So, after a short two months, this will be my last post from Nepal. Man, how the time flies when you get into a routine.  I’m getting increasingly excited to get out of here and back to the developed world, to good, safe food, to my own house, to walking around shirtless, to the freedom of driving a car, to good mexican food, to A FAST INTERNET CONNECTION, to friends and family, to american women, and to kickass microbrews.

And yet, I’m also hesitant to go.

I’ll miss these incessantly fascinating days, where something completely brand new happens every day and leaving my apartment to bike to work is like stepping into an entirely different universe.  Riding that shitty Indian cruiser through pitch black streets at night with only other headlights to give me the slightest idea how to navigate around the potholes. The spectacular view from my roof that sometimes shows me glimpses of the Himalayas at sunset and is an awesome place to just watch the heartbeat of the city, cars, bikes, and people moving in a thousand different directions.  The incessant laughter, motorcycle rides, and visits to temples with my Newari friend.  The hidden ancient temples, Buddha statues, and intricate wood carved buildings hiding in the most random corners of this haphazardly developed city.  The absolutely dwarfing presence of more than 20,000 ft peaks, and the far too kind Nepali people.

I’ll miss this country; it has been good to me.

So, thanks for following along and listening to my rants, all 20 of you.  Since I’ve got such an enormous following, in all likelihood this blogging experiment will end, at least temporarily, here and now.  Hope you’ve enjoyed.  So long, farewell, alvetersain, ciao, adios, arevoir, namasteeeeeeeee.

I just can’t. I…I’m speechless.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/scahill

I don’t think I’ve ever seethed with this kind of rage at the actions taken on behalf of my country.  It wasn’t bad enough that a preemptive war has shredded to pieces the lives of so many in the middle east and back home.  Now we have to hear that it literally was being fought as an “anti-muslim” crusade by the most corrupt, murderous company in the history of the United States.  I always knew there was something sketchy about this guy and his company, Blackwater, the most obvious being the recent name change to Xe after events in 2007 that finally led Iraqis to kick the entire organization out of the country, but this goes above and beyond my wildest imagination.  I have no words, I just can’t fathom how one gets to this mindset.  If there is evil in the world, Erik Prince is the purest embodiment of it.

Some choice quotes:

Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe”

“Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.”

“Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince’s executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to “lay Hajiis out on cardboard.”

“Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince’s employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as “ragheads” or “hajiis.”

“some Blackwater officials overseas refused to deploy “unfit men” and sent them back to the US. Among the reasons cited by Doe #2 were “the men making statements about wanting to deploy to Iraq to ‘kill ragheads’ or achieve ‘kills’ or ‘body counts,’” as well as “excessive drinking” and “steroid use.  However, when the men returned to the US, according to Doe #2, “Prince and his executives would send them back to be deployed in Iraq with an express instruction to the concerned employees located overseas that they needed to ‘stop costing the company money.’”

“Prince “obtained illegal ammunition from an American company called LeMas. This company sold ammunition designed to explode after penetrating within the human body. Mr. Prince’s employees repeatedly used this illegal ammunition in Iraq to inflict maximum damage on Iraqis.”

“…it appears that Mr. Prince and his employees murdered, or had murdered, one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information, to the federal authorities about the ongoing criminal conduct.”

And to top it all off, the man was profiting on smuggling illegal weapons into Iraq, like “sawed off shotguns with silencers.”  Awesome.  And people don’t understand where all this “jihad” and middle eastern anger at the west comes from.  Put yourself in the shoes of a family member of a random Iraqi civilian mowed down by one of these roided out assholes, calling you racist names, disposing of your loved ones like it was fun, to increase his “body count.”

I’m so ashamed. I just…this can’t be how the world really is.  Every once in a while, when I vacillate back toward that more centrist view that’s willing to give people in power the benefit of the doubt, that their intentions are coming from a good place, something like this just slaps me in the face so damn hard, demolishing what little idealism I have left.  I don’t know how to respond, don’t know how to continue some piddly fight against forces so far beyond my control.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower in his final speech as President, 1961.

http://www.theawl.com/2009/07/the-rape-of-africa-designed-in-california-made-in-china

I tend to agree with the closing paragraph:

“The thing is, I’m not going to suggest that you can somehow make personal decisions that would have an impact—such thinking is fallacious, if comforting. Because even as information technology abounds, informed decisions seem harder to come by. “Awareness” proves at best a form of rationalizing behavior on the individual level that in the aggregate remains tragic. Americans and Congolese alike are so tightly woven into the fabric of global capitalism, there’s no real choice but complicity.”

