There is no posting from me today because the time in which I dedicate to telling you about my time here in china was breeched by this story. Please take the time to read it all, it pretty much says what I think many of us feel, even is it was written by a kennedy.
For those of you concerned, my large intestine is doing quite well now. :)

Those of Us Who Know That America’s Worth Fighting forHave to Take It Back Now from Those Who Don’t
by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Speech delivered at the Sierra Summit 2005San Francisco, CaliforniaSeptember 10, 2005

I want to tell you how proud I am to accept the William O. Douglas Award.
Two of my most poignant memories as a child involved Justice Douglas. One of them was when I was 11 years old I did a 20 mile hike with my little brother David and with Justice Douglas and my father, which was a bird watching hike on the C & O Canal which he played a critical role in protecting. We started at four o’clock in the morning and walked all day. Then I did a 10 day pack trip with him. He took my whole family up to Olympic Range and the San Juan Peninsula and went camping for almost two weeks when I was eight years old.
Justice Douglas had a very strong relationship with my family. My grandfather brought Justice Douglas into public life and gave him his first job at the SEC as his deputy and then got Franklin Roosevelt to appoint him to run the SEC and played a critical role in getting him appointed as a justice of the Supreme Court. He said that his relationship to my grandfather was a father son relationship. When my father was 18 years old Justice Douglas took him for a walking tour of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, all the Asian Soviet Republics. They were the first Westerners to enter Soviet Asia after the 1917 revolution and they had an extraordinary trip and Justice Douglas wrote a book about it.
He had a very, very close relationship with my family and as an attorney the case that was the most important case, he was our greatest environmental jurist and the most important case was Sierra Club vs. Morton where he actually said that he believed the trees should have standing to sue [applause]. And there is nobody in American history that I more admire than him. What he understood - which is what I think more and more people are understanding - is that protecting the environment is not about protecting the fishes and the birds for their own sake but it’s about recognizing that nature is the infrastructure of our communities and that if we want to meet our obligation as a generation, as a civilization, as a nation which is to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment and good health.
As the communities that our parents gave us, we’ve got to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the public lands, the fisheries, the wildlife, the public areas that connect us to our past, that connect us to our history, that provide context to our communities that are the source ultimately of our values and virtues and character as a people. Over the past 22 years as an environmental advocate, I’ve been disciplined about being non-partisan and bipartisan in my approach to these issues. I don’t think there is any such thing as Republican children or Democratic children.
I think the worst thing that could happen to the environment is it becomes the province of a single political party. It was mentioned that I have a book out there that is very critical of this president and that’s true but it’s not a partisan book. I didn’t write that book because I’m a Democrat and he’s a Republican. If he were a Democrat, I would have written the same book. I’m not objecting to him because of his political party and I’ve worked for Republicans if they’re good on the environment and Democrats on the same level but you can’t talk honestly about the environment in any context today without speaking critically of this president. This is the worst - - [applause].
This is the worst environmental president we’ve had in American history.
If you look at NRDC’s website you’ll see over 400 major environmental roll backs that are listed there that have been implemented or proposed by this administration over the past four years as part of a deliberate concerted effort to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.
It’s a stealth attack.
The White House has used all kinds of ingenious machinations to try to conceal its radical agenda from the American people including Orwellian rhetoric. When they want to destroy the forests, they call it the Healthy Forest Act. When they wanted to destroy the air, they called it the Clear Skies Bill.
But most insidiously, they have put polluters in charge of virtually all the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution.
President Bush appointed as head of the Forest Service a timber industry lobbyist, Mark Rey, probably the most rapacious in history. He put in charge of public lands a mining industry lobbyist, Steven Griles, who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. He put in charge of the air division of the EPA, Jeffrey Holmstead, a utility lobbyist who has represented nothing but the worst air polluters in America. As head of Superfund, a woman whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist.
The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago we all read that as second in command of CEQ which is in the White House directly advising the president of environmental policy, he put a lobbyist of the American Petroleum Institute whose only job was to read all of the science from all the different federal agencies to make sure they didn’t say anything critical, to excise any critical statements about the oil industry.
He was there to lie to the American public, to protect one of the big corporate contributors to this White House. This is true throughout all of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution, the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce which regulates fisheries, the Department of the Interior, EPA of course, and the relevant divisions of the Justice Department. The same thing, all these agencies and sub secretariats, it is the polluters who are now running these agencies.
There is nothing wrong with having business people in government. It’s a good thing if you’re objective is to recruit competence and expertise but in all of these cases these individuals as I show in my book, have entered government service not to benefit the public interest but rather to subvert the very laws they’re now charged with enforcing in order to enrich the president’s corporate pay masters.
They have imposed enormous diminution in quality of life in this country.
The problem is most Americans don’t know about it, they don’t see the connection and the reason for that is because we have a negligent and indolent media and press in this country which has absolutely let down American democracy [applause]. All this right wing propaganda which is planned and organized and has dominated this country, the political debate for so many years talking about a liberal media. Well, you know and I know there is no such thing as a liberal media in the United States of America.
There is a right wing media and if you look where most Americans are now getting their news, that’s where they’re getting it. According to Pew 30 percent of Americans now say that their primary news source is talk radio which is 90 percent dominated by the right.
22 percent say their primary news source is Fox News, MSNBC or CNBC, all dominated by the right and another 10 percent, Sinclair Network which is the most right wing of all. That’s the largest television network in our country. It’s run by a former pornographer who requires all 75 of his affiliate television stations -- and this is where Mid-Westerners get their news, red state people get their news -- all of them have to take a pledge to not report critically about this president or about the war in Iraq.
Then the rest of us are -- the majority of Americans are still getting their news from electronic media and it’s the corporate owned media and they have no ideology except for filling their pocket books and many of them are run by big polluters. All of them are run by giant corporations that have all kinds of deals with the government and are not going to offend public officials.
This all started in 1988 when Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine said that the airwaves belong to the public. They were public trust assets just like our air and water and that the broadcasters could be licensed to use them but only with the proviso that they use them to promote the public interest and to advance American democracy. They had to inform the public of issues of public import. They had to have the news hours. None of those networks wanted to show the news because it’s expensive, they lose money on it. They had to avoid corporate consolidation. They had to have local control and diversity of control. That was the requirement of the law since 1928.
Today as a result of the abolishment of that doctrine, six giant multi-national corporations now control all 14,000 radio stations in our country, almost all 6,000 TV stations and 80 percent of our newspapers, all of our billboards and now most of the Internet information services, so you have six guys who are dictating what Americans have as information and what we see as news.
