Living The Good Life at Nan'ao Natural Farm

I knew that Mingyu was going to meet up with a Korean friend here in Taiwan.  What I didn’t know was that she had already made plans for a farmstay at Nan’ao Natural Farm, one of Taiwan’s best known.  How it had so far eluded me eludes me.  

The long-term volunteers lived at the farmhouse up the hill, while we short-termers stayed down at the guest lodge, just a few minutes’ walk from the train station.  The agreement: we work from 9-12 and 3-6 in exchange for accommodation and three meals.  Laughter, songs, hijinks, and memories gratis. 

Meet Sam, twenty year-old son of the owner and blooming permaculture* prodigy.  He took an interest in farming when his father started the farm three years ago and recently got his permaculture design certificate.  In the morning he works on his own projects, while in the afternoon he works on his father’s rice paddies.   Here he’s got some sack gardens.  A bamboo pipe runs down the middle and is filled with compost and stones; water that runs into the pipe is thus smoothly diverted all throughout the bag, delivering important decomposing nutrients and worm casings to the plants within.  These bags have lettuce, garlic, and herbs planted at various levels, and passion fruit up top, which will eventually climb up the ropes, cover the roof, and provide both shade and snacks. 

*Digression: What’s permaculture?  As the name implies, it’s an agricultural philosophy and set of techniques intended to let the farmer farm the same land sustainably, and thus indefinitely.  PC incorporates principles of organic agriculture – i.e. no chemical fertizlier, pesticide, or herbicide – but is a little more holistic, insofar as it gives more consideration to the various interactions between animals, humans, plants, wilderness, and the landscape. 

** Second digression: what’s the difference between permaculture and natural farming?  While permaculture makes use of human ingenuity to design healthy, stable, sustainable ecosystems, natural farming strives ultimately for a state of near “do-nothing.”  No fertilizers of any kind, no pesticides or herbicides of any kind, and no tilling of the soil.  The idea, oversimplified, is that nature knows best and our attempts to control or improve it will most likely go astray.  

Here we are working on Sam’s “Mandala Garden,” also called a “Keyhole Garden.”  It’s a set of two concentric donuts.  The innermost donut-hole is a “sink,” where you can dump all your compost, leaves, twigs, whatever.  Everything is in such close proximity that chemical reactions take place quickly, breaking down everything and sending it outwards towards all the plants on the outside. The “keyholes” (one is visible in the upper right) give you easy access to all the plants. 

On top of the donut, which was made from sopping-wet rice paddy clay, we used a technique called “sheet mulching.”  This is essentially a way of creating soil in layers – compost, leaves, manure, cardboard, then fresh grass – so that you can garden anywhere.   

This guy waited patiently to nab whatever grubs we turned up while turning the soil.

In the afternoons, we “worked” in the paddies.  December and January seem to be sort of "off" months; we spent most of our time cleaning rocks, sand, weeds, and broken beer bottles out of out irrigation ditches, with many a break in between for photos.

You Hsin, an awesome long-term volunteer who left a job in sales to live closer to the land.  Though less adept at English than some of the others, he made up for it with incredible candor.   

More proof that boys and men of all cultures enjoy attacking one another with farm instruments (or whatever else is at hand).

Here’s “Yellow Fish” (a direct translation of his Chinese name), a chemical engineer who quit his lucrative, demanding, and relatively joyous job in order to "devote more attention to improving important relationships and finding out what he really wants in life."  He told me that he was often depressed, but at the farm, he was all smiles, constantly joking, shouting, singing, and having a good time. 

“Little Monkey,” a long-term volunteer who decided that he prefers farming to high school.  He was the official weed-whacker-wielder. 

“Tom,” a butterfly photographer who came to the farm hoping to snap some nice pictures and then decided to stay for a year because he loved the work and the people so much.  

Winky, from Guangdong (aka Canton), China, here in Taiwan for a semester “abroad”*

*let’s not get into that debate again…  

 “Echo,” Winky's roommate.  The farm visit was actually her idea - she wanted to visit some of the nearby aboriginal neighborhoods. 

