Araucaria in Brazil: Ancient Trees for the Future

Once, some 150 to 200 million years ago, Brazil was covered in Araucaria forests, and now only 2 % is left. Yet in the South of Brazil the Araucaria tree is playing a new role in reforestation of what was until recently pastureland mainly for cows. Along the roads, the Araucaria tree is being used as a soil stabilizer and as scout for newly colonizing forest vegetation and birds.  It is fascinating that one of the older species of trees is now being used in these new strategies of 'Agro-ecologia de Montanha'.

                                 petrified Araucaria cones from a long long time ago

You can see that this tree wanted to develop defenses against large herbivores such as the Argentino-Saurus living in the neighborhood and probably devouring everything in its way to sustain its 80 to 100 ton body. This is a nice example of what the Buddhist call "interdependent co-arising".

Not only are the 'leaves' sharp, the the actual trunk has also developed woody spikes to deter any easy munching. This is perhaps the reason why the tree is also known as the Monkey Puzzle tree -- even monkeys will have a hard time to scale this tree. Yet despite its obvious aggressive resistance to obliteration, this holdover from Jurassic times, is actually really generous.
Through its cones the Araucaria produces copious amounts of 'pinhao', kind of an edible pinion nut but about 5 times as big. This delicious and protein rich nut provides ample nutrition for animals and humans alike. If planted correctly ('up') with fresh pinhao, it will grow rapidly and is tolerant to high moisture conditions. This combo of aggressive defense and generousity has proven to be a worthy survival strategy for the Araucaria species --it is still around while the dinosaurs are long gone.
Within 20 years it will grow into a large tree, inviting so many other species to also colonize and inhabit a new area. Biodiversity is the key to survival.

Dear Readers,

Thank you for taking note of my writing. I cannot tell you what immeasurable pleasure it is to know that so many of you from all over the world are reading my work.

Today I am off to Brazil, and I will document as much as possible --I am bringing my camera. I hope to publish some from there as well. Please also see Vortex Politico forthe most complete update (also my political entries) at all times. There is a link to that in the right hand column on this page or you can click here.

To stay in close touch please consider being a follower of both blogs, you will be notified of new entries.

Salut,

Willem Malten

The New Tower of Babel (under construction)

There is a new monument being built in New Mexico that will be on par with the Taj Mahal, as the spokeswoman of NM senator Jeff Bingaman announced. It is called the CMRR and it will be coming to our neighborhood soon in so many ways...

This project, gone largely unnoticed by the public and national media, would require 24.000 cement trucks to careen up “the hill” (Los Alamos) to dump their precious and carbon intensive rare cement earth mixtures to erect a very specialized edifice of worship, able to withstand a magnitude 7 earthquake right under its footings. Or an incoming missile for that matter.

Though its secretive mission seems to be a mystery to all, yet in a kind of religious frenzy no talent nor sacrifice will be spared for its creation. The initial costs were estimated to be about 600 million, but that was just a start. After consultation with the ‘higher priesthood’ in Washington in concert with their corporate sponsors (Bechtel in particular) cost estimates have skyrocketed to about 4.5 billion going on 5 billion, outdating all previous NEPA studies and Environmental Impact Statements, -- and yet those costs may still just be a start. As of now that one LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratory) assembly is estimated to cost about 6 times the Golden Gate Bridge. Completion date is projected somewhere deep into the future -- opening not before 2022.

The exact role CMRR may play is veiled in the fog of Kafka-esque political maneuvering -- to hide its true purpose to commoners and nations alike. After all, it is meant to only serve a small elite of insiders, who can truly fathom the essence of its nihilistic Thanatos worship, and control its bitter fruits.

Once completed, the new building with the acronym CMRR (Chemistry Metallurgy Research Replacement ) will be a blunt boxed monstrosity devoid of any imagination. Though, as I mentioned, compared by the spokeswoman of senator Jeff Bingaman to the Taj Mahal, it will actually be a basic bunker about 10 times the size of a large supermarket or 270.000 sq. feet. Mostly this space is taken up by large vaults, utilities ( no less than 71.500 sq. feet of utilities) and walls, but there remains a small inner sanctum for the priesthood of nuclear weapon development. About 8% of the total foot print or 22.500 sq. feet will be dedicated to highly secretive plutonium laboratories.

This stark isolation is meant to provide a conducive environment for a new generation of weaponeers, who are encouraged to do their black magic, and visualize new strategic uses for new designer nuclear weapons..... smaller, with multiple warheads and more accurate targeting, new delivery systems, deeper penetrating, etc., etc..