The news departments have become corporate profit centers, they no longer have any obligation to benefit the public interests, their only obligation is to their shareholders and they fulfill that obligation by increasing viewer ship. How do you do that? Not by reporting the news that we need to hear in to make rational decisions in our democracy but rather by entertaining us, by appealing to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brain for sex and celebrity gossip -- [applause]. So they give us Laci Peterson and Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant and we’re today the best entertained and the least informed people on the face of the earth and this is a real threat to American democracy.
If you look at the PIPA Report and I’ve known this for many, many years because I do 40 speeches a year in red states Republican audiences and there is no difference. When people hear this message and what this White House is doing and the Gingrich Congress, there is no difference between the way Republicans react and the Democrats react except the Republicans come up afterwards and say, “Why haven’t we ever heard of this before? I say to them, “It’s because you’re watching Fox News and listening to Rush.”
And 80 percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don’t know what’s going on [applause].
I don’t know if any of you saw the PIPA Report which came out after the last election but it confirmed everything and this is kind of a digression but this whole talk has turned into a digression. The PIPA Report was done by the University of Maryland and it showed that there is no—you know all these Saturday morning gas bags, the political pundits you see on TV talking about the moral difference and the ideological difference between red states and blue states.
There is no difference.
The only difference is there is a huge informational deficit in the red states and I’ve known this for a long time reaction I get people and the PIPA Report confirmed that by going and asking people who voted for Bush and who voted for Kerry about their knowledge of current events. What they found that of the people that voted for Bush had the same ideology, the same basic values, they were just misinformed. 70 percent said that they believed that Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center, 70 percent believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, 64 percent believed that President Bush strongly supported the Kyoto Protocol and strong labor and environmental standards in our foreign treaties and on and on.
When PIPA went back and asked them what they believed, there was almost no difference between what the Republicans and Democrats believed where America should be headed. The problem was a huge information deficit because the news media in this country is letting down American democracy and democracy cannot survive long without a vigorous news media.
I’ll give you an example. As I said a gigantic diminution in quality of life that has taken place in this country as a direct result of this President’s environmental policy that Americans mainly don’t know about. I’m just going to focus on one industry which is coal burning power plants.
I have three sons who have asthma. One out of every four black children in America’s cities now has asthma. We know that asthma attacks are triggered primary by bad air, by ozone and particulates and we know that the principle source of those materials in our atmosphere are 1,100 coal burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. It’s been illegal for 17 years. President Clinton’s administration was prosecuting the worst 75 of those plants but that’s an industry that donated $48 million to this president during the 2000 cycle and have given $58 million since.
One of the first things that Bush did when he came into office was to order the Justice Department and EPA to drop all those lawsuits. The top three enforcers at EPA, Sylvia Lowrance, Bruce Buckheit, Eric Schaeffer, all resigned their jobs in protest. These weren’t Democrats, these were people who had served through the Reagan and Bush administrations, the earlier Bush administration.
A top Justice Department official said that this had never happened in American history before where a presidential candidate accepts money, contributions from criminals under indictment or targeted for indictment and then orders those indictments and investigations dropped when he achieves office.
Immediately after dropping those lawsuits, the White House went and abolished the New Source Rule which was the heart and soul, the central provision of the Clean Air Act. That rule is the rule that required those plants to clean up 17 years ago and it’s the fundamental compromise that allowed the passage of the Clean Air Act.
If you go to EPA’s website today, you will see that that decision alone, that single decision, this is EPA’s website, kills 18,000 Americans every single year. Six times the number of people that were killed by the World Trade Center attack. This should be on the front page of every newspaper in this country every single day and yet you’re not reading about it in the American press.
A couple of months ago EPA announced that in 19 states it is now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish in the state for mercury contamination. We know where the mercury is coming from, those same coal burning power plants. In 48 states at least some of the fish are unsafe to eat. In fact, the only two states where all of the fish are still safe to eat are Alaska and Wyoming where Republican controlled legislatures have refused to appropriate the money to test the fish. In all of the other states at least some, most or all of the fish are unsafe to eat.
We know a lot about mercury we didn’t know a few years ago. We know for example, that one out of every six, now one out of every three American women have so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases, autism, blindness, mental retardation, heart, liver, kidney disease.
I have so much mercury in my body, I had my levels tested recently and Waterkeeper will test your levels, you can send them a hair sample. Mine are about double what the EPA considers safe. I was told by Dr. David Carpenter who is the national authority on mercury contamination that a woman with my levels of mercury in her blood would have children with impairment. I said to him, “You mean she might have” and he said, “No, the science is very certain today. Her children would have some kind of permanent brain damage.” He estimated an IQ loss in those kids of about five to seven points.
Well, we have 630,000 children who are born in America every year who have been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in their mother’s wombs. President Clinton recognizing the gravity of this national health epidemic reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That triggered the requirement that all of those companies remove 90 percent of the mercury within three and a half years. It would have cost less than one percent of plant revenue, a great deal for the American people. We have the technology, it exists, we already require it in states like Massachusetts.
But it still meant billions of dollars for that industry and that’s the industry that gave $100 million to this president and about 12 weeks ago the White House announced that it was abolishing the Clinton era rules and substituting instead rules that were written by utility industry lobbyists that will allow those companies to never have to clean up the mercury. The rules say in their face that they have to clean up 70 percent within 15 years which by itself is outrageous but in fact, the utility lawyers who wrote those rules wrote so many loopholes into them that the utilities will be able to challenge them probably successfully and certainly forever and they will never have to clean up any additional mercury.
We’re living in a science fiction nightmare today in the United States of America where my children and the children of millions of Americans who have asthmatic kids are bringing children into a world where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe. Where my children and the children of most Americans can now no longer safely engage in the seminal primal activity of American youth which is to go fishing with their father and mother and to come home and eat the fish because somebody gave money to a politician.
I live three hours south of the Adirondack Mountains, the oldest protected wilderness on the face of the earth. It’s been protected since 1888. We had a right, the American people, to believe that we would be able to enjoy those pristine landscapes, the forests, the beautiful lakes for generations unspoiled.
But today, one fifth of the lakes in the Adirondacks are now sterilized from acid rain which has also destroyed the forest cover on the high peaks of the Appalachian from Georgia all the way up into Northern Quebec and this president has put the brakes on the statutory requirements that those companies, those coal burning power plants clean up the acid rain. As a direct result of that decision, this year for the first time since the passage of the Clean Air Act sulfur dioxide levels went up in our country an astronomical four percent in a single year.