“Star,” a Taiwanese friend of the above two girls, who came along for the trip.  I will be forever grateful for him for recovering my glasses after I cleverly dropped them into a waterfall.

Mingyu's friend Hwa-in.  Into food, buddhism, communities, farming, aboriginals, and learning Chinese.  Remind you of anyone?

Luke, a good friend from South Korea, lives quite near and came down to spend a day working with us. I have a feeling he'll be spending lots of time at Nan'ao in the future.   

This teacher came to give some volunteers a lesson on Chinese acupuncture theory.   At dinner, we bonded over shared vegetarianhood and wound up talking about Vipassana (I’m still working on my post about my 4^th!), chakras, Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy, and who knows what else for about two hours.    

The kitchen was a constant source of chaotic joy.  Out in the fields, we were often too absorbed in our work or too physically spread out to talk much, but in the kitchen we all swirled around one another, cooking  together, taking turns chopping, stirring, scrubbing, searching, cleaning...

 

A typical meal: several stir-fried veggie dishes, one egg dish, and one meat.  

 Interesting kitchen find: “Meekang.”  Rice hulls, dry-roasted then fermented.  They give off a stink kind of like Dwoenjang, Korean-style fermented soybeans, but have a different use.  Rather than cooking with it directly, you submerge vegetables into all of its probiotic glory.  After three days you’ve got pickles.  Floppy yet a little crisp, with a sort of cheesy taste.  A bit strong for my taste, but fantastic in a salad with rice.  Awesome low-cost, low-energy, low-impact, no-nonsense cooking method. 

A favorite way of giving back: cooking for our hosts.  Mingyu and Hwa-in and I headed to the market to see what was available, and it turned out they had bags of Kimchi!  US $30 bucks later and the three of us had enough veggies to whip up a meal for 15 people.  Kimchi-fried rice, eggplant pancakes, mushroom pancakes, blanched spinach, spicy bean sprout soup. 

Clearly, everybody loved it.

The meal on our last night.  

Every evening we had some sort of enrichment session.  Mingyu presented about Heuksalim*, I whipped up a PPT about Sadhana, other volunteers gave status updates on their projects or reports about recent travels, and Michelle, being both completely bilingual and highly knowledgable about permaculture, gave an excellent agricultural English lesson.  

*the organic agriculture R&D / distribution company he worked for in South Korea

 

After cooking and eating lunch together, we had some free-/down-time between about 1 and 3PM.  On this particular day, we took off to a nearby “waterfall.”  That’s it in the background.

Quite brisk!  

  

On the  last morning, I wanted to cook for everyone.  In about 15 minutes I was able to cycle to the market, fill up one reusable container with fresh, steaming-hot soy milk and another with fried peanuts, buy a bunch of bananas, pick up some baking powder, and come back home. Then I taught the boss man to make VEGAN BANANA PANCAKES.  Needless to say, they were a hit.  

On the morning of our departure, instead of working, we had a nice long breakfast, then sat around and sang songs together.  Mingyu had taught Yellow Fish to sing one of his favorite Korean tunes, “ 꼭 껴안고”  (Ggok ggyeo anggo) a song about the joys of surprising family and friends with out-of-the-blue bear hugs.  It was an appropriate parting song.  Much like Sadhana, I came hoping to learn about living close to nature and left with a whole bunch of new friends.  Nothing builds bonds quite like working, eating, and playing together day-in and day-out.  There wasn't a single person I didn't have an interesting conversation with, or didn't grow fond of.  May you all stay happy and healthy until we meet again!

NOW: we’ve left the farm and returned to Taipei.  In the morning, we’ll set out on our last bicycle escapade together for who knows how long.  On the 17^th, Hwa-in will fly back to Korea, Mingyu will be off to Malaysia, and I’ll be left here in Taiwan to make some gear changes, revamp my website (!), and fiddle around with the DSLR and that Mingyu sold me on the cheap.  Until then, the plan is to ride from Taipei to Sun Moon Lake (one of Taiwan’s most scenic spots), then up and over Wuling (at over 4000m, the highest mountain in SE Asia), then down through Taroko Gorge national park, and back home.  Six days, six hundred kilometers, and over ten thousand meters of altitude gain.  Due to the intensity of the upcoming couple days, we’ve dropped all expendable gear.  For me that means about sixty percent of it!  No computer, no extra clothes, no superfluous toiletries, no repair gear beyond the absolute basics.  Just my tent, sleeping bag, camera and bunch of longan muffins from the family.*

*Did you know that I can make inter-lingual puns between Engilsh and Chinese now?!  Check this out – “muffin” sounds a lot like “ma1 fen3,” the Chinese word for “horse manure.”  Better yet, the family understood my joke!

