Part I: Introduction

My nose and forehead were cold against the window as I strained my eyes to look straight down under the wing. We were flying through glaring white Monsoon clouds that towered above us even at 37,000 feet. I wanted them to be mountains. I was looking out the window in child-like anticipation hoping a mountain would appear, just a glimpse of snow and rock that might be Dhaulgiri, Annapurna, or even Mt. Everest. Suddenly the plane nosedived and in a few minutes we were landing at Kathmandu.

I was miffed not to have a glimpse of one of the great Himalayan peaks you would see on a clear day flying in to Kathmandu airport. I wanted to see Annapurna the most because I’d dreamed about her since I was seven years old. Annapurna is the eighth highest mountain on Earth and a hundred miles west of Mt. Everest, the highest of them all. A lot of my day dreaming from age seven upwards featured Annapurna and an assortment of heroic ascents (by me). My favorite dream was repreating the heroic climb a French team made in 1950 (and the American women’s expedition in 1978) when they made the famous first ascent in which Maurice Herzog lost his toes to frostbite. The three heroes of that expedition, Louis Lachenal, Gaston Rebuffat, and the Nepali Sherpa Ang Tharkey were my childhood heroes. But I wasn’t in Nepal this time to climb. I was there to help out with a conference that would take place in Naryangharh, a small city in Chitwan Province, 100 miles southeast of Annapurna.

The crowd at the airport entryway where western passengers hesitated before venturing out into the crowds, the heat and the unknown

Sitting in the plane as it taxied towards the terminal I looked out at the rain wet asphalt glistening in the emerging sunlight. Vast puddles on the runway reflected the fleeing dark clouds of a shower that had just swept across the valley. It looked steamy outside. The other passengers began heading for the hatchway as soon as the plane stopped and eventually a long line of them threaded out from the plane towards customs. Watching them I was suddenly hit with an overwhelming homesickness more intense than I had ever experienced. I didn’t want to get off the plane. I desperately wanted the pilot and crew to run back on board, start the engines and take me right back home to my farm and children. I felt vastly empty.

I sat for a while hoping the ache would go away and then looked around the plane’s cabin and saw I was the only person left on board. I twisted out of my seat and followed where the others had gone down the stairs to the ground and across the tarmac to the terminal. I still had that bereft feeling, a loneliness, and I wasn’t exactly sure why I was there or if I wanted to be.

Between the plane and the terminal there were two lines of Nepali soldiers in bright blue uniforms standing crisply at attention facing each other so they created a corridor for the debarking passengers to walk down. The soldiers held M-16 rifles vertically in front of their torsos and looked sharply across at each other the way soldiers are trained to do. I studied their faces as I passed down the aisle between them and caught the eye of one. I smiled and he instantly melted, smiling back at me. He totally lost his composure and clumsily dropped his M-16 which fell with a clatter to the asphalt. I picked it up and handed it back to him. All the other soldiers were smiling and nodding at me. “Hhhmmm,” I thought, “this can’t be such a bad place.”

This was my first glimpse of Kathmandu the far-away city with the exotic name

Twenty minutes later, past customs with my visa in hand, I walked towards the exit. I was going into Kathmandu with a Nepali man by the name of Prakash, who flew on the same plane with me from Germany. Prakash was one of the conference organizers and we were going to meet with several other men who were taking part in the conference. At the glass doors of the terminal’s main entrance I saw my fellow passengers from the plane staring out where a huge throng of people, Asians, waited for us to venture outside. It was the “face ” of Asia, I thought, and perhaps my fellow passengers were imagining the people on the outside were there to ask us for money. I pushed on the door and heard someone shout anxiously, “Alex, are you going out there? Do you know where you’re going?” It was the American woman I sat behind on the plane who was traveling for a few weeks with her young daughter. All the westerners standing there seemed paralyzed with fear at what was on the other side of the door, of what they did not know. I felt some of the same feelings and empathized with them but waved goodbye and turned again to go out into the throngs and in that instant, like a cloud’s shadow passing swiftly across a landscape, I thought, “now I have to forget everything I have ever known, forget everything, and go out there and immerse myself completely in this experience; open myself completely.”

Hundreds of bicyclists and motorbikes filled the streets in the morning rush hour in Kathmandu

The view from my hotel room window my first morning in Kathmandu included the famous Tuborg beer sign and new construction going on. The city was focusing all its energy and resources on building an infrastructure for tourism with the hope that it would become the lead 'industry' in Nepal and bring in lots of foreign capital.

I really wanted to stay in a Nepali hotel in Kathmandu so it was with some reluctance that first night that I agreed to stay with my colleagues in a western-style hotel so we could talk about the conference and make plans for the coming week. We had dinner at a new, western-style Chinese restaurant where I also felt uncomfortable. I was miffed because I wanted to begin my Nepali experience by eating Nepali food. The meal, on the other hand, was wonderful and the men around the table were personable and eager to help me acclimate to Nepal. They had all attended university in the US. The conversation was "heady", intensely intellectual, and mostly about the politics in Nepal and their perspectives on how the government should be run. I could feel the strong pull of entitlement and privilege that was groomed into these Nepali men.

