Orion

One night during my first week in country I went up on the roof of my host family´s house. I instantly knew I was in a different place because when I looked directly above, to the sky´s zenith, I saw Orion. I almost didn´t recognize him in his new spot. And it was a little unnerving. Last night when I looked up at the sky, I couldn´t identify any constellations! When I lived in New Hampshire, the night sky and its constellations were so familiar I could get my bearings in an instant by looking up. I realize now that not only was I connected to the landscape there – the types of trees, the stone walls, the lakes, the wild blueberries, etc. – but I was also grounded by the sky. In Ecuador, I´m starting to grow accustomed to the high sierras, dead volcanoes, and Andean forests… but I still have no idea what´s going on overhead at night!

It´s been a little while since my last post. I´ve moved on from biol to biochar (a type of fertilizer and carbon sequestration method), and overall things are going well. I moved to an apartment, which has been a nice change (I no longer have roosters outside my window that cockle-doodle-doo at three in the morning). The dueña (landlady/owner) of the apartment is a doctor in town. She´s really sweet but a little nutty – the first few days she called me Daniel, David, and Andres. There´s a women´s group she´s a part of, and I plan to start working with them because of their interest in organic, home gardening. Another opportunity to look into. Also, I just started a home garden with a family in the neighborhood of San Jose, where I used to live. We´re in the process of constructing a perimeter fence to keep out chickens and dogs, and we´re forming raised beds for our veggies. I might try to make some Biodynamic horn manure preparations – not sure if that´d scare people though. The plan is to create a really beautiful garden (complete with compost, biol, biochar, and wormbeds) to use in the future as an outdoor classroom for folks who want to start growing food in their homes. It also hits multiple important topics: environmental stewardship, food security, and nutrition. I´m really excited about this project and hope to use it as a foundation for much of my other work. And I think it´ll make teaching easier. It´ll be easier for people to learn how to create compost when they can see how the system is set up. And it´ll be easier for them to learn what healthy soil is when they can feel it and smell it in their hands.

Stay tuned for my next post on learning Ecuadorian folk music… Hope everyone is staying cool up there in the northern hemisphere!

Biol

Biol is a liquid, organic fertilizer. This is basically how you make it:

Fill a 100-liter barrel about a third of the way with fresh horse manure (cow, chicken, pig, and guinea pig manures work, too). Mix in 2 liters of milk, 2 liters of molasses, some egg shells, some leaves from leguminous plants (beans, guaba, etc.), and maybe some potassium. Fill the rest of the barrel with water. Hook-up the barrel´s air-tight cap with a tube, and after fastening the cap to the barrel, place the tube´s end in a bottle of water. Wait sixty days.

This simple recipe could solve a lot of problems here for small-scale farmers. It´s an easy way to make a nitrogen-rich, organic fertilizer using materials that you can for the most part find in the home. During the sixty-day waiting period, the materials in the barrel ferment due to microbial activity causing anaerobic decomposition. While oxygen can leave the barrel through the tube, it can´t re-enter because the end of the tube is in the bottle of water creating a barrier. Since the process is anaerobic, it keeps the nitrogen in a form that’s usable by plants. We simply apply it to the crops by mixing the biol with water and using a backpack sprayer (bomba de mochila) to spray it. So, in essence, biol is a relatively cheap way for small-scale farmers to replenish the nitrogen in the soil and get a better crop yield. Since it isn´t realistic to make compost for vast acreages of crops, this type of fertilizer is about the best we can do to meet both the earth´s needs and the farmer´s needs.

We´re going to give it a shot on Saturday. A fellow from Recinto de Pasachoa named Alfredo wants assistance with a small plot that hasn´t been yielding much produce. We´re going to start a batch of biol but use some biol I helped make during training to get things started. Admittedly, I feel a little nervous about the trust he’s putting in me. But the desire to really earn that trust is fueling this vast amount of enthusiasm I feel for helping Alfredo accomplish something truly good for himself and his land.

Oh, another interesting thing. I´ve been hearing lots of blame being put on the rain for poor harvests, but I only recently realized why. It´s not so much that the plants are getting too much water (what I had thought) as the soil is getting eroded away. Pasachoa is a mountain, after all, and its slopes are particularly steep. So, it seems the problem of fertility is both a problem of soil erosion and of taking nutrients out of the soil (via crops) without replenishing them. Huh, who would’ve thunk?

So, My focus right now is learning as much as I can about biol and about soil erosion… oh, and about bees, too! Let’s see where this whole thing takes us.