ETD: 8 hours!  Wish me luck!  

12000 Chickens.

2011 has been a slow year for blogging so far! I'd like to think it's because I've been keeping busy...

After the Idli party, I spent a few more days with Sadhana friends, then took a couchsurfer from Colombia, Jorge. A really nice, cool guy. He stayed for a week and we hung out a fair bit; I really had nothing to do except study Korean, write another article for Daegu pockets, translate it, and eat the candy he brought as a gift. After a week or so, he and his friend Isabel (who was staying with another host) found their own place near another university, where they're going to TA for Spanish classes while taking an intensive Korean course. I have already told them that they can repay my kindness by cooking me an occasional vegan Colombian dinner. Next semester is shaping up nicely...

I had planned to head off on my farming excursions around the beginning of February, but as Lunar New Year fell on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, the farmers asked me to postpone my visit until the following Monday. So, I spent Korean New Year alone recuperating from about 5 weeks straight of being excessively social (Christmas group trip, New Year's group trip, continuous Upo wetlands camp prep meetings, early January visit to see friends in Seoul, various environmental things in Daegu, Tobin's visit, Idli party, Couchsurfers), napping and reading and studying Korean and cooking and such goodness.

So, come Monday the 7th, I came out to NunbiSan Maeul (Snow-Rain-Mountain Village), a chicken farm about 3 hours northwest of Daegu. I found out about Nunbi not through WWOOF, but through Seon-ju, a Korean friend I met in Sadhana. She spent most of the last 5 years visiting different kinds of communities - Buddhist, self-sufficient, sustainable, et. al. - in Japan and southeast Asia, and she knows of some stuff here in Korea too. She hadn't been here yet but asked me to check it out.

"Chicken farm" isn't exactly the best way to describe Nunbi, but I don't know what is. I can't post any pictures now, but later I'll show you the 7 buildings, each divided into 10 or 25 smaller rooms, holding a total of abotu 12,000 chickens. You could walk a circle around the whole set of buildings in about five or ten minutes; it's not too big, but it's big enough that the chickens have ample space to walk, jump, exercise, and do their chicken culture stuff.

The design for the coops was apparently invented by a Japanese farmer named (something like) Yamagasi - I've only heard the name in passing and haven't seen it written yet. Wooden beams run the length of the back of each coop; the chickens jump up onto them to sleep, and since they're about a foot off the ground, the chickens can poop without stepping in it and dragging it all around. The water is in a tray at the front of the coop, far from the feces. The space in the middle has some troughts for food, and on the left and right side, hanging off the walls, are big triangular boxes. The base of the triangle is filled with hay, and the hypotenuse blocks out sun and light, so that the chickens have a dark, soft, warm place to lay their eggs. When the farmers/workers/members of the community come in, all they have to do is open up the hypotenuse, grab the eggs out of the hay, and move on. Because the boxes are so nice, the chickens hardly ever lay eggs on the ground, which mean few get stepped on, missed, or wasted.

