Saturday, February 23, 2013
Monday, February 4, 2013
After a Long Day Walking in Colombo
Plant Design Online's photostream on Flickr.
We were out in the sun for too long after a delicious but late breakfast. Nothing to drink and swollen feet led to blisters and frustration. But many adventures taking in everything we could, reflected here in a few of the pictures I took.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Private and Public Life in Colombo
In this busy busy city we spend most of our time on the streets. So we get to have a feeling for the public life that takes place in front of everyone. From that maybe we can guess about the private life people have behind curtains, doors, or walls.
The public life is noisy and out there. Though we see women there are mostly men. Groups of men, men by themselves, men squatting in dirty sarongs, men in uniforms in front of guard posts, men hawking wares, young men walking in groups.
It's the tropics and many of the walls you see are rotting. We looked at housing yesterday that I guess was from the late '40s, about the time of independence. Maybe Soviet-inspired, maybe funded by the USSR. Pretty crowded and decrepit like the streets around them in Slave Island. A block away we saw an elephant in shackles, looking pretty sad, looking like it just tolerated the human being who was following it.
The public street is full of the sounds of horns, beeping, honking, sporadic, steady. And the sound of traffic, wheels careening around curves, trucks and buses jangling in the potholes. Behind the walls there is a kind of quiet, like behind the walls of our house, and family life takes place, women and children, who you don't see many of in downtown colombo. Nut you also see children being taught to beg, dirty children with bare feet, in contrast to the children of our hosts, quiet, obedient, studious.
Somehow the streets we've walked on seem to have less in the way of foods or wares to sell. So the feeling is distinct from Mexico, where it seems the streets are packed with merchandise. We haven't been to the Pettah though, where this kind of action is probably more apparent.
After a night spent mostly awake my mind isn'tworking too well this morning, so I'm not writing up to speed, but here are some good photos from yesterday!
The public life is noisy and out there. Though we see women there are mostly men. Groups of men, men by themselves, men squatting in dirty sarongs, men in uniforms in front of guard posts, men hawking wares, young men walking in groups.
It's the tropics and many of the walls you see are rotting. We looked at housing yesterday that I guess was from the late '40s, about the time of independence. Maybe Soviet-inspired, maybe funded by the USSR. Pretty crowded and decrepit like the streets around them in Slave Island. A block away we saw an elephant in shackles, looking pretty sad, looking like it just tolerated the human being who was following it.
The public street is full of the sounds of horns, beeping, honking, sporadic, steady. And the sound of traffic, wheels careening around curves, trucks and buses jangling in the potholes. Behind the walls there is a kind of quiet, like behind the walls of our house, and family life takes place, women and children, who you don't see many of in downtown colombo. Nut you also see children being taught to beg, dirty children with bare feet, in contrast to the children of our hosts, quiet, obedient, studious.
Somehow the streets we've walked on seem to have less in the way of foods or wares to sell. So the feeling is distinct from Mexico, where it seems the streets are packed with merchandise. We haven't been to the Pettah though, where this kind of action is probably more apparent.
After a night spent mostly awake my mind isn'tworking too well this morning, so I'm not writing up to speed, but here are some good photos from yesterday!
Colombo
Colombo is a city of the developing world. Every ethnicity and religion seems to be here and the evidence is seen in architecture. Hindu and Buddhist temples and shrines, mosques, and churches of every stripe are found around every corner. Buses, trucks, and tuk tuks spew smoke and particulates into the air, and everyone, rushing, is on their horn. That is the noise of the city.
Wide old waterways near the Fort Railway station and every sort of beggar, toothless, eyeless, limbless. Hawkers sell the Sri Lankan flag this weekend, independence weekend. It is hot and humid but there is a breeze. There are sidewalks intermingled with piles of sand and construction materials, ancient braided trees, rotting old concrete buildings.
We have breakfast in a coffee place designed in Southern California with a menu to match, every kind of latte and chai and coffee and tea on tap. A few blocks away the city's main park, a huge modern stadium, old museum buildings, families, and piles of construction materials inside and out. Last night we walked to the ocean as the sun was getting lower and reached a train station right on the water in a blighted part of town, a fire burning right outside an old marketplace, mostly men in sarongs, almost no women, but at one corner a business college filled with hopeful young people who want to be the commercial leaders of this place.
English is compulsory and it seems that all of the supposed 10% of Sri Lankans who speak English are here in colombo. We'll see as we travel farther afield. Hot as it is it seems we can't get enough liquids. The chaotic railway station, flies, fans, sweat, but we got the ticket or almost got the ticket we want for next week, a reserved seat on the Kandy-Badulla line through the mountains. First class and observation car tickets were sold out and the hosts we emailed ahead of time who nicely agreed to help never did.
