major losses occur, the industry pats itself on the back for judging their risks correctly for that year. They’re happy and profitable. If the risk landscape changes, they absorb the payouts and adjust the terms accordingly.
The optimistic point of view is that insurance can play a major role in guiding businesses and individuals toward more climate-friendly decisions. In theory, insurers study the real probabilities of known hazards, figure out a viable premium that gives themselves a profit and the policyholders the agreed upon protection against the risk. When climate change raises the risks of flooding, business interruption, and other insurance hazards, the premiums go up, which can lead their policyholders to change their behavior. Financing for a new factory can be prohibitive or even impossible to get, if insurers won’t cover it.
In practice, though, this theory is faulty for several reasons. Climate change poses special challenges to insurers, not merely because they are on the hook for many weather risks such as hurricanes.
First, to single out one kind of insurance, many factors combine in extreme weather events. A hurricane has many causes, and global warming might only be two percent part of the overall risk. If that part grows from two percent to five percent, it seems negligible, but in fact it’s quite significant. As one insurance executive said, “Even a minor increase in a risk like that can mean billions of dollars in additional losses to insurers.” If the winds are a few miles per hour stronger, and the storm takes a path through a heavily insured area, insurers can be overwhelmed.
The same is true for other climate impacts. There have always been floods, extreme weather, and times when the water cycle intensifies. But if climate change is turning up the dial, these familiar events may break out of their boundaries and become more frequent, more intense, or changed in unexpected ways.
Second, insurers are people too, and the cognitive blind spots that afflict individuals also affect the risk business. In practice, the insurance industry’s grip on certain probabilities often relies on seat-of-the-pants methods that are subjective, and whose over-optimistic assumptions are sometimes rudely corrected by ugly surprises, especially when risks are constantly changing, as they are with climate change.
Like all of us, insurers want certainty, even when they know that certainty cannot be attained. At a 2007 conference about hurricane science for an insurance audience, the world’s top climatologists discussed various topics in modeling and hurricanes. The head of underwriting at a major North American insurer snorted at the hedged, qualified way the scientists state their conclusions. The underwriter then complained, “Why don’t the scientists give us numbers we can use! These probabilities are too nebulous for us to write business with them!” His impatience is widely shared, but the answer is no.
Third, insurance functions well when the risks of various hazards are truly independent of each other, and truly random. One trouble with climate change is that climate instability tends to make floods, windstorms, and other extreme weather more interrelated.
One force binding all these factors together more tightly is land use, which in the US is often part of a highly entrenched political juggernaut promoting the worst possible policies, such as building heavily in flood plains, or on beaches very prone to hurricane damage.
Consider Florida, where the laws, business practices and general culture are geared to developing every square inch of land near water – oceans, certainly, but also lakes, streams, wetlands. Even in the absence of climate change, this is an obviously dangerous policy. It’s also very popular. John Coomber, former CEO of Swiss Re, once grumbled that every American wants to live on the most vulnerable beaches they can find in Florida.
Governments occasionally try to buck the pro-development tide, but the political pressure against the anti-development forces is swift and merciless. Certainly no politician can withstand it. Rather than resisting, many property and casualty insurers have pulled away from vulnerable coastal property in Florida.
In response, Florida created its own public insurance pool. Result? Development continues, and the state fund is actuarially unsound – a major storm hitting a developed area would bankrupt the fund in short order. A few more storms would bankrupt the state of Florida, which would then call on the Federal government — as the stand-in for taxpayers in all other states — to bail them out.
These three factors mean that the insurance industry is weaker than it appears when in matters of changing social and economic policies. The only way to change these entrenched policies would be for other social forces to align with the insurance point of view. That will require energetic political leadership and vigorous regulation. The market alone cannot save us.
~~~
Brian Thomas left Swiss Re in 2006 and became a sustainability consultant with a focus on communications. He has developed green-themed projects for clients including Merill Lynch Global Markets and Investment Banking, Cofra Holding, Good Energies, Zurich Financial, Edelman, the City of Chicago, the City of New York, and others. He is currently a member of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, EnviroComm, and the Association of Green Technology Auditors, to name a few. Thomas started his blog, Carbon Based, in 2007, after requests from contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He is the author of Climate Change Adaptation in 2010 and currently resides in West Cornwall, Connecticut, where he is an activist member of the Conservation Commission. For more information, please visit www.carbon-based-ghg.com, and his blog, http://carbon-based-ghg.blogspot.com.
I’m pleased to share with readers of Terrain.org, who may have caught my blog posts about my travels through East Asia last year, that two versions of my profile of Chinese writer and people’s historian Liao Yiwu have been published this month, in the print edition of The Progressive (also featuring contributions from David Sedaris, Jim Hightower and Dave Zirin), and in expanded online form on Counterpunch, here.
Liao is an incredibly important figure. His first book to be translated into English, The Corpse Walker, was a collection of 27 startlingly raw and unexpected literary interviews with mostly older people on the margins of Chinese society, who were directly impacted by the horrors of life under Mao Zedong. Several of his other books, including Earthquake Insane Asylum, chronicling the invisible and uncounted following the disastrous 2008 Sichuan earthquake, have been published in Taiwan and Hong Kong, though pressures from China are having an impact there as well; the Taiwanese publisher of Liao’s books is politically aligned with the KMT in Taiwan, a party broadly in favor of closer ties with mainland China, and has discontinued the publication of Liao’s inflammatory work in the country.
