Site Placement

Today we received our post assignments. Definitely the most anticipated day of training thus far, the staff did their part to add to each trainee´s excitement/anxiety. On the small soccer field at the training center, they had made a map of Ecuador using rose petals to delineate province borders, and they called us up one by one to bring us to our place on the map. Sort of felt like we were on a game show (¨Bob, tell him what he´s won!¨). Really interesting way to deliver information about where we´ll live for the next two years. But fun/funny. Some trainees skipped to their spot.

I won a post in Pichincha. It´s the province we´re currently in. The town is called Amaguaña and sits high up in the sierras - about 2100 meters - about the height of two Mt. Monadnocks. It´s just an hour and a half south of Quito. There are about 15,00 residents and the foundation I´ll work with is interested to have me help with introducing organic agricultural practices to the farms that surround the town. So far it sounds like an excellent site: sierras, small town, no malaria or dengue, and the work will be a hybrid of natural resources conservation and agriculture - awesome! Really excited. Tomorrow, all of us trainees are headed to our sites for a week-long visit. Some have to travel for two days to get to their posts. A couple trainees who´ll be serving down south on the coast will need to take boats for the last stretches of their journeys. I think my site is the closest. There´s a current Peace Corps Volunteer serving in Amaguaña who´ll I´ll replace in April, and the fact that she hasn´t ETed (early terminated) I think is a great sign.

In other news...

The US embassador to Ecuador met with us yesterday to offer up her support of our future activities as volunteers. She likes birding.

Been doing the 5 Tibet yoga stretches every morning and I highly recommend them to anyone. Thanks Emily for teaching them to me.

I may have a guitar lesson through the interwebs with a great trad music guitarist in NH - Flynn Cohen of the band Annalivia http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-MfViFq3sc Incredible!

Really enjoying the book Jayber Crow by my favorite auther, Wendell Berry. It´s a novel about a barber in a river town in Kentucky. Beautiful. Read anything by Wendell Berry and your soul will feel rooted and uplifted at the same time.

Happy St. Patrick´s Day to all!

Cotacachi

Volcanoes are married here. This past week eleven of us went to Cotacachi for our first tech trip. The small city is in the northern sierras of Ecuador and sits at the base of the dormant volcano from which the city derives its name. On Wednesday we hiked around part of Cotacachi´s crater, doing trail maintenance and learning about ecotourism from a park ranger. He told us that the last time the volcano erupted, all of the ice from it´s summit melted and formed the lake that now sits in the crater. Also, two islands were thrust up in the lake. Cuy (guineapig) populated the islands and the place became known as Cuicocha, which means ¨lake of cuy¨ in Quichua. The legend of the indigenous communities here tells that Cotacachi is the wife of Imbaburra (a volcano across the valley) and their babies are the two islands in Cuicocha.

The views of Cotacachi´s summit were incredible (I hope to post photos soon). Wispy clouds whipped past the peak, covering and revealing it within seconds. The views of the landscape in the valley between the two married volcanoes were equally breathtaking, with the small cities of Cotacachi and Otavalo surrounded by farms that spread out and rose up the checkered slopes of the mountains on the other side of the valley. The sun was hot, and we got burnt. But it was a highlight of the trip. Also, at 3,5oo meters, it was the closest I´ve ever been to the sun.

Cotacachi has a large indigenous population. Forty-two communities surround the city, and their schools are generally bilingual, teaching classes in both Spanish and Quichua. When we were attending a tourism workshop on Thursday, I got to hear a few conversations in Quichua for the first time. We were hanging out with three women who were making jewelry to supplement the income they earned from farming. Cotacachi is a big in handcrafts and leather products and receives alot of tourists. Anyway, it was cool, and hopefully I´ll learn a bit of Quichua while I´m here.

The whole week was great. We attended workshops on cooperatives in indigenous communities, ecotourism, and park management, and worked on several farms (worked alot with uvillas - or gooseberries). Also got to see a neat permaculture farm run by a hip ecuadorian-japanese couple. Their washing machine is hooked up to a bike for power. I asked whether they worked at all with the Biodynamic calendar, but they said they only use the lunar calendar. I´m on a trek for information on how to farm Biodynamically at the equator. There´s a farm in Pifo (about thirty minutes from Tumbaco) that is connected with Kroka - the Waldorf-inspired adventure camp in N.H., and I´m hoping I can get there before the end of training to see how they practice Biodynamics. The search continues.