We are staying on a quiet back street called Barnes place, an old English mansion built about a hundred years ago. The quiet here belies what's outside the gates and a block away, a vibrant, dirty, noisy, living city. We live in the so-called developed world. Subways, sidewalks, a certain crowd control are things we take for granted. Stop here to look at a temple and you attract someone with a sarong who tells you what fierce blue gods are depicted on its walls and asks for money for his storytelling. An elephant in shackles, tuk tuks stopping right in front of you telling you to jump inside, many police giving many tickets.
These few words don't do justice to all we've see in these 24 hours but they are a sampler of the things we've seen and done here in Colombo. Here's a picture of our portico and quiet garden.
Wide old waterways near the Fort Railway station and every sort of beggar, toothless, eyeless, limbless. Hawkers sell the Sri Lankan flag this weekend, independence weekend. It is hot and humid but there is a breeze. There are sidewalks intermingled with piles of sand and construction materials, ancient braided trees, rotting old concrete buildings.
We have breakfast in a coffee place designed in Southern California with a menu to match, every kind of latte and chai and coffee and tea on tap. A few blocks away the city's main park, a huge modern stadium, old museum buildings, families, and piles of construction materials inside and out. Last night we walked to the ocean as the sun was getting lower and reached a train station right on the water in a blighted part of town, a fire burning right outside an old marketplace, mostly men in sarongs, almost no women, but at one corner a business college filled with hopeful young people who want to be the commercial leaders of this place.
English is compulsory and it seems that all of the supposed 10% of Sri Lankans who speak English are here in colombo. We'll see as we travel farther afield. Hot as it is it seems we can't get enough liquids. The chaotic railway station, flies, fans, sweat, but we got the ticket or almost got the ticket we want for next week, a reserved seat on the Kandy-Badulla line through the mountains. First class and observation car tickets were sold out and the hosts we emailed ahead of time who nicely agreed to help never did.
We are staying on a quiet back street called Barnes place, an old English mansion built about a hundred years ago. The quiet here belies what's outside the gates and a block away, a vibrant, dirty, noisy, living city. We live in the so-called developed world. Subways, sidewalks, a certain crowd control are things we take for granted. Stop here to look at a temple and you attract someone with a sarong who tells you what fierce blue gods are depicted on its walls and asks for money for his storytelling. An elephant in shackles, tuk tuks stopping right in front of you telling you to jump inside, many police giving many tickets.
These few words don't do justice to all we've see in these 24 hours but they are a sampler of the things we've seen and done here in Colombo. Here's a picture of our portico and quiet garden.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Water and the Built Environment
Getting ready for an adventurous five-week trip to Sri Lanka where I will focus partially on water.
The island of Sri Lanka, best known for beaches and Buddhas, features a lesser-known geographical phenomenon. Since antiquity, thousands of reservoirs have dotted the landscape. The reservoirs, large man made lakes called wewas, were associated with irrigation, agriculture, and the development of civilizations on the island. These massive public works projects, rebuilt through the ages, are still in use today, often cheek-and-jowl with rice paddies, another landscape feature I hope to explore in detail.
From what I've read, wewas allowed the ancient Lankans to grow two crops a year in their tropical, seasonally dry climate. A relative abundance of food provided the basis for what is today one of the most densely populated countries on Earth. Doubtless the wewas played a role in the development of a governing hierarchy as well as religious and social complexity we see today in Sri Lanka. (I promise to take notes and lots of pictures for future posts. Right now I'm betting that my iPhone5 stays home).
All of this is incredibly cool but the Lankans weren't alone in massive waterworks projects. In other posts I've written about the amazing canals of Xoximilco, south of Mexico City, a paradise of human collaboration with microbes, animals and plants.
Farther north in what is today the Salt River Valley of greater Phoenix, Hohokam peoples developed massive reverse-flow water systems that allowed for three crops a year and supported a population of hundreds of thousands of people. Trade based on Hohokam agriculture spanned thousands of miles and spurred enormous cultural interactions.
One last example. The Nabateans, a poorly known, semi nomadic group who inhabited the Negev Desert in what is today Israel, utilized water catchment techniques that allowed agriculture in one of the world's driest regions. I saw an example this past summer of a similar technique, low tech but highly effective, at the Hopi Second Mesa in Arizona.
Water and water use is such an enormous issue in contemporary society. We depend on vast expenditures to maintain technologies that support human endeavors of every sort. Here in the United States we exert punishing pressure on water resources, emptying ancient aquifers, introducing toxins to our freshwater, and abetting disastrous salinization in freshwater ground tables hundreds of miles from the ocean.
