WHRC work in Brazil in the news.

Boston Globe article featuring Dan Nepstad, Frank Merry, and others talking about the fire problem in Brazil.

How many nationalities does it take to successfully celebrate a birthday?

Answer: 6. Two Germans, Three Brazilians, an Austrian, a Guatemalteca, an American, and the Colombian Birthday Girl.

From left to right: Graça, Suzie, Ehidee

On Saturday evening we celebrated Ehidee’s birthday in a diverse array of Portuguese accents over some Birthday beers, and some traditional Brazilian guitar music which then transitioned into eighties covers when they ran out of Brazilian favorites. The group was quite an interesting mix: The Brazilian-born son-of-two-Germans spent most of the evening trying to elicit some sort of reaction from Carmen, the Guatemalteca. In addition to taking advantage of every opportunity to have his picture taken with the two of us (see below).

The Austrian owner of a Brazilian microbrewery was quite happy-go-lucky, and I learned much about the .5% of the Brazilian beer market which is comprised of microbreweries. He confirmed my assessment of the fact that there are, in practicality, no imported beers in Brazil. That when I am drinking Stella Artois or Heineken, they have been bottled in the Southern Hemisphere.

The younger German spent some time complaining about his headache, but seemed to be enjoying texting enthusiastically (rather more than conversing with the diverse array of female company). At one point Ehidee turned to me and said: “¡Me encantan los hombres que prefieran jugar con sus celulares que conversar con la gente!” (“Don’t you just love men that prefer playing with their cellphones to actually talking to people?”) I promptly burst into laughter and responded “¡Como no!”(“How could you not?”) He did not look up.

Ehidee had already informed me about Suzie’s same-sex preferences, but Suzie also decided to inform me herself. The conversation went as follows (a rough translation from Portuguese).

Suzie: “I want to tell you something…..I’m a lesbian.”

Me: “I know. No big deal—she (Ehidee) told me.”

Suzie: “At first when I saw the rainbow flag in your room, I thought….”

Me: (laughter)

Suzie: “But then I figured out it was just a peace flag.”

(laughter)

Suzie: “It’s ok: I’ve already been with an American.”

Me: “And?”

Suzie: “It was boring. The only thing she knew how to say in Portuguese was “você e muito bela—“it got old.”

Lessons of the evening:

Don’t hand your camera to a drunk German/Brazilian unless you are willing to relinquish it for a while.

If you’re going to try to seduce someone of either sex, you’d best learn how to tell them something in their native tongue other than that they are attractive.

thanksgiving

There is nothing quite like getting sick on Thanksgiving to:

a) make me feel extremely thankful for being continuously blessed with good health
b) provide me with plenty of time to lay around (nonmoving) and think about the many friends, family and opportunities with whom/which I am richly blessed
c) read a favorite book
d) pretend my mother is there telling me to gargle with salt water (yes, mom, I did.)

Fruit.

Avocados here are delightful, and twice the size of the ones in the states:

Do not be fooled. The fruit below may appear to be pear-like, but it is a Goiaba, or Guava. It is one of the most delightful fruits ever, at least in my humble opinion. There are red and white varieties in the grocery store here, and they are both fantastic. The red variety provides for a lovely aesthetic experience while munching, but the white is tastier, I think. I especially like the crunchy seeds surrounded by sweet inner core of goodnes, with a tart, granny-smith-like exterior 'mantle'. If you do not already feel good about Guavas, note that they are high in fiber and in Vitamin C!


The tomatoes here, however, do not hold a candle to the tomatoes we get in VA. Even the less-than-ripe, character-less ones you get in the Kroger or the Food Lion. Sorry, Brazil.

A troubled post about the fate of Hydrochaeris hydrochaeris in Belo Horizonte

I have noticed during the past several weeks that the Lagoa da Pampulha is not looking so hot. My suspicion is that this is a direct result of recent rains that carry all kinds of wastewater and solid waste into the lake. It smells terrible and looks even worse--I don't like to bother carrying a camera around on most walks in the city, and the pictures would make you unhappy.

