Macapá sits on the equator and they have a modest monument marking it.They say that the sun shines right through the hole in the tower during the spring and autumn equinoxes. I don’t know what time it would be.  At high noon the sun should be directly overhead.

This monument is on my list of things that are worth seeing but not worth going to see, but since it was on the way to the boat it was worth stopping and officially putting one foot in each hemisphere.There are lots of myths about the equator. Some people think that an egg can stand up straight on the end on the equator. This is not true. 

A more persistent myth is that water drains in different directions in different hemispheres. This is also is not true.  The idea is based on the Coriolis force, which deflects the air to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere. This only affect phenomenon that are spread over very large areas, like hurricanes. In physics weak forces make large extensive things and strong ones make small compact ones. There is no Coriolis affect exactly at the equator, which is why hurricanes can't cross the equator, probably a good thing. Water going down the drain is too small to be affected or more correctly it is much more affected by other factors such as how the water hits the drain or the shape of the vessel holding the water.

I walked down the rail marking the equator. That was my ritual to the place.

The pictures are all from Macapá. Up top is the equator monument. Below are kids playing soccer in the Amazon. This part is tidal; the river withdraws from the dock at low tide exposing the soccer field. Next is downtown. Not very exciting. And just above shows how little red peddles fall from the trees. It is kind of like the pink snow in the "Cat in the Hat" or maybe like candy. It is pretty in any case.

It is as if one world lassoed another and pulled it closer. That is what this bridge across the Rio Negro did.  It is the first bridge you encounter as you come up the Amazon system. The river is just too wide everywhere else and besides there is nothing much to connect.

There is nothing much to connect here either – yet. The long high bridge now ties the unremarkable village of Iranduba with Manaus might seem like a waste of money. But it is changing things. You used to have to take a ferry for a couple hours to get to Iranduba & there were few reasons to make the trip; you can now drive in fifteen minutes.  This has the practical effect of creating new land in Manaus and you can already see what will happen in the next few years. As you cross the bridge into this formerly distant peninsula between the Solimões and Rio Negro, the first thing you notice is all the real estate signs. It reminded me of Northern Virginia in the boom times. This will soon be suburbs and exurbs, probably mostly high end from the looks of the pictures advertising the new developments.

From my public affairs angle, I thought this would be the ideal time to connect local leaders with Americans who have experienced similar growth in the not very distant past. Development is inevitable, but it can be done well or poorly. There is a lot of wetland and nature that should be properly protected. If done well, they can avoid the damage caused by rising water and erosion.  I say avoid the damage, because they cannot avoid the water and can avoid damage by not building in some places. People like to build on low areas near water. They shouldn’t do it. Beyond that, I hope that there is better planning. Manaus is not an attractive city. Just spreading it across the river would be a bad idea. Maybe some of these guys should visit Curitiba. They plan right down there (although this week's "Veja" indicates that not all is well in Curitiba's suburbs.)

The village of Iranduba evidently has only two claims to fame, or did before the recent Anschluß with Manaus. It was a place that produced bricks and natural rubber condoms. The brick making is the one that the town fathers choose to emphasize but the monument they chose to erect could be appropriate to both, as you can see from the picture above. Below is the other factory Lam-Latex.

Besides these industries, there seemed to be a lot of fishing and cattle ranching. I don’t know what will happen to the former ferry port on the Solimões. My first thought was that it would atrophy and fade away, but if the town grows I could envision it becoming a kind of tourist attraction.

We visited a big marketplace where the locals could buy all they needed.The fish were very fresh, many were still alive. I could not identify them, but they said some were piranhas. Besides fish, there were butcher shops, produce stands, stands selling clothes etc.

Farther down the road are more tourist attractions in transition. You can see in the pictures. It reminds me of those little resorts on small lakes in Wisconsin. Most of them have now become bigger, moved high-end or faded away. I think the days of the little lakes lodges are fleeting. 

The beach you see in the picture is on the Rio Negro. The water is very warm and shallow. This is a high water time on the Rio Negro, as you can tell from the submerged trees and bushes. Our Brazilian friend told us that the beach had gone out another twenty meters a few weeks earlier.   