He was due to visit the U.S. for the first time this year, but as the Chinese government has responded to fears of insurrection like that unfolding in the Middle East, it has arrested numerous prominent Chinese activists, artist and writers, including Ai Weiwei, Ran Yunfei, and Tan Zuoren. In this wave of repression Liao has not been arrested, but his permission to leave the country was revoked on April 1st, at the last possible moment.
Please do check out my expanded profile of Liao, and, if you’re able, please do let potentially interested people know, as Liao’s opportunity to come to the U.S. and speak to people and share his stories in person has been denied.
Last spring I spent a few weeks exploring New Zealand’s South Island with local friends. I was dazzled by a land of clear, intensely blue waters. I was astounded that on mountain hikes in their Alps, I could even drink water freely and safely. At one stop at the high alpine Lake Rotoiti, I became curious about the graceful, velvety, blue-eyed eels that met my gaze from a pier over the water.
I grew up hearing tales from my older sister of night eel-fishing parties on the rivers in Virginia where I spent my childhood. And here were eels in New Zealand, taking gulps of bacon dangling from children’s fingers as the children lay at my feet on the sun-warmed planks above the lake’s edge. When I asked my friends about these eels, they laughed, recalling tall tales and encounters with the longfin eels during their childhood. They exclaimed that “heaps of eels” have always been around, but that they never really thought much about them. “They’re just there, mate.”
When I returned home to Tucson I began to do some exploring of the virtual kind. I was astounded at what I discovered about the eels and disillusioned about their supposed land of clear, clean water. It turns out that these fish are ancient creatures with a peculiarly wonderful life cycle. But their days of being common, or of even existing at all, may be coming to a close. So in returning to New Zealand three months later, I decided to meet with marine and freshwater scientists from such groups as the Ministry of Fisheries (regulators of the country’s fishing industry), the government’s Department of Conservation, Massey University, and Forest and Bird (the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand, a privately-funded conservation organization locally called Twig & Tweet).
I learned that over 100 million years ago, the ancestors of these freshwater longfin eels (Anguilla dieffenbachia) likely lived their lives in the ocean, and eventually found some protection by entering the freshwater ecosystems of what would later be called New Zealand. Scientists believe they gradually adapted to spending more and more of their lives farther and farther inland, until they became what they are today: an unusual fish species that spends its entire adult life in lakes and streams, but is still bound to the ocean for one critical life phase. Longfin eels must migrate far out to sea to spawn, and the young must then find their way back upstream and inland to live their adult lives. This incredible life migration accounts for why this particular species could become extinct in short order. First, the female eels must live between 30 and 100years before they are able to reproduce, while the males take 15 to 45 years to reach reproductive maturity. Since many eels won’t live that long, only a small number of adult eels actually migrate down from the lakes each fall. And due to modern human obstructions, only a fraction of these migrating eels now make it to the deep sea trenches to mate.
You can imagine the changes to New Zealand’s waterways since the Industrial Revolution. A century ago there were no imposing hydroelectric dams. A century ago only a few people (mainly the aboriginal Maori people, to whom the eels are a sacred part of culture and tradition) were fishing with handmade hinake nets in order to feed only their own communities. A century ago wetlands had not been drained. A century ago the waters were free of choking pollutants like pesticides and fertilizers that run off from farms. Today, if a two-meter-long migrating female – her body full to bursting with millions of eggs – is lucky enough to be gently “caught and carried” over a dam by humans, she must still make her way past commercial traps that catch unsuspecting eels by the tons each year. She must still struggle over many smaller dams, across large expanses of dry sand and rocks, and through chemical-laden water. And all that even before reaching the Tasman Sea, where she will begin an ancient journey to the deep sea trenches some 4,000 miles away!
Before the adult eels undertake this epic journey, their bodies undergo dramatic physical changes that will allow them to survive. First, the eels’ eyes grow larger and more sensitive to light. This lets them see better while they travel by night in order to avoid dangers such as large predators. Next, they stop eating. For several months their traveling bodies must subsist without food, for there is no room for it with the massive amounts of egg and milt (sperm) that fill their body cavities. Then, as they reach brackish water where the rivers meet the sea, they rest a bit and allow time for their gills to change so that they are able to get oxygen from saltwater rather than fresh.
Scientists are just now taking steps to understand precisely where the eels go to mate as well as the actual nitty-gritty of their mating ritual. It has long been believed that these longfins all meet up in the Tonga Trench. About 6 miles deep, it is located just to the east of the Tonga Islands. In just the past several years scientists have been radio-tracking these superfish. They now think the eels may also travel to other deep places to mate, including eastern Fiji Basin. We know that the eels meet in these trenches, mate via external fertilization, and die.
But, a scientist from the Department of Conservation gave me the real, brutal details. It seems that the longfins form a violent mass of reproduction. As they have evolved no other way to release their gametes (sex cells), the swarm of eels begins to knock and bash into each other, bursting apart and releasing their egg and milt to swirl and mix and join in the water as the old, battered eels die.
Soon the tiny young become part of the smallest creatures in the ocean. During their time at sea, the larvae (leptocephalli) are unable to swim for themselves, and thus depend upon the seasonal ocean currents to drift all the way back to the edges of New Zealand. As they travel, like a tide of shimmery leaves, they begin to morph into something that looks more like an eel, but is transparent. This stage, known as the glass eel, is colorless to escape the view of predators. The glass eels begin to darken, and so become “elvers” when their tube nostrils sense more freshwater and less saltwater around them. Soon the elvers bunch up and enter the freshwater waterways under the cover of darkness. They travel by night, like their parents did, and their scaleless bodies wiggle backwards to hide between and under rocks during the bright days.