On Sunday I went out for a walk. On the way back towards my house, I notice a large brown animal on the trash-strewn shore of the lake. I knew immediately what it was, given my near transformation into one during my several months researching and caring for them in Ecuador: a capybara. I stopped and took out my headphones. I stood perfectly still for several minutes, staring intently at the body to see if there was any movement from breathing--but there wasn't. I must have looked upset; a man stopped next to me and said "it's a capybara!" "Yes," I said, "it is a capybara." "Is it dead or alive?" He asked. "Dead, I think," I said. He was convinced that it must have escaped from the nearby zoo. "they don't live here!" He said. I started to try and tell him that they might, actually, live in the lake...and then decided it wasn't worth it. He would have no reason to believe my word on that one, and probably would not have believed me if I told him I had spent a whole semester researching the animal.

The very sad part of this is, that the capybara was probably, up until it's demise, living happily in the Lagoa da Pampulha until it ate something toxic or suffocated in the incredible stinking matt of algae covering the grassland on the edge of the lake. The body was still there yesterday and I am too angry and sad to write anything else about it. Here is a happy picture of some very sweet domesticated capybara, for old times' sake:

“That’s not a tree; it’s a carbon stock!”

(This one is for my Dad—who I fear, if he didn’t know me as well as he does, might be convinced that I really believe that everything in life is economically quantifiable.)

*******

It is 2015: a sunny October Saturday in an urban neighborhood of Richmond, VA (insert other, more relatable city). An attractive family with the requisite 2.1 children is out for a stroll, and is walking towards the community garden and natural preserve to pick a few apples and get the dog (a frisky beagle) out of the house. In the last year they have moved from a suburb that was a 45 minute commute to work for each, to an area closer to the downtown as a result of several new greening projects (aided, in Richmond, by a well-trained force of strikingly enthusiastic Virginia Tech Urban Forestry students).

They are meandering down a path in a picturesque wooded area. They all yell for the dog as he bounds off after a rabbit—the children play tag and roll in the leaves. The father summons the children (ages 8 and 10) over to talk to them about the stately, historic red oak that borders the path (with a small plaque designed by a Virginia Tech student), saying: “Come here and let me tell you about this tree!” The boy, age 8, pipes up knowingly: “Dad, that’s not a tree! It’s a CARBON stock!” Confusion flickers across the father’s face as his mind takes him back to freshman biology lecture, most of which he realized then that he had slept through. He rumples his child’s hair and says: “Well, I guess you are right, son. It is a carbon stock.”

*******

Return to the present with me. This weekend I have been translating a document into English by a colleague here at the University for the Woods Hole people to take to the global conference on climate change taking place soon in Nairobi. This document summarizes recent research about predicted deforestation and loss of carbon from the Brazilian Amazon and argues for the instating of a carbon trading system for deforestation avoided by developing nations. I was struck by a sentence that said, more or less, that the Amazon should not simply be seen as the world’s largest carbon stock. That the valuation of carbon tied up in the forest is one way to preserve all the other various resources and the intangible value associated with the forest, for all posterity.

But indeed, what are our options for visualizing something as vast as a forest resource? Our new technologies and incredible amount of knowledge allow us to predict and quantify the movement of something so intangible as Carbon—something that escapes into the atmosphere when we set fire to it, gets tied up in trees, powers our vehicles, and somehow contributes to the warming of our planet over time.

I suppose, at a personal level, I question our ability to balance this view of quantification of the earth’s services while still retaining the wonder that we experience when we walk in the forest, and the rich historical tradition of peoples that have, for centuries, been dependent on the forest.

Ecologists and economists both think in green, at least with respect to forests. As an economist, the idea that I could go walk around in the forest if I wanted to is worth something to me. As is the idea that there are people still running around with bones in their noses and hunting still-present monkeys with poison blow darts. And what I would or have actually paid to do these things is probably the best measure that we have for what they are worth, in terms of their ‘use value’. But is that really all there is to it?

