If There Is Anything That Is Wrong, Then This Is Also Wrong.

Warning: This post contains some unpleasant pictures.   They're not gruesome, but they are for sure gross, a bit gory, and hopefully at least a little disturbing.

Modification of warning: the Great Firewall is still completely screwing me over.  I have to post my blog via a circuitous and totally non-suave email method, which means I don't get any control over formatting.  I have no clue whether the pictures will actually go up.  

Disclaimer: Before I begin my tirade, I bow humbly to all the friends and others I know who spend their vocational lives in the service of others or of the earth.  I know people in international development, international conflict resolution, journalism, wetlands protection, primitive skills training, community projects, and more, all of whom devote much more time and energy than I do to altruist pursuits.  I mostly just avoid buying and consuming certain things.  I actually feel a bit of shame at the fact that my way of contributing is purely avocational,  so I want to be careful not to write as if I had a monopoly on the practice of doing good.  That said, there's something special about vegetarianism: anyone can practice it without it affecting the other spheres of his or her life.  Compared to changing careers, changing your diet is a piece of cake. 

So,

Frankly, I'd rather be writing about my last couple weeks in China.  How Shanxi province was full of ups and downs both literal and figurative.  How a middle-schooler gave me his gloves.  How we ran into and joined up with a crew of twenty-two Chinese cyclists, had our first taste of Chinese vodka, stormed a guest house, then rode up the 2000-meter high Mt. Banshan en masse the following day.  About how the bare cliffs of the ensuing descent, as well as our subsequent ride down the Taishan mountain range this afternoon, made me once again marvel at the beauty and power of nature.  I felt pleased, proud, even honored to be so utterly dwarfed.  I wonder if this is how believers feel in the presence of God.

But, instead, I'm going to write about a truckful of pigs that I crossed paths with about fifteen or twenty kilometers south of the Shanxi-Henan provincial border.   From across an intersection, I saw the truck pull into a gas station. A wave of pity immediately carried me into the truck's wake.  While the driver was gassing up, I pulled around the other side unseen and began to have a look and take pictures.

There were six cages to a row, stacked three rows high.  I couldn't tell if the cages were one or two rows deep; simple geometry makes it seem like there wouldn't be enough space for thirty-six cages on the truck bed, but then again, the way the pigs were crammed up against one another with hardly an inch to move suggested that they had been squished together beyond the limits of physical possibility, let alone compassion.  Close inspection of one pictures makes it look like such may well have been the case, but I'll be charitable and say that there were only eighteen cages.  Three pigs to a cage made fifty-four pigs.  Not a single one of them looked healthy or comfortable.

The first thing I noticed was that several pigs had their rears hanging out of the cages.  They had so little room that they had been forced to back up so far that the bars of the cage actually ran in between their butt cheeks, like an oversized, metal, rusty wedgie.  Some of them apparently did this so that they could urinate and defecate away from the truck, though of course the pigs on the lower levels – many of them with open scrapes and sores on various parts of their body – were hit with the effluent nonetheless.  Other animals, the ones unable to turn themselves around, just pissed and shat where they stood.  Or lay. 

The way the bars cleaved the pigs' back ends revealed a number of anal and vaginal sores.   Further, several pigs had white foam seeping out of their closed snouts.  A few of those on the upper level were drooling directly onto those on the lower level; one strand of drool even fell directly into another pig's eye, swollen and red with infection. Not a single pig had sufficient room to turn around.  Many had their snouts or entire bodies smashed up against the bars of their cage.  For most, shifting from a lying position to a standing one, or vice-versa, would have been possible with the permission and collaboration of their cellmates, many of whom had already collapsed, apparently immobile.  A number of the pigs licked, gnawed, and pushed at the metal bars in pitiful, futile efforts to at least earn themselves some breathing room.  Some were so nearly still that I couldn't tell whether they were breathing or just being pushed by their brethren. 

