One of the senators from the state of Amapá has been asking us to visit the site of a World War II American airbase, so we did. According the locals, we are the first official Americans to visit the base since we vacated it after World War II. There is not much left except a rusting tower where they use to tie up blimps, some decaying buildings and the remains of the runway. But the visit was certainly worth the effort as it made the senator very happy and seemed to delight the local population. The mayor came along on this visit as did a couple dozen others.
We were also told that there was wreckage of a World War II American plane in the jungle of Amapá and that the bodies of American airmen killed in the crash were buried nearby by the people that found them many years ago. This is something we will investigate. If it is true, we will certainly want to bring those men home. We need to know if this is just a story or the truth.
It took us more than three hours to get from the capital city of Macapá to the municipality of Amapá. Amapá gave its name to the state, but it is no longer the capital. It is really not much more than a village, connected to the world only by a dirt road. The airbase is nine kilometers beyond that on an even worse dirt road. Inaccessible is the word you would use to describe it. One of the vehicles in our convoy hit a slippery patch and went into the ditch. Nobody was hurt, but it made us late for our next appointments and provided a spectacular picture that you can see above. Below is the municipal building.
Nevertheless, the drive was interesting. As the senator described and as we saw, Amapá has five distinct biomes. There is dry forest, wet forest, cerrado, marsh & campo (grassland). The state is not that big, so it is surprising to see that much diversity.
Much of the cerrado near the road is given over to eucalyptus plantations; I understand there are 135,000 acres. They were once owned by international paper, but were sold to a alliance of two Japanese firms – Marubeni Corp. and Nippon Papers Industries. I was told that there are no eucalyptus plantations not owned by them in the state. They chip the trees and sell the chips but do not process them further. The eucalyptus are ready to harvest in six years. Amazing.
This entry is out of order. I will write up my stories from Amapa and post soon.
I am going up the Amazon with the Semester at Sea, a university sponsored by the University of Virginia course aboard a boat. About 600 students take a semester of credit courses, while the boat sails around the world. Among the places it goes in Manaus. The Amazon is navigable by ocean ship to Manaus. This is a very fast ship, but it still takes two days and nights to arrive. Gives an idea of the size of the Amazon.
The courses are like ordinary university courses, but with emphasis on the places they visit. The students all have to read the book “1493” which I read as part of my routine reading list, but now I can claim to have done as homework. Sweet. I get to go for free. Well I have to pay for my trip by giving lectures, which I like to do so it is better than free. I have a good job.
The job is a big part of the lectures. I am trying to get these smart kids interested in careers in the FS or in the Federal government in general. This is not hard to do. I just tell them what I have been doing for the last couple of days and everybody wants to sign up. This is not entirely representative. My job is more fun than most and the last few days have been more eventful than usual, but I think the overall picture is right. There are a couple of my more junior colleagues who fill them in about life nearer the beginning of the careers, still very good. I am also trying to create awareness of the Brazilian Science w/o Borders program and also President Obama’s 100,000 Strong initiatives to encourage Americans to study in South America. All I care about is Brazil, so I try to encourage Portuguese language study and Brazilian specialization. We need more Americans who know this place.
The ship is very comfortable. It is like a floating hotel, different from most of the U.S. Navy vessels I have visited, not gray for one thing. Food is good on the ship. It is much like that on a big Navy ship or my Anbar chow hall, which I know does sound like it should be good to those who have not had it, but actually is. I like cafeteria type food. My cabin is very nice. They are treating me very well. The ship rocks a little, but not much and is generally very smooth.
It is very cool to watch the Amazon forest from out of the windows or off the decks, but it gets to be a lot like a long flight. The scenery does not change much that you can really tell from the distance. It is an unbroken green. When you go around a bend in the river, there is more of the same. Sometimes the river widens out and there is a marshy area. Other times the forest comes right to the shore. I sat on my little balcony (yes I have one) last night for a long time, looking at the moon and thinking about the vastness. If I jumped off the boat and could swim to the shore, I would be in that proverbial middle of nowhere. There is no way I could get back. It would be like one of those episodes of “I survived” except that I wouldn’t. I don’t recall ever being in a place like this before, so empty, vast & hostile to survival. It would be scary, if I was not aboard a luxury boat, bringing civilization with me up the river.
Unless I am working or traveling, I spend my weekends and holidays home alone. The big events are walking to the grocery store and running along the lake. This is not as sad as it sounds. I am alone but not unconnected. I talk to Chrissy every day and get lots of internet connections. And I have things to do. I actually like the work I do, for example, and I like to do background research and writing at home w/o interruptions.
