Tobin said sometimes it seems like I'm holding back when I write

For the last month or so, I’ve been working harder than I’ve worked in years to prepare for the Upo Wetlands English Ecology Camp, which was originally planned to take place this weekend. I was surprised, both pleasantly and not, by the amount of time and effort that one has to put into doing things that matter. The work has included: 3-plus-hour trips via train, bus, and car, sometimes all three in one morning, to reach the camp site; long and frustrating meetings with budget people from the government; lectures about why government funding is so complicated and why it might be reasonable that they refuse to buy us pastels rather than crayons; nights spent sleeping in rooms so cold that even my three layers on top weren’t enough, so I slept in my parka; and being so tired and busy and worn out that I even ate a grilled Wonderbread and Kraft Singles sandwich. Thankfully, I didn’t get to the point where I would eat cup ramen, but it wasn’t far off.

I don’t want to paint a negative picture of the camp, because I believe that, however short and whatever the effort put into it (actually, in all likelihood, because of that very effort), it will be one of the best things I’ve done in Korea, both for me and for others. It has given me lots to chew on regarding various incarnations of the environmentalist (farmer, conservationist, organizer, educator, bureaucrat, practitioner) and various obstacles to conservation, and has helped me to think about what kind of action makes me happy, what kind makes me feel useful, and what kind makes me frustrated. Most importantly, I’ve met several new and impressive people who are working in their own ways towards their own ends, which are necessary compliments to mine. I respect them greatly and look forward to networking, if not just plain working, with them again in the future.

This post was supposed to happen on Monday, and was supposed to be full of pictures of kids meditating in the “Secret Garden,” checking out displays and dioramas in the ecology center, biking around the wetland banks, and looking at constellations and making up their own stories. Instead, the post is happening today and will center on the evils and ironies of, surprise, modern meat production. Usually, I don’t write too much about these things, because I don’t think of myself as any more of an expert than anyone else. Perhaps I’ve read a little more (though some readers definitely have me beat here), but nothing in my particular experience makes me more affected by global warming or the Texas-sized plastic island in the middle of the Pacific than you.

But, this time, it’s personal.

While the point of the camp – not in the minds of those who conceived it, and not even to me – was never to convince kids to go vegetarian, I do think that hours spent:

- watching migratory birds go through one phase of their life cycle,
- learning all about wetland ecology and the complexity and multiplicity of relationships between land, climate, plants, animals, and people,
- seeing the conditions even of relatively fortunate livestock,
- talking with farmers,
- cooking sweet potatoes together over a fire,

and on other such activities that we had planned for the kids, could only have served to increase their feeling of connection to and responsibility for nature, both of which underly my dedication to conservation, which itself underlies my vegetarianism. Thus, it strikes me as ironic that the (most) recent outbreak of foot and mouth disease in Southern South Korea, which is almost certainly due to the ruthlessly cramped, unbelievably filthy, and inarguably inhumane (or shall we say “efficient?”) conditions that livestock are raised in, caused someone somewhere higher up to postpone the camp. It wouldn’t surprise me if the postponement eventually became a cancellation.

When reading environmental literature, one often sees discussions of feedback loops, where one cause’s effect affects the cause in turn, resulting in more of the same, perhaps ad infinitum, or perhaps just to the end, wherever that may be. (I don’t think I want to find out.) For example, increased air and ocean temperatures increase the rate at which the ice caps are melting; the resulting water, which as ice reflected a certain amount of the sun’s rays, now absorbs more of them, leading to further heating. Which leads to more melting. And more heating. And so forth. The foot-and-mouth outbreak (fiasco? travesty?) seems to me to be another, more human-centered version of the feedback loop. Because of said outbreak:

- people tend to think of animals as dirty and dangerous; they want eggs that didn’t come out of a chicken’s butt*, pork chops that that didn’t come out of a pig’s side, and milk from a cow that isn’t pregnant, so...
- the government makes stricter laws regarding animal facilities, NOT to actually improve the health of animals or people [if this were the goal, the government could, say, limit the maximum number of animals a farm can raise to number it can keep healthy without drugs, or the number it can feed with its own grass, or the number of individual animals the CEO in question can identify] but rather to convince consumers (and perhaps themselves) that their meat will be clean and safe to ingest. I say this because compliance with these laws generally requires purchasing new equipment (e.g. for cleaner slaughter or processing) or using new technologies (e.g. antibiotics), both of which cost money and may not be viable options for small-scale farmers, so...
- Said small farmers go out of business, often ceding their land and customers to larger entities, which relate to customers through advertisements and images, not through direct contact. This means that people who already have little incentive to go see the condition of the animals from which, like it or not, animal products come from, now lack even the opportunity to do so...
- The gap between producer and consumer, both in terms of physical distance and in terms of knowledge about the origin and nature of the product, widens. The only thing supermarket shoppers know about meat is its price; this is all the producers want us to know, and mostly, we are content to know no more, so...
- Producers have undeniable economic incentive to treat the animals even worse (or shall we say, “more efficiently?”), cramming them into smaller cages and pens, feeding them even cheaper food (often waste products from the same or other operations), and pumping them full of other drugs, all of which practices devastate the animals’ health and reduce their capacity to resist pathogens, so...
- Outbreaks of diseases (if not Foot and Mouth, then perhaps Mad Cow or Avian Influenza) become more regular, and probably more serious, so...
- People tend to think of animals as dirty and dangerous; they want eggs that didn’t come out of a chicken’s butt, pork chops that that didn’t come out of a pig’s side, and milk from a cow that isn’t pregnant, so...
- You get the point.

The personal element is the following: in my humble opinion, the only way out of this cycle is for consumers to know more – ideally, everything – about what they’re consuming. Most of us, understandably, give up on this desire, if we ever feel it in the first place. How much can you explain about your plumbing, your TV, your car, your phone, your breakfast cereal, even your banana? Did you know bananas grow upside-down? Or maybe it's more sensible to say that we eat them upside-down?

The point is, the camp, or something like it, is a sine qua non; it may not in itself be a way out of our lifestyle of half-willful, half-imposed ignorance, but it is at least a start. Without it, without camps and other events like it, without the people who planned it and without people like them, I see little chance for change. We need more programs that take kids** away from their TVs, their Nintendos, their cell phones (did I mention that during the camp, there would have been no video games, no cell phones, no instant food, no paper cups, no plastic bottles or aluminum cans, and pretty much nothing else to throw out?), their bags of chips, their cans of Coke, and yes, even their school books. We spend our days living in an environment almost entirely of our own making. Even the trees and flowers we pass are decorative and not meaningful parts of an ecosystem. If not for the sky and wind, we might never have to confront nature at all. We all, and children in particular, need to break out of this cycle if we are to take seriously the limits that our environment places on us. Breaking out of this cycle requires spending time in nature, learning to learn with our eyes and ears and skin, not just with books. Spending time in nature gives us both the desire and the fortitude necessary to resist the forces that have brought us to such a precarious position. So, as much as I feared actually taking responsibility for my curriculum, my students, and my actions, I am infinitely more disappointed now that the chance has been taken away from me.

Of course the disease is a tragedy for consumers, who run the (quite small) risk of eating contaminated meat and facing side effects such as ____________. [I should admit: I wrote this without knowing the side effects, or much at all about the disease. Then I went to look up the side effects, so I could make the post more dramatic, only to find that "Humans are very rarely affected" and that "it is a much greater threat to the agriculture industry than to human health." Apparently, the most significant effect of the disease, from the human standpoint, is reduced milk production in cows and the death of pigs that could otherwise be turned into meat.] It’s also a tragedy for small farmers, who will find it much harder to recover from culling twelve percent of their stock than large corporations with other sources of income will. Let’s not forget to mention that it’s a tragedy for all the animals who suffer fevers, blisters, secretions, swollen testicles, and then, must be culled by being buried alive, since spilling their blood might spread the infection. It’s a tragedy for wild animals, who may catch the diseases in question, and therefore for other animals and plants that depend on those animals, and those that depend on those, and so on. It’s a tragedy for future generations of animals, who will likely grow up on farms even more dystopian than their parents’. The only people, the only beings, who may look at the outbreak as anything other than a tragedy, are those who caused it in the first place, since they are the ones who will comply with the government regulations, consolidate smaller enterprises, and continue progressing towards monopoly. On second thought, it’s probably also good for those who make the regulations, too. On third thought, I suppose it's good for the virus itself. Small comfort.