How do we keep humanity seeing green, feeling green and doing green? And I don’t mean merely appreciating the fact that the rainforest ties up carbon that would otherwise be contributing to global warming (and threatening the long-term viability of our race). Not just realizing, with a warm sense of satisfaction, that our annual contribution to the Nature Conservancy gives us a 10% discount if we should ever want to go fly fishing in Montana. Not just eating organic food to alleviate guilt, or to improve our lithe physiques. Not just walking in the woods because the subsequent ‘clearing of our head’ will allow us to reach a new height of productivity at work on Monday.

When I am able detach myself from economic valuation mode, if you will, I am able to think about my own experience and how it has led me to thinking in green (economic terms) in a belief that this will leave us with the prospect of being able to see green, feel green, and do green well into the future. I find that my wanting to learn to think in green is a direct result of my taking part in, for many years, the more tangible, perceptual and emotional greens (seeing, feeling, and doing).

As a child, I would climb the hill behind my house to watch the sunset from the top of a red cedar tree. I would wander the ridge, wondering what the enormous piles of stone were that were covered in leaves—I used to think they were Indian burials until someone wiser informed me that they were the stones that had been removed during the plowing of the fields, which I found a very practical explanation. I remember wondering what I was going to tell my parents after I wrapped our family canoe around a tree in the Middle River at flood stage with my friend Scott (who, despite this experience, was hired as an international kayaking instructor).

Insect and leaf collecting in Mary Ann Angleberger's Biology class. Riding my horse alone in fields full of cows. Hiking down the Grand Canyon with three generations of extended family. Getting lost in caves with my mom, dad and brother—and having to calmly convince my brother that we would, in fact, make it out alive. Weekends at the Juniata field station where I saw my first porcupine (they still fascinate me…), and where you wait on flocks of turkeys to cross the road. Jaunts in the jungle where I have taken, on faith, a flash of brilliant color as the only sign of a rare bird. Sleeping under the stars in Clover Hollow, outside of Blacksburg. Walks on gravel roads in Grottoes where I can almost reach out and hug the inviting, feminine curves of the Blue Ridge—as if she might, in fact, be my spiritual mother.

I could go on—but here is my simple point: there is a history and a future associated with every landscape. A history of natural evolution which is enough to inspire belief in God among cultures everywhere. A human history that shaped and was shaped by the landscape. A personal history—the history created as a result of the time that I took to interact with my landscape—to let it shape who I am.

I have chosen to embrace economic logic, to believe in the power of thinking in green. I have not, however, had to relinquish seeing, feeling, or doing green to embrace this economic paradigm. I will even argue that there is a mysterious element of synergy—that because I allow myself to explore the limits of economic paradigms through my own experience, I am forced to continually challenge myself to think critically and creatively about the ways in which we can think, in green, for the welfare of our own and for that of future generations.

The fact is, a hypothetical ability to visit a national park, memorization of statistics about global carbon, or how much I might be willing to pay (or have paid in actuality) to see an endangered species, are only peripherally related to what inspires me to see, feel, or do, in green. Only an actual visit—a visit to the classroom of the outdoors—will open me to being drenched by a thunderstorm or startled by a rattlesnake, to being moved to tears by a sunrise. And only this openness to change the ways in which I interact with the world through the lessons of my own experience has inspired—will inspire—these three things in me. And this, my friends, is a process that even the most creative of economists would find difficult to model or quantify.

Of cockroaches and heels: balancing vanity with practicality.

Two events this week have highlighted things that I already knew about myself but had forgotten. One: If given the choice between comfort and vanity accompanied by intense pain, comfort wins. Two: While I express great love for the animal kingdom and often cry when people squash innocent arthropods, I will jump at the chance to brutally murder a cockroach.