Below is the characteristic we environment near Iranduba. I joked with our Brazilian friends that I expected alligators. They pointed out that this was not true, since this was anaconda habitat. I expect people moving into new subdivisions won't be able to keep small dogs and cats ... at least not for long.  I thought my colleague Justen should wade into the water and see if he could scare up a couple of the big snakes, but he was unenthusiastic about the idea.

I spent two days and two nights sailing up the Amazon with the Semester at Sea. Most of my waking time was spent talking to students. They kept me fully scheduled, which is how I like it. It was lots of fun to interact with the clever students and professors. They also have a group called “lifelong learners,” who are retired people who want to cruise in a learning environment.

But I did have some time to myself and I spent lots of that free time just looking at the river and thinking about how interesting it was just to be on the Amazon. You can see my balcony in the picture above. It was nice to sit out there. It is humid, but fresh on the river. The Amazon - the word conjures up all sorts of feelings and images. It was interesting and a little scary to look out over the river in the midnight darkness. It is so empty out there, as I mentioned in an earlier post. The picture up top shows a beautiful scene. Beautiful from a distance. That green in the front is not grass. It is a type of reed. You could not walk through it.

During the day you can see that the water is the color of coffee with cream.  The silt does not sink out.  There is a lot of other stuff floating. It is mostly branches and floating weeds, but I also saw whole trees and what looked like a dead cow. The dead cow made me feel more confident about the water. I figured that if a dead cow could float unvexed down the river there could not be that many piranha.

I was told that the water was low, even though it looked like the forest came right to the shore and was only a few feet above the water. Evidently in the high water time the river goes into the forest and you can see the tops of the trees reaching out of the water. That would be interesting.  It is hard to believe that the river could be much wider, but it can.

As far as famous rivers go, however, the Amazon is a little monotonous. The land along-side is almost uniformly flat. You get a lot more variety on the Rhine. The Nile has cataracts. I don't know the Mississippi except in Minnesota & Wisconsin, but it also has more bluffs and variety. The interesting thing about the Amazon is the water itself not only the sheer amount of it but also its composition.

The Amazon is formed when the Rio Solimões meets the Rio Negro outside Manaus. The Solimões is cloudy and coffee & creme colored, as is the Amazon downstream. The Rio Negro, as its name implies, is black. Above is Manaus from the Rio Negro. Below is a ferry stop on the Rio Solimões.You can see the difference. The waters meet but don’t immediately mix, instead running side by side for several miles. I did not see this, since the ship crossed this at night while it was still dark. I woke up to see that the color of the water was black, as we were heading up the Rio Negro toward the Port of Manaus. It was also dark when we passed Santarém the night before. This is where the Rio Tapajos meets the Amazon. The Tapajos is supposed to be turquoise colored. I will have to wait to see that some other time.

We did cross the new bridge in Manaus across the Rio Negro. I will write a little more about that later. Suffice to say now that on the other side we caught up with the Solimões.  The Amazon takes its look from this river. The Rio Negro & the Tapajos just give their water and soon lose themselves.

These forts really were impregnable. If you had a fort like this, you forced your adversaries to engage in some other sort of warfare.  Of course the problem with static defense is that it makes you rely too heavily on the bricks and mortar or on the technologies that were dominate when you built the structure. You don’t adapt to changing conditions both because you trust your existing protection and because you have so much invested in it that you really cannot easily change. Most of the great infrastructure of war is never conquered, but it is often bypassed or overtaken by changes. The smart opponent doesn't attack your strength but searches for weakness.

They told me that the fort in Macapá is the largest of its kind. I don’t know if that is true; it isn't that big but I have not seen many other star forts. I am also a little leery of the that term "of its kind."  Maybe it’s the largest of its kind in Macapá.  I don’t know. Star forts have walls that point out like tips of a star. This was a response to artillery. Medieval castles have straight walls, since you could repel attackers from any point and they could attack from any point. The problem is that there are blind spots that cannot be adequately protected from any of the castles towers.  This doesn't matter if your attackers are using swords, spears or pointy stick. It matters if you enemy can bring artillery to bear on your walls and if you have artillery of your own to direct against them. What the star fort does is fill the blind spot space so that anywhere that the enemy could approach is subject to interlocking fields of fire from the various points of the fort. The walls are also sloped so that projectiles will tend to glance off instead of just slamming in as they did with a medieval wall. The walls are also lower, since you can presumably put your adversaries under fire from a long way off. 

