travel
Madonna and Child, with Climate Change
02/08/10 09:02
This is a story about what fear for the climate of the future looks like, on a personal level. I usually try to be optimistic in these entries. This one is less so.
We had been touring the eastern plateau in Qinghai province, western China, for over a week, slowly making our way up to the headwaters of the Mekong river. Each day was sunny and clear, but every evening clouds would gather rapidly. A wall of blustery rain would approach, pushing us to set up our little tents quickly under cover and have a wet meal under plastic.
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We had been touring the eastern plateau in Qinghai province, western China, for over a week, slowly making our way up to the headwaters of the Mekong river. Each day was sunny and clear, but every evening clouds would gather rapidly. A wall of blustery rain would approach, pushing us to set up our little tents quickly under cover and have a wet meal under plastic.
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The Bright Red Line of Faith
19/05/10 16:16
South Asian rivers experience the best and worst of treatment. The Ganges river — also called Ganga or Ganga Ma (Mother Ganges) — is treated like a sacred body, even a person or god, by hundreds of millions of people. Her many tributaries and branches are part of a sacred continuum spanning between the Himalayas and the Indian ocean. This year, there is a great mela in Varanasi, India, a mass event relishing the river that will involve hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who come to wash the sins of their current and previous lives away. Melas occur every twelve years, and they are widely described as the largest peaceful gathering of humans on the planet. In many towns and villages along the Ganga, you see ghats, which are steps going down to the water for bathing. Many people also hope to bring the ashes of their relatives to the river so they have find absolution and release. Several times I’ve seen funeral pyres on the banks of the Ganges or, during the dry, in the dry riverbed. The faithful depths of the Ganges are inspiring, even for those weak in faith.
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A month of War and Peace
21/03/10 08:48
I’m always a mess on the flight home, but I thought this was a unique, solitary experience until today (or whatever 20 hours ago is in the context of a three-continent plane ride). The lesson came in a taxi on the way to the sprawling Delhi international terminal, my mobile rang — my hydrological colleague who was in Guatemala was calling. He was in a cab as well, also headed to an airport on the way home. If I have a brother in water, it must be B.
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Arrivals: The Beginning of Copenhagen
07/12/09 00:04
My first morning in Copenhagen, and I haven’t yet seen the light. Most of our delegation is staying in a hostel that a reviewer wondered if this is what a prison might look like if it had been designed by Ikea. It’s actually not that bad — I’ve stayed in much worse. And the beginning of a long stay in any place far from home always focuses on securing essentials and dealing with practicalities: unpacking, making sure you have the right plugs for your electronics, and laundry. Read More...
John in the Tank
13/07/09 09:40
The Reef Tank blog has just published a brief interview with me about my background and work. Read More...
New! Video blog entries
08/07/09 15:43
I’ve started teaching a distance learning course with Dr. Bruce Dugger at Oregon State University on wetlands. Read More...
Silent Gaps
31/03/09 05:37
I’ve been accused of having a glamorous job several times, but twice in the past six months I’ve felt what must be the worst fear of a traveler: news of the serious illness or injury of someone close when you are far from home. Last October, I was in Delhi. I was on a six-week jaunt across east and south Asia, no longer than a few days in any one place, traveling alone, focused on specific goals for each place, managing emails despite intermittent internet access, and keeping my next flight prominently in mind. On such trips, “time off” is usually little more than laying in bed in the few minutes before sleep with a book, but I had never been to Old Delhi despite three trips to the new city in the past year; I had scheduled a rare free day.
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Elevator Stories: Moving Up at the World Bank
05/04/09 09:35
There are three major global water-related meetings: the World Bank’s Water Week every February, World Water Week in Stockholm every August, and the World Water Forum, which occurs every three years (and is discussed in another recent entry). Last February, I was invited to speak about some work I was leading for a team at the Bank’s Water Week. Water Week occurs in Washington, DC, where the World Bank’s global headquarters is located. The World Bank was founded after World War II at the Bretton Woods Conference along with the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund to promote equitable economic development. Water is a critical element in the Bank’s strategy: reliable and sustainable water use and infrastructure development are critical to development in most (all?) parts of the world, so the Bank advises on and funds projects such as dams, irrigation programs, and even habitat restoration. But the World Bank is not a normal place to be for a conservation biologist. Either from the Bank’s perspective or from the biologist’s. We don’t really go to the same kinds of parties. Read More...
Dashing Among the Eco Stars
12/10/08 16:02
I just returned from the World Conservation Congress (or IUCN, as it is also known) in Barcelona, Spain. There is clearly a circuit of these international conservation and development meetings, with a set of individuals who travel from one meeting to the next. Sadly, I am now in this group. Walking around, recognized many faces from other recent, previous meetings, such as the Stockholm World Water Week (described in Meet the Banks and Meet the Press). Strangely, a few people even recognized me. There is a small hierarchy of what I can only assume are professional conference-goers. And in this hierarchy, there are the Eco Stars: those people known to all, who exist as Names and Contacts. Read More...
