nice nice nice

Not much to write about of late.

My Scottish coworker and the-better-part-of-a-year cynic and vegetarian buddy Andy left the country after three years. The week preceding his departure was full of plantnappings, furniture nabbing, pancake gorging, and rice wine till 6AM. One fine night, five of us went through eleven kettles of rice wine and one of each pancake on the menu (spicy chive, green onion, potato, kimchi, split pea, sesame leaf) except cabbage. There was much talk about death, breathing, zen, the grave, goodbyes, environmentalism, Sadhana, and some other slightly-less-couth topics.

Tobin, a fellow American whom I met in Sadhana Forest, took his sweet time meandering around India, Nepal, Tibet, China, Japan, and Seoul, and finally made it to his real destination (my living room) sometime around the middle of the month. He hung out for a week, had a really great time (if I may say so), participated in the first ever giant party in my house (25 person, hundred dosa, thousand idli [admitted overstatement] Indian potluck), and then headed off about a week ago. I hesitate to write about the experience because, for one, I am pretty sure he'll be reading this at some point, and, for two, because he's just that sort of friend that one has nothing but loads of good stuff to say about, and I'm generally not comfortable giving other people compliments (i.e. I give them to myself quite well), and particularly not in front of an audience as GIGANTIC as mine (proof).

The very next day, a pair of Couchsurfers arrived from Colombia. Jorge and Isabel. Jorge's now staying in what was once Tobin's spot, while Isabel is staying with another host nearby. I've been enjoying showing them around town, taking them to meet my friends at excellent restaurants, cooking various foods from them - from Korean to Indian to random stuff from my fridge - learning about Colombia, and realizing how much my Spanish skills have atrophied since 2002. It's been a bit of a burden having guests for about a whole two weeks now, but it's also been really nice to reconnect with an old friend, meet someone new, and share my life and time and food and social circles and bathroom day-in and day-out.

Then, this morning, I headed back to my old neighborhood (Chilgok, where I lived in '07-'08) and met up with Mr. Kim, the manager of the "Farmer's Marketplace." Back in March or so I saw the store while on the bus and have been frequenting it since then. When I got the bright idea to start showing films, I started dropping off advertisements there, even though foreigners hardly visit and middle-aged Korean women who do the shopping for their family are never going to come to my Saturday-night screenings. The cashier lady asked me once, nicely, why I bothered biking around and doing screenings and if I wasn't just tiring myself out, and without thinking I told her that I just mostly felt compelled, that I didn't know what else I would do if I weren't doing "this." (I learned an important fact about myself at that moment.) We talked briefly about how pitiful we are in contrast to the influence of major agro-corporations, then I put the minipumpkins and sweet potatoes in my bike bag and pedalled off.

Sometime in December - I remember because it was the first big snow of this winter - I stopped by again to do some shopping on my way to meet a friend. It was some sort of customer appreciation day, so after brushing the flakes off my ridiculous orange parka, the cashier lady took me to the back of the store, where pork was a-grillin'. I enjoyed a bit of grilled rice cake and kimchi and some homemade rice wine that hadn't been fermented quite as long as it should have, and wound up meeting the manager, along with a local artist, a former school principal, and some other guy, all related to the Daegu eco-scene in some way or another. Now that I write this, I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it before, in the post about things coming together.

Anyhow, it was on that day that Mr. Kim said that we should have tea together. And it was at that moment that he explained to me that the Korean phrase "let's have tea" means something like "maybe we have something in common, let's try to get to know one another," whereas "let's have a meal" means "let's cement this relationship" and "let's have a drink" means maybe something along the lines of "let's get drunk and vent and then make some plans." I accepted and vague tea-related promises were made.

Actually, though, I think it's a little weird just to have tea, so I called Mr. Kim last night and arranged a lunch meet for today. I grabbed the bus out to Chilgok, gave myself nausea trying to finish the appendix to Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, did a little shopping at the Marketplace, then was taken to "Nok-ya-won," an awesome little restaurant I wish I had known about back in 2006 when I first came.

