Political Ecology of Forests!

The Political Ecology of Forests

Hi everyone! Mom, dad, friends and family!

This is Sunday morning, the first weekend I’m back from the forests. Its 7:15 in the morning, which is the time at which my body simply refused to let me sleep in any longer! Yesterday I woke up naturally at 4:00 am… but then, I was on top of the third highest peak of Thialand, and an hour later me and a handful of friends started the dark climb up the steep rocky trail to the top of the peak for sunrise. The top was like an island in clouds, jagged mountain tops rising out of a turning slurry of white mist. The din pre-dawn light settling as lightly on the jungle-alpine flowers as the dew.


But that’s another story….

Forests was a very wonderful course for me. There were no shocking moments, and no ground shaking surprises, but I’ve just come back from spending two weeks living with and learning from probably the most generous people I have ever met in my entire life. I have, probably also, come back from participating in the most environmentally simple life-style of my entire life, and that felt wonderful, too.

I think I may have had a particularly peaceful experience, since my entire life I have been fascinated with ancient subsistence lifestyle. In my heart I have always had a place that wished I was born into a nomadic-wilderness tribe. Not, to say, that the Karen are living either and ancient nor normadic-wilderness life style, but that the simple subsistence tasks, the proximity to nature, and the tremendously tight communities involved echoed well with me.

Excusing the roosters and the bed bugs, I could easily live that life style for a long time. It felt natural, to me.

So what you must really be saying right now, is well?! What life style!! So I guess I better get down to the context.

P.S. pictures are up on Picassa too, if ya’ll want to open that in another tab and maybe read along, it might spark me to type out some explanations for those moments.



The course started out with a 8 hour bus ride to the very north of Thailand. The land is mountainous, and considering it is the “cold season”, I usually like to put on fleece or hat in the evenings . The first place we arrived at was a little town called Maehongsong, we visited an NGO there (The Project for the Recovery of Life and Culture) and rested up, and the next morning we took off for a 4? Hour back of the pickup truck ride into the mountains. We bounced and rattled down a rickety dirt road, twisting and plunging through the hills, all the way out to a little mountain town called Huey Tong Kaw.

Huey Tong Kaw is a ethnic Karen village with 28 houses. The village is budhist with a large serving of traditional animism. It has a public sala, a community of black smithers, a herbal medicine man, one man with a pick-up-truck, and solar panels (prodived by the Taksin administration) which provided electric lighting to each house. It is located sort of on a mountain side/base and my house was the furtherst up the hill. They have low land patty rice fields (called Na), and upland swidden-agricultural fields (called Rai). The Karen are famous (idealiszed?) for having the more env. friendly agricultural techniques of all the different forest tribes. As we found out, this is something they are very proud of, and I was convinced that it is pretty dang good, considering.

Swidden agriculture, also sometimes known as slash and burn, means cutting down a swath of forest to plant, planting it for a period of time and when the soil is exhausted, moving on to a new plot. Rotational swidden agriculture, like the Karen have, means the community has about 8-12 different Rai location, and switches through them each year. While the Rais are not in use (fallow) the jungle grows back over them, the plants repleshishing the soil, and building up organic living matter, so that when the Karen return, cut and burn the plot, all that matter turns into yummy food for their plants.

The Karen have a special style of this rotational ag, where they leave large tree trunks sticking out of their Rai. The amazing thing is cutting and burning the field, if you leave these stumps, doesn’t kill the trees! Even as we harvested rice with them we could see tons of young saplings shooting out of the old stumps. This Coppicing technique means the plots reforest super super quickly! I had this amazing moment with Pati (uncle) Coru while asking him why they only planted rice one time per year (some places plant twice) as we cut and bundled rice togheter, and he said… ‘well then the trees would die!” I looked around me at the sea of blacked knubs… “uh…” I said. Thinking, these were about the deadest trees ever…. “look” he says, and point to the nearest stump, sure enough huge sprigs of new shoot were rocketing out from the base. “if we plant twice the roots die, but this way the forest grows back fast”. He pointed out across the valley from our mountain top fields, so a pale patch stamped out of the adjacent mountain. “That’s a Hmong Rai, they plant there every year. The trees die, and the soil is not good.”