The eggs that Nunbi produces are fertilized, which means that if they were left alone they'd hatch into baby chicks. This may sound a little cruel - actually, the chairman of the community, when he heard about my veganism, said that he'd rather eat unfertilized eggs than fertilized ones, which is an argument I understand - but the truth is that fertilized eggs mean happier chickens. Here at Nunbi, the ratio of roosters to hens is about 1:12-15, which gives an egg fertilization rate of about 95%. I'm not sure what the "natural" ratio would be, but in many standard (sterile) egg operations, the hens never encounter a male and thus never get a chance to mate or have a child. To me, this looks like their ability to express one of the fundamental traits of animals is being denied. Not only the physical acts of mating, conceiving, and laying, but also the social acts of courting, competing, showing off, or however chickens get on with it. I don't think one has to know the details in order to acknowledge the justice of allowing them some amount of freedom. Furthermore, even if roosters were present in most egg-laying operations, mating would probably be impossible, since the conditions are so cramped that the chickens can hardly move around, let alone strut, play, or mount one another. Fertilized eggs don't guarantee that the chickens have space to move, but they raise the likelihood. Finally, chickens in standard egg operations don't even live through full life cycles. After being caged and manipluated and worn out (by antibiotics, "enhanced" feed, and non-natural light cycles), they're killed as soon as their productivity drops. Most of these chickens, bread for egg-laying ability and not survival capacity, wouldn't even survive if let loose, even into good conditions; their bodies are weak, and since they never saw adult chickens foraging or mating, they have no clue how to get by. Fertilized eggs mean, at least to some degree, that the chickens have been allowed to express some of their chicken-ness. And there's no such thing as animal welfare without this freedom.

So, for 2 days, I woke up at 6:30, put on some nice tall boots, and went outside to pour hot water on the faucets, which freeze every night. Once they faucets are operational, the water is turned on so the chickens can drink. (In the non-freezing months, it's always on). Then I went through the coops with the young chickens, who haven't quite adjusted to the "don't lay your eggs in your own poop" system. I would throw a few handfuls of seed into the corner, and and with the chickens distracted and scattered, I was able to clearly spot and pick up the eggs that had been laid on the ground. If I saw a chicken preparing to lay an egg anywhere other than in the egg box, I picked it up and moved it to the egg box, both for its own comfort and ours. After a time or two, the chickens pick up the habit, and by the time they're six months old, they hardly lay on the floor at all.

Breakfast at 8:00, then back to the chickens at 9:00. We opened up the rooves to let the sunlight in, then one more round picking up eggs from the floor - yes, they lay them that frequently - then gathering from the egg boxes. A room with 100 chickens might produce about 50 eggs overnight. The eggs are set into temporary cartions, and then we drive them down to the little factory, where they are stored for the moment. Then we weigh out a bag of feed for each room (10 to 20 kg depending on the size of the room and the age of its inhabitants) and set it out in front of the door. Then we head in for lunch and a nap.

At 2pm, back to the chickens. They have a special long coo for when they're hungry, which I don't think I can transcribe. The tone is kind of plaintive (maybe that's just me projecting) and moves from low to high. Entering the coop, I'd toss some feed in one corner to get them out of the way, flip over their troughs to empty them out (chickens are not the brightest animals and often stand and poo inside the trough while eating), and then fill them with new goodies.

After that, miscellaneous time. On the first day, we made a special snack out of the eggs that were too ugly or damaged to sell. We boiled several hundred defective eggs, then mixed them (shells and all) with some organic nutrition supplements and some rice husks, and then I donned my boots again and stomped on the stuff until it got kind of pasty-clumpy. It was like taking a bath in a tub of scrambled eggs; I was half salivating and half ready to puke. Then we distributed it to the young chickens as a sort of protein supplement.

The idea of feeding eggs to chickens struck me as somehwere between stupid and inhumane. But, actually, if you watch chickens, you'll quickly see that if you accidentally break an egg in their presence, they race over and gobble it right up; this has been explained to me as an attempt to recover the protein and other nutrients that their bodies jettison each day in the process of laying. They won't break intact eggs open - that would be a truly stupid, maladaptive habit - but eggs that have no chance of developing into chicks are fair game.

The next day, for the older chickens, we fed them something one of the farmers called "corn kimchi." They had grown corn the previous summer and kept it fermenting for months and months, kernels and cobs and stalks and all. The rancid, rotten, stinky smell means that the corn is full of little living bacteria, probiotics, which are good for the chickens' digestion and overall health around this time of year. They loved it.

After that, one more round of picking up ground eggs. Then all the eggs are brought to the factory, which has fifteen meters of conveyor belts that bring the eggs through six or seven different machines. The machines wash the blood, feathers, dirt, and poo off the eggs, sort them according to size, enter all sorts of statistics into the computer, and then drop them into cartons.