Chulla Vida

I´ve been in Ecuador for 23 days. In training they´ve said that it takes 21 days to form new, daily habits, so I think it´s fair to say that not flushing toilet paper is now surely a habit of mine - and it´s not that bad. Also, I´ve gotten used to instant coffee, buses o´death, amazing fresh fruits, reggaeton, and the fact that avacados grow here.

I live with a host family in Tumbaco (about an hour outside of Quito) and commute to training in the nearby town of Collaqui six days a week. My host family - the Garcias - are really patient with my limited spanish skills and they feed me incredible food. The most unusual meal I´ve had so far was pig foot soup. It was difficult to get the meat off the foot, but the broth was amazing. I haven´t had cuy (guinea pig) yet, and I have my reservations about eating it since my goddaughter has one as a pet. There are amazing fruits here and there seems to be a plant to cure any type of illness.

The past three weeks have been a mix of technical training and language and culture training. I´m in the Natural Resources Conservation program, and we´ve been doing some cool stuff like tree nursery construction and management, community garden management, and parks management. Next week we go on our first of two tech trips - this one to Cotacachi in the sierras. Really looking forward to it, and I hope to have some good stories to share when we get back...

My Spanish is coming along. I can understand most of what I hear, but speaking it has been difficult. But I´m confident I´ll get there... poco a poco.

¨Chulla vida¨is the Ecuadorian equivalent of ¨seize the day¨/you only live once.¨I learned the phrase from my older host brother who has taught me most of what I know of Ecuadorian culture. It´s the posture I plan to have for my time in this country.

Here We Go!

Tomorrow will be my last day at my folks' on Long Island. On Wednesday, a 7am train will take me down from Penn Station to DC, where I'll meet up with the other 41 Peace Corps Trainees going to Ecuador. We'll have a brief orientation at a hotel and fly out to Quito Thursday morning.

My bags are nearly all set. I've been careful about including the essentials: camera, penny whistle, and Dr. Bronner's soap. Almost all "see ya laters" have been said. Adrenaline is starting to kick in. I'm all set.

Hope to be able to post during training. I'm pretty sure the interwebs will be fairly accessible; feel free to check in here for updates....

Book List

Books I'm taking with me to Ecuador:

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
American Earth edited by Bill McKibben
Ecuador by Lonely Planet
Woman hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros
Writing About Nature by John Murray
The World We Have by Thich Nhat Hanh
Harmony for Guitar by Lance Bosman
Irish Traditional Fiddle Music by Miller and Perron

The Premise

A few years ago, I heard an interview from the late '60s in which Dorothy Day described the life of her friend Peter Maurin. She said Peter strove to create a world where it would be easier for people to be good. Voluntary poverty and simplicity, with a focus on community and service to the poor, were important tools for them both in their efforts. Their model is what has most influenced my decision to join the Peace Corps. That's probably the simplest way to put it. To endeavor to create a world where it is easier for people to be good. What would be more worthwhile?

So, that's the premise for why I'm going to Ecuador. It will be a new context for learning about the things that interest me the most: community, environmental stewardship, and simplicity. I hope to use this blog as much as I can to share my experiences and to tell the stories of people I meet.

A week from today, I'll head down to D.C. to meet up with the other Peace Corps trainees going to Ecuador - about 40 of us in total. The next day we'll fly to Quito to begin our eleven weeks of training. We'll live with host families in Tumbaco, which is about an hour outside of Quito. After that we'll become volunteers, and Peace Corps will place us at sites throughout Ecuador for two years. I'm in the Natural Resource Conservation program and will be an environmental educator.

Here we go!