The person who gave me this t-shirt talked about mountain top mining a few minutes ago. A year ago in May, I flew over the coal fields of Kentucky and West Virginia and I saw where the coal is coming from. If the American people could see what I saw, there would be a revolution in this country because we are cutting down the Appalachian Mountains. These historic landscapes where Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett roamed are the source of our values and our culture and we’re cutting them down with these giant machines called drag lines. They’re 22 stories high, they cost half a billion dollars and they practically dispense with the need for human labor and that of course, is the point.
I remember when my father was fighting strip mining back in the ‘60’s, a conversation I had with him at the dinner table where he said they are not only destroying the environment but they are permanently impoverishing these communities because there is no way that you can generate an economy from the moonscapes that they leave behind and they’re doing it so that they can break the unions and he was right. In 1968 when he told me that there were 114,000 unionized mine workers taking mines out of tunnels in West Virginia.
Today there are only 11,000 miners left in the state and almost none of them are unionized because the strip industry isn’t. Using these giant machines and 25 tons of dynamite that they explode in West Virginia every day, a Hiroshima bomb every week. They are blowing the tops off the mountains and then they take these giant machines and they scrape the rubble and debris into the adjacent river valley.
Well, it’s all illegal.
You cannot dump rock and debris and rubble into a waterway in the United States of America without a Clean Water Act permit. So Joe Lovitz sued them and he won in front of a great crusty old West Virginia judge, Judge Charles Hayden who recently died. Charles Hayden said the same thing I said, he said, “It’s all illegal, all of it” and he enjoined all mountain top mining.
Two days from when we got that decision, Peabody Coal and Massey Coal who had given millions of dollars to this White House met in the White House and the White House rewrote one word of the Clean Water Act. The definition of the word fill that changed 30 years of statutory interpretation to make it legal today as it is in every state in the United States to dump rock, debris, rubble, construction debris, garbage, any kind of solid waste into any water way in this country without a Clean Water Act permit. All you need is a rubber stamp permit from the Corps of Engineers that in many cases you can get through the mail. It has none of the safeguards that the Clean Water Act provides.
And this is what we’re fighting today, this is not just a battle to save the environment. This is the subversion of our democracy.
The industry and the great big polluters and their indentured servants and our political process have done a great job and their PR firms and their faulty [biastitutes] and all these think tanks on Capitol Hill, have done a great job over the past couple of decades of marginalizing the environmental movement, of marginalizing us as radicals, as tree huggers, as I heard the other day, pagans who worship trees and sacrifice people.
But there is nothing radical about the idea of clean air and clean water for our children. As I said before, we’re not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the birds and the trees. We’re protecting it for our own sake because it’s the infrastructure of our communities and because it enriches us.
If you talk to these people on Capitol Hill who are promoting these kind of changes and ask them, “Why are you doing this?” What they invariably say is, “Well, the time has come in our nation’s history where we have to choose now between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other.”
And that is a false choice. In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy -- [applause]. If we want to measure our economy and this is how we ought to be measuring it, based upon it loses jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations, over the long term and how it preserves the value of the assets of our communities.
If on the other hand, we want to do what they’ve been urging us to do on Capitol Hill which is to treat the planet as if were a business in liquidation, convert our natural resource to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy but our children are going to pay for our joy ride.
They’re going to pay for it with the muted landscapes, poor health, huge clean up costs that are going to amplify over time and that they will never, ever be able to pay.
Environmental injury is deficit spending. It’s a way of loading the cost of our generation’s prosperity on to the backs of our children -- [applause].
One of the things I’ve done over the past seven, eight years, since 1994, since this whole movement, the anti-environmental movement got a foothold, a beach head in Congress, is to constantly go around and confront this argument that an investment in our environment is a diminishment of our nation’s wealth. It doesn’t diminish our wealth, it’s an investment in infrastructure, the same as investing in telecommunications and road construction. It’s an investment we have to make if we’re going to insure the economic vitality of our generation and the next generation. I want to say this, there is no stronger advocate for free market capitalism than myself.
I believe that the free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free market capitalism in this country because the free market promotes efficiency and efficiency means the elimination of waste and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources and it’s the under valuation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free market economy you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.
But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market.
You show me a polluter; I’ll show you a subsidiary. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market. And force the public to pay his production costs. That’s what all pollution is, it’s always a subsidy, it’s always a guy trying to cheat the free market.
Corporations are externalizing machines. They’re constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production, that’s their nature. One of the best ways to do that and the most common way for a polluter is through pollution. When those coal burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley and it comes down on my state New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year but I can’t go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me.
They liquidated a pubic asset, my asset. The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They’re not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them.
Nobody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they’ve stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State.
When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercy—the mercury poisons our children’s brains and that imposes a clause on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, hundreds of thousands lost work day.
All of those impacts, impose costs on the rest of us. That should in a true free market economy be reflected in the price of that company’s product when it makes it to the market place.
What those companies and all polluters do is they use political clout to escape the discipline in the free market and force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, everyone of the 28 major environmental laws, all of them were designed to restore free market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the market place to play the true cost of bringing their product to market. What we do with the Riverkeepers—we have 147 licensed Riverkeepers now and each one has a patrol boat, each one is a full time paid river keeper and each one agrees to sue polluters.
What we do and we don’t even consider ourselves environmentalists any more. We’re free marketers.
We go out into the market place, we catch the cheaters, the polluters, and we say to them, “We’re going to force you to internalize your costs the same way that you internalize your profits because as long as somebody is cheating the free market, none of us get the advantages of the efficiency and the democracy and the prosperity that the free market otherwise promises our country.
What we have to understand as a nation is that there is a huge difference between free market capitalism which democratizes a country, which makes us more prosperous and efficient and the kind of corporate cloning capitalism which has been embraced by this White House which is as antithetical to democracy, to prosperity and efficiency in America as it is in Nigeria -- [applause].
There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. They encourage us to take risks, they maximize wealth, they create jobs. I own a corporation.
They’re a great thing but they should not be running our government.
The reason for that is they don’t have the same aspirations for America that you and I do.