While the people in the factory are setting up the eggs for distribution, the people outside get the chickens ready for bed. Turn off the water, close the roofs, lower the windscreens, and coax the chickens into their sleeping spots (stragglers who attempt to sleep away from the flock often catch colds, so it's important to put them all together). Once the sun sets and the chickens are OK, the workers can head in for dinner.

Nunbi has an interesting dynamic. About ten or twelve people work here; some of them are alone, living in the dorm, eating communal meals, while others live nearby with their families. Together they produce between eight and ten thousand eggs a day, all of which are sold to Hansallim ("One Life," or maybe "Korean Life"), an organization that runs a chain of environmentally-friendly supermarkets. Regardless of his or her role, each worker receives an equal share of the profits, after some has been set aside to donate to local causes and for the development of the facilities. The people who stay in the dorm - actually, "research center" - hang out together in the evenings, drinking tea and chatting and reading and practicing "Guk-seon-do," a reportedly ten-thousand year old Korean style of Tai-chi/yoga/martial arts/meditation on Wednesdays.

I've only spent 3 of the last 10 days at Nunbi and have a lot to write about Heuksallim (Saving the Soil), the organization where I spent the rest of my time. But, it's nearly lunch time, and after I eat, I'm heading off for another ten days of noble silence. That's right, my second Vipassana of the year! I didn't think I'd have another chance until next summer, but the founder of Nunbi knew about an unlisted course happening not to far from here and set me up. I'm not sure whether I'll volunteer (i.e. cook, clean, etc, meditating only about 3 hours a day) or whether I'll full-on participate (ten or twelve hours of meditation daily), but either way, I won't be back until just about March. See ya then...

I can't believe how little I've posted about Kimchi: Practice

Now that I've covered why people traditionally made Kimchi and why I'm interested, here's how it's done.

1) Plant some cabbage (probably around September, after you've finished your summer harvest).

(Actually, this is a different kind of cabbage, but it's closest thing I have a picture of.)

2) Pick said cabbage, probably around mid-December.

3) Recruit some friends and experts to help you work.

4) Chop the cabbage in half or quarters (along the vertical axis) to increase surface area.

5) Leave the cabbage in saltwater overnight. This softens it up, opens the pores (for maximum spice absorption), and probably also kills some bacteria.

6) Using several different bowls, rinse the saltwater off of the cabbage. Stack it all up and leave it to drain for 12 hours or so. I suppose if you apply the spices while it's too wet, it'll be runny and less tasty.

7) While it's draining, mix up the jang (spice paste). Lots of anchovy paste, garlic, and red pepper paste and powder. Definitely wear gloves. Definitely don't breathe in.

8) When everything is ready, divide into slatherers (to apply the jang to the cabbage, one leaf at a time) and gophers (take away slathered cabbages [wow! my own soggy effigy...], refill emptied jang tubs, deliver other cabbages, scratch itchy places). My friends and I were slatherers.

9) Sit around and chat while you work work work. Try not to look at the pile.

10) Put it all in huge tupperware containers. Divvy it up. Go out for dinner. Sleep on a heated floor. Go mountain climbing. Get hugged by a tree.

All in all, it was a really cool weekend. There were 4 generations present! The woman (elder sister) who invited me is actually a grandmother. The great-grandmother (in the picture with the big cabbage pile) was there, probably 70-something, healthy and cheerful and working harder than any of us. The daughter, a few years older than me, was also helping out, but mostly tending to Yun-jin (I think that was her name), the great-grand-toddler.

I mentioned in my previous post that our understanding of jam, indeed, of almost all food, has changed profoundly over the past few generations. That understanding ha probably changed more in the last seventy years than in the seven thousand before it. I had a little chat with elder sister about just this topic. She learned to make Kimchi by helping her mother to make it, but as she went to school and became a professional (she's a nurse, but that's just incidental), she understandably got into the habit of buying her food rather than making it. Thus, for a good 40 years, including the time during which her own daughter was growing up, she didn't make any Kimchi. The daughter, then, had no direct experience with Kimchi as a non-industrial product, related to certain times and seasons and rythms. Nor would the grand-daughter, had elder sister not started making her own again about 5 years ago.