When a waterless area must be crossed, the eels wriggle over the surface of land and actually breathe through their skin. But they can only sustain this for a short time, while their skin remains moist, an especially tricky predicament because New Zealand has lost 90 percent of its wetlands since the first Europeans arrived.
Voracious predators, the growing eels will eat anything they can catch, grasping prey with rows of slanting, peg-like teeth. Exposure from their burning hunger allows the elvers to be caught in large numbers and exported as a delicacy to European and Asian markets. The eels that manage to avoid such capture continue their upstream migration.
Elvers measuring less than five inches can climb steep, wet surfaces, up to 100 feet tall. Many of New Zealand’s damns, however, are higher – and larger elvers cannot climb vertical walls at all. When the eels cannot crawl over or find their way around the dams, the eels starve or are eaten by predators that include invasive species like perch and rats. Rats wait by the edges of dams and snatch migrating eels right off the dam wall. Longfins have lost half of their habitat to dams.
Most of these hard facts were shared with me one wet, wintry day in Nelson, New Zealand, as I sipped coffee with Dr. Mike Joy, a fish and freshwater biologist from Massey University, on New Zealand’s North Island. It seems Dr. Joy is swimming upstream himself as he tries to get others with influence to listen to the facts that show the precarious state of the eels. I listened as he explained that many other endemic, freshwater fish in New Zealand are in similar danger due to the rapid degradation of the country’s freshwater ecosystems. If he could make people aware, and have the Ministry of Fisheries ban commercial longfin eel fishing, he would feel somewhat successful.
I was glad I could tell him that I heard, and was hard at work writing and illustrating a children’s book about the eels to help raise awareness. Then he mentioned that the American eel (Anguilla rostrata), of Atlantic watersheds, is equally amazing – and equally challenged.
As I walked back to my hostel, I had to shake my head and laugh at how we often seem to know and understand the least about the intricate life that in our own backyards and streams. I suppose a trip to my sister’s home along that river in Virginia is about due. I will listen to her fishing stories. I will look into that old familiar water and try to really see – before it is too late.
Take Action
Go to Forest and Bird’s website and a petition calling for a moratorium on commercial longfin eel fishing: www.forestandbird.org.nz.
~~~
Stephanie Bowman most often resides in Tucson, Arizona. She is an educator, artist, and writer working for the environment. Stephanie serves on the board of directors for Reptile and Amphibian Ecology International, where she develops educational outreach presentations that connect rainforest ecology with the ecology in our own backyards. She will be leading several high school students on a scientific expedition to the Amazon rainforest this summer.
This October, Stephanie plans to visit New Zealand schools with a longfin eel outreach program that utilizes art to teach teh science of the eels and freshwater ecology. Contact Stephanie with questions or offers of assistance and funding for the eel outreach program.
The tremors that ravaged the beautiful face of Chile, from the curved coasts of Valparaíso to the green hills of Temuco, were a direct hit home for me, as a translator of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Chile, where is your poet son when you need him? Where is Pablo Neruda? He lives on in his words of poetry on the tongues of the Chilean people in the wake of devastation left by these recent quakes.
When I first heard the news, my mind snapped to a quote from Neruda’s poem “Insomnia,” in which he asks, “What will become of my poor, dark homeland?” (Memorial de Isla Negra, 1964). While that line more directly relates to Neruda’s legacy as champion of the Chilean people, at the time it took on another meaning, and I mouthed it aloud in shock. Neruda has other poems that now seem almost prophetic, such as “Earthquake,” which I have translated from Canto general, originally published in 1950:
I awoke when the ground of dreams gave way
beneath my bed.
A blind column of ash was staggering in the middle
of the night,
I ask you: have I died?
Give me your hand in this rupture of the planet
while the wound of the bruised sky makes stars.
Aye!, but memories, where are they?, where are they?
Why does the earth boil, filling with death?
Oh, masks under curled dwellings, smiles
that fright had not yet reached, beings torn
under the beams, covered by the night.
And today you dawn, oh blue day, dressed
for a dance, with your golden queue
on the subdued sea of debris, fiery,
looking for the lost faces of the unburied ones.
Neruda pivots on this chilling scene before resting on the picture of a beautiful new day dawning, yet it is bittersweet as the daylight searches out the faces of the deceased. As this poem begins while the speaker is still asleep, so did the late February earthquakes that shook many Chileans out of their beds that dark Saturday morning.
Chile is alive with seismic activity and has a long history of deadly earthquakes, and Neruda knew their destruction firsthand.
The 8.8-magnitude earthquake and aftershocks that struck offshore in proximity of Concepción killed more than 800 people, reports Chile’s National Emergency Office. The initial earthquake was so strong that, according to NASA, the city of Concepción moved some ten feet to the west, and the Earth’s diameter contracted ever-so-slightly to shorten the length of the day by a fraction of a second.
The earthquakes also occurred amidst heated political elections, another subject about which Neruda was passionate. He was a political figure and an unwavering supporter of left-wing, communist government in Chile. The government has again fallen into the hands of conservative leadership, but regardless of politics, everyone now must focus on rebuilding.