Just got back from a feild visit to the middle hills yesterday.  I’m trying to bust ass to get this report done, so I’ve just attached a chunk of an email sent to a friend about the experience.

“…It was definitely the boonies out there, people living in straw roofed huts, no electricity, sometimes an outhouse, though only where the red cross has paid for them.  Everything was super isolated, where towns are 2-5 hours walk over slippery trails (I bailed constantly on the way down, like I’d been drinking nail polish remover), and intermittent downpours and huge landslides are frequent.  The first five days or so were crazy, walking from town to town and over terraced rice fields, talking to the locals about their lives, why shits so undeveloped, how dependent they are on the land, how bad of a problem food security is.  These are people that make way less than a dollar a day.

It was a strange, mind f*** trip of a time.  The clouds were socked in a lot, with sight distance like 50 feet.  I’d just see little kids scamper off into the abyss.  It made everything so eerie, and over the last few days started to seep into my brain.  But the first 5 days were great, having hilarious conversations with this guy who was my guide that worked for a tiny WWF office out there.  I always wonder how different people’s personalities are in their own language than how they come across when they dont speak the best english.  It’s like Akiko’s (un)intentional hilarity just because of the english phrases she uses.

The third day out, we were way down the hill at this local chairperson’s house at like 2 in the afternoon, and he was hell bent on making us stay the night at his house, which I would have done, but feeling a major bout of the shits coming on after a glass of straight from the teet buffalo milk (sour, tastes like buttermilk), and not wanting to sleep in the dirt, however hospitable it may have been, we trudged it uphill and after about an hour, it just started to dump.  I had an umbrella for the first time in my life, which was great, but it was raining so hard everything still got wet, and then the leeches, those sneaky little bastards, came out.  Theyre such f*****s, they inch their way, like worms in cartoons, up your shoes and through your socks without you even noticing.  Every 100 yards, thered be 10 new ones buried in my shoes.  I thought I’d been doing a good job of picking them off, but when we stopped at the top of the hill and I took off my shoes after about 2 and a half hours of hiking, to my surprise there were like 5 on each foot, including one massive f*****r that had been there so long, it had grown huge from all of my blood.  I ripped it off and threw it, and then a chicken walked over and ate it.  AKJDFKLAJF!!LFJFDJ!, jesus it still gives me the shivers.

So after battling the shits and the chills for a day or so, I hoofed it back to the airport, where I was supposed to catch a flight the next day.  Of course, it was canceled.  This went on for three days straight until finally I got an opening today.  It was such an emotional roller coaster because I wouldn’t hear if it was canceled or not until the last minute, after getting all of my shit together and my hopes up that I was finally getting out of podunkville.  I couldn’t go hiking around either, because I’d have to wait until 11 or 12 to hear if it was canceled or not.  As stir crazy as I was, I think you would have gone insane.  On the plus side, it was at least a little nicer near the airport and the setting was gorgeous, when the clouds didn’t make sight visibility next to nothing.

Oh yeah, also, everyone stared at me ALL THE TIME LIKE IT WAS A CONTEST BETWEEN US.  Seriously, straight through to the back of my head until I looked away, never them.  I know it was just curiosity at having never seen something so handsome, but after a while, it started to make me way too self-conscious.  I never thought I’d know exactly what it feels like to be a really hot chick, but now I understand completely.”

Officially 20 days left in Nepal, and I’m finally starting to get my head wrapped around the ridiculous complexities of this country.  I just got out of a meeting with two of the most cynical phds (even more than I am) that have spent 25 years working on natural resource issues in Nepal, that finally gave me a more accurate picture of how truly fubar everything is here.  This is how I see it:

After a 10 year civil war where 13,000 people were killed, two thirds by national army soldiers and the rest by the Maoists, a peace agreement was finally brokered by the UN, which would oversee Maoist arms control, between a 7 party alliance of democratic leaders formed in India, and a coalition of the diverse communist movement.  In the three years since, Maoists continue to perpetrate violence through armed youth groups, which the opposing democratic parties have themselves formed in response so that they’re on equal ground, leading to random beatings, stabbings, and killings both amongst the different youth groups and on random more well off citizens.  Small arms are everywhere, the peace process is hanging by a thread, the UN is widely in disrepute, and the current democractically elected government has 10 months to create a constitution out of thin air.

In one recent incident that continues to baffle me, two local student groups representing different political parties, which themselves are affiliated with different contracting companies, broke out into violence against one another, including burning furniture and shootings in an all out melee, all over which contracting company would receive the bid for a new chemistry building on campus.  This one incident is unfortunately a microcosm of how this city and country tends to devolve into chaos.