Monsoon clouds like those we had flown through stack up over Kathmandu late in the day

On our way to the restaurant we passed a Nepali woman who was living on the street. I wanted to talk to her and asked one of the men to translate for me. He talked to her and repeated all my questions to her, or so I thought, and saying things back, answering me, but in a way that made no sense. My interpreter was impatient. He said I shouldn’t be talking to her in the first place and kept pulling me away. He said he wanted to catch up with the others so we left. A dozen yards along I broke away from him and went back to the woman on the street corner just as a second woman appeared that I had not seen. “That man didn't say one thing to her that you asked and he didn’t tell you one thing that she answered,” she said. “Can you meet me back here tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock,” I asked her? She said she would.

An Egg Walla out early in the morning in Kathmandu

The next morning I found a large group of women waiting for me including the woman who had stepped from the shadows the night before. She introduced herself as Renu Sharma Upreti, and said she was one of the directors of the Women’s Foundation of Nepal. She spoke English well and was compassionate in helping me understand Hindi and in particular telling me exactly what the women were saying. She translated as the women told me their stories. Almost all of them, when they were young girls, had been sold by their parents and forced to become prostitutes in India. They were thrown out of the brothels where they worked and lived when they contracted sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The Nepali government did everything it could to prevent the women from returning to Nepal but they found paths through the hills and along the rivers once used by traders and returned secretly (and at enormous risk) only to be rejected by their families. I was overwhelmed by the women’s stories and invited them to attend the conference. Their stories and stories of other women will be interwoven throughout this blog.

This photo was taken months later and includes some of the women I met that first morning in Kathmandu. The woman in the white T shirt on the left is Renu Sharma Upreti who had stepped out of the shadows the evening months before to talk to me. She is one of the founders and directors of the Women's Foundation of Nepal based in Kathmandu which does amazing work with and for Nepali women. It was an amazing coincidence that I met her in my first few hours in Kathmandu and that she was generous and gracious enough to take me under her wing. It was an enormous gift.

Urban couple commuting to work in downtown Kathmandu

Part II: Conference Planning

Our group left Kathmandu that afternoon and drove south to Rampur where we temporarily moved into the lovely home owned by Prakash's parents. In the early stages of planning their was agreement the conference goal was to explore a short list of sustainble strategies for Nepal's immedate future. The context, or mission, was to give momentum to national strategy for "transitioning" Nepal towards a "sustainable" future and to define, in concrete terms, what that sustainable really meant. The larger strategy called for more local resilience and less national dependence on the growing global economy (globalization in general). From a purely academic perspective the conference was an exercise in integrating "ecological principles, sustainable agriculture, and sustainable economic development into a national political policy."

It's worth noting that we used the words "sustainable" and "sustainability" as organizing principles. We used them in phrases like "more sustainable", or "less-sustainable", and the terms and their meaning could have been replaced with "eco-friendly" or "environmentally sound" that are also loosely knit variables and not science based. For that matter they are subjective value judgments. In the planning phase of the conference we wanted to define sustainability with more accuracy and less subjectivity by way of scientifically derived data from the fields of anthropology, ecology, biology, biochemistry, geology, sociology, chemistry, and physics, that inform the growing usage of the term.

I was originally asked to help design and facilitate the conference based on skills I have in Future Search Conference management, in farming and specifically sustainable agriculture, plus a teaching background in ecology. I was excited about the conference because the country is at an important transition point in it’s development and because it is vulnerably situated between two rapidly emerging superpowers, India and China. It could easily be devoured by market forces beyond it’s control. I wanted to see if a small group of people could temper and reshape development strategies and actually integrate sustainable thinking into the national policy planning of a deeply impoverished third world country. The issue for me was whether we could get a national consensus to alter development forces, change the nominal procedures and outcomes, and find a “sustainable” solution?

The planning sessions went on well out of the fiercely hot sun in this shaded arbor for a few hours each morning and again in the cooler periods of late afternoon.

As the planning progressed a centralizing theme emerged which was nothing like what we had discussed earlier and it represented my worst fears. The more politically ambitious men wanted a terse philosophical argument pitting the "evils" of “Globalization”, meaning the expanding global economy, against the multi-faceted concept of “Sustainability”. These men wanted the conference to be a political statement. They wanted to use the term "Sustainability" as a hammer to bludgeon the nominal economic development strategies of their political opponents. In their zeal to polarize the two concepts they created a false dichotomy in which they portrayed globalization as “the belly of the beast”, as one of them put it, as all ”bad”, and portray sustainability as it's polar opposite as all “good”. There was inaccuarcy and confusion within these definitions. For example, at one point they were saying “organic” was synonymous with “sustainable”.