A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it wants profits and the best way for them to get profits is to use our campaign finance system which is just a system of legalized bribery to get their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the market place to give them a competitive advantage and then to privatize the common, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us.
And that doesn’t mean corporations are a bad thing. It just means they’re amoral and we have to recognize that and not let them into the political process.
Let them do their thing but they should not be participating in our political process because a corporation cannot do something genuinely philanthropic.
Its against the law in this country because their shareholders can sue them for wasting corporate resources. They cannot legally do anything that will not increase their profit margins and that’s the way the law works and we have to recognize that and understand that they are toxic for the political process and they have to be fenced off and kept out of the political process.
This is why throughout our history our most visionary political leaders Republican and Democrat have been warning the American public against the domination by corporate power.
Teddy Roosevelt and again, this White House has done a great job of persuading a gullible press and the American public that the big threat to American democracy is big government. Well, yeah, big government is a threat ultimately but it is dwarfed by the threat of excessive corporate power and the corrosive impact that has on our democracy. And you know, as I said, you look at all the great political leaders in this country and the central theme is that we have to be cautious about, we have to avoid the domination of our government by corporate power.
Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign power but he warned that our political institutions, our democratic institutions would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth who would erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, another republican in his most famous speech ever warned America against the domination by the military industrial complex.
Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the height of the Civil War “I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me. And for my country I fear the bankers more.”
Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by corporate power is “the essence of Fascism” and Benito Mussolini who had an insider’s view of that process said the same thing. Essentially he said that – he complained that Fascism should not be called Fascism. It should be called corporatism because it was the merger of state of corporate power.
And we what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called Communism.
The domination of government by business is called Fascism.
And what our job is is to walk that narrow trail in between which is free market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.
In order to do that we need an informed public and an activist public.
And we need a vigorous and an independent press that is willing to speak truth to power. And we no longer have that in the United States of America. And that’s something that we all, puts us all, all the values we care about in jeopardy because you cannot have a clean environment if you do not have a functioning democracy. They are intertwined, they go together.
There is a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny and the level of environmental destruction. I could talk about that all day but you cannot—the only way you can protect the environment is through a true, locally based democracy.
You can protect it for a short term under a tyranny where there is some kind of beneficent dictator but over the long term the only way we can protect the environment is by ensuring our democracy. That has got to be the number one issue for all of us; to try to restore American democracy because without that we lose all of the other things that we value.
I’ll say one last thing which is the issue I started off with which is that we’re not protecting the environment. What Justice Douglas understood.
We’re not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the birds.
We’re protecting it for our own sake because we recognize that nature enriches us. It enriches us economically, yes, the base of our economy. And we ignore that at our peril.
The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment but it also enriches us esthetically and recreationally and culturally and historically and spiritually. Human beings have other appetites besides money and if we don’t feed them we’re not going to grow up. We’re not going to become the kind of beings our creator intended us to become.
When we destroy nature we diminish ourselves. We impoverish our children.
We’re not protecting those ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest as Rush Limbaugh loves to say, for the sake of a spotted owl. We’re preserving those forests because we believe that the trees have more value to humanity standing then they would have if we cut them down. I’m not fighting for the Hudson River for the sake of the shad or the sturgeon or the striped bass, but because I believe my life will be richer and my children and my community will be richer if we live in a world where there are shad and sturgeon and striped bass in the Hudson.
And where my children can see the traditional gear, commercial fishermen on the Hudson that I have spent 22 years fighting for their livelihoods, their rights, their culture, and their values. I want my kids to be able to see them out in their tiny boats using the same fishing methods that they learned, their great grandparents learned from the Algonquin Indians who taught them to the original settlers of New Amsterdam. I want them to be able to see them with their ash poles and gill nets and be able to touch them when they come to shore to wait out the tides, to repair their nets. And in doing that connect themselves to 350 years of the New York State history.
And understand that they’re part of something larger than themselves; they’re part of a continuum. They’re part of a community.
I don’t want my children to grow up in a world where there are no commercial fishermen on the Hudson, where it’s all Gordon Seafood and Unilever and 400 ton factory trawlers 100 miles offshore strip mining the ocean with no interface with humanity.
And where there are no family farmers left in America. Where it’s all Smithfield and Cargill and Premium Standard farms raising animals in factories and treating their stock and their neighbors and their workers with unspeakable cruelty.
And where we’ve lost touch with the seasons and the tides and the things that connect us to the 10,000 generations of human beings that were here before there were laptops.
And that connect us ultimately to God.
I don’t believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping it as God, but I do believe that it’s the way that God communicates to us more forcefully.
God talks to human beings through many vectors. Through each other, through organized religions, through wise people and through the great books of those religions; through art and literature and music and poetry.
But nowhere with such force and clarity and detail and texture and grace and joy as through creation. We don’t know Michelangelo by reading his biography; we know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
And we know our creator best by immersing ourselves in creation. And particularly wilderness which is the undiluted work of the creator.
And you know -- [applause] -- if you look at every one of the great religious traditions throughout the history of mankind the central epiphany always occurs in the wilderness. Buddha had to go to the wilderness to experience self realization and nirvana. Mohammed had to go to the wilderness in Mt. Harrod 629, climb to the summit, rest one angel in the middle of the night to have the Koran squeeze from his body.
Moses had to go to the wilderness of Mt. Sinai for 40 days alone to get the Commandments. The Jews had to spend 40 years wandering the wilderness to purge themselves of 400 years of slavery in Egypt.
Christ had to go into the wilderness for 40 days to discover his divinity for the first time. His mentor was John the Baptist, a man who lived in the Jordan valley dressed in the skins of wild beasts and ate locust and the honey of wild bees and all of Christ’s parables are taken from nature. I am the vine; you are the branches. The mustard seed, the little swallows, the scattering of seeds on the [Fellowgram], the lilies of the field. He called himself a fisherman, a farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd.
The reason he did that was that’s how he stayed in touch with the people. It’s the same reason all the Talmudic prophets, the Koranic prophets, the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament prophets. Even the pagan prophets like Aesop they did the same thing; they used parables and allegories and fables drawn from nature to teach us the wisdom of God.
And all of the Old Testament prophets, all the Talmudic prophets, all the New Testament prophets came out of the wilderness. Every one of them and they were all shepherds. That daily connection to nature gave them a special access to the wisdom of the all mighty. They used these parables and the reason Christ did that was that’s how he stayed in touch with the people. He was saying things that were revolutionary like all the prophets.