Things like I just reported will not come as news to most.  Indeed, what I saw was small-scale and relatively benign compared to what goes on behind closed doors in meat processing plants around the world.  I know from experience, though, that one often has to be confronted with something several times before he or she can accept it.  The first time, one scoffs, unaware of the scratch that's been made in his or her armor.  The second time, the scratch become a chink.  Then a crack, then a fissure, and eventually, , after four, five, or however many times, the whole suit falls to pieces, and you're left naked, defenseless in front of the truth.  I personally was so shaken that I've decided to renew my commitment to veganism, which has been slipping in recent months; I rationalized this by saying "I cause harm in other ways (e.g. using and disposing of plastic, consuming non-organic food) without thinking twice, so why give myself such a hard time about what kind of food I eat?  Aren't I doing enough already?"  So, to whoever is reading this, I won't say "please don't eat meat" or "please go vegetarian."  What I will say is, please don't ignore the fact that the conditions that I've just described are commonplace.  Please don't let your hard-earned money go to support those who knowingly treat animals this way.  Please don't say that it's not your fault, or your responsibility.  Please don't say that whatever good you could do pales in comparison to the evil done by certain others, or that one person can't make a difference.  You can.  Please do.

Sorry to interrupt your hopefully beautiful day with such stuff.  Thanks for reading.

My TEDx Palgong Talk - Official Version

Most of you have probably already seen the version I mailed out, but here's the legit one!  Watch it, like it, share it, pity me when nobody laughs at my jokes...




http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/My-Path-to-Green-Living-Michael

http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=gosQDsnwlTM

Southward, Sloooooowly

Getting a grip on the size of China has been quite a mind-bending experience. Several times, after managing to settle in to a good pace and hammer out 80 or 90km a day for a few days in a row, I’ve had the feeling that Taiwan is just around the corner, after which the rest of the mainland will be a breeze. The next thing I know it I’ll be in Vietnam feasting on Jackfruit and regretting all the time I wasted studying Chinese. At other times, even to say that we’ve been “inching” along would be a gross exaggeration. That’s because when the going is tough, transversing an inch of map-space (scale: one to EIGHT MILLION) can take a week. Worse, when it takes that long, it’s almost always because of rough terrain, truck jams, emphysema-genic dust clouds, general lostness, and other unpleasantries that make the riding grueling. On a good day, I can dismount the bike after 100km and not even feel like I had ever put foot to pedal, while on the worst days, half that can seem like a gauntlet.

Recently we’ve had two of the “worst” days. On one, we only made it 40km before stopping for an early lunch and then collapsing in a park. We were so exhausted that we napped all afternoon, ruining our chances of doing any PM riding. The waning hours were spent using the park’s exercise equipment, playing Frisbee, looking at maps, practicing harmonica (me) and ukulele (Mingyu), and reading the very weird “Journey to the West,” an old Chinese epic about the exploits of a Stone Monkey.  Or at least, that's what the first 200 pages were about, but now he's been banished under some mountain and apparently is no longer a relevant character.  I'm no longer sure whether it's worth my time.
The next day, our search for the “Stone Village” led us so far off the beaten path and so high into the mountains that we managed only 20km before 1pm. By the time we had finished with lunch shenigans (pictures to come), some meandering through the ancient cobblestone streets of “Yujiashitoucun,” and ruckus in the schoolyard with a mob of little elementary-schoolers, it was nearly dark and we had no choice but to crash at the first homestay that we came across.  Two bucks a night, plus one per meal.  Hurrah!

Now we're rested and moving south through the horrific mountains of Shanxi province.  The name literally means "West of the Mountains," so I thought that we'd just have to cross them once while heading westward before coasting down towards the Buddhist grottos and Dharma caves of Luoyang and Dengfeng.  Not so.  It was uphill all day today.  As October and autumn are upon us, camping at 1300m is out of the question.  Thankfully, we've now demoted ourselves from "Booze Rooms" (read: hotels) to "Travel Halls" (read: dingy like hostels, but not with any particular youth focus.) 