When I agreed to come to Nepal and work on the conference I didn't know that members of the organizing committee had political ambitions and that the conference would be used as a political platform to promote secular political interests. In other words they were using the conference to build credibility that, in turn, would give their ideas legitimacy. In that context the centralizing idea and attendant themes of the conference were compromised by the expediency of those ambitions. It became apparent these men had a proclivity to polarize "hot" issues to give them a dramatic flair. The conference was no longer an exploration of the complex issues and variables atttendant to both globalization and sustainability and had become an overly simplfied argument striving to make the issues black and white. It seemed risky to me to go in this direction. I preferred the original idea of looking for a shared vision of a transition process for Nepal, that was in itself sustainable, and that would be supported by the government.

To be fair to the conference planners, the politically ambitious included, they could only see Nepal as a small, landlocked, vulnerable country sandwiched between India and China and they were feeling how vulnerable Nepal was to exploitation by these political entities as well as the expanding global economy which they saw, realistically, as a house of cards. It was a delicate position to be in.

The social structure of Nepali society is complex. There is a complicated caste system that involves social and professional groupings of people, men and women. It doubles as a class system. Women have almost no status and own next to nothing. In the caste system Brahmins are at the top of the social order. The ‘untouchables” are at the bottom. In between there is a warrior caste and a merchant caste. Brahmins are not necessarily the wealthiest group. Brahmins are often the poorest people in the room. However, they’re the intellectuals, scholars, teachers, and politicians. Nepali men, most of their lives, live quite apart from women. They interact with women very little as they grow up and the two genders are very separate. For the first two decades of their lives, until they are married, the men hang out with men. Women hang out with women and do most of the manual work.

In addition, the level of poverty in Nepal is staggering. It has a profound impact on the country. Women and men, particularly in rural areas, have extremely difficult lives. Living is strenuous for both genders, but the burden falls on the women. They've only had a voice in the government since the 1990 constitutional reform. Nepal’s is a patriarchal culture practicing patrilineage in which kinship and property is passed down by the father; on the male side of the family, to the son. There’s also a dowry system. When a woman marries she (her parents) must pay her husband’s family for taking her in and she also lives with the husband’s family and helps them. Her parents have had to pay for her to leave and are left without the extra helper. For those living in dire poverty this is an enormous burden. On top of that Nepal has a history of polygamy so that a woman may have to compete with a second or third wife for position and rank.

In the planning stage it became more and more obvious that these issues would not be discussed. They would be implicit and yet it is impossible to talk about the sustainability of any system or any form of government in which all people are not essentially equal and where the health and well being of women and children (and men) are not the highest priority. Sustainability can’t be achieved where there are deep schisms in the perceptions of justice and where basic human needs are not met.

In the last days before the conference was to begin we had agreed on various governing principals for the conference. This included the modes of facilitation and discussion, the hands-on exercises, a work shop and several field trips that would be congruent with the themes of the conference. A community development organization (CDO) in Naryanghar, a small city in south central Nepal on the Naryani River, was going to host the conference. This all sounded good but as the planning wrapped up and we got on the road to Naryanghar I was nervous about how loose everything felt. So much time had been spent on the political themes the agenda and time line were still vague. We were going to "wing" it. I decided to step back and trust my experience of conferences and the "group process" in general. I have seen lots of magical things happen with groups and it fortuitously was the case in Naryanghar.

The Berlin conference was held at a 500 year old castle and attended by European academics writers, ecologist, and environmentalist who were wrestling with a working definition of "sustainability" and trying to understand the full impacts of the most pressing environmental issues. In this picture we were sitting at a huge table in the castle garden at 10 pm. The sun was still up because we were so far north.

On my way to Nepal I stopped in Berlin, Germany to attend a conference there that focused on Globalization and its impact on Europe and other areas of the world. My purpose was primarily to meet two British environmentalist, Nick Hilyard and Helena Norberge-Hodge who were presenting at the conference. Helena, in the early 1990s, published a book she and her husband wrote titled, "Ancient Futures" about their experiences living in Ladakh over a 16 year period. They also produced a video titled, "The Future of Progress" that explored mid to late 20th century economic development on the culture of a small non-industrialized country like Ladhak. Teddy Goldsmith, Nick, Martin Khor, and Helena are interviewed in the tape and create a grim picture regarding the future of non-industrialized countries like Nepal.

Nick was the assistant editor of the British scientific journal "The Ecologist" working with the magazine's editor, Teddy Goldsmith, who was legend in the environmental movement in Britain and Europe. In my eyes Nick and Helena are highly respected, educated, articulate, and down to earth practitioners who are far more grounded in reality than a lot of the purely academics folks are. I also wanted to participate in the Berlin conference to better understand the tensions that exist between academics who want to define concepts and practioners who want to achieve a proficient practice "on the ground." The tension was there at the Berlin conference. In one instance the director of the conference, a well known academic, told Helena to "shut up" because she disagreed with him. There may have been gender issues involved in this tiff, but it was clearly a tension of fit between abstract and the "real" .