This type of fort worked well until artillery power, range & accuracy improved. It is the characteristic colonial fort of the Spanish and Portuguese. An example of a star fort in the U.S. is Fort Ticonderoga.

The fort in Macapá controls the main mouth of the Amazon. I didn’t know this, but the river that comes out at Belém do Pará is technically not the Amazon. It has the same water, of course, but in going around an island it gets a different name. The Amazon empties into the Atlantic at Macapá.  

We were nominating the Instituto Geográfico e Histórico do Pará for a grant to renew & restore their document collection, so due diligence required that we go there in person to look around. Things often look different on a paper proposal than they do when you see them in person. The need and the utility are there, as is the potential to make things better. They have a large collection of paper documents describing all sorts of transactions as well miscellaneous documents such as the sorts of notices they used to post for the general public, some centuries old. They are not in a terrible condition, but also not good and threatened. This is a very humid climate. Many of the documents look good, but it would not be good to handle them too much. The Institute will file, restore and most importantly make electronic copies of the documents. Documents that you cannot access are not more useful than documents that don’t exist.

The documents are not the only things that need restoring. The Institute is housed in a building that is still very elegant but in a "seen better days" way. The location is great as you can see from the picture above.The place used to be owned by a rich and influential local citizen and the Institute used to be the go-to place for records and research in Pará. The rich guy died; universities and other institutions took up most of the research work. But it remains one of those places that good cities revere and protect. It has a board of directors of influential local citizens and will one day – probably soon – again be a very pleasant local center. Restoration is being done on the building and the furniture inside, as you can see below.

All this made me think of how buildings and institutions work. Sometimes we would just like to preserve them and there is a school of thought that we should set these sorts of places aside, museum like, protected.  I disagree. IMO historical buildings are like Stradivarius violins. They have to be used or else they decay and lose their value. This means renewing, restoring and to some extent changing rather than preserving like a fly in amber. That fly is dead. It is important that cities be full of life. Homage to the past doesn’t mean giving up the future. Things must be constantly renewed and protected against the forces of destruction. Below you can see the evidence of one of those big agents of destruction - termites.

Cultural place often supplement their incomes by housing restaurants and cafes. This provides not only some needed cash, but also brings people into the venue and since people appreciate and value what they know and what is familiar, it builds a constituency for culture. The institute has plans for such a project and I encouraged them to pursue it with determination and vigor. We don’t nominate those sorts of commercial projects for grants; there is a kind of prejudice against the profitable, but in the long run a successful operation like that will be worth more than the kindness of strangers as embodied in a grant.

We visited the Teatro da Paz in Belém to see if it would work for a visit by the Battery Dance Company, which we hope to bring to Belém in April.  It does.  This will be a great venue for the dancers.  Now my only worry is that they will really come.  I am reasonably sure that they will, but it depends on a decision by ECA.  

The Teatro is similar to the Amazonas Theater in Manaus, but it was built about twenty years earlier.  It is in the same tradition of bringing opera to the Amazon.  Both are beautiful theaters and both are a bit of a folly. They tried so hard to be part of the cultured world of the time.  Well, I suppose it was like building a stadium might be today. They figured that every important town needed one.

You can see the view from the stage of the theater in the top picture.  The others are the curtains and the rehearsal area.

We visited the BNC in Belém in time to see the investiture of the new president.  The Belém BNC is well established and prosperous.  They have six branches, including one in Santarem, which is very far away up the Amazon.  I wonder if they could open a branch in Macapá, which is actually a bit closer, although in a different state.

The BNC has a really great facility with its own theater, which you see above and an exhibit space, which you see below.  BNCs face serious completion from schools that just teach English and English is the way they make their money.  But BNCs are much more.  They do the educational advising, sponsor art and give lots of free scholarships.  I am trying to support BNCs in any way we can for that reason.