There is a line Jensen uses over and over throughout Endgame, as well as in other works. Like Jensen, if I may be forgiven for making the comparison, I use this line because I hardly even know what actions I should take myself, so I’m not going to pretend to know about anyone else’s capacities, beliefs, inclinations, etc. What’s best for me, and what’s necessary where I am, is not likely to be what’s best for you or for wherever you are. There’s no room for prescription. And there are enough problems that it’s not even necessary. The line is, the question is:

What are you going to do about it?


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*I am pretty sure I’m stealing this image from Casaubon’s Book
** Adults, too.

I

Published Twice In As Many Months

Cribbed from my Noksaek Sari site:

Noksaek Sari is proud to announce that it has officially left the internet for the first time! (That is, not counting the hours spent digging around at the garden and watching Eco-Films at Buy the Book.) Daegu Pockets has included a stepped up version of Noksaek Sari's review of the Suseong-gu Organic, mostly-Veg buffet IPPL in its January issue. Have a look:

You can download the whole magazine for free at www.daegupockets.com/pdfs/Jan2011.pdf.

Coming up in the March issue will be an article about Ecobike, the organization behind Daegu's monthly 대행진 (Grand Bike Parade). Keep your eyes peeled.

WJWD on New Year's Eve

2007: Alone in my studio watching someone ring a big bell in the giant plaza in Seoul.
2008: Clubbing around Hong-ik University in Seoul. Lots of Vodka, then fried chicken, then maybe an incident in the restroom, fighting with George about the right way home, getting lost, finally getting back to the hostel, then maybe have another incident in the restroom.
2009: Watching a big TV in the central square in Kuala Lumpur, then taking a taxi with a local to a restaurant at the top of a hill outside of town and watching 3 or 4 fireworks displays at once.
2010: Dressing up in forest garb, listening to shirtless people in baggy pants playing drums and guitar, looking at the moon, sitting in a giant circle and OMing for an hour.
2011:

Note the time on the picture: 2011/01/01 00:01 Awesome, eh?

Where am I? At a little temple on top of Namsan (Mt. Nam / South Mountain) in Gyeongju.

What was I doing there? Sitting around with friends and strangers eating rice cake soup and drinking quince tea and chanting the same Buddhist sutra - "The Great Darani" - 108 times.

How the heck did I get there? I was asking myself this same question the whole night - here's the rundown:

Not too long ago, I briefly mentioned the Vegan Potluck Gorgefest I attended for Thanksgiving. I met some really cool people there, by which I mean people who think more or less like I do about food and food politics. Many of them knew each other from a Yoga camp that had gone down sometime in October.

The VPG was such a smash hit that we decided to follow it up with a Random Vegan Smorgasboard for Christmas. Eight of us rented a "pension," which in Konglish means a vacant country house, for the reasonable price of about 90 bucks a night. We all brought backpacks full of fruits, veggies, nuts, powders, cookies, squash, noodles, teas, spices, and whatever other edibles we had on hand, along with a few computers, mp3 players, speaker sets, a dwarf Christmas tree, and of course my trusty projector. We spent two nights and three days drinking tea, enjoying fine cinema (Home Alone and the animated Grinch), playing card games, drinking wine, lazing around on the hot floor, and cooking whatever we could, which included a pumpkin/noodle/perilla powder mash, a spinach-ginger-tomato-coconut milk soup, curry, bean burgers, flat bread, crepes with blueberry jam, and homemade fig jam on toast.