They served us green tea, then jeong-sik, which has of late become my favorite kind of Korean meal. Literally "decided meal," jeong-sik is kind of like the soup du jour, except that rather than soup it's 10 or 15 or 20 vegetable side dishes served with rice. The specific dishes vary according to the restaurant, the location, the season, the prices at the market, and I suppose the cook's whims and specialities. Included in today's lunch:

-Noodles and radish in vinegar/red pepper sauce
-Black rice and mushroom porridge
-Sticky sweet potato noodles with sliced vegetables
-Sauteed mushrooms
-Thin-tofu soup
-Slightly stronger tofu in red pepper paste
-Sweetened dried radish
-Sesame leaf kimchi
-Sweet lotus root
-Grated carrots, bean sprouts, and spinach
-Doraji (some awesome root) in a sweet red pepper sauce
-Donnamul (little crisp leafy guys, stem and all) in a thin soybean paste and onion sauce
-Some little fishies
-Just a tiny bit of steamed pork, leaves, and dip
-An awesome kind of sliced root with peanut sauce, which I had never tried before
-Another vegetable with some crazy seasoning I can't begin to describe.
-And I think two or three more that I can't quite recall.
-Not to mention that the rice - multi-grain, with pumpkin and sunflower seeds and ginko nuts too - was wrapped up in a lotus leaf and then steamed.

My lord, it was good. And Mr. Kim paid (12 bucks each) while I was in the bathroom.

While eating, we talked about Mr. Kim's path from anti-goverment demonstration in his college days to a few years doing politics with an independent party to (I'm not sure, my Korean isn't anywhere near as good as I'm making it out to be) to finally operating this marketplace and trying to raise environmental awareness through volunteer programs, farmstays, movies, and other strategies. We also talked about the communities I'm intending to visit in the coming weeks, and how so may aspects of community here have collapsed, that most people don't even realize it, and what the best way to go about addressing that problem is. I explained to him what WWOOFing was and offered to connect him to my persimmon farmer down South, and he offered to connect me to some "famous" environmentalists around here who do documentaries and other things that I didn't really understand. I asked him if he knew about CSAs (I hadn't found a Korean farmer yet who did) and he said that actually his marketplace is a sort of CSA and that some of his customers have direct relationships - which means they've met face-to-face and even worked in the fields side-by-side with- the farmers who supply the store. Excellent!

After lunch, he dropped me off at another eco-friendly shop, where I buy my laundry detergent and other stuff. I'm on good, maybe somewhat flirty terms with the (female) manager there, and since I was buying stuff for friends as well as myself, and my bag was stuffed and I probably looked pathetic (the nausea still hadn't/hasn't gone away), she gave me a solid 20k won discount (on a 70k won basket of goodies) even though I've never bothered signing up for a membership card.

She also introduced me to the guy behind me in line at the checkout counter, who happens to be a farmer on the mountain nearby. He also happens to be one of the store's suppliers for soybean paste, red pepper paste, and other fermented foodstuffs. She told him I was interested in farming, and within 30 seconds of meeting me he offered to let me come to his farm and check out both his organic plots, where he grows enough to feed his family, and his processing facilities. He also offered to give me a ride home. Equal parts nauseous and grateful, I accepted.

On the way home we chatted about this and that; his 11-month old son, his time in Australia, his farm in the mountains, his family, Korean hospitality, his sister's Canadian husband eating really spicy peppers, how Finnish people can't handle kimchi, the virtues of raising your own food, what to plant come April, how nice sweet potatoes are, and so forth.

What I draw from this is that, even though I feel ridiculous sometimes [edit: most of the time], talking to people about this "group" called Daegu Green Living that is still at this point just me, throwing around flyers indiscriminately, chatting with owners, interviewing interns, writing articles, taking pictures of foods and signs and postponing putting them up on the web, it really does seem like a lot has come of it. Things and opportunities I didn't expect and couldn't have predicted in advance. The more I put myself out there - sharing my opinion, making efforts to fix things, deciding not to hide my values - the more I seem to meet and connect with similar people. And the more those people seem to respect me and want to help me and connect me to other people they know. I suppose it shouldn't really come as a surprise, since there's no way any of this could happen if I just sat around in my little turtle-shell of a home studying Korean (which I do do sometimes). Nonetheless, it's pleasant. It's nice that, despite all the things that make me curmudgeonly (see recent post about Foot and Mouth, as well as my recurring references to Jensen and probably most posts with the "Wisdom" label), there are
people in my immediate vicinity who share my concerns and ideals and hopes and frustrations. It's also nice to know that there are more people than I know of who are, in their own ways, going about doing the sort of stuff I am.

I don't know what else to say. Just, "nice."

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?


__________________________________________

*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