Quick News Update

Things are getting busier, and I’m starting to feel settled in Amaguaña. The chance to start a project is also becoming more of a reality as I continue to meet more and more people in various communities. I have a couple of dates down to work with several small-scale farmers in San Antonio de Pasachoa (up on the mountain), and I was able to get a meeting for tomorrow with some folks from the municipal government who, like me, want to get some bee projects going in Recinto de Pasachoa (also on the mountain). So, more or less things are moving along, slowly but steadily. Patience and humility are important virtues for the volunteer. Also, if you smile a lot and make fun of yourself, man, people warm up real fast.

On the 28^th my supervisor from the PC Office in Quito comes down the Pan-American highway to visit my site and to make sure everything’s kosher in Amaguaña. Since all is well here, the visit will be more of a formality than anything else. But it’s also my chance to get housing approved so I can move into my own apartment. I started looking for a spot yesterday and found a really promising house in a family compound next to the house of an elderly couple. It’s in the center of town and doesn’t have a space for gardening, but other than that it’s really nice – clean, big, safe, quiet. Also, I got the monthly rent dropped significantly. I didn’t know it, but apparently I’m a good negotiator. Or, maybe it’s just that I’m not allowed to pay more than $80 per month in rent, so the fact that I couldn’t go above that helped me get the landlady, Anita, down to $80 from $120. She said it was because I’m in Peace Corps. Cool.

Things like finding an apartment are helping me see myself here over the next 22 months (no worries, I’m not counting down). It’s part of the place-making, sending-out-roots process. I’m like a plantula (¨seedling¨ – a maple or oak, maybe? Definitively not eucalyptus) who’s been transplanted and whose roots are getting used to the new soil. It’s an uncomfortable process, but it’s starting to feel better, little by little.

Empanadas are Beautiful

My discomfort in my withdrawal from technology is matched by an increasing awareness and appreciation of simple pleasures, like eating bread. Forget about Netflix and iPods, give me a glutinous piece of heaven to eat and a grazing cow to watch and I´m satisfied – a happy stomach and good company.

In fact, I´ve grown particularly fond of a certain variety of bread called empanadas. An empanada is basically bread that was folded over before it was baked, with a little bonus in its center. This bonus is often cheese or a sweet of some sort, but my favorite is an empanada con queso y cebolla (with cheese and onion). This seemingly odd combination of flavors is a gastronomic perfection of astronomic proportions, especially when the top of the empanada is decorated with little sugar crystals. I would argue that it´s a super food, on the level of peanut butter or quinoa. But this view might becontroversial since most bread dough here is made with loads of pork grease. I learned this when I mixed dough for Rafael´s mother when she was teaching me how to use her clay oven. She poured quite a bit of the old H1N1 juice in there. In general the experience was really great (hope to write about it next time I bake bread with her), but it did leave me wondering if there is any vegetarian bread in Ecuador. It also made me realize why the empanada dissolves so wonderfully in your mouth, yes, just as the sugar crystals begin to hit your taste buds. For those of you in Brooklyn, when you think empanada con queso y cebolla, think lard bread from that little bakery window (in Carroll Gardens?) – it approaches that level of indulgence.

A plain piece of bread costs about $0.10 or $0.15, but because empanadas con queso y cebolla have some value-added goodness, they generally run $0.25 or $0.30 each. I allow myself to enjoy one every few days. With considerations for my budget, my health, and my overall self-esteem I´ve determined this rate of empanadaconsumption to be acceptable.

Simple pleasures are important. A steaming cup of coffee on a chilly morning is a beautiful thing. So is putting on a crisp, clean shirt that you washed by hand and dried via that very basic solar technology, sunlight. Have you watched a cow graze recently? They´re incredible! There´s a young boy who lives across the street who I always hear playing his recorder as he walks home from school every afternoon, totally engrossed in his music making. It´s popular to go for walks (dar una vuelta). The aim is not to exercise or to do errands but to see what you see and to welcome a simple pleasure – maybe you´ll bump into a friend. These are random ephemera that I´ve just begun to notice, primarily because they are not hidden by electrical gadgets that would distract me and keep me from being present to my surroundings. There are so many beautifully mundane things to notice!

To lead simple lives, it seems, is to give ourselves opportunities to be aware of and appreciate our most basic and arguably our most important connections to the people around us and to our landscape. And as much as I had been seeking a simple lifestyle in the States, technology is ever-present and addictive. It needs to be put in its proper place. Ecuador is forcing me to do that, and I´m grateful.