This past weekend when I was in Paratí, I did something I had been meaning to do for a while: Buy a pair of shoes in Brazil that a Brazilian woman might wear. Those of you who know me well know that I have a bit of a shoe fetish, though this is usually manifested in me buying multiple pairs of comfortable, practical shoes which I have absolutely no need for. My own mother affectionately (I think) refers to me ocassionally as 'Imelda', in reference to one Imelda Marcos, who apparently was infamous for her collection of shoes, among other things. Consider this an element of personal vanity (or personal flaw, depending on how guilty I am feeling) that is inherently inconsistent with my quality Brethren upbringing emphasizing the simple life.

So, after carefully considering the offerings of this particular shoe store, I settled upon a not-too-expensive pair of heels that resembled something that I might have imagined Pocahontas would select at a Payless—with a soft leather moccasin styling, accented by a short, inoffensive looking heel. Remove the heel and I could fairly picture myself chasing a deer with a bow and arrow in these shoes.

My imaginings of comfort aside, I was determined to try to do what it seems every Brazilian woman is capable of doing: wearing a pair of heels for a full day as if it is the natural thing to do. So, on Monday, I nonchalantly threw on my new pair of heels with my jeans, feeling effortlessly chic.

The treacherous sidewalks and rolling terrain of the first part of my walk to the university were navigated with ease, and as I enter the university gate, I am still thinking: “I can do this. This is not so bad.” 200 m and one steep downhill later, I have sorrowfully realized that I have blisters forming on my heels. And my usual peaceful facial expression that characterizes my walk to school has been replaced by a look of stalwart determination. By the time I sit down at a desk, all I can think about is taking them off. And, for the rest of the morning, I am dreading the walk home.

No sooner have I left the building in the middle of the afternoon to go to the bank then I realize that I would rather die than walk home in these heels. That I would prefer to sleep on the cold, tiled floor of the remote sensing lab, or on a bench outside. So, in an act of abandon, I fling my heels off and walk, barefoot, all the way to the bank. Replace heels to look like a normal person while standing in bank line. Remove heels outside bank. Walk home, carefully avoiding small glass splinters on pavement. My feet, they were thanking me for sacrificing my vanity. The Brazilian women—they definitely just thought I was a wimp.

As for cockroaches? Monday evening I am pouring a glass of wine, and I hear my housemate scream. I rush into her room where she is pointing at her bed: at first I think she is dismayed that she has left her bed unmade. Then, I see the little beast emerge from under her bed. She proceeds to hop on the bed and start chattering about how it’s now in her shoe. I quickly grab the shoe and proceed to smash all of the inner workings of the cockroach onto her floor. She, meanwhile, has her fingers in her ears to avoid the crunching noises. I feel strangely satisfied; perhaps this is the rush a medieval knight would have experienced after slaying a dragon.

Or, maybe I just secretly despise cockroaches---yes, I find that my love for arthropods does not extend to these strangely sinister creatures that scuttle to hide in the darkest and most vile of places when you turn on the light; as if they are aware that their sole purpose in life is to perpetuate bacterial diseases and frighten women. So, last night, when provided the opportunity to murder another one in my bathroom, I stepped up to the task. This time, with the handy bottle of Lysol sitting on my sink. First, I douse him well as he scuttles into the drain, thinking, “well, that at least will make him unhappy.” It does…he reemerges and I nail him again. In an act of surrender, he rolls onto his back while I spray him mercilessly until his little legs stop moving and he stops struggling. I cackle gleefully—how uncharacteristically morbid of me.

I have spared you the pictures of my impressive blisters, raw toes, and the dead cockroach on my bathroom tile. I did not think you would mind so much.

Paratí, RJ

Caipirinha followed by espresso
unavoidable mud between cobblestones
mirroring the unavoidable rain that hovers over the mainland
sharing of space and sunscreen with brazilian teens and brazilian babies
on beach and on boat
that finish one beer with the purpose of beginning another (the teens)
that stare, and smile (the babies)

The islands look best from above, from the back of a horse
with a couple other brazilian adventure-lovers
as if you could place yourself in the stream and end up in the ocean

the vet teaches me about bot fly larvae and how to remove them,
and demonstrates on a black dog

(lacking pictures of the horseback ride--tradeoffs between freedom and carrying a camera...)