Nick Hilyard (looking at the camera) is an environmentalist and writer and an editor at " The Ecologist" under senior Editor Teddy Goldsmith. They devoted the entire January 1972 issue of The Ecologist (Volume 2, No. 1) to their now famous "A Blueprint for Survival"; a powerful scientific-environmental statement that laid out all the major issues threatening our planet and defined "sustainability" in ways that put it into a usable context. It really shook the world. It was more overt and comprehensive then anything written prior to its publication and probably since. It's hard to believe that it was written 40 years ago because it's a brilliant effort to alert the world and the world's leaders to the need for deep changes in the infrastructures of industrialization and, particularly, the use of carbon fuels. I'll always admire Teddy and Nick and the staff of The Ecologist for their courageous efforts to create a strident voice for change in the tradition of Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Olaus and Mardy Murie, and a long list of other naturalists and ecologists.

Helena Norberge-Hodge, with her husband John Page, had lived in Ladakh (Little Tibet) for six months a year for 16 years, or 8 years total, and in the early 1990s pubished a book with a video about their experiences. In her writing and video material she has shared an insightful social ecology within the global discussion about the questions our survival. Helena's insights of how the rampant economic development impacts undeveloped countries that can not adapt quickly enough to protect themselves from the industrialization process making them vulnerable to a literal "killing off" of local, indigenous knowledge, wisdom and integrity. Her video was one of the first visual documents to show what's been happening in the "Third World". Her book and video tape are still available (try Amazon.com. Once again her book is titled "Ancient Futures" and the video is titled, "The Future of Progress"). "The Ecologist, Vol. 2, No. 1" is available on the web.

A view of the castle across the moat

The Berlin conference helped prepare me for the Nepal conference. The subject matter was similar and the academic thrust, the intense need to politicize the issues, as I've already described, was also similar. Seeing it in Berlin first and then in Nepal confirmed for me that it wasn't a phenomenon of a "cosmopolitan elite". The Berlin conference helped me to be patient with that academic perspective and to learn how to gently push for a science-based perspective which mean avoiding the tendency to paint everything black or white. This blog will explore these ideas through the roles of individuals, particularly women in impoverished countries, as they grapple with limited resources to really understand the quality of life issues and the real "practice" of sustainability. The critical question on the table (that we're all are sitting at) is: can humanity survive another 200 years, or even another 100 years, or another 50 years on this planet? And if so, how? I don't think any one really honestly knows the anwer.

A few days after leaving Berlin I was in this paradise far from Eurocentric perspectives. I was far, far away in a place where everything was very new (to me) and exciting and delicious and beautiful. At this well (in the photo above) behind the house in Rampur we washed our dishes, our clothes, and ourselves under that hand pump. It was elegantly simple. We walked to the well along that path in the photo below. It was a lovely haven of exotic flowers, ginger plants and mango and lemon trees and a profound silence that was at first shocking and which then became astonishingly essential to me, like a cup of cool, spring water. How often do we get to experience real silence, that essential stillness and peace?

This is the back of the house and shows only a small piece of the larger, productive garden the couple kept. All their organic waste from the toilet and kitchen went into a composter which had to be churned once a day to produce bio-gas which they used for lighting and cooking. They grew 95 percent of their own food including dairy products and vegetables. They ate meat occasionally and sparingly. It's the healthiest diet I've ever lived on. This picture of the family and the way they live is a snapshot of a potentially sustainable life style, but not entirely. It's deceptive and I've discovered that I have to be careful in how I label what is sustainable and what is not. It can be complicated. In this case the house and garden share the same infrastructures and resources that we all do and that we use daily without being acutely aware of the impacts.

This looks a bit like Eden. The area in the back of the gardem with the lighter, horizontal greens is the large pumpkin patch where we harvested greens every day for our main meal.

The task of stripping the thick outer skin from the stems of the pumpkin leaves and runners was time consuming and an excuse to sit and gossip. I used the hours of food preparation to learn Hindi and more about Nepal and the immediate neighborhood. Those hours are some of my most cherished memories of Nepal.

When I wasn't helping with food things or working on conference stuff I roamed the lanes of Rampur with my cameras and journal writing down the descriptions and names of plants, asking my litany of a thousand questions to anyone who would listen. I enjoyed the interactions with the neighbors and they did as well. The quiet setting and the relaxed pace of the communication were valuable in helping me learn the language and helped the neighbors get to know me. I was curious how my presence as a white male from half way around the globe was felt by the people I met. My whiteness was a continual point of connection because some of them had never seen a white person before. They loved looking at me in detail, wanted to touch my skin, the hair on my arms, and some kids even wondered what I might taste like if they were to lick my forearm.

I'll discuss this concept of gender, color, education, and class a litte further down in the blog, For the moment I will only say that upon my arrival in Nepal I felt a sense of "freedom" because I was outside the "system" and it gave me a kind of license but I also felt enormous responsibility to be overt, honest, make myself available and be transparent to everyone I met. By available I mean that I let people "make use of me" as I do in my social work: to be open and let them ask personal questions, rant about things, share their personal narratives and express their feelings honestly without judging them.