On our last morning, we decided to go out for a stroll. After passing some shacks and traditional tile-roofed houses, we wound up walking through a field of completely dried out red pepper plants and then somehow found ourselves heading up a mountain path. We heard some click-clocks and a weird droning, which turned out to be coming from a lone man, reciting some sutra and syncopating on his mok-tak (Mahayana Buddhist fish-shaped wooden percussion instrument) as he made his way up. We followed him for a while, then passed him and continued to the top of the mountain, where we ran into a monk who spoke excellent English and poured us several rounds of green tea to warm us up. She invited us to stay for the Sunday service, which consisted of about an hour of chanting, a few minutes of meditation, and a short dharma talk. She commented that though some foreigners had found the temple and stayed for tea, none had ever sat through a service, and then invited us to come back the following weekend for some mega-sutra action (my words.)

So, the following Friday, a few of us caught a bus to the intercity bus terminal, then another bus to Gyeongju, then another bus to the bus stop closest to the foot of the mountain, then followed the sign to Ch'ilburam.

We arrived around 6, just as it was getting dark and just in time for a bowl of hot rice-flake soup. Promptly at 6:30, the chanting began. One prayer to the triple gem (no clue what that means), then 12 Great Dharani sutras, which took about 30 minutes. Then a 30 minute break. Then 24 Dharanis (one hour) and another half hours break. 24 more, rest. 24 more, rest. 24 more, rest. 12 more, rest, and a closing thousands eyes and hands sutra brought us to about 3:30AM. Though there was barely enough room for all of us to sit, we somehow managed to spread out and catch a few hours of rest.

We woke up again at six, had some more of the same soup, and then headed up to the top of the mountain to wait for the sunrise. The monk said a blessing, then for about twenty or thirty minutes we chanted "Gwan-se-um-bo-sal," a prayer to the Boddhisatva who is supposed to be watching over the world, protecting people and ensuring good fortune. It was a cloudy morning, but we were lucky: the clouds were floating just high enough over the mountains to the East that we were able to get a decent view of the sun on its way up:

After the sun had disappeared behind the clouds again, the monk gave another short Dharma talk. I couldn't really follow it, but it was something about how the sun wasn't really new and neither was the year but in any case it was as good a time as any to try to renew our dedication to living a kind and compassionate life. Or perhaps I'm just projecting what I would like to have heard.

Then the assistant monk insisted we get a picture of all the foreigners together, along with some of the Koreans who had been speaking English to us throughout the night.

In case you're wondering how I got the picture: the photographer, a devotee of the hermitage, posted it on the official website and sent it to me via email.

How Far E-Cards Have Come

I got Elf'd by my good friend and neighbor and top sous chef and fellow Sadhanite Suze.

If you want to know what that means, follow the link.

Warning: It's a little disturbing.

http://elfyourself.jibjab.com/view/neGmBqvVZLe1JUbNabHL

When It Feels Like I Am Too Small

True or false: it's ok for one to beat a dead horse if the horse is asking for it.

Once again, a thought-provoking and inspiring post from Causabon's Book: What Does It Matter?.

When talking with friends and acquaintances, whether of like mind or not, there is question that often comes up, one which is disheartening both in its frequency and its content. The question is - surprise - what does it matter? What does it matter if I eat one less egg, plant one more tree, forego one more luxury, volunteer for one more hour, or even inspire one more person? Isn't it true that whatever good I do today will be just about cancelled out by whatever my neighbor does tomorrow or whatever Coca-Cola will do in the next two minutes*? Isn't it true that even if all 7 billion of us went organo-vegan, changed our light bulbs, abandoned fossil fuels, composted all our poo, and stopped supporting corporations, it would still be too late to save the planet as we know it? Even if we as a species just up and vanished.

Some people ask the question because they're exceedingly clever and feel it justifies them in buying and using and consuming whatever they want, or at least can afford. Maybe it does. Some people say it because they're exceedingly scared and honestly feel like no matter what they do, it won't be enough. It probably won't. Some people say it when they're just too tired of feeling like they're opposed to everything about the system they live in, when they need to give themselves a break, just for a minute, or for a bite, when they need to feel like they're not asking too much of themselves, which of course they are, and which of course they have to be. I say it most days and have said it in each way, and probably in other ways as well.