I see this as an instance of valuable knowledge - about our relationship to nature, about how to produce what we need, about how to remain independent and self-sufficient and secure - coming to the brink of disappearing before being reclaimed. If you know how to make what you eat, then you will have an alternative when you realize that one of the most important foods you eat, produced as it is by on large scale by large corporations, results in environmental degradation as well as low-quality, hardly-nutritious food. Yun-jin (the fourth generation), who will probably have to deal with the mess left behind by preceding generations, is lucky to have a family smart (and yes, also comfortable and wealthy) enough to take an active interest in such matters. For every family like this, though, there are hundreds or thousands more that let that knowledge slip away, leaving their fate in the hands of others. The evidence is mounting that this is a risky, if not downright reckless move.

I can't believe how little I've posted about WWOOFing

You wouldn't know it from the blog, but I've been to visit farmers in Busan four times, in Miryang thrice (I think), in Geoch'ang twice, and in Hwaseong once. I posted the picture pretty soon after the fact, but I've yet to write much about the experiences, mostly because I don't know how to make them interesting.

About a month ago, though, Jade, who works at the Korean WWOOF headquarters in Seoul, sent out an email asking WWOOFers to submit short letters about their WWOOF experiences so that she could combine them into a book. I wrote one. It's a little schmaltzy and I don't entirely like it, but I'll let you have a look anyway:

(Begin)

Wake-up calls at dawn. Vicious ant attacks by day, mosquito swarms arising from the rice paddies by night. Plodding around knee-deep in mud and rotten watermelons. Soybean paste soup with anchovy heads bobbing about. Suffocating dust clouds inside sweltering triple-layered plastic houses. Though a good deal of foreign teachers in Korea choose to spend their vacations at Haeundae [Korea's most popular beach] or in Phuket [the ultimate Korean package tour destination], soaking up the sun, people-watching, sipping cold drinks, and unwinding after several months of hard work, I chose instead to pursue even more of it by visiting Changwon and spend a week at Sweet Persimmon Village. But even if I try to conjure up the most painful-sounding memories I can – perhaps the worst of all was being surrounded by hundreds of trees, tens of thousands of low-hanging persimmons, all of them far too green and bitter to eat – I can’t help but admit that each of them is infused with pleasure and meaning and worth far beyond what I would have found had I just taken it easy.

It seems to me that the people who deserve vacations most are also the ones who are least likely to get them. We all know, somewhere in the back of our minds, that farmers labor year-round, tilling and irrigating, planting at just the right time, weeding and spraying and maintaining throughout the season, waiting for the perfect moment to pick, and then starting again, spring, summer, winter and fall. Even century-old fruit trees require regular, scientific pruning and coercion in order to produce what they’re really capable of – a fact I didn’t know before, but learned in my 10 days working with Mr. Gang and the others at Sweet Persimmon Village. All of this effort is directed towards feeding us, the city-dwellers and travelers and guests of the land, who have an indirect and generally underappreciated relationship with that which sustains us.

I look at WWOOFing as an opportunity to explore and reclaim this relationship, to learn about what I unknowingly require of the Earth, and what the Earth quietly, patiently asks of me in return. I wanted to learn how to listen to the ground, how to give back to it, and how to support the plants and bugs and microorganisms and myriad other lifeforms and systems that make my life possible. It turns out, it’s a lot of work, requiring study, planning, practice, creativity, diligence, dedication, [and] discipline, in addition to incessant bending, stooping, lifting, reaching, and sweating. Thankfully, though, the truth is that the best friendships are forged through work and effort directed at a common goal; even something as mundane weeding under the late afternoon sun, or as filthy as tearing apart a soggy watermelon patch at the end of the season, can bring people of different ages, vocations, skin colors, and nationalities together. Actually, it sort of makes sense - what could unite people better than the work that nobody, no being, can avoid: feeding him- or herself?