Only Two Pages
12/10/08 06:38
After 15 hours on planes and in airports, I was finally back in Oregon. The descent was beautiful: deep forests, snow already covering some of the higher mountains, a smoking volcano. We landed and passed quickly into Homeland Security’s border control area. The line was gracefully short. Within 15 minutes, my passport had been stamped, gratuitous questions asked, and I was through and on my way to customs. Normally, I rarely look at my passport, but for some reason I did this time. Read More...
Dead Time in the Aeroporto
01/09/08 12:57
I’ve heard for years about the “coffin hotels” of Japanese airports: you rent a tiny room in a hotel inside of a terminal in places like Tokyo. Most of the businessmen using these are between long-haul flights. Apparently Brazil’s Sao Paolo has something similar since I’ve checked in. The hotel charges by the hour (five hours comes to about the price of a regular hotel room). Read More...
Meet the Press
23/08/08 05:12
World Water Week in Stockholm is very policy oriented. This year, much of the focus was on sanitation, but two days were spent in a series of linked symposia on water and climate. Talks ranged from more details on emerging climate impacts with the IPCC’s new technical report on water and climate to regional and local adaptation strategies and tactics. Easily two of the most novel experiences for me as a scientist were interacting with the press as an “adaptation expert” and holding some introductory climate adaptation conversations with two international development banks. I’ll write more about the banks later, but the media interaction was a good if difficult experience. Read More...
Water, North and South
23/08/08 05:08
Roughly 30 hours ago, I was rushing to the Stockholm airport. As I boarded the plane, I passed a small window used when guiding the walkway between the plane and the gate. A little sign a few feet in front of the nose of the plane stated the airport name, the city, and the latitude and longitude. Fifty-nine degrees north latitude, I thought. That’s the farthest north I’ve ever stood, at least on the ground. Then I laughed: this flight would carry me in 10 hours to Chicago, where I’d catch an 11-hour flight to Sao Paolo, Brazil, and then a last plane headed to the southwest for two hours to Cuiaba, Brazil, near the Bolivian border. From there, I drive straight south several hours to roughly 25 degrees south latitude, the southern-most point of my life. In basically a day and a half, I’d be spanning 85 degrees of latitude and pushing the extremities of my experience.But the contrasts were not merely of hemisphere and geography. My time in Stockholm was largely spent at a 2,500-person conference where water was only visible on PowerPoint slides and drinking fountains, while the Pantanal is a wetland the size of England and Scotland filled with jaguars, hyacinth macaws, and capybaras. The night sky is bright with stars and is one of the few places with essentially no planes visible in the sky. It has a great deal of water and very few people. Read More...
Devonian Time
25/07/08 12:20
The first modern geological map was pieced together early in the nineteenth century in England by William Smith almost single-handed. He also helped standardize some of the terms we use to describe geological periods, which is why some of these refer to parts of the English countryside. But in late July, I found myself in the country of Devon, thinking of Devonian time in a way that was quite different from the geological use of Devonian as I attended a countryside getaway with some friends and their network of acquaintences. Read More...
The Legacy of Empires
25/07/08 12:19
The farthest east I’ve traveled in Europe before visiting Vienna was the Czech Republic, a country with a historic orientation to the west for the most part. That was a long time ago, however — 1996. On that same trip, I also visited Berlin, a place once isolated as an island of east-looking Germans. Even so, Berlin never felt like it was in the east. Perhaps in current language, Berlin was a kind of Forward Operating Base in the Cold War. In Bavaria, both Munich and Passau felt close to the east, but again the connection seemed pretty weak. Like Berlin, the east felt like more a threat than a source of ideas, oppportunities, or culture. Vienna is completely different. Vienna looks hard to the rising sun, facing downstream and east. I sense that it still thinks of itself as the capitol of the Balkans, though dressed in the latest fashions and carrying a world-weary sense of empire. Read More...
Great Circles: My Big Night Out & Up
02/07/08 08:27
Last April, I was in India for about a week, wandering between the Delhi and the foothills of the Himalayas with some colleagues, taking overnight second-class sleeping car train rides and long rural cab trips. But my schedule was pressing and I needed to complete some work in Delhi with some colleagues there before I returned west a day earlier than the rest of my colleagues. And I left the hill town of Mussouri and took a frightening little plane ride back to the great metropolis is Delhi. Thus began one of the strangest of my travel experiences so far. Read More...
UPDATE: Kids and Climate Paranoia
22/08/08 11:40
UPDATE: You can see a short video of these kids from the week as described below. A marketing piece, but a very nice one.