The CMRR is rapidly becoming the bargaining chip for signing on to the CTBT (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty). What a terrible price to pay for a largely symbolic treaty, that already has been signed and endorsed by the chief executive branch (Clinton).

Obama’s solemn declarations about a nuclear free world in Prague will soon begin to sound hollow. This late spring, during a fresh round of the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) hearings at the UN in New York, representatives from all over will start hearing about the newly planned CMRR, the largest new investment in nuclear weapons worldwide. American citizens too will start to question how come, in this time of restraint for most ordinary citizens, this time of pressing priorities of job creation, global warming and green conversion, etc. etc.....how come, the Nuclear Weapon Laboratory (LANL) can count on a 22 % budget increase, primarily to fund the CMRR ? What is the logic?

Regardless the possibility of scaling down the quantities of weapons in the arsenal and regardless of the possible signing of the CTBT, the message that America sends with the construction of the CMRR is clear: the CMRR allows the production of new types of nuclear weapons through pit production of 80 up to a maximum capacity 200 per year. That is a clear message. The go-ahead of the CMRR building sends a strong signal about the depth of commitment the USA will have to a nuclear weapon future, where nuclear weapons will still be the very spear point of global super power. This is exactly what CMRR is intended to do militarily: spread fear and thus destabilize.

Locally for New Mexico, the enlarged and ever increasing scope and costs of the CMRR project requires a whole new NEPA study and environmental impact statement. New elements in the design have come forward that will impact the whole region, and haven’t been examined properly or not at all. The climatological impact of CMRR will likely involve certain environmental laws that prohibit its progress.

Any political and diplomatic advantage that may come from building down the nuclear arsenal to let’s say 311 nuclear warheads, as was recently proposed by some prominent US Air-force strategists would dissipate in light of the very existence and capacity of the CMRR facility. Building the CMRR would not just damage the reputation of Obama, it would damage the credibility of the US and its role in the world. Perhaps most importantly, it would damage a growing military chorus that wants to adopt a strategy of increased security through non-proliferation, and a de-emphasis of the role of nuclear weapons. CMRR is the opposite of that approach. It is the incarnation of everything that is wrong with continued proliferation and the societal detriment and sacrifice that it brings. This will be a church to the “Idol of Hubris".

There is a whole host of questions surrounding the CMRR project, but most importantly, its mission itself needs to be clarified.

The tower of Babel, was never completed because the builders became so confused about its purpose that they could no longer understand each other. They became scattered all over.

That, I predict to you, is the most likely fate of the CMRR. It will never be completed......

Silence in the Snow

I was standing on the roof of my bakery in Santa Fe as I saw a man approaching in the snow, dressed in a long black robe, a little black cap with a red cross embroidered on it. Long white beard, old, but obviously full of live/light. After I had descended from a narrow and long ladder, I learned that his name was Father Elias, living as a hermit of a Greek Orthodox Monastery in Northern New Mexico, south of Abiquiu lake.

He was collecting some of the day old Cloud Cliff bread, even monks go hungry these days...I gave him what was on hand, and then he asked me for a little bit of the sourdough 'mama' culture from which all the Cloud Cliff artisano nativo breads come forth. The sourdough culture is about 35 years old now, and it goes back to my own days living as a lay monk in the Tassajara Zen Monastery, the place where I started to understand bread baking. Without further thinking I gave him some of the sticky and moist live mother dough.

A few days later I started to worry. In a way, a 'self-made' healthy sourdough culture consisting of at least 5 different micro-organisms (some say it is more like a hundred or so), that lives on for many years (as long as it is nourished properly) is the most prized possession for a baker. Inadvertent destruction of the culture is nothing less than a disaster.

I wanted to make sure that my brief instructions for the care of the mother dough, the 'Levain', en francais, were clear enough, so I tried to call Father Elias, and when that was unsuccessful, I impulsively announced that I would make the trip up North and bring some supplies for baking bread, in particular rye, and of course, inspect the mother dough.

Shortly after I arrived at the tiny Greek Orthodox chapel --about 2 hours north of Santa Fe in an intimate New Mexican valley with a year round river, Indian ruins, cattle and forests -- it began snowing..... hard.
Meanwhile in the comfortable guest kitchen, Father Elias and Father Cristian, and myself were addressing the fine points of bread baking. In a glass jar, the sourdough mama seemed happy, bubbly and very alive. I had been worried for nothing.