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 interesting 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.

The museum is named after Emílio Goeldi, a Swiss anthropologist who organized the collections and did a lot of anthropological studies in Pará and what became the state of Amapá.  We talked about the native people of the area.  Ancient people of Amapá produced the urns you see above.  They contained to bones of the dead.  The people who made them are now extinct and not much is known about them, but the urns and related items were used to show the continuity of cultures of Pará and Amapá. 

The region was more healthful in pre-Columbian times before the introduction of malaria & yellow fever and could support a larger population using simple agriculture, hunting, gathering and fishing.  I mentioned “1493,” the book I have been reading.  The author says that malaria had a decisive impact on the history of the Americas. Among other things, it transformed the Amazon from a relatively healthy place to live, in terms of diseases, to a very unhealthy one.  The author speculates that malaria came over from Africa with slaves.  African populations have some immunity to malaria; natives of the Americas did not.

Much of the archeological and anthropological research in Pará and Amapá was carried out by German or Swiss-German scientist and German influence in general was strong in this region. As you look at the exhibits, it is one German after another. There was a darker side to this in the 1930s. The Nazis encouraged anthropological research as an adjunct to their general race-based theories. I remembered that from my studies in anthropology so many years ago after I was reminded when one of our Brazilian friends mentioned that one of the anthropologists left Brazil to serve as an officer in the Wehrmacht.  

Also part of the museum is a zoo and botanical gardens. It is in many ways the old – and IMO good – model of an integrated scholarship. The zoo is mostly a rescue of animals, i.e. they don’t go out and capture them for the zoo. They had lots of sloths and some anteaters. Evidently these slow-moving animals are often victims of traffic accidents.

Belém is the kind of place I expected it should be. When I was in Manaus, I didn’t especially feel like I was in the Amazon. It was like another big city. In Belém, in contrast, you can actually  see the Amazon. 

I will be writing more about what we did in Belém.  We were very busy.  But I am also very busy today, so writing the history will have to wait.  In the meantime here are a few pictures.  You will notice at the top that his is just really pretty.  As usual, the picture doesn’t capture all the beauty. The reddish dust you see on the path are pedals from flowers falling from the trees. 

Above is a local poet Ruy Guilherme Paranatinga Barata.  It is a nice memorial to get to sit for eternity in a beautiful garden.  

Flying into Belém you see a kind of water world.  The Amazon splits into many rivers, with lots of islands. Streets are lined with very big mango trees, some planted a century ago.  I was told that that drivers here have to buy special mango insurance, since the heavy fruit so often fall on cars, denting the hoods. But the trees are beautiful & worth the trouble.  They make the city feel much more comfortable and lower the overall temperature.  

Since we (Justen and I) got into town late, we didn’t have time to do too much. BTW, my picture is not good because of the late hour. It was dark. But those trees were really impressive and I wanted to get a picture for today's post.  We did find time to visit the offices of one of the major media firms, that owns newspapers, webpages and RBA (Rede Brasil Amazônia de Televisão)  Rede Bandeirantes in Belém.  We spoke to the boss, who is a good contact of some of my Embassy colleagues, but who I had never met.  He was a very nice guy who spoke to us in English, explaining that he had family in Charlotte, NC and had lots of connections with the U.S.  

He explained that Pará was getting more prosperous.  The initial impetus was the vast mineral wealth.  Vale (Compania Vale do Rio Doce) has mountains of iron, enough to supply the world for decades,  and Alcoa has similar amounts of bauxite. There is also the wealth from forestry and agriculture.  But Pará has now moved beyond simple resource based economics.  At first this was because services had by necessity followed firms like Vale or Alcoa, but now the economics is self-sustaining.  

A small but important help to Belém would be regular direct flights to Miami. Belém is closer to Florida than it is to some other parts of Brazil in terms of easy of access.  This may soon happen, as firms add flights in response to growing demand.

We talked about educations, a subject always important in Brazil and making sure Pará was included in initiatives, since all the economic growth will require a more sophisticated labor force.  Not everyone is as aware of the opportunities as might be desired, nor are people aware how easy it is to study in the U.S.  We discussed doing webchats on the study in the U.S. and the Science w/o borders program. The beauty of the web format is that we can do it from Brasília or anywhere else and still tap into the network in Pará. This is something worth following and perhaps using in other places.  The Amazônia site gets about two million visitors a month.   