Not too long ago, two youths were beaten to death by an angry mob after rivals started spreading word that they were kidnappers.  A mob quickly developed and before the cops could even try to intervene, two teenagers, friends for life and completely innocent of any crime, were dead.  It is absolutely shocking to see the mob mentality break out fairly often in this city, with people having no sense of justice or trust of their fellow man, and apparently no qualms about beating people to death, regardless of the spurious claims.  It gives you a frightening sense of the effectiveness of the police force and the rule of law, which ultimately is responsible for the mob fear that lead to the mob violence.  Everyone is on edge about kidnappings because they are becoming an increasingly easy way to make a lot of money, where more well off families are targeted with both men and women held for ransom, as if it were Afghanistan or Iraq (the difference being that foreigners are not being targeted, so I’m cool, no worries).

Party politics only inflame most situations and have become an endemic part of all aspects of day to day society, with various affiliations between the hundreds of ethnic groups creating strikes and traffic jams that shut down major roads for hours at a time because they have become the only method to which the severely weak, corrupt, infighting, and inefficient national government will respond, which only serves to legitimize the action as an effective tool for redress.

Almost all government employees are severely under paid to such an extent that they cant afford to send their children to good schools, which are costly in Nepal because free public education is so terrible and only lasts through 6th grade.  This of course leads to petty corruption because people grab whatever they can whenever they can, just to make sure their kids get a good education, and it’s not just a few bad seeds.  95% of departments are corrupt, making it extremely difficult to take a stand because you’d just lose your job in some quixotic quest for an unattainable moral high ground.

Also because of the extremely low salaries, resource managers with good engineering degrees from western style universities are constantly on leave for years at a time to go work in Afghanistan, Qatar, Malaysia, or anywhere else where they make much more than they do working for Nepal.  This, of course, means that their work in Nepal is deficient and basic departmental priorities are not met.  But even if they didnt take so much time off to go make money to survive and send their kids to college, they’d still face a daunting institutional framework in Nepal, where national development plans are implemented at a snails pace, projects wont get off the ground because construction companies refuse to work in Maoist controlled areas for fear of their lives and the high costs of extortion, and there are new ministries and departments with different mandates popping up all the time.  Just last week, the Ministry of Water Resources split into two, so that the 7 Party Coalition could appease some ancient recycled politicians.

On top of it all is the worsening state of the environment due to a variety of factors, including mass migration into Kathmandu, which already is incapable of providing basic services to the people (less than 50% of the country has access to good sanitation), sewage running through the gutters and city rivers, trash piling up on street corners, fumes from air pollution  bad enough to make you wheeze up a flight of stairs, and drinking water so contaminated with fecal coliform, bacteria, and parasites that the locals don’t even drink it and eating vegetables washed in it will make you deathly ill.  There is an entire village in western Nepal right now where people are literally dying of severe diarrhea.

And then theres climate change, which is melting glaciers that over 1.5 billion people depend on in the region for water supply, changing the monsoon patterns, which limits food productivity and causes food insecurity for the 80% of the population that lives under $2/day, and making for increasingly intense and more frequent floods and droughts that lead not only to higher incidences of human trafficking, but severely affect food security and livelihoods.  Fluctuations in water supplies, either from glacial melt or the monsoon will also further burden electricity supplies that are so weak that load shedding, where a different part of the city has power at different hours of the day is prevalent, even during the monsoon rains.  In the winter of 2008, it was up to 20 hours per day.  Think about all the things we do in the states that require electricity or how many hours of your day are spent connected in one way or another to a power source.  It’s not hard to think about how the economy would come to a grinding halt in such conditions.  Kathmandu, a city of 2.2 million, running on generators and candles in the cold of the Himalayan winter at 5,000 ft.

Economically, there is more money in the informal economy (ie money that goes unreported, exchanged between street vendors and anyone else that doesnt pay taxes) than in the entire national budget.  No one pays taxes because no one collects taxes, 60% of the national budget is provided by international monetary organizations like the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, USAID, and DFID that often have very different priorities and don’t trust the government.

Where are the bright spots, if at all?

The private sector, whether business or international and local NGOs, that continues to expand where the government is horribly deficient.  There’s cheap drinking water in Kathmandu because 50 companies compete, micro hydropower projects are being built at the local levels where government cant or wont work, small farmers are learning about greater water efficiency, more sustainable farming techniques and getting greater access to markets, the tourism industry is still going relatively strong despite political instability, there are vast natural resources that remain underutilized, and somehow there is still economic growth despite it all.