Pablo Neruda’s birthplace, the city of Parral near Santiago, was among those places hardest hit by the initial earthquake, though his homes in Isla Negra, Santiago, and Valparaíso were unharmed.
Neruda loved his country, and if he were alive today, he would surely be at the side of his people, offering not only his poetry, but his profound leadership. Leaders have often turned to the words of poets for comfort and hope in times of disaster. John F. Kennedy often quoted Tennyson and Yeats. Che Guevara was known to recite Rudyard Kipling’s “If—” at length. In fact, Che even may have turned to Neruda’s poetry for strength in trying times, as he was said to carry a copy of Canto general at the time of his death.
When ordinary words cannot express the intensity of our emotions, we must turn to figurative language, imagery, and metaphor: poetry. Poetry has a healing quality. Not only can poems spread messages of sympathy, love, and hope, but the rhythm of the words can be like mantras, like hymns—soothing and strengthening the reader and the greater human condition.
Neruda’s poetry can be warmly reassuring, such as his poem from 1952’s Los versos del capitán “The Mountain and the River,” in which he offers these lines:
Who are those who suffer?
I do not know, but they are mine.
Here, Neruda gives a voice to the suffering people, beckoning them to come with him. He continues:
the struggle will be hard,
the life will be hard,
but you will come with me.
At the most desperate times, simply knowing that someone hears your plight and that you have support can comfort.
Poets throughout history have been inspired to compose some of their greatest work out of the darkest of times—civil oppression, unrequited love, the horrors of war, and natural disaster.
In Neruda’s poem “To the Air in the Stone,” from Las piedras de Chile (1961), he admits, “Everything changes skin hour by hour,” and he means “everything,” even the face of the earth itself, even those things which we perceive to be stable. The title of the poem implies that even rock is not as solid as it may seem.
As the Chilean people begin to rebuild their cities, they will draw on the creativity that is key to their culture. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Neruda proclaimed, according to the Swedish Academy’s Karl Ragnar Gierow, “I come from a dark region, from a land separated from all others by the steep contours of its geography. I was the most forlorn of poets and my poetry was provincial, oppressed, and rainy. But always I had put my trust in man. I never lost hope” (1971).
Neither should his fellow countrypersons lose hope now. They must put their trust in people, the people of Chile and the helpers from around the world who will rebuild that unique region. While the Chileans will never forget what has happened, never forget those who died, the catastrophe will make them stronger and more resilient yet. I hope that disaster becomes the fodder for an artistic outpouring, healing the hearts of the people, in the tradition of Chile’s beloved poet.
~~~
Caleb Beissert is a poet, writer, and translator of Spanish poetry living in Asheville, North Carolina. His work is featured in Tar River Poetry, Beatitude: Golden Anniversary, 1959-2009, and Pisgah Review.
“The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.”
Young girl in interesting alleyway, Chengdu, Sichuan, China, 2010.
Here is a girl, standing at the end of an alleyway in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province in southwestern China, in the early days of the Gregorian year 2010. The longer I look at these photos the more love I feel for her.
What will she become, and what will life in the place and time she was born into allow her?
When we first made eye contact, she made a grim face, turned abruptly, and marched with purpose the other way. Then she stopped, executed a surprisingly martial turn, and stood surveying me for a pregnant moment. I waved, and she seemed not to respond at all; just stood there stone-faced, or so I thought at the time. After a moment of standing there like an absurd soldier, she vanished into the doorway of what I assume was her home.
In this moment, so many things went through my mind: My god the Chinese are rigid: even this little girl in pink and turquoise walks like an expressionless soldier! What a dirty alleyway; aren’t they loathe to hang their clothes outside in this grime after they just washed them? What is she thinking about me?
When I got the chance to look at these pictures in more detail, I saw that there was a glimmer of a smile on her face, mostly around her eyes. I have very poor vision, and my camera, with its optical zoom, sees far better than I do.
Yes, the Chinese are, for the most part, quite rigid. But you would be too if you lived in an authoritarian state (it’s not communism; never was) where creativity and dissent are often punished, and you knew almost from the start that you were going to have to compete against billions of other people if you hope for any control over the terms of your life. Authoritarianism and a crushing of people’s ability to dream and define the terms of their own lives is mutilation and psychic murder. The Chinese people make the best of the lives their government allows them, and this little girl is a great example of why it’s important to oppose governments and corporations, not peoples. The Chinese people are not to be feared or damned for the vehicle they’ve been shoved into. Their spirit in trying to advance and overcome is to be respected and admired.
This little girl’s alleyway holds several things of interest and relevance. To touch on the simplest one first, the grime is a byproduct of industry and sheer population density, and industry is, in our globally metastasized consumer culture, how people raise their standards of living. And maybe the U.S. didn’t invent it, but we sure did refine it, give it some steroids, and begin exporting it to the world on a massive scale. There are great and obvious distinctions to be made between the U.S. And China of course, but perhaps the largest and most important, as cartoonist, author, and occasional New York Times essayist Timothy Kreider observed recently, is that in China, the government owns its corporations, while American corporations own our government.
Second among the things that interest me in this alley is the red and gold tracksuit, probably an older brother or cousin’s national team uniform. It takes passion and determination and focus to excel in the athletic arena. That’s why governments and businesses spend so much money and time on their sports teams. It creates a strong emotional bond between the athletes and those who admire them. It’s an entirely natural thing, the same way one might admire a swift or elegant bird. Then those natural human feelings are appropriated and welded to artificial jingoism. This little girl’s likely older brother or cousin (the one-child policy, while powerful, is not as rigid as is commonly reported) probably takes order and discipline very seriously, and if he’s on a national team, it means he’s achieved some level of recognition for his efforts in a highly competitive society. Even before politics and ideology, this little girl is surely absorbing these things like a sponge: How does one make sense of the world, how does one find one’s way through it? You learn from what’s closest to you. You don’t have to understand ideology to be shaped by it.