The Rai we were harvesting in was a 1.5 hour hike from the village, 1.4 miles of which was up a mountain. The dry brushy jungle/forest opened up to a huge wood piled fence with a ladder over it (keep free roaming village cow and buffalo out) and beyond that the mountainside opened up to a brilliant yellow and green rice field, prickly with blacked stumps, and peppered with intercropped pumpkins, sugar-cane–like sweet grasses, and little resting huts. The Rai was perched over blue and green jungly mountains. Once, a few years ago, a wild elephant had stormed into the Rai, and once (probably more later) Pati coru had shot a couger like big cat there while it stalked his cattle.

Anyway, to start this whole thing off I should really start with our first village experience of the course.

On the way we stopped in a town called Huey Hee, and just as we arrived a yellow dog comes chasing a mama and baby chiken out into the road, chases the chick in circles around the back of our truck. Oh how cute…. Chop! Off he runs into the bushes, squeeling chick in teeth. Meinwhile, mother hen pump her head and struts confusedly back and forth, as what appears to be her last chick disappears. Welcome to Thailand.

( I later found out dogs that eat chicks are beaten or shot, so I’m unsure as to the fate of this first chick. Maybe the dog just ran off with it… )

When we arrived at Huey Tong Kaw, I introduced myself to the village MuGas (aunts = all women are called aunts as an address) and made friends with Muga La Won, so Erin Moody (my roommate for the 5 days) and I went home up the hill with her to her family. I had a kind host dad (the guy from the waterfall pictures), and a grandma who lived with us but spoke no Thai (the villagers speak a norther langague called Bakenyaw, but most learn Thai is school… we were both operating under a second langague). I also had three host simblings, a 14 year old brother, a 8 year old sister Nawng “Jolly”, and a 5 or so year brother (this kid with big eyes and a cool wooden amulet necklace from most of the pictures… the ones with the three kids dancing he is front center, the others are his friends).

Journal excerpts:

Ride there:
I’m on the bus headed to Mae Hong Song. On the trip Marcia nd I made friends with the bus attendant, young Thai man, Catholic, studying to be a priest, very fun. At one point he gave us his cell phone so we could talk to his friend. Later, at a stop, he gave us it again and got off for th stop. It rung again and we answered, hehe. Marica talked to his (friend?) the prurised person who called, for like 20 muinets. It was very funny. I can learn a lot fro her about how to keep a conversation going. She would always come pu with something to say in the silences like “do you like pizza?”. I will go talk more.
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A we drive further north, into the mountains, the air gets cool. It smells and feels wonderful. Marica quote “like fresh bread made out of grass”

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After dinner at a nice restaurant in Maehongsong we explored the town, lots of art fiar like shops selling crafts and jewlry. We wondered off the main way and found dragons guarding some dark stairs that led up to the wat on the top of the mountain/hill overlooking the city. We found some Thai men sitting on the steps an asked if we were allowed to climb. They said, laughing, “good luck!”, it wasn’t too hard! The stairs switched back through young teak trees, the city behind was lit up in orange and yellow dots, making rows of streets, and also lights floating into the sky. Tonight is the biggest night of the special Chiangmai holiday Roy Gra Tong where ppl make prayer boats and send them down the river with candles and incense to thank the river spirit and say sorry for anything they might have done wrong. People buy sparklers, and fire works and light paper lanterns and let them go into the sky. We climbed the mountain and flocks of lanters climbed with us into the stars.