Unfortunately for Nepalis, the private sector can’t do everything.  The government still needs to provide security, protect natural resources, and internalize market externalities as best it can, but because its so incomprehensibly intertwined in a mess of political favors, corruption, infighting and debilitated technical capacity that all create a state of laughable governance, Nepal will be severely unprepared for any of the longer term impacts from climate change or economic develpment that require comprehensive and transparent national planning that the market cannot provide.

It’s the land of paradox – such a f@#$%d country in such a beautiful place.

Another one of my boss’s friends who works for USAID came late with her husband, and were both a source for great conversation, from endemic bureaucratic corruption in Nepal to cultural differences with the states.  After two and a half hours of such conversation,  espousing my inevitably cynical perspective and the nuanced relative shifts in my politics since I’d arrived (The World Bank is maybe not entirely evil – at least they get shit done, and hydropower is a good thing sometimes)  including one of the best egg and pineapple cheeseburgers in my life (funny story, its illegal to kill cows in Nepal, but they can have “accidental deaths”), I headed home on my shitty Indian made cruiser back through the windy black streets, stoked about the great food and even better conversation.  I was thinking I could really see myself working in development, moving around the world from place to place for a few years at a time, drinking beers with people like Dorjee and Luna and leaving illegitimate children in my wake (Just kidding), until the pangs of domestication finally get to me.

“The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.  Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.”

Jesus, the man can write.  No wonder it won the pulitzer prize for fiction.  It’s a rather dark and gruesome post apocalyptic tale, cannibalism and all, but well worth the read.  I can’t remember the last time a book kept me up at night.  The movie version with Viggo Mortensen comes out in the fall

This is exactly why I’m working on climate change and water:

Water wars in India.

Forget about the Taliban, Pakistan is f#@$%d.

The coming water wars.

The winner.

The contest.

I don’t think all of winners are as good as the above two from Nepal (there’s a bit too much cheese in the rest), but this one is pretty powerful.  Between the two from Nepal, you get a remarkably good picture of the problems facing this country: trash in the streets, power outages, political violence.

Before you stop reading and say to yourself, “climate change is bullshit, we don’t even know if it’s just part of natural global patterns that work over thousands of years,” take just a second to think about the amount of complex scientific knowledge required to operate global climate models that attempt to project decades into the future.  Sure, uncertainty is going to be pervasive in any model that attempts to predict that far into the future, but these conclusions are not being made by everyday Joe Blows that have little understanding of the complexity involved.  These are well-trained scientists that have spent their entire lives investigating the effects of increased CO2 levels on planetary climate systems, and the detailed reports they produce show it.  So my question is, why wouldn’t we defer to their understanding?  Of course scientists have been wrong in the past about climate trends, but that has been wayyy overblown by opportunistic rewriters of history.

My point here is that far too many bloggers, pundits, editorial boards, and average joes have decided they are qualified to be climate scientists without reading a page of the IPCC reports.  I’m not singling out one side or the other here; both make asenine and often very wrong statements about climate change, it just so happens that the majority of the bad information is coming from denialists that have not taken the time to educate themselves on the issue.  I can’t blame busy people whose jobs don’t involve climate change research for not doing so, but I also don’t understand why they wouldn’t defer to experts who spent way to much time and money on their dissertations to be so readily passed off.

One article, blurb, blog post, or editorial does not make an expert.  Without enough training and education on the issue, why wouldn’t you defer to respected professionals?  Watching Court TV wouldn’t make someone want to defend themselves in trial. How is this any different?

The Fallacy of CBA

As for the economics side of the W-M debate, any cost-benefit analysis is pure bullshit.  The benefits of avoided future disasters a hundred years from now are simply too difficult to quantify.  Because of the uncertainty of the future, greater value is always placed on costs today, reflected in what is more or less the discount rate (the interest rate that you would get if you put your money in the bank instead of spending it right now).  The higher the discount rate, the greater the priority on today and the less the incentive to invest.  In stable societies like the US, the discount rate is low because there is a reasonable assumption that that same stability will be there next year and the year after that.  The problem is that the time spans between costly climate change mitigation efforts today and their ultimate benefits are decades and even centuries apart, so even with a low discount rate of say, 3%, the billions or trillions of dollars in benefits of avoiding major climate devastation in 100 years discounted backward to today values are much lower than today costs.    So then the politicians say, “The cost benefit analysis clearly shows that this is a bad bill.  The costs clearly outweigh the benefits,” which is not a lie, but its also not the whole truth and based on such massive uncertainty (any economic projection of increase in value beyond 30 years is futile, which should be especially evident from recent global economic crises). 

The basic point – it is impossible to know what the long term benefits of avoided climate change related destruction are worth because we have no idea what value future society will place upon them, but In all likelihood, they are worth far more than we can currently conceive, or that our economics models can predict.