I have found that I have to make lists of things to do to keep the day on track and make sure that one day doesn’t just melt into another. I have to put my house cleaning & laundry duties on the list; otherwise I put them off. The weather in Brasília helps create a feeling of timelessness. We have a wet and a dry season but the days are similar. You don’t get that changing seasons feeling.
BTW – the list system works well in other timeless activates, such as long airplane trips. I make a list of things I want to accomplish on the plane. I never get them done. I procrastinate. But the act procrastinating and avoiding work makes the time pass much faster.
On weekends I can catch up on my sleep. I really don’t like to go to be before midnight, often 1am, but I still have to wake up at 630. By the end of the workweek, I am tired physically. I also have lots of books to read. I put them on the list and tend to get at them on weekends. I have written before about audiobooks. Audiobooks go with walking. I find that if I sit while listening I fall asleep.
My biggest weekend activity is gardening. I dispensed with the services of the gardener and bought a push mower. You have to mow the lawn more often but it doesn’t make all that noise. I planted corn, tomatoes, beans, lettuce and cauliflower. I planted the corn with the beans. The beans will fix nitrogen to help the corn grow and the beans will be able to grow up the corn stalks. The corn just spouted, so I put in the bean seeds. My plan is that the corn will be ready in March-April when the dry season starts and it gets hot enough to finish the corn.
My watermelon experiment is failing. I got really big vines but I had only one melon. That one was attacked by some kind of animal and subsequently invested by pests. It takes me a week and a half to eat one watermelon. It probably just is not worth it to grow them, even if I could. Tomatoes and corn, on the other hand will be cost effective and worth the effort. I should have planted them earlier, but I went with the flowers first. I have a banana tree, but I don’t know when/if it will get any bananas. I had lots of mangoes, but I don’t much like mangoes. The birds tended to get at them anyway. Mangoes are very productive and I can see that they would be good to have if you liked the fruit.
What I need is a Coke Zero tree.
I know this is a boring entry and it might seem to indicate a boring existence, but I don’t see it that way. The books are giving me a lot to think about and the gardening, growing the plants from seed in what is for me a strange soil and climate, is pretty interesting for me. Maybe I am just a boring guy, but these are things I find interesting.
Of course, my work can be interesting in the more active sense. Next weekend, for example, I get to take a boat up the Amazon. It will be part of a “semester at sea” program. I have to give a few lectures and in return I get to do what not many people can. That weekend will be more eventful than usual. I will take pictures and post some entries.
Above are some guys washing windows on one of the new buildings. I thought it was an interesting picture.
This is a draft of what I will send for my quarterly article in “Virginia Forest” magazine.
The easy answer is that countries where illegal logging is rampant simply lack strict laws or the ability to enforce them. The first part of this statement is often not true. Many developing countries have – on the books – much stricter preservation laws than we have in Virginia. In some places it is just plain illegal to cut down native forests on a wide range of land types. These are often the places most likely to be deforested, as illegal logging targets them first. They understand that government authorities probably cannot protect them and that the off limits status has removed the incentives for local people to pay much attention. The second part of the statement – that they lack the ability to enforce the good laws – is true in areas of deforestation but it is not as remarkable at it seems because it is true everywhere.
People are born pre-programmed. A variety of talents, abilities, habits are inherited to some extent. On the other hand, within these constraints human behavior and preferences are highly mutable. (Science proved what any perceptive parent of more than one child already knew.) I take this to mean that you can have a lot of freedom to change things if you recognize and work with nature, its gifts and constraints.
Pinker studied statistics on violent deaths. Of course there are no statistics on Stone Age people in the actual Stone Age, but it is possible to study more modern Stone Age people. It turns out that murder rates among primitive people about which we have records are astronomical. It is a myth that people were good and later corrupted by civilization. Civilization civilizes and it is better than the alternative “natural man.”
Of course, why violence has declines is important. What goes down in human behavior could go back up. Pinker does not think the explanation is that humans have improved or human nature has changed. He is too much a scientist to think these things. He does not try to make a comprehensive explanation, but he mentions some possibilities. The first is the rise of stable states. He doesn’t use the word strong, but prefers competent in the sense of keeping order and satisfying the basic needs of its people. Competent states must be strong, but not all strong states are competent. Nazis & communists had strong states.
Life provides us with a never ending series of constrained choices. It is certainly not true that anything is possible, but making good choices can expand our contentment as well as our ability to make more good choices. Some human problems are intractable and some “problems” are not really problems in the sense that they cannot be solved. If we ask the wrong questions, we will come up with the wrong answers. We will never achieve a society where everybody is equal because people are not equal. We will never achieve a society w/o violence because people have propensity to selfishness which sometimes leads to violence.