Whether these water management strategies are sustainable will depend on how well they (and we) adapt to future changes and contingencies. As we look to past civilizations we can see that long-term sustainability is never a guarantee in any climate.
The island of Sri Lanka, best known for beaches and Buddhas, features a lesser-known geographical phenomenon. Since antiquity, thousands of reservoirs have dotted the landscape. The reservoirs, large man made lakes called wewas, were associated with irrigation, agriculture, and the development of civilizations on the island. These massive public works projects, rebuilt through the ages, are still in use today, often cheek-and-jowl with rice paddies, another landscape feature I hope to explore in detail.
From what I've read, wewas allowed the ancient Lankans to grow two crops a year in their tropical, seasonally dry climate. A relative abundance of food provided the basis for what is today one of the most densely populated countries on Earth. Doubtless the wewas played a role in the development of a governing hierarchy as well as religious and social complexity we see today in Sri Lanka. (I promise to take notes and lots of pictures for future posts. Right now I'm betting that my iPhone5 stays home).
All of this is incredibly cool but the Lankans weren't alone in massive waterworks projects. In other posts I've written about the amazing canals of Xoximilco, south of Mexico City, a paradise of human collaboration with microbes, animals and plants.
Farther north in what is today the Salt River Valley of greater Phoenix, Hohokam peoples developed massive reverse-flow water systems that allowed for three crops a year and supported a population of hundreds of thousands of people. Trade based on Hohokam agriculture spanned thousands of miles and spurred enormous cultural interactions.
One last example. The Nabateans, a poorly known, semi nomadic group who inhabited the Negev Desert in what is today Israel, utilized water catchment techniques that allowed agriculture in one of the world's driest regions. I saw an example this past summer of a similar technique, low tech but highly effective, at the Hopi Second Mesa in Arizona.
Water and water use is such an enormous issue in contemporary society. We depend on vast expenditures to maintain technologies that support human endeavors of every sort. Here in the United States we exert punishing pressure on water resources, emptying ancient aquifers, introducing toxins to our freshwater, and abetting disastrous salinization in freshwater ground tables hundreds of miles from the ocean.
Whether these water management strategies are sustainable will depend on how well they (and we) adapt to future changes and contingencies. As we look to past civilizations we can see that long-term sustainability is never a guarantee in any climate.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Urban Geography, Ecology, and Sustainability
Many years ago when I was an anthropology major in college ideas of urban ecology held great interest for me. I return to them now as a biologist, a sustainability consultant, and a lifelong city dweller. Urban ecology seems richer and more complex to me than it ever did. Where once I saw the urban landscape as a primarily social landscape, I see it now as a larger complex of realities both human and non-human that shape the world profoundly.
We can think about urban form as the streets, buildings, and open spaces of the city. But we can't separate these physical presences from the life of the city. Transportation, work, commerce, and play all go on in these "hardscape" spaces and play a mutual role in affecting, and being affected by them. So the urban landscape comprises both structures and the humans and their activities within.
But this framework still seems too simple. So much more is going on. The urban landscape is an open system that interacts with its environment. Light and heat energy, water, and movement all flow through the system. Tons of "stuff" are brought into the urban environment every day and they either stay or leave, sometimes in the same form and sometimes radically altered. Raw and finished materials, carbon dioxide, wastes of every conceivable sort move in and out of the city in a kind of steady-state flow that reminds me of cellular systems in living organisms. Art and ideas are also exported from the urban environment, less tangible but not immaterial.
In my blog "Botany Without Borders" I wrote about non-human life forms in the city. Everything from bacteria to algae, grasses, trees, and animals of every sort have a place in the incredibly complex urban web, all of them in close contact, sometimes intimate contact, with their human contemporaries. Urbanization has, in many ways, exerted a negative, simplifying effect on the larger ecosystem through paving, channeling, building, mining, and dumping. The changes are physical and chemical in nature, and have challenged once diverse lands and waterways. But inside the special ecosystem that is the urban space lies a unique, deep, well of diversity, unexpected perhaps, largely unseen, but powerful in that it influences the urban landscape in many ways we still may not understand.
As we continue to learn more about urban ecosystems the mutual influences inherent in these systems will come to make more sense. As my friend and colleague Margarita Iglesia states, sustainable things tend to stick around. Systems that are unsustainable disappear. So for example in fifty years we'll see with some clarity what the place of the personal automobile was in the urban setting. Our understanding of water use, energy consumption, and land use patterns will also come into better focus. How will issues of density, green space, and recycling be understood? And how will we reconcile urban form, especially in the broader geographical perspective, with global climate change?