He was contradicting everything that the common people had heard from the literal sophisticated people of their day and they would have dismissed him as a quack but they were able to confirm the wisdom of his parables through their own observations of the fishes and the birds.
And they were able to say, he’s not telling us something new; he’s simply illuminating something very, very old. Messages that were written into creation at the beginning of time by the creator. We haven’t been able to discern or decipher them into the prophets came along and immersed themselves in wilderness and learned its language and then come back into the cities to tell us about the wisdom of God.
You know, all of our values in this country are the same thing. This is where our values come from, from wilderness and from nature and from the beginning of our national history. People from Sierra Club have to understand this and articulate it.
Our greatest spiritual leaders, moral leaders and philosophers were telling the American people “You don’t have to be ashamed because you don’t have the 1,500 years of culture that they have in Europe because you have this relationship with the land and particularly the wilderness. That’s going to be the source of your values and virtues and character.
If you look at every valid piece of classic American literature the central unifying theme is that nature is the critical defining element of American culture, whether it’s Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway. All of them.
Let me just finish this thought. The first great writer we produced in this country, an international best seller, was [James Fenimore Cooper]. He wrote the The Leather Stocking Tales, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer, about this character Natie Bumpo who was a creature of the American wilderness. He had all the virtues that the European romantics associated with the American woodland; he was a crack shot, he was self reliant, he had fortitude and integrity and he was a gentleman and honest.
The reason they made him a bestseller in Europe was not because it was great writing; it wasn’t. It was atrocious, but because they believed that there really was a new being being created out of the American forest. We made him a best seller in our country because we believe that about ourselves. A generation after that you had Emerson and Thoreau come along who have kicked off the traces of the European heritage and they embrace nature as a spiritual parable of all Americans.
They say if you’re an American and you want to hear the voice of God you have to go into the forest and listen to the songs of the birds and the rustle of the leaves and if you want to see the American soul you have to look at the mirror of Walden Pond. Our poets Whitman, Frost, Emily Dickinson, Robert Service.
Our artists, we have two schools, defining schools of art in this country: the western school – Remington and Russell – and the Hudson River School – Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Samuel F. B. Morris, etc. And all of them painted these stark, indomitable portraits. Storm King Mountain, El Capitan, the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon. Any evidence of humanity is in ruins.
And there are other national schools of art that painted nature. The British have their still lives and the French and Italians and their garden scenes, etc. But that’s nature tamed.
The American artist chose to paint nature in its wildest state because they saw that as the way to capture the American soul.
As I said this is where our values come from.
These people on Capitol Hill they look out at our green landscapes and they see nothing but cash for their corporate contributors, quick cash. I saw a couple of days ago Donald Rumsfeld on TV and I saw him and I saw how articulate and eloquent he was. I know Donald Rumsfeld, he lives next to my house in Washington.
When I got out of prison in Puerto Rico a couple of years ago he actually was very kind to me. I met him at lunch and dinner a couple of times at my mom’s house. He’s a very charming guy, an affable. If you’re not in Abu Ghraib… but I saw him on TV in his suit and he looked so good and he’s so eloquent and charming and stuff and I say, here’s a man who’s had the best of our country. He’s gone to our churches, had the best schools, the education, the contacts, the money everything. And then I see these letters that he wrote back and forth with Alberto Gonzales, he’s e-mailed debating how much it was permissible for Americans to torture people. And I say to myself how did these people miss the whole point of America? How do they not know that torture is not an American family value?
And I say that this is an administration that represents itself as the White House of values but every value that they claim to represent is just a hollow façade, that marks the one value that they really consider worth fighting for which is corporate profit taking.
They say that they like free markets but they despise free market capitalism. What they like if you look at their feet rather than their clever, clever mouths what they really like is corporate welfare and capitalism for the poor but socialism for the rich.
They say that they like private property but they don’t like private property except when it’s the right of a polluter to use his private property to destroy his neighbors property and to destroy the public property.
And they say that they like law and order but they are the first ones to let the corporate law breakers off the hook. And they say that they like local control and states rights but they only like those things when it means sweeping away the barriers to corporate profit taking at the local level. And you and the Sierra Club know and I can give you hundreds of examples. They’re suing my cousin Arnold Schwarzenegger. Detroit is suing him for this—I know that’s not going to get a lot for applause in this room.
But you know what do you sign into law? The best automobile emissions bill that was passed by the Democratic legislature and now Detroit is saying they’re going to sue them just because they recognize that the emissions here were not protecting the health of the people of their state. So they want ones that will. Now Detroit is saying it’s going to sue them and the Federal government is now making noises that it’s going to come into that suit on the side of Detroit. That’s not local control.
We know and when I’m fighting these hog farms down in North Carolina and the first people they hear from when these local counties try to pass the zoning ordinance to zone out the big hog shows. The first person they heard from is Ted Olson up in the federal government saying that’s an interference with federal commerce and we’re going to come down on you like a hammer.
The same thing in West Virginia, when the localities try to zone out Massey Coal and Peabody from cutting down their mountain the federal government comes down and crushes them. So they don’t like local control.
And you know all of these things they claim to love.
They claim to love Christianity but they have violated every one of the manifold mandates of the Christian faith --[applause] -- that we care for the environment.
We treat the earth respectfully and we treat our future generations with respect and all of these things, the values go along with the land we all know that.
I’ll close with a proverb from the Lakota people that all of you have heard, that’s been expropriated by the environmental movement to a large extent where they said we didn’t inherit this planet from our ancestors; we borrowed it from our children.
I would add to that if we don’t return to our children something that is roughly the equivalent of what they receive, not just in the quality of the environment but in the integrity of the values that have been handed down through generations of Americans.
You know, visionary Republican and Democratic leadership only to hit these destructive people who are now running our country. The worst administration that we’ve had in American history and the greatest threat now to our country and our democracy. And all the values that cherish about America. And you know the way we’re viewed and the rest of the world we need to return those things.
I look at this White House and I ask myself—and this may be unfair—but I ask myself a lot of times, how did they get so many draft dodgers in one place? You know, the president, Dick Cheney five deferments; John Ashcroft, six deferments. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Tom DeLay, all of their buddies. Dennis Hastert, Rush Limbaugh, well, you know, there are a lot of people who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War and I know a lot of them.
Most of them did it because they had moral qualms about that war.
But not these people.
These people love the war; they just wanted somebody else to fight it. And it occurs to me that the reason for that is that these are people who don’t understand the values that makes America worth fighting for. But America is worth fighting for and it’s worth dying for.
Those of us who know that it’s worth fighting for have to take it back now from those who don’t.
Thank you very much. Read more!