As a counterpoint, consider the blue jeans. What do blue jeans mean to the Chinese? Although it’s a glib generalization to talk about “the Chinese,” in much the same way talking about “Americans” is somewhat foolish, asking what blue jeans means is not a silly question to ask in an age of mass-produced culture and mediated conceptions of identity. We live, after all, in an age when people see nothing weird or immediately sad about expressing aspects of themselves through the choice of which mass-produced item they selected for purchase.
And “America,” among many other things, is a brand, embedded with all manner of code that is exported aggressively to the world. “Freedom,” “happiness,” and “opportunity” are its dominant brand values. Consider how identified with “America” blue jeans are, and then further consider that the Chinese word for America is meiguo or “beautiful country.” I have been called meiguoren (literally, “beautiful country person”) probably several dozen times in my short time here, and it always makes me feel a stab of pain that’s related to the pain I feel when I look around at the ubiquitous Western beauty ideals on display here. Really?, I think, a 5000-year old culture of several billion people with a staggering amount of cultural achievements and its own beautiful people and land can’t think of anything better to aspire to now than material wealth and the trappings of hyper consumer culture? They want to be like…. us?
Why aren't there more affordable, non-polluting electric bikes in the U.S.? Also: note this woman's Team USA track jacket.
The Chinese also enjoy being lazy sometimes.
Even a cursory study of China makes it obvious how much yearning and rage course through the people, much like an underground waterway. One of my all-time favorite songs, “Once in a Lifetime,” by the Talking Heads, has a line about there being “water under the water, carrying the water,” and I think it describes the humanity and dogged spirit of the people laboring under the yoke of Chinese government and now-ascendant commerce quite well. They yearn, they long, and, when it boils over, they can exhibit shocking rage. The surface is not the reality.
To tie this all back, looking at the picture of the little Chinese girl at the top of this post, caught between repulsion and friendliness at the sight of me, I think: Love is both dangerous and beautiful, and sometimes you have to zoom in and pay attention before you can see it looking back at you.
~~~~
Brian Awehali, a former editor at Britannica.com, founded and edited the North American magazine, LiP: Informed Revolt (anthology: Tipping the Sacred Cow, AK Press). In 2010, he will be traveling through Taiwan, China, and Mongolia, writing diffusely about culture, sustainable development, and emerging “green” technologies. He curates LOUDCANARY: One interconnected journey through everything and nothing. He is a half-Irish member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
High tree line, Nantou County, Taiwan. Everything just grows here.
By Brian Awehali
I was taken on a lovely tour of the fog-wreathed high mountain tea country in Nantou County, in the central and only landlocked part of Taiwan. Here, especially in the east, near the Hualien coastline, it’s easy to see why the Portuguese dubbed this place “formosa,” which means “beautiful island.” Butterflies and lush vegetation abound.
One must dwell in beauty when contemplating strategies for military conquest and brutal political suppression.
Among the many interesting natural sites, I also saw the “bamboo house” that Nationalist (KMT) leader Lord Chiang would retreat to in the years after he lost his struggle against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and was forced to flee mainland China. I’m not sure if he went here before or after he contracted the gonorrhea that would eventually sterilize him and leave him with only one biological son, but it was definitely before he imprisoned or executed upwards of 140,000 people for opposing the KMT in Taiwan.
After the tour, I was invited to visit a local tea aficionado to learn more about the history, process, art, and etiquette of Taiwan’s second-most-acclaimed product (the first being the creation and modern defense of a functioning democratic Chinese society and government).
We entered and began the tasting: Spring and Winter varieties of Rose Oolong, Jasmine and Black teas were in the offing, and it was surprising just how distinct the flavor of each season’s tea was. I learned that the best tea is grown at the highest altitudes, where it takes the longest to mature. Winter tea is the most prized, and most expensive, though I personally favor the spring tea for its greener, and more precisely chlorophyllic aroma and color.
Chushan tea master, pouring
I am a mostly unapologetic hedonist, and I often have as much trouble limiting my enjoyment of something pleasurable or delicious as I do stopping an interesting conversation, or leaving a beautiful place. So I kept accepting one cup of fine tea after another as my host offered them. I was at this tasting with my partner F. and her parents, and courtesy dictated that if I accepted more, more would be served. I was having a grand and fabulously caffeinated time, completely engrossed in asking as many questions as came to mind while everyone translated for me. What was the difference between black tea, green tea and oolong? (They’re all from the Camellia Senesis plant, but black tea is fully fermented/oxidized, oolong to a lesser extent, and green tea not at all). Why was the first short steeping of the tea always discarded? (To “wake” the tea and to wash away any residue on the leaves before drinking). Why were there so many steeps of each tea, and why such tiny cups? (We were performing a ceremonial method called gongfucha, and the exacting chemistry and temperature of the ceremony dictates smaller cups with hotter water). Would a person get fat from eating so many of these delicious biscuits, peanuts, and cookies between each serving of tea? (“Not as long as they’re consumed with tea!,” chirped my comfortably stout host.)