Nepal life is so much slower than anywhere in the West. It is pedestrian by contrast to the culture I live in and a pleasant change from a large cosmopolitan city like Berlin or even my own city in Western Massachusetts in the US.

Part III: A Short Detour to Look at Corn Production In Nepal and Get A Glimpse of Some Sustainable Agricultural Concepts

It was typical to see small groups of women and girls, or pairs like this one, carrying these baskets of freshly picked ears of corn from the fields back to their houses where they would shuck the corn and remove the kernels and dry them. This traffic went on from very early morning until late afternoon. I arrived in Nepal during the corn harvest and close to the beginning of rice planting. The two crops overlap in their growing cycles. Rice and corn represent about 90 percent of Nepal's agricultural harvest and the two grains are equal in importance as well as in the size, or amount, of the harvest. They are the country's "staple" crops and the basis of the country's food system and diet. Other items in the diet include barley, wheat (in western Nepal), and some green vegetables. The diet in the areas where I visited in Nepal included a limited amount of meat, usually goat or buffalo. The corn harvest goes on at about the same two or three week period when the rice has to be planted and is dependent on the arrival of the Monsoon, so, as in other agricultural areas around the world, it is a busy, labor-intensive time.

Watching this procession each day and meeting some of the women as they walked back to the corn fields gave me my first impression of the role of women in Nepal and how hard they work, and how little they receive from their hard work. They put in long days and everything they do involves large expenditures of energy possibly at about the same rate as running a long race, or climbing a difficult mountain. This form of agriculture, the intensive manual labor by women, and the growing of only two crops with the resulting lack of diversity and the huge impacts on the soils, brings up some interesting points. Is this a sustainable form of agriculture? What are the variables that make it more sustainable than other ways agriculture might be practiced in Nepal now and in the future, and how do some variables make it less sustainable?

A woman on the way to the fields in Rampur to harvest corn. She's holding a "corn knife" which most women carry tucked into the back of their saris.

The absence of a mechanized, petroleum-fueled agriculture, one that is more subsistence-based for home consumption, very dependent on manual labor with additional power supplied by oxen, makes Nepali agriculture appear sustainable and relatively stable over long periods of time. It utilizes local, seasonal supplies of surface water that requires little additional energy (mainly gravity) to move to the crops in the field. About 50 percent of the yearly supplemental nutrient applied to crops is from locally produced organic fertilizer derived from composted animal manure. These features represent facets of a sustainable agriculture seen in the context of a small country with a small population to feed, but I want to explore whether that is a valid assessment of Nepali agriculture in general.

The concept of sustainability, as I have been using it, represents a continuum of perspectives and practices. It consists of many, many variables. It's usually boiled down to a few axioms that are useful but not accurate. It has also become a "buzz word" which further blurs its meaning. What's sustainable in Nepal might not be any where else. Or what is sustainable for one individual may not be seen as sustainable by another individual. As a continuum, sustainability is a measuring tool that gives us a way to compare practices, impacts, rates of adaption and eventually allows us to make decisions that promote the health of the soil, the water, the plants, the Planet, and each of its inhabitants. Sustainability equals reduced stress in living systems which, on the flip side, translates to greater, or optimal health of living systems. As I mentioned before it is really a broad organizing concept that helps pull information into a central heading for closer (better?) evaluation and decision making.

In the early 1960s with the advent of the IBM Fortran 1640 computers the field of Ecology, as a substantial field of science, became modernized in a brief period of time. The word "ecology" was suddenly on everyone's lips, used in advertisements for myriad consumer items. The term "sustainability", congers up some of the same ideas Ecology does about the interrelationships between the environment and the seeminly infinite numbers of living things inhabiting those environemnts. One really sound measure, today, of whether what we humans are doing is sustainable or not, is the fate of the biodiversity within those environments as it is represented by the fauna and flora on our planet. All of us are probably aware that the biodiveristy index is shrinking astonishingly quickly (tragically) almost on a daily basis.

Those early IBM computers made it possible to collect and store enormous amounts of precise data and organize the data into a more comprehensible picture of the Earth's ecological systems then what had existed before. By the way, those computers were as slow as molasses, as big as automobiles, and made really strange, scary noises late at night in the college laboratories they inhabited.

Ecology suddenly became a very important science for helping us understand the complex interrelationshhips of all things, everything that makes up the natural world here on Earth, and the human impacts on those systems.

In addition, computers changed the way we use language to define things. Computers created a language of their own that change the way we perceived the Earth and the living systmes and one spectacularly related phenomenon, the Apollo Space Program, which was computer "driven" created a revolution in how we perceive the Earth. That was when in 1969 American astronauts made the first moon landing and immediately began sending back photographic images of the Earth. In an instant most people on Earth near a television suddenly saw their home as a gorgeous, brilliant blue, white, brown, green marble hanging precariously in the blackness of space. Those images revolutionized the way we thought and talked about the Earth.