We can think about urban form as the streets, buildings, and open spaces of the city. But we can't separate these physical presences from the life of the city. Transportation, work, commerce, and play all go on in these "hardscape" spaces and play a mutual role in affecting, and being affected by them. So the urban landscape comprises both structures and the humans and their activities within.
But this framework still seems too simple. So much more is going on. The urban landscape is an open system that interacts with its environment. Light and heat energy, water, and movement all flow through the system. Tons of "stuff" are brought into the urban environment every day and they either stay or leave, sometimes in the same form and sometimes radically altered. Raw and finished materials, carbon dioxide, wastes of every conceivable sort move in and out of the city in a kind of steady-state flow that reminds me of cellular systems in living organisms. Art and ideas are also exported from the urban environment, less tangible but not immaterial.
In my blog "Botany Without Borders" I wrote about non-human life forms in the city. Everything from bacteria to algae, grasses, trees, and animals of every sort have a place in the incredibly complex urban web, all of them in close contact, sometimes intimate contact, with their human contemporaries. Urbanization has, in many ways, exerted a negative, simplifying effect on the larger ecosystem through paving, channeling, building, mining, and dumping. The changes are physical and chemical in nature, and have challenged once diverse lands and waterways. But inside the special ecosystem that is the urban space lies a unique, deep, well of diversity, unexpected perhaps, largely unseen, but powerful in that it influences the urban landscape in many ways we still may not understand.
As we continue to learn more about urban ecosystems the mutual influences inherent in these systems will come to make more sense. As my friend and colleague Margarita Iglesia states, sustainable things tend to stick around. Systems that are unsustainable disappear. So for example in fifty years we'll see with some clarity what the place of the personal automobile was in the urban setting. Our understanding of water use, energy consumption, and land use patterns will also come into better focus. How will issues of density, green space, and recycling be understood? And how will we reconcile urban form, especially in the broader geographical perspective, with global climate change?
Friday, January 25, 2013
Obeying Your 3AM Thoughts
I was up at 3AM tossing and turning because I needed someone to fill a teaching position in the online program I coordinate. Specifically I needed a math person to rewrite and subsequently teach a course and everyone was turning up dead in the waters. Maybe it was the old syllabus I sent them, a strange mishmash of high school math and "practical" applications. Maybe they had better things to do, or thought they did, than get back to a colleague. It could be people were just being rude. Or...Sometimes people ask and ask for an opportunity and when you lay it out in front of them they get cold feet.
The one call back I was expecting last night didn't get back to me and with the weekend fast approaching and my effective working hours tick tick ticking away (we leave for Sri Lanka Thursday night) I was in a fix.
Nothing like the three o'clock hour (the devil's hour) to make you aware of your shortcomings in excruciating detail. Not a list maker, something unknown and unsensed in my head was etching an indelible to-do sequence in my mind as I laid in bed uncomfortable, dissatisfied, and panicky.
At 6AM the heat came on in the cold house. Down to 49 degrees. I got the baguette baking and the coffee brewing and sat down on the kitchen couch in what turns out to have been automatic pilot.
I started writing to all the people my fevered brain had noted in my half awake state in the middle of the night. Lois, Michael, John and others received super early-morning notes as I put out feelers to this second tier of people who in retrospect made more sense than the people I contacted in the first place.
All this had been instructed somehow in the middle of the night and I was acting according to program, not plan. I don't know how I concocted the list or what the logic was. And I don't know what made me get right to work on it first thing in the morning. I have to ask myself, was I still asleep?
By eight one of the people on my devil's hour list had gotten my note and responded immediately with"I accept!"
The one call back I was expecting last night didn't get back to me and with the weekend fast approaching and my effective working hours tick tick ticking away (we leave for Sri Lanka Thursday night) I was in a fix.
Nothing like the three o'clock hour (the devil's hour) to make you aware of your shortcomings in excruciating detail. Not a list maker, something unknown and unsensed in my head was etching an indelible to-do sequence in my mind as I laid in bed uncomfortable, dissatisfied, and panicky.
At 6AM the heat came on in the cold house. Down to 49 degrees. I got the baguette baking and the coffee brewing and sat down on the kitchen couch in what turns out to have been automatic pilot.
I started writing to all the people my fevered brain had noted in my half awake state in the middle of the night. Lois, Michael, John and others received super early-morning notes as I put out feelers to this second tier of people who in retrospect made more sense than the people I contacted in the first place.
All this had been instructed somehow in the middle of the night and I was acting according to program, not plan. I don't know how I concocted the list or what the logic was. And I don't know what made me get right to work on it first thing in the morning. I have to ask myself, was I still asleep?
By eight one of the people on my devil's hour list had gotten my note and responded immediately with"I accept!"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)