"You cannot get fat, no matter how much you eat, as long as it's while you're drinking tea!"
I also learned just how intensive the human labor of tea (especially oolong) is. The vast majority of it is picked by hand, a pound of tea requires tens to hundreds of thousands of leaves, and pay is generally very low. Taking this into consideration, the slower and more deliberate consumption of tea makes perfect sense.
It was not until many hours and maybe 50 cups of tea (small ones, but really: 50) that I realized just how very much tea had been consumed. When we finally tore ourselves away, my obviously great love of tea led our host to offer me a very fine traveling tea set and some lovely spring tea from the high mountains of Nantou to take with me on my travels. Score!
The first ten cups make you smile, the second twenty make you talk. The twenty after that may give you tachycardia.
That night, I worked merrily through the night while F. and her parents complained bitterly the next morning about insomnia and bad sleep.
It is not simply national chauvinism when the Taiwanese tell you, as they often do, that the very best tea is from Taiwan. The choicest tea they produce is bought up by men doing business in mainland China, who use it to bribe Chinese officials and thereby grease the wheels of commerce. This is so common, I was told by a merchant for one of Taiwan’s largest tea producers, that it’s very hard for the average Taiwanese to get any of their prized winter tea. I noticed that the Wikipedia entry on oolong tea does not mention this fact. Then again, as great as Wikipedia is, you can’t be too trusting of anything you read online…
NEXT: Ten days working on a WWOOF-affiliated “organic” farm in Chunan, on the northwest coast of Taiwan. ABC’s of Japanese-style organic fertilizer! The genius of birds relative to that of insects! How to cut and harvest bamboo without getting eaten alive by vicious little bugs! (That is, vicious little bugs other than the Taiwanese vampire mosquito.)
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Brian Awehali, a former editor at Britannica.com, founded and edited the North American magazine, LiP: Informed Revolt (anthology: Tipping the Sacred Cow, AK Press). In 2010, he will be traveling through Taiwan, China, and Mongolia, writing diffusely about culture, sustainable development, and emerging “green” technologies. He curates LOUDCANARY: One interconnected journey through everything and nothing. He is a half-Irish member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
Tom Rooney, CEO of SPG Solar, rings the solar gong at the SunTech solar factory in China.
Greetings from Beijing where, from my cafe seat near Tiananmen Square, plans to expand solar power in the United States look a lot different than from my office in Northern California — where I am the CEO of one of America’s larger solar power companies.
Many of the measures — and half measures — that we read about every day in American papers are things the Germans and Chinese and Spanish and French decided to do 10 years ago.
They are racing. We are walking.
Germany, for example: Hardly a sunny hot spot — but it has more solar installations than any country in the world. 200 times more than England. That is because German citizens have been getting 50 to 75 cents per kilowatt hour for the solar power they sell back to the grid. Spain is similar.
Great Britain and France and Ontario and other places throughout the world recently raised their so-called ‘feed in tariffs’ to comparable levels.
In Gainesville, Florida, the feed-in tariff is now the highest in the country at 32 cents. All of a sudden there is an explosion of interest in solar in Gainesville.
In California, we get less than 10 cents. And that is more than most places.
In the United States, we limit not just the price but also the amount of solar energy an owner can sell back to the grid. So we wait for the day when all the transmission lines are perfect. When the grid is perfect. When all the energy infrastructure is in place.
Meanwhile, we wait for an energy future that may never come.
If we allowed the price to rise, and removed the limits on how much solar energy a farmer or business owner or school or police station could generate, we would see an explosion in demand for solar and other renewables. That would reduce our dependence on foreign energy and stimulate domestic manufacturing, as well.
It’s a two-fer.
That is our best chance of creating solar panel manufacturing jobs in the United States. But it is already very late in the game. Michael Northrop of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund points out the most of the world’s largest renewable energy manufacturing happens outside the United States. He says, “Not only are we shipping oil dollars to the Middle East, we are watching our solar, wind, and other renewable energy dollars begin flowing to Asia. … The U.S. needs to decide rapidly whether it wants to own this future or pay for it.”
From my seat in Beijing, where I am traveling the country visiting suppliers for my solar power installation company, it looks as if this decision has already been made.
~~~
Tom Rooney is the President and CEO of SPG Solar. He can be reached at spgsolar.com.
Editor’s Note: Over the next year or so, Brian Awehali, cross-posting at www.BrianAwehali.com, will share his adventures as he investigates green planning and sustainable development efforts in Taiwan and China, pausing along the way for as many marvelous things as possible. A writer, designer, and editor of LOUDCANARY, Brian will check in periodically from Taiwan (where he posts his first report, below), Chengdu, Dongguan, and, luck holding, his yurt-to-yurt horseback travels in Mongolia. We hope you enjoy, and look forward to, these posts as much as Terrain.org does.
Part 1: Unamerican Activities
By Brian Awehali
Chushan (lowlands) tea farm and traffic safety mirror
We arrived in Hong Kong early in the morning, en route to Taipei to visit my partner F.’s family for Chinese New Year, and to work on a WWOOF-affiliated farm for two weeks. After that: mainland China for 6+ months, where I hope to learn (and write) as much as I can about the realities and propaganda of green development in the world’s most populous country.
Our landing was stomach-vanishingly rough. During the worst of it, I looked over and saw a stone-faced woman next to me with a jade pendant necklace that was hovering straight out from her body instead of resting on her neck. I suppose flight is for the birds and insects, and that most of us take it far too much for granted, rather than as the miraculous (if ecologically catastrophic) thing it really is.