We had supper with five alumni YA and English immersion students.  These are all smart kids.  The older ones are completing their university studies.  We talked in about the program and about things in general. One of the participants was planning to apply to Science w/o Borders and another said that he would after we explained it to him. He had been unaware of the opportunity.  

I have never met a YA who was not wildly enthusiastic about the experience.  Their challenge is staying in touch with colleagues, which they all want to do.  This is something we should be more active in helping. These networks will prove extremely valuable to participants.   As they move up in Brazilian society, and they certainly will, they can network with participants from all over Brazil.  It is a great program and we need to make sure it keeps on paying dividends. 

Most Brazilians have become better off in the last twenty years.  Although the income distribution per se has not changed much (the rich got richer too and Brazil is still an unequal place), the general increase in wealth has disproportionately helped the poorer Brazilians.  Relative wealth matters, but absolute wealth matters more when you are trying to climb out of poverty.   A rich person whose income doubles might be able to buy a nicer car of a bigger refrigerator, but he already owns those things and the additional utility he gets from a better model may be small or even trivial.   The poor person, however, who for the first time gets into the income bracket that he can afford his first car or his first refrigerator feels a quantum leap in his lifestyle.  In the last couple decades, perhaps 50 million Brazilians have climbed past the threshold where they can afford the basic comfort level.

There are also generally better opportunities and people are better able to take advantage of them, as well as few people to do the work.  These three factors interplay.  A big source of domestic help and unskilled labor in general had been the rural areas, especially in the chronically poor regions of the Northeast. Nordestinos , often living on marginally productive small farms, took buses to the cities in the richer South or Southeast whenever life became unbearable or a drought hit the region. Both these things happened with monotonous regularity, but the high birthrates seems to ensure an unbroken supply of very poor people seeking a better return on their hard work. 

People used to talk about the two Brazils. One scholar characterized the country as “Belindia”, i.e. part was rich as Belgium and the other as poor as India, but there was no border between them and the richer cities of other parts of the country. It would be as if the poorer parts of Mexico or India were part of the United States. This was not strictly a geographic phenomenon. The rich and the poor in Brazil often live very close together, but there was a definite geographical aspect too. 

The Northeast is still poor, parts are developing rapidly, actually drawing in labor from other places .  If you bought a Ford Fiesta last year, it was probably made near Salvador, Bahia, part of what used to be an abysmally poor region.   There are lots of people ready, willing and able to work if there is a chance to do it. At the same time, population growth is slowing even among the poorest Brazilians.  Demographic inertia will carry the population higher, but the drivers have stopped.  Among those smaller numbers, illiteracy has dropped, meaning that people can take advantages of more of the available opportunities.   Domestic help doesn’t really need to read.  Most other jobs do. Illiterate or semi-literate people are stuck in the jobs that are going nowhere but the kitchen or the garden.  

It is a healthy sign that it is getting harder to get good domestic help.  Live-in maids are not very productive for the society as a whole.  But their sudden disappearance has created some problems.   A world with full-time maids does not invest much in labor saving devices.  Most American homes, even those of the “poor” have appliances such as dishwashers, microwave ovens and efficient washing machines and driers.  Americans with lawns own power lawnmowers.  People have power tools  and most Americans are accustomed to using them.  There is also something we often overlook.  

Things in the U.S. are simple to use and keep in good repair.   Our shirts don’t require ironing.  Our floors are naturally shinny and don’t need to be waxed much or at all.  Frozen food sections are full of fairly good tasting products that can be zapped in the microwave and ready in minutes. In short, an average American home comes equipped with machines and features that take the place of full-time household help.   Brazilian houses are not like this.  My house in Brasília, which is obviously built for a person richer than I am, did not come equipped with a dishwasher.  I don’t think you can even find a newer house at or above the median price that doesn’t have a dishwasher.