7 Days to Shanghai (Hopefully)

If all goes well in the next 7 days, I will be going to shanghai in the next week. Things seem to be set in motion as far as this goes, but I am a little apprehensive because my health has been adjusting in the last week and I am concerned that travelling at this time might not be the best idea. I am going to continue to forge ahead with plans to go and wait to purchase my ticket until a couple of days before hand because I want to see if I improve.
Without going into too much detail, I think that I have over exterted myself and gotten a bacterial infection as the same time. I have developed quite the sour stomach over the last couple of years and after several weeks of challenging meals, I think I may have either eaten something questionable or had some questionable water. Regardless, the need to have a western style toilet nearby has been a much needed thing!
To add to the calamity, I managed to slice my index finger quite nicely yesterday while preparing lunch. I called the department head and asked him to take me to the hospital and it turns out that there is a clinic here on the campus that treats such things. I was quite happy to discover this. His assistant, the ever so lovely Fiona, escorted me down to the place to have my bloody finger examined. I felt that it might need to be stitched, but upon arrival, they immediatly cleaned the wound and inspected it and came to the conclusion that it would not need to be stitched. It was a close call though.
I heard rumours that the Chinese hospitals were much different than the western ones--and this clinic certainly echoed that theory. Chinese medicine is a mixture of modern pills and ancient Chinese remedies. The place did not have the stench of sterility, but rather a smell of herbals and peroxide.
The cleaned, salted and wrapped my finger and placed it in a neat gauze bandage and I was instructed to come back on Monday so that they could have a look. I asked Fiona to also explain that I have stomach issues, probably from bad water or food, and the woman understood and gave me a prescription of pills to take for the problem.
I have a set of four different pills to be taken three times daily, one set for antibiotic, three four the food illness. I took the first dose last night before bed and was able to sleep through most of the night--although I did have a strange series of dreams.
This morning I do feel slightly better and hope that this continues because if I am not better by mid week, I will be staying here in Chenzhou for at least half the break on the mend. From what I have read this is something that seems to be a common occurence and once you get through it, your stomach is good as new--and I could use a new one!
In other news, I seem to be the new recrutier for the foreign affairs department here on campus as I have assisted with one Americans visa issues and last night went to dinner with bob and fiona to recruit this guy from Britain that I liked, but was a little apprehensive about. He seemed like a nice enough guy, seemed to be well travelled, having just taught in Vietman for the last two years, but there was something about him that reminded me of a drifter of sorts. He thought it was rather amusing that I was mildly picky about the food, noting that this wouldnt be the case if I was ever to go to Vietnam. I asked him what he meant by that and he laughed and said that in Vietnam there is all sorts of things in your meal, wood, ants, mites and you just learn to get on and eat them. He also said that he eat dog quite often and he didnt mind it because he doesnt really like dogs, so it was okay. Perhaps this is where I thought that was a strange thing to say. I don't like a lot of things, but I wouldn't eat them. I am not a big fan of rats, but I wouldn't eat em. I didn't make this comment to this guy though because I feared what he might say in return.
In case you were wondering, he said that you know when you are eating dog (most of the time) because the meat is very dark and tough. It takes a while to chew and when they cook it, it doesnt smell very good and if you are near the kitchen, you'll know. He said that you have to chew it much longer than beef. Now I must admit that before speaking with him about this, I felt that I would indeed like to try a bit of it for myself, but after this conversation, I have decided to decline.
He also added that in Vietnam the have cat restaurants all over the place. He had not gone into those places because the smell is just horrible and he rather likes cats, so he doesnt think he could enjoy it as much. I nodded in agreement and felt my stomach grumble in protest at the thoughts that my brain was processing at the moment. These are not things one should be considering while partaking in a meal...
But then again, this is China and that is Vietnam. Read more!

UPDATED PHONE NUMBER

It is easy and fun to call to China!
Please take note: I have just moved to a brand new flat, so my number has changed. Please update your records accordingly.
The new number is: 86-735-265-8209 (the old number was 8200, this one is 8209)
My cell number is 86-387-551-4020.
It is much cheaper for you to call here than for me to call there. Just remember that it is a 15 hour time difference, so add three hours to your time and switch the am/pm. For example, its 7:35am here right now, which makes it 4:35pm there. Kapeche? Read more!

Let us not forget that the Chinese cities are an interesting contrast to the country life. The Chinese are known for their knock off's, but this one takes the Ice Cream.
Here we have the Harry Potter restuarant. A "Western Style" eatery that serves Haggen Daaz Ice Cream at the low price of just $22.50usd per pint! What a great deal, eh?







Here is a shot of the western dinner at Harry Potter, which was about $3.50 a plate. The red container in the center is Hunt's ketchup, the unofficial premier ketchup of China. On the bottom is a western style steak dinner, complete with a fried egg (not in view). It wasn't too bad, especially considering my Coffee (the first I've had in three weeks) was twice as much.






Take a picture with potter himself!!




















"Feed em to the pigs"
Oh yes, the pigs in a pen. We did not eat these pigs for dinner, but they were getting ripe, according to Julian.













One of my favorite pics thus far. This is overlooking their houses in the mountain side--the lush, green fields are rice fields.












This is one of the archaic tools I was speaking about in the long post from yesterday. This is what is used to seperate the grain from the greens, post flood. It is operated by a foot pedal which pulls the grain from the greens. I would like to see this one in action--I imagine it is quite comical. Read more!

As told in the previous post, this is the duck herder. The man with the striped shirt is the duck man, his wife is in the green. The other gentleman in the hat is the Uncle of Julian and the rest of the people are his kids.










The post dinner pictures. This is Julians brother, who singlehandedly forced me to drink about 1.5 liters of beer with him. It was lovely.













This is me thanking the Uncle for such a wonderful day as we depart. The man smiling is the county constable, who travelled just to greet me as I was the first white man to visit the village. Gambeh!








The family picture--with everyone in the room, the entire clan post dinner. The grandfather and grandmother are 85, 86 years of age. The grandfather is in quite poor health, but he manages a grand smile for the camera.
What a great way to spend a sunday. Read more!