After touching down in Taipei we took a bus and high speed bullet train to Chushan (or Zhushan; the Romanization varies), a farming town of about 30,000 in Nantou, central Taiwan. We’re staying at my partner’s mother’s family home, the center of what used to be a large farm, but is now just seven or eight homes arranged around a courtyard.
I didn’t sleep on the flight, so when we finally arrived, I was dead on my feet, and went to bed almost immediately, smelling fire under simmering bamboo soup, and many other things I couldn’t identify, and that my nose may well never have experienced before.
It’s worth mentioning that since taking a (highly recommended) perfuming workshop in San Francisco several weeks ago, my sense of smell has been in hyperdrive. On the plane, every foot, every lotion, and every other less-appetizing thing there was to smell crawled up into my sinuses and made a home. In the Chushan countryside, the smells are better. From my bed, I smelled well-seasoned Taiwanese sausages (rice wine, garlic, Chinese cinnamon powder, and soy sauce paste) curing in the next room, along with glutinous rice and daikon cakes that are fed to the gods at New Year’s, but then eaten by mortals once the gods have had their fill. It was explained to me that the gods eat only the cake’s essence, which works out well for everyone, I suppose.
Temple and tree together in Chushan as the Year of the Tiger begins
During New Year’s celebrations and worship, a ubiquitous ritual involves burning “joss paper,” or “ghost money,” so that it may reach ancestors and the gods in the afterlife. It was explained to me by an uncle that some Taiwanese environmentalists are opposed to this practice because it creates so much air pollution and because it contributes to deforestation. Apparently some people have started to burn virtual money for their ancestors, setting a computer up near the family shrine and extending the reach of computers into the spirit world. (I hope the IT professionals in the afterlife have more effective ways of combating identity theft!)
"Ghost money" offered to the river god on bridges at New Year's
After sleeping for 14 hours, I awoke to an eager rooster crowing well before dawn, and decided to walk into town, about 20 minutes away. I took a shoulder-less road flanked on one side by an open mountain spring-fed culvert, sniffing at the freshly-disturbed earth from various gardens, and drawing in moist air infused with about four parts plant life to one part exhaust. It’s more pleasant than it sounds. Then again, I also used to really love the smell of gasoline.
Roadside spring in Chushan
As I walked I saw several trucks with water barrels and long-nosed suction pumps pull over along the road, drivers climbing directly from cab to bed to extract some of this water, and was later told that people travel from other places for this mountain spring water, because it makes the best tea. (All drinking water is first boiled here, though the water quality is quite good, and I should note that the water for tea is extracted a bit closer to its source than the picture above might lead y0u to believe; the people I saw were farmers, getting water for their crops). Lush vegetation rioted happily in family gardens on all sides: banana trees, corn, plots of sweet potatoes, and more lettuce than I expected, given the seeming lack of lettuce in the Taiwanese diet.
I do not speak Chinese–yet, so my chances of communicating with anyone in a smaller town like Chushan are quite poor. F.’s grandmother and grandfather speak only Taiwanese, and everyone else in the family speaks both Chinese and Taiwanese. I keep making all manner of small mistakes relating to my cultural ignorance, then struggle to understand what I’m being told. For example: my first meal with the family, I put my chopsticks down in my bowl to rest, so that they were pointing upward. This is a no-no; chopsticks are to lay flat when not in use, and are only placed downward in a bowl when offering food to the gods, as if one is making it easier for them to eat. I felt stupid and sad to have made a disrespectful blunder, but, of course, I had no way of knowing about this custom. As an American, I marvel somewhat at the complexity and reverence displayed for the gods here. I have come to believe increasingly in an animistic world, where everything is alive and interconnected. Not only does this jibe with my knowledge of nature and quantum physics, but I also have this sense that the forces of materialism, monotheism and scientific ascendency have diminished meaning and magic from a great number of important and vital things.
One of Chushan's several earth god temples. This one, like many other temples in the area, has recently been renovated and expanded.
But it’s one thing to believe such a thing in an abstract intellectual way, and quite another to experience a culture where none of this is an abstraction, and where there are gods for everything, who must be respected and paid attention to. Offerings are made to the earth god, and it was explained to me that every region has its own earth god. The temple for the earth god of Chushan is just several hundred yards down the road, and the patriarch of the family, now over 90 years old and mostly deaf, walks down to pay his respects every morning.
Several miles into my early morning walk, the foggy countryside gave way abruptly to cityscape. There’s very little separation between the natural and man-made landscape in Taiwan. At 7am, the streets of the city were an organized bedlam, with pedestrians and people on scooters navigating what seemed to me, especially at first, like impossibly limited space. Many, if not most people in Chushan ride scooters — not just adults or boys. Grandmothers, fathers with daughters, mothers with three kids, mothers with two kids and large potentially explosive propane tanks nestled between their legs — everyone. (F’s nonagenarian hard-of-hearing grandfather rides his into town several times a week!)
Cars, scooters and pedestrians vying for space in downtown Chushan, Nantou, Taiwan
About half of those on scooters wear what appear to be surgical face masks. I say appear because that’s what I thought they were at first. Such masks were ubiquitous at the Hong Kong and Taipei airports, covering the mouths and noses of all food service workers and most administrative staff.