There is a sudden boom in household appliances.  Dishwashers, driers, microwaves etc are selling very well.  I have not actually studied this, but I bet there is also a trend toward simpler construction, more prefab and easier to maintain features.

A recent article re this subject (in Portuguese) is here.

I also noticed more ads about cleaning services.  It looks like the future here will be more like the present in the U.S., with most of the maid's work done by labor saving devices and people who can afford it hiring cleaning services once a week or for special occasions.   

A related phenomenon is illegal immigration.  As Brazil’s economy grows and Brazilians no longer want to do the dirty jobs, others are being drawn in to take them.  It is funny to see Brazilian attitudes toward illegal immigrants coming to resemble ours in the U.S.  The news has recently featured stories about Haitians.  They come on a roundabout route  through Peru.

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. 

Illegal loggers steal from us in many ways. Sometimes they are literally stealing our trees, but it goes way beyond that. Illegal logging is rarely done according to good procedures that protect the environment and preserve the forest for future generations. The public views the scenes of destruction left by illegal loggers and jumps to conclusion that this is how logging is done. That means that illegal loggers also steal the reputations of honest loggers and landowners who are good stewards of their land and often have been for many generations.

Addressing the problem of illegal logging, however, is not as simple as enacting stronger laws and harsher penalties. In fact, worldwide it is often the theoretically strong laws that are the problem. Of course, in Virginia we still have timber theft. This is a type of illegal logging but at the levels and ways it is done, it is more akin to ordinary crime like burglary or grand theft auto. There are no cases of widespread deforestation caused by illegal logging in the Old Dominion.  Unfortunately, this is not the case everywhere.  In some countries the illegal timber harvest can reach as high a 60-70% of the total.  What accounts for the difference?

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.

Logging is almost always done in relatively out of the way places. Laws are never enough. Even the most active authorities cannot effectively police large areas of forest land.  In Virginia, they really don’t have to.  Landowners, loggers and foresters have incentives to preserve and enhance the forests on their land because they can use and benefit from them. They also know that everyone around suffers if forests, soils, animals and water are wantonly destroyed.  It is obviously true that the authorities protect my forest land in Brunswick County.  But the first lines of defense are my neighbors, friends and even strangers who know that we are all in this together. Virginians protect their own land and those of others because they own the land. We have centuries old traditions of protecting property rights and we all are in the same boat. We protect each other’s stuff.

We also enjoy the use of our land with fewer restrictions than in most other places. We can harvest trees and other forest products within reasonable rules. We can hunt that animals that inhabit our forests and, again within reasonable limits, we can change the way we use our lands. In the final analysis, what most protects the forests of Virginia is the effort of thousands of Virginians who have a stake in the management and use of the forests and the products they produce. In Virginia, hunters, loggers and landowners are preserving and enhancing our forests. Laws work when they are reasonable and when people see the benefits. If you want to preserve and improve forests, you have to let people cut some trees and kill some animals. You have to let them have a stake.

Places that suffer widespread deforestation because of illegal logging often find themselves in this unhappy situation not in spite of but because of strong laws, albeit misapplied. Laws and regulations meant to preserve forests often end up destroying them if they make it difficult or impossible for the people who live in or near the forests to make an honest living from them. If strict rules make it impossible to make an honest profit, some people will make dishonest ones. Even worse, as honest people leave the business and dishonest ones take their place, the whole respect for law as well as the whole idea of stewardship disappears.  The field divides between preservers and destroyers.  Neither is the right way to go.  We need stewards.

If I can be permitted a little immodesty, in America we got it right. That is not to say challenges have disappeared. There is no perfect system and everything must always adapt. But we should never make the quest for the perfect the enemy of the good. The methods of stewardship that have grown up in the United States during the twentieth century work well. The American Tree Farm System and other independent certification systems are doing their jobs.

Most landowners want to do the right thing on their land. People I talk to not only want to take care of the land during their own lifetimes. A major motivation is to leave the land in better shape for future generations.  People are willing.  We need information and guidance both to do the right things and to do things right.  What we don’t need is strict, sometimes incomprehensible, rules that make it difficult for honest people to make honest profits.  We have created a wonderful and sustainable system of forestry in Virginia.  We can be proud of it and we should all work to protect it and try to spread the word as far as we can.