This woman is selling "Moki" by the side of the road. It is roasted corn and what we ate for breakfast and snacks most of the time I was in Nepal. You sip your chia while you wait for the roasted corn cob to cool off. Then you pick off kernels of corn individual and chew on them. It's yummy and a great breakfast with that provides a lot of energy that lasts for hours. Nutrition-wise it's the same idea and probably a little healthier than corn flakes.

We've latched on to the word "sustainability" as an expression of hope and commitment. We, started fairly recently to critically measure all impacts humans have on the planet particularly those which pose a serious threat to the "sustainability" of the Earth where sustainability means survival. Right now, as I write this in April 2009, sustainability is most often used in conjunction with the terms "biodiversity" and "global warming", the two popular measuring tools of sustainability. Within those terms sustainability poses the critical question: "will the Earth continue to sustain life indefinitely? Will we be able to sustain our existence here indefinitely? These are post-modern questions and the first real indicators that something is terribly wrong. The first cues about the accumulated damage we've been doing to our planet initially emerged from books like Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" in which she reported the enormous damage done by the DDT and other pesticides. It was widely read and instantly a comprehensive, unified response by the US government which was to ban the use of DDT in the United States. That was an example of "sustainability" in action and one of the first of numerous warnings that reached a broad cross section of the population and created a consensus along with a "mindfullness" that we needed to be much more aware of what we are doing to the environment. Carson's book coalasced a broad response from conservation, preservation, and environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, The Audubon Society, and the Wilderness Society.

Back to corn: the history of corn in Nepal is fascinating. Corn originated in the New World emerging out of what's now Mexico, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. It grew there as a wild plant. Over, perhaps, a thousand years it was slowly bred out by people in that region and it gradually evolved into a food crop that farmers had control over. They could plant seeds in clearings they made by burning the forest and they would not fairly accurately when the corn would be mature. Calenders were created to determine what was the best time to plant the corn and how to predict the harvest in advance. Corn became an important food crop helping to sustain the ancient cultures of the Maya, Ayacomo, and other first people.

Beginning before the Christian era (2000 BP) corn began to "migrate" to the far corners of North and South America. A long list of Native bands from present day Canada and the United States, from ocean to ocean, have had corn in their diets for more than a 1000 years if not longer. It is now grown on every continent including Asia and Africa where it's a very important food source. It was introduced into Nepal in the mid-1800s and has, since then, offered a secure staple crop that would not fail if the rice crop failed. I am going to guess that corn was introduced to offer some insurance against famine. Corn, at the time it was introduced, had no known pests in Nepal and it grows well in the climate and soils of Nepal, and uses the same tools and labor force that rice does for planting, cultivating and harvesting.

There is a section in the blog below on rice cultivation but to compare corn and rice historically is interesting. The latest theories regarding the development of rice as a cultivated food say that it was first domesticated along the Yalu River in China beginning 7000-6000 years ago and that it took almost 2000 years to develop reliable domestic varieties. It began with wild varieties and over a painstaking period and process rice eventually emerged as a dependable food crop. This history parallels the development of other grains like buckwheat and wheat further east during the same period in human history.

Corn is not the most sustainable crop to grow. It's an anuual and like rice, is a "heavy feeder" meaning it removes a lot of nutrient from the soil particularly nitrogen but including other essential soil ingredients like sulphur, phosphorus, and potassium. (The three macro nutrients in the soil are expressed as NPK: Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium. There is a long list of essential micro-nutrients like iron, sulphur, manganese, magnesium, zinc, copper, etc). Corn produces a lot of biomass including the corn plus the corn plant. Nepali farmers utilize the entire plant first as human food and then fodder for the livestock. Only a small portion of the corn plant isn't used and what isn't used is plowed back into the soil at the end of the harvest where it adds organic matter and nutrients (small amounts) back into the soil.

I grow corn in my home state in the US which I sell in local markets. I made a point of talking to the Nepali farmers about their corn "practices" particularly how they compensate for the heavy loss of soil nitrogen by the yearly corn crop. The farmer in this photo told me that because of the large number of farm animals (water buffalo primarily) that are still used for field work there's a good annual supply of animal manures (farm yard manures=FYM) which are reapplied to the fields in a composted form. Corn loves manure and cows (buffalo, too) love corn! The variety of corn he's holding is what I saw most of the time in Nepal. It is most likely a variety called Rampur Composite which is a yellow, semi-flint, open pollinated variety (OPV) and it's close in color, size, number of rows, and taste to a variety that was popular in the US in the 1960s-1970s called "Golden Bantam". It's called a "good keeper" because it holds it's sugar content longer than some of the new "super sweet" hyrbrids like "Butter and Sugar" (popular in the US) which only keep their taste for a few hours after they're picked before the sugar turns to starch and the corn becomes less tasteful. Semi-flint refers to the hardness of the outer shell, or casing, of the kernels. There are several types of corn: Dent, Flint and pop corn, for instance. Dent has a softer shell and that means the starch is configured differently then Flint corn which as a super hard corn has more starch. One last note: Nepali's get most of their carbohydrates from corn. Most of the corn grown in Nepal is consumed at home, or in the village where it is grown.