We were even given a “flu kit” as we left the secured area of Taipei Airport. It was surprisingly elegant: a bright red package containing a well-constructed face mask with cloth strings, some pleasant-smelling soap, and a packet of disinfectant tissues. F.’s was plaid and relatively tasteful. Mine had a tesselated pattern of hearts and American flags. Someone later explained to me that the people on scooters wear these not for flu-prevention, but in order not to breathe the noxious levels of exhaust they’re exposed to, and my brief walk through town convinced me of the wisdom of this. My sense of smell may be peculiarly heightened right now, but the haze in the air and sooty grime on any available surface corroborated what my nose was telling me.
Rapid industrialization and the attendant ills of air pollution are a significant problem for Taiwan. The tea grown here, expensive and prized as among the best in the world, must be grown at increasingly higher elevations in part because the air quality is too poor at lower elevations, and ruins the tea’s flavor.
I confess, with some shame, that I had a momentary impulse to judge the Taiwanese for ruining the air of their beautiful island, but then quickly reminded myself that my flight here, on its own, probably contributed more air pollution and carbon than any one of these scooterists could possibly produce in a year, and that the average American contributes far more to pollution and global warming than does the average person in Taiwan. Additionally, Taiwan has made great (and typically rapid) strides to address its pollution and emissions problems.
Translation: "No regrets for reducing energy consumption, let's join together to reduce carbon emissions, we love the earth and so will reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, everyone should get together to fight warming" The Sioulin Elementary School, built in 1954, serves pupils who live along Dinglin Road which goes up into the mountains to the east of Chushan. (photo D. Cowhig)
The soot and exhaust are offset, at least in part, by gardens and vegetation in almost every available patch, growing right up to the edge of the road, nestled next to busy intersections, in narrow alleyways, in planters on rooftops, and in tiny front yards. Such gardens are commonplace here in Chushan, and they make me wonder why more people, especially in the fertile climate of Northern California, my adopted home for the past seven years, are not doing the same.
F. and common roadside garden in downtown Chushan
Downtown Chushan riverside garden
Later in the day, we took a walk up a beautiful path behind the family place, through bamboo forests and banana mangroves, and past several striated hills that used to be used for growing tea, but are now abandoned and brown. When I first met F.’s mother, she was most animated when showing me the proper preparation of tea. When she explained to me that it was to be steeped for absolutely no more than 25 seconds, she spoke as if personally aggrieved by the ongoing widespread murder of tea by ignorant fools. So: Steep for 25 seconds, using only half a teaspoon of tea, then pour out the water so that you may re-use the leaves and enjoy several more (small) cups! If you do not follow these directions, if you let the leaves linger in sitting water or steep for too long, they will lose their essence and you will have ruined a potentially exquisite experience.
Next post: My day learning tea history, technique, ecology and etiquette from a local tea enthusiast.
Formosa Betrayed (“New Movie Ties Taiwan’s Messy Politics to Bay Area Murder”)
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Brian Awehali, a former editor at Britannica.com, founded and edited the North American magazine, LiP: Informed Revolt, as well as an anthology of its collected best, Tipping the Sacred Cow (AK Press). In 2010, he will be traveling through Taiwan, China, Mongolia and Guatemala. In China, he will be writing mostly about sustainable development and emerging “green” technologies. He is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and is most committed to the advance of The Marvelous. When not blogging for Terrain.org, he curates LOUDCANARY: One interconnected journey through everything and nothing.
Death eventually comes knocking, but before it does, a person might as well pass the time writing poetry. Bill Holm implies as much in “Ars Poetica,” one of his many until-now-unpublished poems included in The Chain Letter of the Soul, printed and posthumously distributed by Milkweed Editions in October 2009 after Holm passed away unexpectedly earlier that year from pneumonia.
Along with new work by Holm, The Chain Letter of the Soul recounts treasures from some of his previous works, The Dead Get By With Everything, Boxelder Bug Variations, and Playing the Black Piano. The book itself is named after a phrase in an application Holm made to the McKnight Foundation to support the time he spent crafting his final batch of new poems: “I have written and intend to continue until someone among you takes up the happy work of keeping the chain letter of the soul moving along into whatever future will come.”
Serendipitous and poignant, many of the poems track Holm’s own emotional negotiation of life, death, and infinity. Through images steeped in landscape, people, wildlife, technology, and music, he questions why death is difficult to accept, what mundane day-to-day moments can teach, and what it means to be human. Take the outset of one of the last poems he wrote, “I Began the Day in My Sixty-Fifth Year,” in which Holm says he asks “himself questions that nobody else has bothered to ask.” By sharing these intimate exchanges with readers, Holm seems to have understood – even if intuitively – how his creativity would continue to resonate much farther than his own abruptly ended life.
The Chain Letter of the Soul is an appropriate entry point for those unfamiliar with Holm, and it offers touching closure for readers already acquainted with his work. The book holds nearly 100 previously unreleased poems, well worth the investment, even though the end of the “Storm Coming to Seattle” section seemed a bit rushed. Please consider The Chain Letter of the Soul as highly recommended and especially so while enjoyed aloud with Mozart or Beethoven, preferably performed on piano, playing in the background.
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Claudia Bromanlives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Writing Nature: An Annual of Fine Nature Writing and Drawing.
Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments explores the nexus between the built and natural environments through two theme-based issues per year. Online since 1997, we publish editorials, poetry, essays, fiction, articles, reviews, interviews, the ARTerrain gallery, the UnSprawl case study, and the new To Know a Place multimedia feature.
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