My car couldn't make it out somehow -- it just went up a little ways on this frozen incline and then it would slide backwards, towards the monastery entrance. There were a few other distractions that I won't go into here, but to make a long story short.... I got stuck two days.

Over time I gathered all kinds of excuses.... to see some beautiful Greek Orthodox Icons and to find silence in the snow.

Coral: Bones of the Ocean

Stay Posted, I will do some entries about my experiences on the Heraclitus Explorer Ship in the Carribean soon.

I found some coral on an island beach (Mustique) and was fascinated by its structures. I took a series of photographs of the inner stuctures of coral with up to 200 times magnification.  Corals are the bones of the ocean:  they give shape to habitat for so many diverse species.....like trees...

Oh Oh, a lot of Morgellons here --whatever they may be... look for them on the close ups: they look like hairs, long fibrous strands of filament, sometimes black, sometimes white, or even rust colored. It is very unlikely that my samples here were contaminated by hairs --so what are they?
I found these filaments as well in the closeups of my mycelium and mushroom footage. Any ideas ? 
Let me know.

I used a rare track by Madredeus --enjoy!

Haiti on my Mind 2: The Future

--Re-establish flour mill in Haiti, owned by the people of Haiti (state)
--Establish local state bank (how ? all salaries first go into this bank) 
--Re-institute grain and rice growing and re-invest in rural infrastructure
--Study local and other Carribean island traditions. attain food self sufficiency within 5 years

--Re-vitalize local grain production, and bakery/tortilla processing locations, at least one per 75.000 people
--Impose tarrifs on imported foods which will provide the taxbase and stimulus for local growing.

--Start re-forestation programs, establish water catchments and 'condense rain' curtains in the      mountainous areas. Employment/school tree planting programs.
 --Form alliances on healthcare and energy with immediate neighbors, 
including Cuba (doctors) and Venezuela (cheap energy).

--Architecture: forget about concrete, whether imported or local, from now on, start growing building    materials. Bamboo is relatively quick.

--Introduce technologies for solar cooking and pv decentralized energy production.
--Establish a government of the people, for the people, by the people

Pressure other governments, the French and US in particular, for some kind of historical reparations that can then be used in large scale environmental improvement and economic self sustainability. Resist further economic colonization.

Of course nothing can happen until the immediate suffering is alleviated. Our thoughts are with the doctors, the nurses, the Hatian people..... and all the ones that are distributing food and hauling water.....hats off.....

Haiti on my Mind

"It's not culture or curse, but a difficult history of occupation 

and environmental degradation that explain the country's woes".

woman 'baking' mud cookies to still the sense of hunger...this practice has been happening for a long time already

Haiti is on my mind.....in so many ways it is a test for our civilization. Are we still able to 'put things back together?'
The history of colonial dominance shows itself now even in the approach to so-called assistance. Never looked assistance so much like an invasion with soldiers.... carrying the guns but unable to "deliver the gauze", as one  Haitian doctor said.
The desperate but non-violent Haitians are being thrown bread from helicopters. They feel humiliated once more. Many are going hungry now. No search and rescue equipment was delivered to the communities, let alone doctors, anesthesia and such. Bare hands are not enough to remove tons of concrete, bare hands are not enough to amputate limbs. The stench of death must be unbearable by now.

Once the dust of the concrete settles, which may take a long time, it will be time to take a hard look at Haiti's history, and try to understand how it became so vulnerable and so poor starting with the land itself: when you look up Haiti and the Dominican Republic on Google Earth, the first thing that strikes you is the border: On the West side, Haiti is brown mostly(=desertification) while the East of the island the Dominican republic is green (=trees). Why is this ?

Kim Ives, who writes for Haiti Liberte, sums up Haiti's history with brevety and insight:  


"We can say, first of all, there was the case of the two coups d’états held in the space of thirteen years, in ’91 and 2004, which were backed by the United States. They put in their own client regimes, which the Haitian people chased out of power. But these coups d’états and subsequent occupations, foreign military occupations, in a country whose constitution forbids that, were fundamentally destructive, not just to the national government and its national programs, but also to the local governments or the parliaments, the mayors’ offices and also the local assemblies, which would elect a permanent electoral council. That permanent electoral council has never been made—it’s a provisional—and hence Préval, and just before the earthquake, was running roughshod over popular democracy by putting his own electoral council in place, provisional, and they were bringing him and his party to domination of the political scene.
And Aristide, in both cases, was taken from Haiti, essentially by US forces, both times. The first time he ended up spending it in Washington, but now he’s presently in South Africa, where he’s been for these past six years.