So, come watch a cow graze. We´ll eat some empanadas.

Bees and a bit of Beston

A lot of hurry-up-and-wait at the moment, but I think it’s normal at this early stage of service. I’m waiting to hear from a couple of community presidents to see if I can start working with them. There’s a good chance I’ll meet with the president of Recinto de Pasachoa on Saturday. That community is pretty rural, and apparently some folks up there speak Quichua, which is exciting!

Yesterday, I had my first encounter with a bee colony here in Ecuador. My counterpart Rafael keeps several hives around Amaguaña, and he took me out to visit one in Cachaco. Last year when I had attended a workshop on beekeeping at the Pfeiffer Center in New York, we didn’t use any protective gear, so I was surprised when Rafael put on his jumpsuit, head net, and gloves when we went out to his hive. Apparently, most of the colonies around here are a mix of African and American bee species. The African bees produce a lot more honey, but they also tend to be more aggressive and defensive. So after tucking in my shirt and donning a head net, we were ready to head over to the colony.

It was a nice, hot day, so the bees were fairly active. They’ve been struggling a lot this rainy season, apparently, so it was great to see them so energetic. After setting up behind the hive, Rafael used a smoker (basically a tin can with a small, smoky fire in it) to calm the bees and warn them we were coming in. He then showed me the inside of the hive, which bees were which (drones and workers… didn’t see the queen), which cells were being used for what (eggs, honey storage, pollen storage), and things of that sort. After going through and checking the status of the hive, we closed her up and headed out. And nobody got stung.

The folks in Recinto de Pasachoa work with bees a fair amount, so there’s a good chance I’ll be working on a project that in some way involves bees. Vino de miel – or honey wine – also known as meade could be a cool value added product. Well, little by little Rafael is going to train me how to inspect a hive and all that, so I’m really excited. I’d definitely like to take some more workshops at the Pfeiffer Center in apiculture and have a few colonies when I get back to the States.

Que mas?

A little personal project I have for my PC service is to read/study a book called American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, edited by Bill McKibben. It’s a great compilation of excepts and essays by American nature writers, including my favorite, Wendell Berry. I recently read a piece by Henry Beston out of his book The Outermost House. After being asked by some friends what he got out of an experience of living in a cottage by the ocean in solitude for a year, he wrote,

I would answer that one’s first appreciation is a sense that the creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and as active today as they have ever been, and that tomorrow’s morning will be as heroic as any of the world. Creation is here and now. So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment, a solitary note heard in a symphony thundering through debatable existences of time. Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.



I hope all is well Stateside!

A Week In

When I visited Amaguaña for a week back in March I saw an encouraging sign that confirmed this place as the perfect post for my two years of service: a rainbow. I hadn´t seen one since I left Glen Brook last Fall, so the sight of this one made me feel a little more at home. Last Wednesday, when I arrived in Amaguaña for good - after swearing in as a volunteer - another one of nature´s phenomena greeted me as I hopped off the bus with my duffel bag and guitar: a giant crack of lightning (followed, of course, by torrential rain). I´m not sure what biblical significance the lightning may have regarding my service here, but it seems to compliment the softness of the rainbow, for sure.

Amaguaña sits about an hour south of Quito in Los Chillos Valley, and its slightly high elevation gives you some great views of the rest of the valley on clear days. The volcano Pasachoa sits right outside our town and rises 13,766 ft. above see level. My house is somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 ft. and the volcano really towers over our town.

I live with my counterpart, Rafael. Counterparts are basically community contacts for PCVs who´ve requested the PCV´s service from PC/Ecuador. Rafael´s a young ecologist who runs an environmental education foundation in Amaguaña called JASDUC. He´s already taught me alot about native plants, but more importantly he´s taught me the ecuadorian way to make soup (possible topic of a future blog post). He´s been great about showing me around town and such. So we´re getting along fine. Rafael´s house is simple, which I like. But I´ve been noticing some things seem to be missing, like a table to eat at, chairs, and a sink in the bathroom. But as they say here in Ecuador, ¨No pasa nada,¨or ¨Fuhgeddaboutit¨ if you´re in Brooklyn. We have no hot water, a leaky roof, and a cement floor that holds alot of moisture, but like I said, no pasa nada.