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


- Wendell Berry

Maple Sugar Lines

"There’s an art to tapping." John Kenney, whose family produces 6% of New Hampshire’s yearly maple syrup harvest, informed us of this truth when he stopped by to help us with our sugar maple lines yesterday. He’s only twenty-eight, but he knows pretty much all there is to know about how to make good syrup – he’s done it his whole life. John and his family have been neighbors and friends of Glen Brook for years, and the common drive to produce good work has led to a continual exchange of favors and helping hands. So, when John pulled up to help the three of us amateur maple syrup harvesters, we all breathed sighs of relief.

Glen Brook established a maple sugaring program last year. We acquired an evaporator, constructed lines to connect series of sugar maple trees on our property, and developed an educational program that culminated in a maple sugaring weekend for families. Our efforts resulted in forty gallons of pure, New Hampshire maple syrup and amazing pancakes. Although I’ve just started at Glen Brook this month, I’m excited to join the rest of the staff in continuing the program and shooting for eighty gallons of syrup this season. We’re all poised to get our hands sticky.

The traditional image of maple sugaring seems to consist of a bucket hanging on a tree by a metal tap with a pitched cover to keep out snow, rain and debris. Although we’ll keep this endearing, New England image alive by hanging buckets on taps on a few trees, the bulk of our effort will incorporate rubber tubing. The rubber tubing goes from tree to tree – really from tap to tap, since some trees can have two or three taps – and runs from one tree, at the top of a hill or grade, down along a series of trees to a barrel at the bottom of the hill. As the trees seep sap, gravity pulls the liquid down to the barrels. Then, we transfer the sap to two hundred-gallon vats in our sugar house above the evaporator.

John showed up as we were trying to set up one of our lines. Although we were having a great time, our lack of experience couldn’t have been more obvious. You want the lines to be taut so that the sap flows smoothly and doesn’t get stuck in a droopy section of the tubing, where it will sour. Our first attempts consisted of tying the lines to each sugar maple using twine. We couldn’t get the line taut and the taps weren’t lining up with the trees – there was too much slack in the line. Our neighbor carried a broad smile with him as he stepped out of his pickup and met us under the tree where we were working. It was the type of smile you get when you know that the person sees exactly what’s wrong with your work and knows that you have no idea what you’re doing. Thankfully, John patiently showed us the art of tapping.

We stopped using twine and, instead, stretched out the lines from tap to tap until they were taut and then wove the line between the trees so that the tension held. Sometimes the taps on the line did not fall in sync with the tree it belonged to, so we simply cut the line, adjusted its length, and reassembled it using plastic connectors. The only downside to this was that, once you cut the line, you have to chew on the end so that it will stretch and fit onto the connector. The plastic line tasted awful, but thinking about the syrup to come made it bearable. We got the job done, and the line looks perfect.

We were able to hang two more of our five lines yesterday. After we finish setting up the rest we’ll wait until the temperature gets consistently above forty degrees during the day – an indication that the trees are waking for the spring and their sap is flowing. We’ll see how this pans out. Hopefully John will be by again.

Photographs by D. Foster

But it's not done yet...

Requiem

The crucified planet Earth,

should it find a voice

and a sense of irony,

ought now well say,

of our abuse of it,

"Forgive them, Father,

they know not what they do."

The irony would be

that we know what

we are doing.

When the last thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth would say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the Grand Canyon,

"It is done."

People did not like it here.

Kurt Vonnegut

Photograph: Taken at Yosemite National Park by D. Foster

Listen to the Farmer...

The science writer Michael Pollan says, "Vote with your fork!" He and Wendell Berry continue to convince me how hugely important it is to vote with food on my mine. Pollan's call sounds silly, but even sillier is how we take our food for granted. As Berry and Jackson write here, "This is a political issue, certainly, but it far transcends the farm politics we are used to. It is an issue as close to every one of us as our own stomachs."

This article appeared in The New York Times on Jan. 5, 2009.
A 50-Year Farm Bill

By WES JACKSON and WENDELL BERRY

THE extraordinary rainstorms last June caused catastrophic soil erosion in the grain lands of Iowa, where there were gullies 200 feet wide. But even worse damage is done over the long term under normal rainfall — by the little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded cropland, and by various degradations resulting from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.

Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government.

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.

To the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. Some of this toxicity is associated with the widely acclaimed method of minimum tillage. We should not poison our soils to save them.

Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological “solutions” for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.

Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.

For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.

But a more radical response is necessary if we are to keep eating and preserve our land at the same time. In fact, research in Canada, Australia, China and the United States over the last 30 years suggests that perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and sunflowers can be developed in the foreseeable future. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can better protect the soil and substantially reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution.

Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient. And with an increase in the use of perennial plants and grazing animals would come more employment opportunities in agriculture — provided, of course, that farmers would be paid justly for their work and their goods.

Thoughtful farmers and consumers everywhere are already making many necessary changes in the production and marketing of food. But we also need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.

This is a political issue, certainly, but it far transcends the farm politics we are used to. It is an issue as close to every one of us as our own stomachs.

Wes Jackson is a plant geneticist and president of The Land Institute in Salina, Kan. Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer in Port Royal, Ky.

Cross-Vanes and Willow-Stakes

Last Spring, my field crew and I were assigned to work in a creek just south of Hercules, California, on the East Bay. The Muir Heritage Land Trust had acquired Fernandez Ranch, a 702-acre plot of rolling hills and fields, and was preparing to open its foot trails to the public. The Trust hired us to work with the Urban Creeks Council (UCC), a Berkeley-based non-profit that designs and supervises creek restoration projects – they are the ones who, years ago, originated the “No Dumping, Drains to Bay” signs that populate street drain curbs in the Bay Area.

The organization I was with, Civicorps, is a non-profit conservation corps that hires some of Oakland’s toughest inner-city youth. Our crews had worked at the ranch in past and had pulled tons of trash, the result of years of dumping, out of the creek. My crew and I were there to work on two somewhat more artistic – and, as it turned out, physically demanding – tasks: cross-vane construction and willow-staking.

Rodeo Creek cuts through the northern section of Fernandez Ranch. It heads almost directly West towards the San Francisco Bay, dividing the fields in the north from the hills in the south. The creek is fed by a tributary from the south that meanders down from the hills. As I recall, the creek banks host mainly coast live oak, willow, coyote brush, and unforgiving patches of poison oak. Some areas of the creeks are densely vegetated, providing refuge for wildlife. We noticed a great amount of bird actively and spotted bluebirds almost daily. We also noticed the very edible miner’s lettuce and the not-edible-at-all poison hemlock – the poison Socrates was condemned to drink.

The Fernandez family used the land for cattle grazing, and the property, though no longer theirs is still leased to raise free-range cattle. Although these activities have allowed for beautiful fields, often sprinkled with wild flowers like California poppy and wild mustard, they have had some negative effects on the land.

Tree and shrub roots have the important duty of keeping the soil where it is, and with the absence of these structures comes soil erosion. At Fernandez Ranch, repeated grazing has prevented shrubs and trees from returning. When a disturbance occurs once, whether by cow, fire, plough, or something else, shrubs and trees can return after a given number of years; however, grazing constantly disturbs the land, maintaining it as a grass field.

Both Rodeo and its tributary have cut right through the land, literally dropping the creek beds a steep thirty feet. And the heavy amounts of rain that hit the area during the winters haven’t helped. Each rainy season adds massive amounts of energy to the creeks’ cutting abilities. The result is further drops in the creek bed and, at some points along the banks, mudslides. In short, creeks need stability. At Fernandez Ranch, my crew and I learned how to bring back stability to Rodeo creek and its tributary…

Cross-Vanes and Willow-Staking, Part 2

When we got to the site on our first day, Mike, our collaborator from UCC, was already sharpening his chainsaw on the tailgate of his pickup. Our first couple of days would be spent cutting willow branches form willow trees along the banks of the creeks. The basic idea behind willow-staking is that if you harvest and prepare the stakes correctly, you can hammer three-foot-long sections of willow branch into the bank of a creek and they will bud and turn into trees. The “new” trees spread their roots throughout the soil and hold the soil in place. This is a simple and effective long-term solution to soil erosion. And very cheap, too.