Im going through the change

I have once again come down with a temporary illness of some sort and had to cancel the one class that was scheduled for this morning. A mixture of over doing it and adjustment makes me a prime candidate for getting ill now and again as my body makes an adjustment for a different lifestyle—one that I do believe will be more healthy and active that what I was doing the last several years in Washington. It would seem that my body is in the stage where it is wondering where all the drinks and bad food have gone, why the belly is being filled with things like stir-fried vegetables, rice and tea. Gone are the days of Starbucks, and quick on the go foods. There is no glorious rum here, just beer and this rancid rice wine that is like everclear—totally undrinkable at this point in my life. The thing that is strange is that I do not miss these things at all and I am just waiting for my body to finish its cleansing process—I just hope it is not too late and that my liver can go back to normal size and the resistance does not continue. It is hard to say at this point—I could just be continuing to get a few bugs here and there, but it seems much more rational that these differences are because of the adjustment in diet. Each day I seem to feel stronger and more fatigued at the same time. My leg muscles are coming back stronger than they have been since the accident which left me with a fused ankle several years ago. I am walking and sweating in the humid Southeast Asian climate and it feels so good to have this much sweat trickling all over my body.
If this is the cost for the transition back to a healthy lifestyle, then so be it.
In other angles of life:
Things are settling in nicely. This is the second week of class and my literature class went very well for the week as we discussed the different theories of who the real Shakespeare might be as we begin to go into his works. It was an interesting and somewhat lively discussion with most of the students taking the side that Shakespeare is the work of several different people—which goes to show that they either didn’t pay attention to the material that I sent them or they didn’t understand it, which is good to know so early in the term. I sent the materials out to check over the web and I think that a good deal of them do not have direct access to the net, which makes sense. At times it is hard to remember what the average Chinese lives like here on campus because we English teachers have it so well.
Speaking of which, I have moved into a new flat. The other one was quite unsatisfactory in its condition (It seemed fine until these new ones opened up). So I have a new flat now and everything, including this computer, is brand new. It is the same size as the old flat, but everything is new and has been repaired according to standard. The old place had not been deep cleaned in at least a year or two and the person who last lived there was much messier than I could ever be…. (I know what you’re thinking!!)
So I finally feel as though everything is finally in its right place and it is time to start focusing on my desire to get some works published. I have found that I do indeed have a lot of time in which to work on projects and do not feel stressed like I did in Seattle. I am making a salary which is comfortable here and most of the bills for the place are taken care of, leaving me time to work on the craft of writing a lot more than if I lived in Seattle. Most of the money that I earn is going to be directly earmarked for seeing this amazing country—not drinking or fuel for the Volvo or rent or utilities, but leisure. It is such a liberating feeling to be able to make so little and save so much money.
More on the Mid-Autumn Festivus….
Before the festival was here, I had made a vow that I would never eat another mooncake for as long as I lived. This was due to the fact that I went to the store and purchased my parents a very nice mooncake package to give to them, along with a very nice dish set. I went to China Post to mail all of these things off to them and immediately China Post informed me that the government forbids sending mooncakes to America, so there was no way that they would send them!!!! Since these things are marketed as gifts to send to people, I was furious—why are they packaged in such beautiful packaging? They don’t even taste as good as the packages make them look! It didn’t matter though. They weren’t having any of it.
Then, to add insult to injury, I was also informed that to send the dish set which I had earmarked for my family, it would be about 1000rmb to send the dishes to them. Over $100! So, thanks, but I’ll stick to smaller items in the future. They are nice dishes, but not worth 100 bucks in shipping costs to get them there in a couple of weeks. It was 300rmb to have them sent over on a boat, which would take two months—which is still $35bucks and the woman said that there is no way to know if it would actually arrive!! This is simply insane, but there isn’t much you can do—it is run by the state and there is no bartering on this issue. So, it looks like sending things home for keeps isn’t going to happen. When I book my ticket back to the US I am just going to have to buy an extra baggage fee and be done with it. Perhaps a trip to Guanzhou and putting it on a plane myself if a better idea….
Anyway, I was invited by Julian, a new teacher and a colleague of mine, to go to his families place for the holiday. I agreed to do so, not really knowing or caring what I was getting myself into. I thought that he was from the same town that Mao was from and I was curious to go to the town where the famous Mao was from. It turns out that is where he went to University and was from a town nearby, so there would be no long busride to take in the countryside, no train which I am most eager to experience, but rather a short bus ride followed by a hired motorbike to get to the farm where he lived. I have been a frequent rider of motorbikes during my time here as the majority of for hire transport is on a motorbike and it is super cheap, costing about 2-3rmb per kilometer. We use them often for short treks that are too long or too dangerous to go on foot, so I was prepared.
Or so I thought.
When we arrived at the stop where the motorbikes would be, it was in the middle of nowhere. Think of the area on the way to Pullman past Washtucna—nothing but the occasional farmhouse. As we crossed the road, two motorbikes sprang into action, I was motioned to get on the larger one (people are always concerned by my size—like I am going to break a motorbike) and we sped off into a red clay dirt road that appears to have only seen motorbike usage in its time because it was full of boulders and crags that would make it nearly impossible to clear by a car. I was watching carefully as this man to whom my life was in his hands was flying along as faster speeds that most would feel comfortable in, but I couldn’t tell him to slow the fuck down because he wouldn’t have any idea what the hell I was saying whatsoever, so I just hung on and hoped. As the road got further away from the paved one, the conditions got much worse and muddier. We continued to ride through it all, Julian behind me on another bike, yelling at the drivers in what seemed to be commands to speed it up. My driver obliged by gunning his motorbike even faster and soon enough we were finally at our destination. 15 minutes of a fun filled journey through the best muckity muck China has to offer for a grand total of 5rmb (which is about .68cents).
Upon my arrival at Julian’s grandmother’s house, which is a set of concrete buildings next to rice fields the size of some of the farms in the Palouse, members of his family begin the Chinese art of foreign staring as they give me a once over look. It would seem that Julian did not take the time to tell these people that a westerner was going to attend his families dinner, but I knew better.
Within a few moments, the stares turn into smiles as they slowly approach me to greet me, welcome me. The men each offer me a cigarette, a gesture that must not be ignored (I managed to accept all the cigarettes, but left many of them on various tables throughout the place as I cannot smoke like these people do, but you must smoke with the man of the house if he offers, they do not understand or accept any reasoning) After our first cigarette together, his grandmother approaches—a beautifully old and wrinkled woman in a housecoat, showing her old teeth in a wide smile. She extends her aged yet smooth hand toward me and I shake it in immediate appreciation of her. There are times where you can just look at certain people and see that they have seen so much in their lives that is different than yours—the eyes are very telling in this sense, and she certainly had that look about her.
I was told immediately to take a seat in the only room in the entire place with a fan and watch some tv. I haven’t really talked about it in great detail, but people here are obsessed with television and it is terrible. The channels here that people watch is the equivalent of Star Search Chinese style and all the people are trying to be the Asian Britney Spears—it is just that crazy. If its not that, then its game shows where everyone acts as though they have been freebasing Ridilin before filming.
So we sit and watch the television as people begin to trickle in to see the Westerner. I manage to scare small children, who run, wondering what the hell I am doing in grandmother’s house. I manage to keep a perma smile on my face as these people trickle in, offering me cigarettes which I am already not wanting, but this is China.
We are brought a bowl of noodles, which I am immediately suspect of, this being the country and all. Chinese people just have a different style of eating than us westerners do. They like to make everything spicy and I don’t mean spicy like Hooters wings, but spicy like your face should just burn off it would be much easier that way spicy. The thought on the spiciness is simple, the more the spicy, the less you want to eat and since there didn’t used to be a lot of food in China…..
But this was not spicy at all, just the opposite actually. It was bland but tasty and the meat appeared to be pork, which is just fine. As long as I think I know what I am eating, its all good.
I must go for now, but I will continue this story later on tonight, with pictures… So, if you happen to see this entry with pictures, than the content has been added.