Each PC site gets a maximum of three volunteers (six years of service, total). I´m replacing another volunteer in Amaguaña who had served for the last two years up until a couple weeks ago. Following her has made things alot easier for me. For example, during my site visit in March, she showed me around town - where to get good deals on avocados, how the buses work, etc. I also appreciate all the things she passed on to me, including a bed, a refrigerator, cookware, books, dvds, a shower head heater, and best of all a French press (with a bag of real coffee!). This has been tremendously helpful in making me feel at home in Amaguaña. I like the sense of continuity that following another volunteer brings, and it will be nice in two years to welcome the third volunteer to serve here (and pass on the invaluable French coffee press).

In terms of work, I´ve made some good progress the past couple days. My counterpart and I have decided to start out by working with two communities that live on the slopes of Pasachoa, about an hour hike from my town. Because the slope are steep and folks only grow corn, there is a fair amount of soil erosion and poor soil quality. We´d like to work on these two issues and hopefully introduce some simple organic fertilizer sprays that can easily be made with home materials. I have a meeting with the presidents of the communities on Friday, so hopefully we can get the ball rolling. In the meantime I´m going to see about starting a smaller project. Rafael´s foundation has an educational park called Cachaco. It´s a beautiful spot next to the San Pedro River with alot of native vegetation and bird activity (pictures to come). We have a tree nursery there where we raise seedlings for various reforestation projects in the valley. So, we´re going to use a portion of this space to experiment with various types of homemade organic fertilizer sprays, which I´m really excited about. The soil there is fairly poor, so it´s a good baseline from which to measure progress.

Address

This will be my mailing address for the next two years:

PCV Daniel Foster

Cuerpo de Paz, Casilla 17-08-8624

Quito, Ecuador

Please send me mail! But don´t send anything more than 4 lbs, and don´t declare a value.....

Quick Update

Tomorrow, our group of trainees, Omnibus 105, will take the oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and become Peace Corps Volunteers.

Soon after the swearing-in ceremony, we´ll split up and travel to our posts where we´ll serve for 24 months. Our close-of-service (COS) date is April 20th, 2013.

My Program Manager found me housing today in Amaguaña (just in time, right?), so I´m excited that everything is set for me to get started at my site. So many great opportunities lie ahead!

Hopefully I´ll be able to provide a good description of the upcoming events of the week - and some pictures, too. Swearing-in and Holy Week, crazy week.

Tech Trip on the Coast

This past week we split up into groups of 11 for our second technical trip of training. My group went to a small city called Arenillas, down near the coast on the boarder with Peru in the province of El Oro. The bus ride down took about 12 hours and cost $10 (eat it, Greyhound). I´m kind of glad we took a night bus because I couldn´t see all of the cliffs I´m sure we almost fell off, but we probably missed some great views, too. All of a sudden we found ourselves surrounded not by mountains and volcanos but fields and fields of banana plants. It was kind of like driving through the US midwest but instead of seeing corn as far as the eye could see, it was bananas. It was bananas!

The trip consisted of alot of training in a variety of topics. We visited a shrimp farm and learned the process of getting shrimp wheels to Stop n Shop and Hannaford´s in the States from the Ecuadorian farmers. Like most industrial operations, it´s complicated, and the workers and the envrionment tend to suffer the brunt of the cons while the owners and middlemen get all the pros. The boat ride out to the farm was really neat though. It was great to be on the water - riding through the mangroves. There was alot of bird activity too, and we could see groups of the predator birds soaring in thermal columns at several points along the way to the farm.

We also visited a dry forest that forms part of the border with Peru (and so the military runs it, not the environmental agency). The trees in this forest drop their leaves in the summer as a way to protect themselves from the intense heat - basically the opposite of why our tree drop theirs in the fall in the Northeast US. The heat was definitely distracting - for pretty much the whole trip - but the seco (dry) forest was a really neat environment.

Our last day of the trip we took a hike through another national park, further up the coast this time, in the province of Guayas. This forest was really beautiful. Dense vegetation and really wet and humid. The mosquitos and spiders were more than made up for by the howler monkeys, who we definitely heard before we saw. They make these incredible grunt noises and can be heard from really far away - kind of intimidating. But also cute. We saw several carrying their babies way up in the canopy.

We did some other things on the trip (actually loads), but my brain is having trouble processing it all at the moment. We got back at 8am Saturday after another nauseating bus ride - still exhausted - and I´ve been popping Peptobismal like its candy - a small price to pay for an incredible experience.

In other news:

I´m reading The Alchemist, but in Spanish this time...

Only have a week and a half before I move to my post in Amaguaña...

... But I don´t yet have a place to stay there (my Program Manager is working on it)...

I´m on quest for a fiddle..

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…