Agriculture is labor intensive in Nepal and that's underscored by this picture where a family is busily husking a small mountain of corn. I saw this repeated everywhere as in the photos below and largely it was women who were doing the work.

Another family and another mountain of corn. The corn seen here is for home consumption. After the kernels are removed from the cobs they're dried on tarps when the sun is shining and then it is ground into a product like corn meal or hominy and stored for use by the family. During the harvest season everyone enjoys the corn roasted on open flames when it is referred to as "Moki" (moke-eye).

The labor issues around corn in Nepal are more complicated than the nutrient needs of the plants. Nepal is currently risking everything to become a world tourist country. It has sixteen, or so, national parks with different themes. Many of them are conservation areas around the high peaks of the Himalaya like Everest (Sagamartha), Annapurna, Mansalu, Kanchanjunga and Mansalu that create a governance for environmental protection and the ability to manage the amount of traffic. The others are primary tourist attractions as well as plant and animal sanctuaries particularly for endangered Asian species like the Bengal tiger and the Asian elephant. Because most of the infrastructure for this industry is located in cities like Kathmandu and Pokhara they tend to draw men off the farms with the hope for better pay and more money. It's that old story. So the population left in the rural areas to tend to the planting and harvesting of crops is largely in the women's and children's hands (and backs, etc.) Is that sustainable? The response has been to create an infrastructure to mechanize agriculture as much as possible. That means tractors, bank loans, tractor dealerships, tractor repair people, gas stations, tire stores, etc. It means jobs but it also means more capitalization by the farmer.

In 1919, in the US, 90 percent of the male work force was involved in some area of agriculture whether it was on the farm or working at a factory that made tractors and plows, or other implements, or fertilizer and pesticides (although there were few chemical pesticides in use at that time). In 2009 less than 10 percent of the entire US work force is involved in agriculture and most of that is within the golf industry. Golf Courses in the US now account for millions of acres (approximately 3,000,000 acres in 2009) of grass that needs watering, fertilizers, insecticides, specialized lawn mowers, etc. It is the largest sector of agriculture in the US at the present time .

First the corn is husked.
Then the kernels are removed from the cobs by hand and it is a tedious, time consuming job
.
Until the basked it filled. I tried to find out how many ears of corn would fill a basket but the sizes of the baskets varied so much that it was useless. This woman and I tried to keep count of the number of ears it took to fill this basket. Suffice it to say it was a lot of ears.

The baskets are emptied on cloth or plastic tarps. The corn is then spread out to dry in the sun.

The sun is sometimes unreliable, or rather, because of the Monsoon season arriving there is a chance of showers at any moment so someone stays close to the corn and makes sure it doesn't get rained on.

This photo incudes the unhusked corn on the left, husked corn cobs on the right and a some of the kernels in the wooden "boat" in the center.

This is a close up of the corn kernels. These will be ground into a coarse meal.

In the foot hills and mountains where the rivers run particularly fast it is economical to build a small grist mill like this utilizing a water wheel and the fast moving water to grind the corn mechanically.

Without a water powered grist mill the corn is taken to a centralized business, a miller, that grinds corn.

Here it's weighed to determine the price paid to the farmer. As I already pointed out almost all the corn harvested in Nepal is consumed in the same place it was grown, by the farmers and their families, or within the village. In other words, very little of it gets shipped to other areas in Nepal, or out of the country.

In the foot hills near Annapurna I watched this young woman quickly use the discared corn husks to make these mats which are used in the homes. She used her feet as much as she used her hands. When I tried to do this I failed miserably and became the laughing stock of the entire village. They probably still laugh uproariously when someone imitates me trying to learn to braid the corn husks.

It was really neat to watch her do this because of the way she used both hands and her feet and she did it astonishingly fast. She made it look easy. It reminded me of the Kumal who made their own fish nets which requires tying complicated knots over and over again but they could do it with blinding speed. I have watched Navahoe and Oglalla people make bows and arrows and arrow heads from scratch in this same way, with skill and confidence and incredible speed. These are lost arts, that indigenous knowledge that gets separated and disappears before anyone know what happened to it.

The very end of the corn harvest entails chopping down the corn stalks and transporting them to where the buffalo are fed.

Here again it is the women and children who are doing most of the field work. This woman and I had a contest to see who could pick up the most corn stalks in a single load and I said I was pretty sure it was a tie which amused her no end.

For the moment that is the end of the corn story but it gets repeated in myriad forms in Nepal in terms of the sustainability of agriculture and development of food systems. Within the conference setting which we will return to, there was fear that by adopting one path to economic development that Nepal would be forced by the World Bank and other lending agencies to change its food system and adopt that of the industrialized countries and, particularly, adopt a mechanization of food production. This had both positive and negative connotations for the farmers at the conference.