The only big news worth reporting is that we’ve picked up a third cyclist, Xiang Liang. We met him about five days ago now on the way out of Beijing. He’s 22, hails from Sichuan, and though senior year of college in Beijing ought to be right around the bend, is taking an indefinite break to clear his mind and figure out why he felt funky. He’s a bit slower than us but quite a warrior for riding a decent-but-less-than-excellent bike with fat (i.e. heavy, high-friction, slow) tires and not a whole lot in the way of gear. It’s nice to have a third around to break up the monotony, particularly since he’s friendly, hilarious, good at English, an excellent tour guide and translator, and a worker of many deals. That said, I’m becoming aware of the pitfalls of group riding, particularly for someone like myself with more than your avferage number of curmudgeonly tendencies.  Over the last week I’ve spent a lot more time and mental energy than I’d like trying to figure out how the three of us fit together; how to deal with the fact that I want to ride faster and further and with fewer breaks than the other two; how not to feel marginalized when I don’t share meat or beer at most meals; how not to come across as stingy when I don’t want to split the tab; etc.  I also spend a lot of time and energy kicking myself for being so childish, for not having yet figured out how to maintain zen and refrain from blowing small conflicts (which only I perceive as such) out of proportion.  Thus, for a few days now I've hardly had any emotional room left to get all warm and fuzzy about the hills and clouds and passes and stuff.  That said, I managed to break out of my funk yesterday almost in a single moment.  Here's how it happened:
    1)  I finally reached the top of an absurd 40km climb and started the downhill portion. 
    2)  I listened to the song "Blue Skies" by Noah and the Whale.
    3)  I realized that all the extra money that I wind up spending subsidizing beer and meat can be viewed as the cost of keeping Xiang around, and since his presence and knowhow actually save me money on food and accomodation, I'm actually coming out ahead.  He's also helping me to support smaller, and thus, probably, slightly more sustainable hotel operations.  Conscience cleaned!
    4)  I realized that my trip is going to be a long, long, long, long, long one indeed, and that I have time to try out all different sorts of travel.  Solo, in a pair, a trois, who knows, maybe sometime I'll join a whole pack of roaming cyclists.  Rather than focus on the things I don't like about any certain arrangement, it's better to take each for what it is, enjoying the positive parts that might not be around a week or a month from now.  Experience and learn from them all.  No resentment, no regrets, blah blah blah I'm going on thirty and still figuring this crap out?!?
In short, life on the road rules and I can't imagine having to wake up to an alarm and then go to a job and work for somebody else. The only thing worth lamenting is that it's hard to find an internet connection that will allow me to upload all the wonderful photos I mooch off of Mingyu.  I'll try to get them up sooner rather than later.  In the meantime, enjoy this special

!BONUS SEGMENT!

Here are some September Statistics for all the nerds out there:

Km: 1241. Low because we spent two days couchsurfing in Chengde, a week around Beijing sightseeing and running errands, and a week on the farm. Hoping to double this next month...

Money Spent: Y1339 ($220). Of that, Y507 went to restaurants; Y279 went to buying fruit, pastries, salad ingredients, and other edibles from convenience stores and street vendors; Y75 was used for accommodations; miscellaneous for the remaining Y478.

That’s right, my rent for this month was about twelve dollars. And my food bill was just over one hundred. The shamefully large etc category can mostly be blamed on two big layouts of Y120 each: entrance to the “Summer Restort” in Chengde, which was a total ripoff, nowhere near inspiring as an empty orchard or isolated mountain pass; and a new heavy-duty lock for the bike, which I think is a justifiable investment. Here’s to an even cheaper October!

Beyond Beijing

It’s only been ten nights since I last slept in my tent, but it seems like longer. I felt so tuned in during almost all of the 450km of my solo trip from just two weeks ago – each experience was vivid and deep, every moment full of joy, every encounter friendly and natural. I was so into the traveling, and particularly the sleeping al fresco, that I distinctly recall falling asleep in my Couchsurfing apartment noting the absence of cicadas. Something about the silence felt wrong. And something about it feeling wrong felt right.

That consciousness has faded over the past ten days, so much so that I almost forgot I was traveling. So frequently leaving and then returning to the same Beijing apartment (friend’s friends Jonathan and Meiqing’s place) gave me the impression of being home, of being settled. Thus, telling others that we were headed to Taiwan and beyond once again began to take on that hazy, even stagnant sense that it carried in Korea, like I was just saying something for lack of something else to say, like I was hedging my bets, like it wouldn’t happen.