But along with this political—these political earthquakes carried out by Washington were the economic earthquakes, the US policy that they wanted to see in place, because Aristide’s government had a fundamentally nationalist orientation, which was looking to build the national self-sufficiency of the country, but Washington would have none of it. They wanted the nine principal state publicly owned industries privatized, to be sold to US and foreign investors.

So, about twelve years ago under the first administration of René Préval, they privatized the Minoterie d’Haiti and Ciment d’Haiti, the flour mill, the state flour mill, and the state cement company. Now, for flour, obviously, you have a hungry, needy population. You can imagine if the state had a robust flour mill where it could distribute flour to the people so they could have bread. That was sold to a company of which Henry Kissinger was a board member. And very quickly, that flour mill was closed. Haiti now has no flour mill, not private or public." 

Closing the local flour mill...?? As a baker I am of course appalled....but...what a masterful capitalist move --truly worthy of Kissinger's international insight and statesmanship. Of course it forced the Haitians to buy flour from overseas (guess where & from whom?) and destroyed the local market for grains and farming. This story is happening all over the world now and it is leading to hunger and unbearable conditions. Then when globalization has taken foothold and infected the nation,  food-prices go up and the countries such as Haiti have become totally dependent and thus vulnerable to further disempowerment. Even leading to slavery conditions.

The empire behaves most despicable in the face of the powerless. I guess that is the worst consequence of a culture of torture, war and meaningless violence. A culture of torture and violent mind programming disables people (and possibly  whole new generations) to respond in an appropriate manner to emergencies. People call for bread --governments will deliver bullets --it is that dysfunctional.


Just as happens elsewhere, the Haitian peasant majority was the first casualty of globalization.

 The heart of the problem of course is a type of 'agricultural' shock doctrine (to apply Naomi Klein's thoughts): First one undermines the rural economy, by offering cheap imports of large quantities of staples. Then, as the local economy weakens, try to destroy local infrastructure and resources, such as mills, bakeries, storehouses, etc. Give emergency handouts of food aid, so that local farming looses incentive......etc. Such destruction of a vital agricultural community and economy, also leads to a movement of populations to the cities ("where the food is")  for work --of course leading to cheap labor conditions.
Now when you look at what Bill Moyers says the whole economic picture becomes clear:

Every president from Ronald Reagan forward has embraced the corporate search for cheap labor. That has meant rewards for Haiti's upper class while ordinary people were pushed further and further into squalor. Haitian contractors producing Mickey Mouse and Pocahontas pajamas for American companies under license with the Walt Disney Company paid their sweat shop workers as little as one dollar a day, while women sewing dresses for K-Mart earned eleven cents an hour. A report by the National Labor Committee found Haitian women who had worked 50 days straight, up to 70 hours a week, without a day off. If that doesn't impact the tradition of child rearing and lead to social distrust, I don't know what will.

for more: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01222010/watch3.html

This is what happened to Haiti. Plus the wrath of nature in the form of 4 mayor Hurricanes.

We need to stay involved with the fate of the Haitian people. This earthquake may provide new opportunities for corporate colonialism --we need to help our Haitian brothers and sisters to resist. 

The shock policies are  similar all over the world: corporatize food production, start increasing prices by introducing scarcity and privatize water. It is happening in your community too.

The kind of massing of  poor people in this case to Port-au-Prince, with disregard of their self sufficiency and food security, an urban/rural nexus imbalance, and a warehousing the Haitian people in shoddy concrete  (imported by now as well) construction,  have  sadly contributed to the enormous losses of live and tragic injuries. Many urban Haitians now are returning to a totally impoverished country side: even though there is hardly any food left there either, it is better there than trying to stick it out in the capital Port-au-Prince, where the most basic conditions for survival are now collapsing.

Even now people are dying from hunger or infections associated with gangrene, a poisoning of a patient through the lack antibiotic or surgical treatment of crushed bones. I hear that more than 7 thousand American Nurses have signed up to volunteer in Haiti, yet the National Nurses United, a national union, has not been able to get through to the White House in order to prioritize them and arrange (likely military) transportation. What is wrong with this picture ? (listen to Michael Moore) 

To all of you who are out there on the line trying to make a real difference in Haiti. 

History is about people like you and the people you are serving.

As usual the best quick current education on Haiti comes from Amy Goodman and Democracy Now. Here are some links

On the situation, militarization, realities and history of Haiti: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/20/journalist_kim_ives_on_how_decades

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/22/security_red_zones_in_haiti_preventing

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/22/t_trembl_journey_to_the_epicenter