It was this sort of frustration, this thing that deep-down I hate to acknowledge but can't get away from, that pushed me from recycling to hounding others about recycling; from taking shorter (and colder) showers to eating less meat (which saves water); from eating less meat to not eating to meat to eating (almost) no animal stuff to growing and buying as much local, organic stuff as I can; from riding a bike to agreeing to volunteer with Daegu's Eco-bike group; from whatever I do now to whatever I can think up to do next.

As stated above, the problem is that the problem is** (or problems are, depending on how you want to look at it) so bad that none of these are enough. This is why I want to involve others. This is why I am trying to start Daegu Green Living. This is also one of the reasons I feel like I ought to be more involved in protests. While direct confrontation is tough for me - I'd rather quietly go about doing my best, and I'd rather go about thinking I'm an example, and I'd rather go about writing blogs, and I'd rather go about showing movies - I am coming around to the idea (thank you, Derrick Jensen***) that it really is necessary. What good is meek and modest silence in response to the wholesale slaughter of the planet and so many of its species, to the mass victimization and immiseration of entire peoples and cultures and, to the ceaseless destruction of any chance of fairness, equality, peace, or perpetuity? Shouldn't people be upset? And noisy? And nuisances? I have a friend who hates PETA for their tactics, but will going vegan ever put an end to factory farming or vivisection?

This idea - that protesting is more valuable than "merely" attempting to live a life consistent with my ideals - fills me with a certain amount of guilt (as if I needed more). Am I trying hard enough? Am I directing my energies and using my privileges in the most effective ways? Could I be doing this or that instead? Or, better, in addition? Am I a wuss? It was with these kind of thoughts as (ever-present) background noise that I found Astyk's words powerful:

"This prioritization of protest over the emergence of an ordinary, sustainable life is understandable in a society that prefers the large and shiny to the small and domestic, and that demeans daily personal actions and ways of life as unimportant. I have in much of my other work attempted to articulate the ways in which our personal actions are in fact, political and the conventional distinctions between personal and political intellectually bankrupt, and while I may have made a modest fame in doing so, I've mostly failed so far. This is problematic because it is precisely the emergence of a life worth living - and that can be lived by all the 7-9 billion people who will share our planet in the coming years that is most urgently necessary. If creating and modelling some sort of preliminary life of this sort is my project, I come to it well after Berry, and less gracefully. Still, such a vast project with so few participants can always use one more.

...

"This is the best that will ever be said of even our most successful efforts to preserve a world in which people can go forward - that we will fail to do enough. Despair, the logical companion of failure is part and parcel of the project - Carruth's poem, Berry's essay are both fundamentally about despair, about failure and the responsibility of those who fail. The odds are good that changing our way of life will not result in anything that we can call success on a world scale, that it is too little, too late. I don't think there's any point in denying this. Nor do I feel it is worth denying that most of the time, even if we succeed in some measure, it will feel as though we aren't doing enough, are paying too high a price, are losing the wars and all the battles. Most of all, we won't get the credit we would for marching and waving our signs, because such things emerge in part as a shorthand for the work of daily action. Without the shorthand to signal our protest, many of the unimaginative won't see it - some of us may forget to see it.

"It isn't an easy project in a world that assumes a great deal of energy and emissions, that says freedom is consumer choice and that participation is mandatory and that wealth is our goal. So when you are in the garden, when you ride your bicycle or walk, when you explain to your neighbor yet again why you don't want their lawn chemicals on your yard, when hang your laundry, when you deliver a meal to a neighbor who is ill, when you say "no, we don't do that," when you teach your children who you are and why you do the difficult thing, when you try and convince yourself that you aren't too tired, when you get up in the morning and it looks like all you've done is pointless remember this - you are doing something hard and vast and new. Without your work and courage there is no hope at all for all of those with the courage to chain themselves at the gates. Without those who chain themselves at the gates, enough people will not know what you have done. With both together, change begins."****

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* If that.

** No typo.

*** Can I beg you again to read Endgame?

**** If I deleted the quotation marks, could I trick you into believing that I had written that?