But now things are returning to their new normal. I’m in my tent, amongst the trees, under a half moon that was a fingernail just five nights ago. Better yet, I feel like a new leaf has been turned over. The first five weeks of the trip were almost like learning how to walk. And also how to pack, ride, talk, eat, and camp. Now that we’ve made it to and through our first big destination, though, I’ve found my stride. My body has adjusted and seems to function better – and even on less fuel – when I’m riding 50km or more a day. I’ve figured out what goes in what bag and what order the bags go on the bike; what a good camping spot looks like, what order to unpack my gear in, what goes in the tent, what stays outside. How to walk barefoot on the tarp to make sure there’s nothing sharp underneath. Then how to leave a little strip of tarp outside one door of the tent so that I don’t have that awkward problem of trying to step out of my shoes and into the tent all at once. How to get drinking water without buying a new plastic bottle. How to wash off in my tent in the dark with less than a cup of water and no spillage on the tent floor. How to keep my food pannier mounted on the bike at night so no ants crawl into it. I even remember to walk around swinging a little stick in front of my face so as not to run straight into a spider web. Oh, and how to pee without even getting all the way off the bike. All of these things that used to require deliberation have settled into routine, leaving me with more mental space to figure out the bigger things, like: where are we going? How long do I want it to take? What do I want to happen along the way? In no particular order:

 Develop my harmonica skills. It’d be nice to have something non-electric to do in the dark, and also to have some sort non-verbal way to interact with hosts, kids, and other random people along the way.

 Stretch and exercise and do yoga and meditate in the forest in the mornings.

 Visit some old villages and some places of extreme natural beauty.

 Get more use out of my hammock.

 Watch all the movies and listen to all the music that are sitting around polluting my hard drive.

 Devote some more time to thinking about Green/Ethical travel.

Ok, that’s that for now. Here are some pictures of the good times Mingyu and I had with Meiqing and Jonathan, who so kindly let us come and go and sleep on their couch and floor whenever we felt like it for nearly an entire three weeks, and who joined us for many a great meal and helped us accomplish a number of bizarre missions in Beijing. May we meet again somewhere.

Note: I'm mooching a verrry slow connection at a super cheap hostel ($7 for a private room with 3 beds) up in the mountains.  The photo uploads will have to wait.  Apologies...

Update: Got 'em!

On the Farm Again: Shared Harvest

If you have been following the Mike Map above, you may have noticed that though Mingyu and I arrived in Beijing more than fifteen days ago we have yet to escape its clutches.  First it was Mingyu’s visa stuff, which took about a week.  Then it was a couple days of me waiting on a package (long story that’s too traumatic to get into).  Now, finally, after a month of wandering both list- and aimless, we finally found exactly what we were looking for: AN ORGANIC FARM!

It’s called Shared Harvest and we found it through a series of events that was truly random, though perhaps no more so than every other piece of good luck that has sprung up in our path thus far.

1) A Couchsurfing host rejects my couch request but clues me in to the existence of a Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market held on the weekends .

2)      I forget about it on the first Saturday and leave town on the first Sunday.

3)      Protests outside the Japanese embassy lead to the cancellation of the BOFM on the second Saturday.

4)      Mingyu and I wind up going on the second Sunday.  We meet Lynn, who speaks excellent English, is tabling for Shared Harvest, and started volunteering at the farm just a few days prior.  (Thus the importance of my forgetting in (2)). 

So, we got her phone number and made tentative plans for “sometime next week.”  Then Mingyu and I went home and delicately badgered the farm people until they agreed to let us come the next evening.  A short* 40km ride the next evening  and here we are!

Shared Harvest is the largest CSA in Beijing (and in China), with over one hundred customers receiving weekly deliveries of hyper-fresh, organic vegetables.  Here’s their blurb:

““Shared Harvest” is a non-profit, service-oriented social enterprise established in 2012 by a group of young people with a strong interest in promoting ecological agriculture and sustainable lifestyles. To address increasingly serious food safety problems, we advocate four principles of organic agriculture: ecology, health, fairness, and care. These principles guide the management and practices of our CSA. We advocate for healthy and natural lifestyles; and we seek to reestablish harmonious rural-urban development and relations of mutual trust across the rural-urban divide.”

Sounds awesome in theory, right?  Here are some pics to show what it’s been like in practice:

The Share Harvest folk at the BOFM.

 Me and some green onions in sweet embrace.

Day 0: getting straight to work on the long beans and Bok Choi.  Notice that they're tied into bundles with rice stalks.  No trash!

Day 1 (Tuesday): Doing some cleaning at the farmer's house.  We're expecting 25 students from Beijing International School to come for a little farm lesson on Wednesday, so we cleaned out this shed and set up some tables for a DUMPLING PARTY.

