SWEPT UNDER THE RUG

Here in Thailand, there is a major smoke problem in the North every March. That’s when farmers burn the rice husks and the corn stalks. Most people who are free to do so leave for at least three weeks during the worst of the smoke. It’s dangerous to health, especially the smallest particles, which burrow deep into the lungs and stay there. Kids who are in school and parents with jobs are stuck here, shortening their lives with every breath.

No one seems to be able to solve the problem, and the government is heavily invested in not taking responsibility for it, nor in implicating the CP corporation, parent company to 7-11 and True/Move, as well as the major agricultural products company in Thailand. If anyone could get farmers to mulch or compost corn stalks it would be the company that sells them the seed and buys the final crop. But I’ve never seen that mentioned. I’ve attended forums with panels of experts, each preaching his own brand of obfuscation, explaining why the problem is intractable.

There are also campaigns to transfer the blame for deforestation, making it seems like it’s everybody’s fault. Schemes to get school children excited about planting trees. Schools collude one day a year when they do just that, the richest taking field trips to have their pictures taken of their students planting trees. We do the same thing in America when we want to deny what’s really going on. Get children to consume food products that make sicken and eventually kill them and then launch a “Got Milk?” campaign where celebrities have their pictures taken wearing a milk mustache.

Here in old Siam, the trends and fads are a few years behind the States. Thailand has lost more than sixty percent of its forests since 1950, but no one wants to talk about that. Instead, the government makes trees seeds available for free! They announce contests to come up with ideas to improve the efficacy of tree planting. These are “red herrings.” They make the Ministry in charge seem to be taking effective action. But no number of individuals can plant trees as quickly as Agribusiness can denude hillsides.

The problem is not the technology of planting, it is instead the deliberate deforestation by Agribusiness of Royal forests cleared in order to plant corn. This isn’t small scale stuff. These aren’t the random actions of poor farmers. Pretending that we each can “save the forests” by planting a seed on land we don’t own is folly. It’s like blaming the smoke in March on hill tribe people looking for mushrooms. Most people don’t own land here, certainly not most foreigners. What good does it do to plant a tree on ground that is going to mowed or paved over?

In Iowa, where I spent most of my time in America, politicians claim to be a friend of the family farm. Except there aren’t many family farms left, and those that survive are enormous operations, with millions of dollars at stake. Much bare ground is managed by corporations, and the owners of the land have retired to Florida or Arizona. You can drive for an hour in Central Iowa and not see anybody working outside. But you can sure smell the hogs when you pass an anonymous looking metal building with a lagoon out back.

Animal confinement is the rule of the day, and in Iowa there are ten times as many pigs as people, and ten to a hundred times more chickens and turkeys than pigs. Their waste is spread directly on fields as fertilizer, and when it rains, their unprocessed shit runs into creeks, then streams, then rivers. Iowa has the lowest surface water quality in the nation. In many industries, this would be considered Hazardous waste, and be dealt with as such, but not in Iowa, friend to the farmer.

Like the smoke in Thailand, the problem can’t be solved, because it’s almost illegal to even talk about it. “Farm Friendly” administrations have passed laws to limit slander and libel concerning animal confinement. A candidate for office who brings it up will certainly not be elected. Nitrates in drinking water are a state-wide public health hazard. Public rivers and reservoirs are off-limits to swimming. Clear Lake, the only natural lake in Iowa, is often closed to swimming. Algae blooms take over by mid-summer. All this runs downstream to the Gulf of Mexico, where it forms the Mother of All Algae Blooms.

We’re just now coming to grips with how often and to what degree we have been lied to by the people we thought were in charge. Nixon’s secret war in Laos and Cambodia, Reagan’s Iran/Contra scheme, Better Living Through Chemistry, Our Friend the Atom, Low-Fat Diets, Hydrogenated Cooking Oils with an infinite shelf life and which the body cannot differentiate from plastics, Sugar in everything, and when we objected to that, high fructose corn sweeteners and aspartame.

 

 

“Where your treasure is, there is your heart also.” – Bible

 

When Albert Schweitzer was still a young man, he was a theology professor at a Swiss University and had recently won a prestigious award for his multi-volume book on Bach’s organ works. He was on top of the world.

But he was a Christian, and Jesus says many times in the gospels, “sell everything you have and minister to the poorest of the poor. Then your reward will be great in heaven.” So Schweitzer was in a quandary.

He prayed about it, asked himself where were the poorest of the poor. He concluded they were in Africa. He asked himself what they needed. Doctors. So he quit his job and enrolled in medical school. Then he began the process of fund-raising for the clinic he intended to establish in the Gabon.

All his colleagues at the University told him he was making a big mistake, that he was throwing away a brilliant career. Some of them gave him money. He finished medical school and his internship, bought the supplies for his clinic, and found himself slowly making his way up the Congo river, in a flotilla of canoes all paddled by naked black men. I imagine there were times on that trip when he wondered if his friends back home had been right.

Fortunately, he had bought an organ before he left Europe, and once they established the clinic and hospital he played that on his time off. The monkeys and tropical birds heard Bach being played on an organ that had to be pumped with a bellows in order to push air through the pipes.

He lived to be ninety. Here is a quote by him:

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.