Originally posted: 25 June 2008
I’m old enough that I was among the last generation to grow up with serious, warranted nightmares about massive nuclear exchanges between the U.S. and Soviet Union. I can remember being about six or seven and first learning about total nuclear annihilation; I had nightmares for a while, and I felt a consistent sense of fear and unease, certainly well into Bush 41’s presidency. I never had to deal with duck and cover drills like the generation before me, but I always felt aware of this potential doom, which felt completely out of my hands. The undercurrent of that time is hard to explain to people who haven’t lived through it.
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Originally posted: 25 June 2008
I’m old enough that I was among the last generation to grow up with serious, warranted nightmares about massive nuclear exchanges between the U.S. and Soviet Union. I can remember being about six or seven and first learning about total nuclear annihilation; I had nightmares for a while, and I felt a consistent sense of fear and unease, certainly well into Bush 41’s presidency. I never had to deal with duck and cover drills like the generation before me, but I always felt aware of this potential doom, which felt completely out of my hands. The undercurrent of that time is hard to explain to people who haven’t lived through it.
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Skymilestones
16/06/08 13:01
Sometime in the past six weeks or so I passed 100,000 flight miles (160,000 km) since I started this position. Read More...
Adventures in Cabbing
13/06/08 11:36
DC is very hot this week — it was 97 degrees F when I landed on Monday, and yesterday was much hotter. And very humid. On landing, I needed to get to my B & B quickly and decided to opt for a cab. Taxis are a little out of favor in the climate change world, especially in cities with a decent mass transit system like DC. But I didn’t see an alternative. Popping out of the terminal, I took the first cab in line. The small man in the front seat turned to me and said in a thick accent, Hello. Where are you going? Seventeenth and Lanier, near Adams-Morgan, I said. Where’s that? I leaned back, suddenly very hot and very tired.
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The 32-Year DC Zoo Review
11/06/08 04:35
I can remember 1976 vividly. I was eight, it was the country’s bicentennial, and my family took a big driving trip from Texas to Washington, DC, that summer in our new Toyota wagon.
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Another Shot in the Arm
11/06/08 03:37
Well, the travel clinic nurse said as I rolled my sleeve back up. There’s not much else I can give you any more. You’re a walking advertisement for immunizations.
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Banker's Hours
20/05/08 07:46
I'm just back from a rapid trip to meet with my funding sources in the western burbs of Chicago. Funding has always been a concern in the worlds of conservation and science, since neither area normally has direct services or products that people with money are willing to purchase on their own merits. At best we are investments with uncertain returns. More often we are some combination of guilt, ethical action, and provide an association with behaviors and people that are deemed virtuous. On this trip, however, I was struck by the personal transformations that many of this sponsor's employees have gone through as a result of the association of this company with three non-profits (including the one employing me) and one government-affiliated research institution. Read More...
Great Circles
15/06/08 18:50
On my last big trip outside of the U.S. I hit the England and India. Six weeks later is my first chance to write a little about the many adventures of this trip. Read More...
Bracing Myself
09/04/08 17:59
I'm reasonably tall — 6'2" (1.83 m), with mostly a normal-sized torso but freakishly long legs. Normally I don't think about this very much, but preparing for a series of long flights always brings the long legs into prominence. The trips next week include one flight across North America, then across the Atlantic (all in one day), and then two days later another flight across Eurasia to Delhi. That one will be the killer. The way back will be even worse, reversing the steps without any long layovers to stretch out. No doubt I will be shorter and crippled by my return. Read More...
The Round Tables
09/04/08 15:56
Perhaps my favorite anecdote about China is the prevalence of round tables in restaurants. I almost never saw square tables, and I quickly learned upon entering a room -- even for a relatively casual meal — to turn to a ranking Chinese colleague and ask, Where do you want me to sit?
Almost invariably we were seated in private rooms with our own set of dedicated serving staff. A rotating lazy susan sat in the middle of each table. All of these features are quite different than in the West, of course. But the seating rank was perhaps the surprising element. Asking where to sit was important because these seating positions are carefully ranked. Some restaurants even had numbers at the seats, and two very nice private dining rooms actually had a small LED screen in front of each chair that could be recalibrated for groups that were smaller than the total number of seats available.
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Almost invariably we were seated in private rooms with our own set of dedicated serving staff. A rotating lazy susan sat in the middle of each table. All of these features are quite different than in the West, of course. But the seating rank was perhaps the surprising element. Asking where to sit was important because these seating positions are carefully ranked. Some restaurants even had numbers at the seats, and two very nice private dining rooms actually had a small LED screen in front of each chair that could be recalibrated for groups that were smaller than the total number of seats available.
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Leaving, on a Jet Plane
06/04/08 10:57
I leave for the UK and India a week from today, flying about two-thirds of the distance around the planet to work on two rivers: the Thames in Britain and Ganga (the Ganges in most of the rest of the world) on the Indian subcontinent. Much of what I’ll be doing in both places is just listening – hearing what experts in each of these basins are afraid of, what they hope for, what seems likely to happen, what is happening. Listening is good work, and comforting too. And it is very good to know and see people who really “know” things. Read More...