People are born pre-programed.  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.  

That is what I liked about Steven Pinker’s book the Blank Slate when I read it about ten years ago.  At first you might feel a little discouraged.   Pinker points out that human propensity to violence, intolerance & sloth were bred into us during evolution.  Humans of the stone age who didn’t react quickly and violently to threats didn’t usually live long enough to become our ancestors.   The good news is that institutions of civilization and social constraints can (and have) made us behave in ways that are – well - more civilized and socially acceptable. 
 

I just started reading Pinker’s recent book, the Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.  I suppose that good intellectual rigor would dictate that I actually finish the book before commenting on the ideas, but I have read several reviews and I just finished reading an interview with the author in Veja that got me thinking about this.  There is a good recent interview here.  The best quick background is Pinker’s TED talk.  (BTW – TED lecture are really interesting in general.)

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." 

Historical records are spotty at first, but it is clear that life was much more dangerous and violent in any ancient or medieval period we study. Death was a penalty for all sorts of minor crimes. And was often inflicted in the most cruel way possible. Torture was common. Entertainments were cruel and bloody. But things improved, at least in the west.  

Despite the great wars and murder on an industrial scale, the 20^th Century has been the least violent in history.  Of course, more total numbers of people have been killed, but that is because there are more total people.  The proportions are way down. 

Most people can vouch for this, if they think about it for even a short time. It is only in recent times that most of the population could expect to live a long life w/o ever being the victim of the deadly violence that was common to all humankind in the past. 

Pinker has to take a lot of crap for pointing out the truth.  One reason is simply because most people like to think they live in the most challenging times.  Beyond that, we have much better reporting.  If a couple people are killed in nasty ways anywhere in the country and increasingly the world, we get graphic and memorable details on the news.   

A counterintuitive reason might be that things are actually improving so quickly that it makes the remaining problems seem that much worse.  We repent much more sorrowfully the fewer acts of terrible violence because they seem more personal.   “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic,” is as quote attributed to Stalin, who understood how to kill individuals and millions. It is nasty, but perhaps accurate. We get inured to lots of violence and more afraid of a little. 

Pinker also has to face what we might call the miserly industry.  Politicians selling programs and NGOs seeking donations need to paint the in the direst colors.   Pinker is a brave man to take this on.

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.

Another explanation is free trade.  In one of the interviews, Pinker quoted that "we can't bomb the Japanese because they make my minivan."  Free trade goes with communications. The more we see people are being like us, the less likely we can treat them as sub-human.

We may be less violent because there is less incentive. Hunter-gatherers are always ready for violence. They sometimes commit violence because they fear violence from others and sometimes just to rip off their neighbors, which is one reason everybody fears violence from others.   War used to be profitable, at least for the winners.  Not so much anymore.  Finally, there is a prosaic reason of habit. Many of us have lost the habit of using violent solutions.

I don't think violence or war will ever go away, but we have seen less of it.  I have never been a victim of serious violence. I felt it personally when Alex was a hate crime victim. This is the kind of senseless thing you cannot purge. His attackers didn't know him or try to rob him. They merely acted out of the dark demons of human nature. I saw war in Iraq and like many observers, I was stuck by the banality of violence.  I saw violence drop not because of persuasion but mostly because the Marines and our Iraqi allies established predictable order.

Violence and disorder always lurks under our veneer of civilization. The threat never is gone. We have to work  all the time to channel the primitive passions and animal desires.  I say "channel" not suppress. These impulses are sources of our energy and creativity.  The uncivilized human is not evil or sinful, as was widely thought in some religious circles, but neither is there any such thing as a noble savage.  Both these notions have caused great misery, as have the ideas that human behavior is determined by genetics or that humans are blank slates on to which society can stamp any design.

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. 

But if we recognize constraints, we can achieve better results. "Going back" to a more primitive society is not an option. It would add to misery. Life was nasty, brutish and short in earlier periods.  Going "forward" to a utopia is also not possible.  Life is actually pretty good for most people in our Western market democracies and it is getting better for those in the developing world. Maybe we will just have to manage with what we have.