Part IV: The Nepal Conference Begins

The road west from Kathmandu to Mugli and Pokhara threads along the left hand (south) wall of the Trishuli River gorge. It is a magnetic, majestic and enticing place that exudes a powerful wildness and beauty. It's not unrealistic to fear that someday there will be a large hydroelectric scheme constructed here to power neon signs at hotels in various parts of Nepal.


This is the road to Naryanghar. The Trishuli starts high in the Himalya close to the border with Tibet and at a point a few miles downstream from where this picture was taken it joins and becomes the Naryani River that flows on to the Ganges and the Bay of Bengal. The Trishuli is a gorgeous river that's already known world-wide as a formidable "rafting" and kayaking river and seems to fit into the present scheme of maximally developing tourism in Nepal.

We held the conference at the CDO, or Community Development Organization, in Naryanghar. The box-shaped yellow building houses the main office, a small class room, and some sleeping quarters. The wide cement sill at the bottom of the wall was a favorite place for people to sit and hang out during the conference. It provided an important "get-away" where a lot of the work of the conference was done by people talking informally and spontaneously.

This is the large building, the "long house", that housed the women's dormitory, the large conference hall, dining room, and kitchen. It was all very compact and efficient. The CDO was remarkably self-contained and self-sufficient including the food we ate which was grown on site.

On the opening day of the conference we were all subdued, anxious, and rigid, or maybe shy is a better description. The "academics" had no trouble talking and felt very comfortable holding the floor and were obviously good at it. It was predictable, too, that the conference would begin on a heavy intellectual note which was intimidating to members who were largely uneducated.

Those who felt uncomfortable talking, like Suvenda, tried to be serious by listening intently and taking notes. At the end of the first day everyone had begun to warm up and a camaraderie was beginning to form. The second day I was amazed how easily everyone slipped into the heady talk about globalization and sustainability as if the conversations had been going on for years. I saw how useful the conference was for creating a long absent forum in Nepal for people to talk about what they were experiencing in their communities, even those members from the most remote villages, and how alarmed they were at what was happening in Nepal.

Conferences have many uses in addition to the dissemination of information and ideas. The buzz words these days used by grant writers who are looking for money to put on conferences commonly state how their conference will "build capacity" and "develop leadership". At well-run conferences that's true.

A key purpose of any conference is to "enrich knowledge" which can be seen as part of building capacity and developing leadership, but it is even more intrinsic then that, more subtle, in that much of what happens at conferences is unspoken, it's absorbed almost through the skin. When we are in groups of people who are energetically focusing on a grouped set of issues our brains go off in myriad directions, synapse after synapse, little firings of intellectual and sensory exchanges in which we process what we know, rebuild it, strengthen it, test it, reprocess it, and then put it up for awhile and revisit it at another day. You can call it creativity at work, insight development, or learning. It's powerful, though.

Some other things conferences are good for: incubators for new ideas, resolving conflicts, building coalitions, learning more about the "who, where, how" of central issues, provide connections between people, and provide a place to practice expressing our ideas and then getting the all-important feedback from other members. Finally, what members take from a conference is a growing sense of his or her "authority" which I'll describe as the "permission to do work". This doesn't mean there's a diploma or certificate, but through connections, the practice and sharpening of ideas there is a sense of "joining around a task" within the conference community. This "joining" process brings with it responsibility, credibility and a plan of action, a task, and it is within that joining that authority is given and taken.

Surya (in the photo above he has his hand up) who came to the conference almost by accident was a good example of the leadership development piece. He's a member of the Brahmin caste and he is also what I call a practitioner. That's my word for someone, not necessarily outside of academic circles, but one who has extensive hands-on experience and understands the practical aspects of the work, or in this case, Surya has a working knowledge of how to implement sustainable ideas and sustainable design and is familiar with the complexities involved. In his case he is a farmer interested in creating a "permaculture" and other sustainable forms of agriculture and sustainable ways of living. Surya is remarkable man, a remarkable human being. He's knowledgable and helpful and has a great sense of humor which he always uses to get his points across. He was an outspoken member of the conference because of his knowlege and because he's a Brahmin (I have added a whole section on Surya below).

The women at the conference were mostly silent the first day, or so. It was evident that Nepali men and women do not interact very much. It was not really shyness, but the few women who there were reticent in the face of the terse academic polemics. They did not seem to have the same volition the men did to condemn globalization per se. They were clear what they saw as the negative impacts that concern them the most as Nepali women, but they were articulate in saying they saw specific benefits for Nepali women in the thrust towards modernity as Nepal was being pushed towards the 21st century. Two of their stated concerns were: 1.) the continuing sale of young Nepali women by their parents to contractors that then sold them in India to brothels where they were forced into prostitution. They saw this as a global issue because they pointed out that it takes place around the globe. (There is a section below that goes into this practice in Nepal in more depth.) and 2.) The growing presence of pornography (films, videos, magazines, etc.) that's imported into Nepal from around the globe. The women are concerned because of the implications for Nepali women and all women living in impoverished countries because women are drawn in to participate in the production of pornography to make money to survive.