-- just read a wonderful email from Grandma J! Thanks Verna!!! Shout out to y’all for your great emails, Beth, Carol. I love the letters! The remind me of all the rich and wonderful details of being home and make me smile!
They also give me alittle prespective for what to write about since, so many things here just seem completely normal now, but they are really so different from things at home.--

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Today, I’m trying to find joy in every moment. Thailand, well.. its hard to explain… but its like I’m used to living here. “life is life” I’m trying to hold on to an exciting sense of wonder, but somehow everything- even eating squid on a stick in the market, living in a hunt in a national forest, using a squat toilet… its all just seems perfectly normal and expected! (writing it down gives it this weird other-ly outsider sperspective which makes it seem exotic, but really, people are just people all over the world, and everything else is just little details! )

Rice harvest day:
Om! What a perfect amazing day! I got up at 5 Am (oih) but I woke up several imes before that to the roosters going nutzo. [this began to take a serious toll on my after a few days… its was really hard to get enough rest when ever 10 munites you wake up to rooster]. I got up and it was still dark. Mu Gah La Won was pounding rice. (think teadertotter with a mallet going into a bowl of rice on one end and you step on the other end. We had pumpking eggs stew for b-fast then we hked for over an hour in the mountains to get to the rai… the trial opened out on a golden swath of rice, and blackened tree stumps. We harvested rice, tied it into bundles, made sure not to step over any of it, and set them in clups of three on little lumps of the piles grass stumps so the rice wouldn’t touch the groud. I talked and talked with the old village head? Pati Coru (in Thai!) and we talked about everything from natural disaster, to dangerous animals, to rice/ag practices. When we met, my having 5 names/nick names, and Pati Coru says “well if you have 5 names that means you can have 5 boyfriends!” so the on going joke of the entire trip became me and my five boyfriends / Tor and 4 imaginary others. (The whole community was talking and joking about it for days. – Tor even became the topic of a community meeting) Anyway, things we talked about at the rai ranged from relations with natial park officials, to how he shot a big cat (courger size?) that was stalking his buffalo. How he then ate it, and sold the bones for 10$ a kilo. We talked about foods (including ecusadorian foods and marshmallows), and gender and racial relations in the USA and political views on Hillary and Obama and why we liked them all of it IN THAI. It was insame the two of us talked on and off allday. While we farmed the hill and looked over themountians.

The houses we lived in were raised on stilts, we took buckets showers out of bamboo outhousebathrooms (icy! But actually I’ve come to really like them). The houses had square wooden harths, we cooked over wood fires inside the house. The Aerobie was a huge hit in this village. In Huey Tong Kaw it was cool, and in the evenings I wore a sweatshirt and hat. For dinner we all gather around the hearth, sitting on the bamboo slat floor. (when people had a bone, or rice fell on the floor they just nudged it through the cracks and the chickens ate it from under the house).

Oh I forgot to mention, for lunch we sat in a hunt in the field and ate delicious pumpkin, and also look closely…. Very closely at the stew in the photo….

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Because it has a rat head in it.  it was really good actually, no squimies for me. The only problems is they just hacked it up and boiled it so it was hard to get the meat.
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In the village we learned about herbal medicine, traditional song, basket weaving, making bamboo cups, and blacksmithing from the villagers. We took a hike to this huge waterfall, I did a watercolor. It was very beautiful. We also started the best game ever! It’s a leach bite competition. We all keep count, with witnesses each time we get a leach bite, or kick a leach off our boot. We all made prophesies about how many we would get for the trip and then we all buy a drink for whoever wins! This drinks are split between the person who gets closest to their prophecy and whoever gets the most total leaches! It was great! It totally changed ou perspective on leaches! I made a high prophecy, so the whole time I was keen to get my leach count up! (I actually only ended up getting two. The first one, I just found the little blood spot on my ancle, and I was like. Oh ok, that wasn’t so bad! And then Cristie looks over and is like “Oh My God! There’s blood all on your back! You got a bite on your back!” and I reach back and my fingers have blood on them! Actually, its not bad at all. What was bad was getting a tick on my ear, which is still very sore two weeks later! And then getting BED BUGS, and having over 200 bugs bites that itched for over a week like mad, covering my arms (which were off of my thermarest, and on my mat).



more later, i'm pretty tired of typing, i'm going to do some reading on the oceans....