That’s not to say that there wasn’t leisure time – on the contrary, when the rains came, when the temperature topped 90 degrees before 10AM, or and [another typo!] when the sun set, we welcomed the opportunity to enjoy a long, slow meal, talk about the environment, about farming, about our homes and our travels, about upcoming events, and about nothing at all in particular. There was no shortage of fresh watermelon (the ones that had successfully dodged our boots) or cold Hite [Korean bear] (our most conspicuous “import”). We spent hours honing our archery skills and teaching each other tidbits of Enlish, Polish, French, and Korean, each release of the bow string and each repetition of a new word helping to build relationships that endure to this very day and now stretch across several continents.

Thank you, WWOOF, for creating the opportunity. And thank you, staff and residents of Sweet Persimmon Village, for opening your fields and homes and tool sheds to visitors from all around the world.

Two Images

I don't remember how, but I awesomely found a pretty awesome [[**very odd typo, but I think I'll just leave it in**]] website/online magazine/perhaps real magazine called http://seedmagazine.com/, which is quickly supplanting Slate and TED as my go-to-source for time-killing media. I highly recommend their "Food Fight" series (introduction here, conclusion with index here), in which an ecologist and a political scientist write back-and-forth essays addressing the question of whether looming (or rather, currently existing) environmental and social problems can best be addressed by capital-intense industrialized farming methods (including the use of nitrogen fertilizer and genetically modified crops) or by sophisticated, synergetic/synergistic, "agroecological," organic-type methods.

I devoured the essays there as well as many of the links found within, and then despaired of not having any eco-articles to get me all incensed again for a few days. Then I found out they have another series, this time on whether overpopulation or overconsumption will cause more problems in the coming years. It promises to be equally interesting. Probably equally frustrating, confounding, and depressing as well.

Anyhow, here are two images/maps/graphs/representations/depictions/what-have-you from the opening article. I think I'd actually seen one or both of them before, but never right next to each other. The first is a world map rescaled so that population, rather than geographical area, determines the size of each country. The second is similar, except that population and geography are replaced by wealth.




The disparity between the American and European situation - high consumption relative to population - is in stark contrast with the high population to consumption ratio in most of the rest of the world, particularly in China and India. (And most of all in Africa, though for some reason I'm not so sensitive on this front.)

Actually, though, the first time I looked at the second image, I couldn't find anything shaped like Korea where I thought Korea ought to be. Then I freaked out when I (thought I) realized that Korea was the big purple blob on the right. Then I calmed down when I realized (for real) that it's actually right where it should be, between China and Japan, with just a slightly different shade of green. The consumption is monstrous! Of course, having been here for a while, having ambled through the most ridiculous, luxurious, frivolous, terrifying department stores conceivable, I knew this on some level. I hadn't imagined, though, that my little old "Land of the Morning Calm" could single-handedly (technically 100,000,000 handedly, I suppose) rival or outconsume France, India, Africa, or South America. Taking population into account, Korea still comes in far below Western Europe and the US, but even so...I need to find a farm, quick!

No more teachers, no more books

EDIT:New pictures posted.

No, this is not some ideological post about education. Though I feel one stirring.

Rather, it's a post about how it's Thursday, May 6, 3:08PM, and I don't have any class until the morning of Wednesday the 19th. About that, and how about it's not even summer vacation. How do you like the apples?

What will I do, you ask? Despite the temptation to sit around the house in my underwear fawning over my bean sprouts, studying Chinese characters, and playing my meditation bowl, I have actually made plans to go do something. I'm heading down to the area around Busan (3rd biggest city in Korea, Southeast coast) to go meet a parent-aged couple who retired and then to some degree renounced the world (I recently learned how to say this in Korean and I now try to throw it into conversation whenever possible),moving out to the mountains, tending a garden, and living like the ancients. Or at least, that's what I'm expecting.

Anyway, I'm gonna go hang out with some low-tech quasi-farmers for a week. Free room and board in exchange for some help every day with whatever they've got going on.

Lately I have been talking the talk - the "I hate industrial/post-industrial society and want to live in a non-destructive way" talk quite a bit, but aside from a few months at Sadhana, I have yet to walk the walk. So here's to trying it out for a week.

And yes, I will return to my old ways and blog and post pictures about it when I get back.