 On the way back to our home base, one of the workers, Shaoting (Xiaoting?) stops to show us a Jujube tree.  A couple shakes later we all have handfuls tiny delicious jujubes.

 Then over to the farm to help the hired hands - all extremely friendly, smiley 50- or 60-something ladies - do a little picking and plucking.  They compliment the way I tie knots with the rice stalks and are surprised that the old "thumbs up" means the same thing in the USA.  I always assumed we had invented it...

 THIS IS ALL CILANTRO.  HOOOOOOOLLLLLLLY CRAP.

Peekaboo amonsgt the cucumber vines.  Or maybe long beans.  They're all hung on a very cool bamboo lattice, so, again, no metal, no plastic, no trash.  Only a few knots in certain strategic places.

 Helping the crew get the deliveries prepped. When I said “hyper-fresh” before, it wasn't an overstatement.  Many of the vegetables are picked and packed on the same day, and then trucked the short 50km to Beijing early the next morning, meaning that customers get their vegetables within 24 hours of their** having come off the vine or out of the dirt.  The only way to get them fresher would be to a) grow them yourself, or b) live in the village and pay a fee for access

 Day 2)  Giving a pre-field trip tour to one of the staff coordinating the Beijing Int'l School (BISS) trip.

I knew somewhere in the world there was something that matched this shirt.

 The plan was to make dumplings with the kids, but it's pretty intensive, so the farmer's wife made most of them ahead of time.

Making time for more shenanigans.

Unfortunately, the bus took the kids to Little Donkey Farm, another organic farm 40km NW of Beijing, rather than Shared Harvest (ours), 40km SE.  Luckily the people at LDF are all friends with the SH people and they covered for us while we popped in the car and scrambled over.  

 The kids didn't know the difference, though, and had an awesome time digging for sweet potatoes.

 Unfortunately the transit SNAFU meant that we had to cancel our wild foraging activities and dumpling making.

Which wasn't so bad, since it meant that back at the ranch we got to enjoy the leftovers.

 Oh, yeah, and a good 30-40% of the BISS kids were Korean.  I had a great time screwing with their heads by repeatedly speaking Korean to them and then disavowing all knowledge of the language.  Then I convinced them that I was Korean and Mingyu was from the Phillipines!  It really was a blast chatting with them.  There was also one Italian boy.  I tried to talk to him but  got totally tongue-tied.

 Hanging out in the office.  Actually, Mingyu and I haven't been spending much time doing farmwork, since the lady crew has that all covered.  Instead we've been helping out the office staff, who are more in charge of strategy, distribution, advertising, and that sort of stuff.  Also, we've been eating.  A lot.

In the office, we found this knick-knack from the 2011 Organic World Congress in Seoul.  Mingyu was there with his company (Heuksalim/ Soil Savers) and I was there on my own just bumming around, as I do.  It turns out that the founder of Shared Harvest was there too, and actually gave a presentation on the developing Chinese CSA scene.

 Lunch this afternoon - Stirfried cukes, stirfried potatoes, moon cakes.  Awesome food here, all organic.  They eat meat, always organic, usually pork, usually in soup, once a day at lunch.

One of today's tasks: sorting out the good and the bad peanuts.

The farm's founder.  That's right, Shared Harvest is not only the biggest CSA in China but it's also the first!  This lady is a pioneer.  She has written one book about her year WWOOFing in the USA and has translated an English CSA manual into Chinese.  

Using basil from the front yard, tomatoes from the garden, and sheep cheese gifted to one of the workers by one of his friends from Inner Mongolia, I turned the standard morning bread recipe into morning pizza.  Hurrah!

The gang!  The gosh-darn mohawk part has yet to sort itself out, apparently...

And just for fun.

For more about Shared Harvest, check out their official site.  They have some awesome sections about the history and philosophy of CSAs.  

*Whereas I used to consider rides of 10-15 kilometers long, and certainly “longer than any other foreigner in Daegu is willing to ride in order to do a private lesson at a rock-bottom rate,” I now regard anything less than 60km as a pre-lunch stroll.  100km, which used to seem inconceivable, is “a good day’s work.”  280km is “the general anticipated distance between real showers.”  500km is still “are we out of our minds?” territory. 

**(The vegetables, not the customers, of course.)