So, Mike, his jindo, my crew and I set off into Rodeo Creek cutting a few straight limbs from most willows that could afford it, hauling the limbs up the bank, and dragging them to our staging area by the trucks. We then cut branches with diameters of 3 inches or more into three-foot-long stakes – each with a 45-degree cut at the bottom. After about three days of soaking in water, the willow would be ready for staking. In the meantime, we started working on the cross-vanes.

Placed directly in the creek, cross-vanes are V-like structures that prevent soil erosion by reducing stress on the banks. You situate the bottom of the V, the lowest point of the structure, in the middle of the creek. The tops of the V you spread out downstream to the banks at inclines of 2-7%. As water flows over the cross-vane, it loses energy and velocity, which, in addition to reducing the cutting power of the creek, encourages sediment deposition. When water hits the cross-vane near each bank, it curls back and is forced to pass the cross-vane in the center of the creek; as the water hits the structure and curls back, it drops sediment, preserving the bank.

Normally, cross-vanes are made out of stones; however, with no stones available, we constructed ours out of the small branches and twigs left over from our willow-stake harvesting. Mike chose a spot on Rodeo Creek’s tributary where, due to the steep grade, the water picked up greater velocity. What originally was a nice hike to the site became many arduous treks, since it took numerous tarp-loads to transport all of our materials. We began each cross-vane by establishing a frame that consisted of two rows of closely-placed wood stakes. Next, we gathered the willow twigs into bunches, which we laid in between the two rows of stakes. We locked the branches and twigs into place by crossing the alternating stakes. Each structure took about an hour and a half to construct. Since steeper grades means faster flowing water, we placed cross-vanes closer together in these higher-energy portions of the creek to better reduce the water’s cutting power. When we returned for our second day of building the structures, we already saw small effects by our first batch of cross-vanes: the pools in between the cross-vanes were increasing in size. Newts use pools to spawn, and, yes, we noticed a couple doing just that!

Some of our soaking willow stakes were already budding when we returned to them three days later. If you look closely at a tree branch, you’ll see little nodes all up and down it. These are points where new limbs can branch out. When you cut off the top of the branch, as we had done and as is done in pruning, energy and nutrients get redirected to the nodes. What we saw on our stakes were leafy green bulges at each node, which meant the stakes were already shooting out new branches. They were on their way to becoming new trees.

We hauled our five hundred or so stakes back down to Rodeo Creek and began hammering them into the banks using sledges and single-jacks. We spaced them about a yard or so apart in sections Mike designated using flags. The 45-degree cut in the stakes helped us get them into the ground, but some still split under the pounding sledges, unfortunately. It took about two days total to plant the willow-stakes.

There are several great benefits to cross-vane construction and willow-staking besides their ecological and economic effectiveness. We harvested the materials from a locally native plant and used nearly of what we took. What branches we didn’t use we left to decompose back into the same soil from which they grew. The materials came from the soil and were produced directly by the sun’s energy, and they were transported by human muscle; therefore, both production and transportation of the materials were local and sustainable, with no waste. Additionally, the cross-vanes and willow-stakes suited the landscape – they fit in. Not only were they not visually oppressive, they were actually aesthetically pleasing. The cross-vanes, especially, looked like a piece by the artist Andy Goldsworthy.

The project made us better workers and a better crew. And it confirmed a view that I’ve developed and held since my year working with Oakland’s youth, namely, that shared, hard work that taps into the emotional, physical, and creative power of each individual and that produces good, tangible results is the best strengthener and nurturer of community bonds.

VI

The yellow-throated warbler, the highest remotest voice
of this place, sings in the tops of the tallest sycamores,
but one day he came twice to the railing of my porch
where I sat at work above the river. He was too close
to see with binoculars. Only the naked eye could take him in,
a bird more beautiful than every picture of himself,
more beautiful than himself killed and preserved
by the most skilled taxidermist, more beautiful
than any human mind, so small and inexact,
could hope ever to remember. My mind became
beautiful by the sight of him. He had the beauty only
of himself alive in the only moment of his life.
He had upon him like a light the whole
beauty of the living world that never dies.

~ Wendell Berry, from Given