* * *
I am struggling with how much oil is in the diet here as well as how little diary there is available. With so much meat, one would think that there is ample diary, but this is not the case. People find milk to be lovely and they tend to drink evaporated milk, which I happen to find repulsive. When I get back to the west, the first thing I think I will have is a nice glass of milk, even if it turns out I am lactose intolerant. After tasting nothing but powdered milk and evaporated milk in everything, I must tell you that I am ready. I will also cook more with oil than with butter or any other substitute, even though I think the Chinese in this area tend to use it a bit much, I can appreciate it. Sunflower oil is the best. It frys fast and a little goes a long way.
Okay, so I am off in a tangent. Back to the farm. After eating a nice lunch with noodles, meat and beans, we spent most of the rest of the afternoon walking around the farming compound touring the various aspects of farm life. Farming tools and equipment are quite archaic, no green John Deere here, just concrete and wooden tools that you would expect to see in a museum that displayed an exhibit on ancient farming equiptment. I have included some pictures here…
The most fascinating was the device used to mash the rice into patties and molds—it was two pieces of concrete attached to one another with a small slit in the side to insert the rice, which then seals and you grind the rice while adding a little water to the mixture. It was something to think about the laborious task of doing this all day, yet most of Julian’s clan had done this their entire lives for several generations.
Julian told me sometime later that only three boys from the village had gone off to college—most will stay here in the fields and work the same crops that their parents did. I thought about the industrialization periods in history and wondered if they really would stay and maintain the work or if the advent of machines more modern would force them to find other work in the ever growing city centers.
We decided to take a walk out to the famous lake of the area. I was curious of the lake as it was talked about in some of the information that I had read and wondered if it was the same lake. We were given straw hats for the walk and told to stick to the path because there were a number of dogs along the way and most would be suspicious of the westerner. These here parts don’t get no strangers, you see…
We walked along the fields, beautiful green fields with slightly rolling terrain, not as dense as where I attended University, but equally as breathtaking with the mountain ranges in the background. After some time, we reached a stairway that led to the levee that kept the plain from flooding until it was harvest time, when they would then lower the levee and allow the fields to flood, making harvest easier. We walked along the pathway, sweat dripping from my shorts, but the asian men are sweating slightly. I chuckle to myself as I wipe my forehead for the fourth time, the sweat stings my eyes as I wipe it off. When we reach the top, I see the lake for the first time—and I cannot see the end of it. It would seem that we are in just one small pocket of what appears to be a huge lake. I stand there moments longer than my companions expect, taking in the scene, taking it in, an attempt to remember it when I am old and gray, one of those snapshots of your life where you remember being at peace for very little reasoning. This was one of those moments.
After a few moments we continue onwards, Julian’s uncle is pleased that I seem to enjoy the countryside so much. He doesn’t say anything, which is fine because I wouldn’t understand, but the human smile stretches beyond language and I know why he is happy and he knows why I stood there at the base of the lake for a moment longer.
As we continue our journey, Julian’s uncle picks up the pace and Julian tells me to hold back for a moment, his uncle is going ahead on a recon mission of sorts. He grabs a long bamboo stick on the side of the trail and begins to forge ahead. We follow him and I think to ask Julian what we are getting ourselves into, but I don’t care. I am here for the adventure and asking would ruin the fun. I know that if I were to be mauled by a tiger Julian would be in some deep shit and so I just continue onwards, sweat covered, heart beating slightly faster than normal.
It’s the dogs. We hear them almost immediately, but we do not see them. A few seconds later the first one comes out and it looks more like a wolf than any dog. I am slightly paranoid about doggies here because when I went in for my travel consult in the US, the woman was insistent that wild dogs were the worst problem in Asia, so every time I see a dog I think of that 80’s movie “An American Werewolf in London” and get a little concerned.
These dogs are freaking out. Julian laughs and says nervously, don’t aggravate them and we will be fine. I laugh at this statement. Don’t provoke the wild dogs. After another hundred feet or so we come to a house, so it appears that the wild dogs of China live in a home. The owner of the property does not notice me right away and he looks over at the uncle and says something in Chinese but stops and begins to stare at me. He then looks to the Uncle and changes his tone completely. They both laugh and look at me. I don’t want Julian to translate and he doesn’t offer, but he is also laughing. The man wanders over quickly and pauses in front of me, gives me the once over and says, “Hello!”
I do the same thing to him, giving him the once over and he laughs. We shake hands and he begins to speak to Julian, a perma-grin spreading across his face. He speaks to Julian in Chinese.
“He says that he has never seen such a big man before.” I have heard this several times and it no longer offends me. If anything the common China man has not a mean spirited bone in his body. He invited into his less than modest home, one that I fear must be simply dreadful in the wintertime, when temperatures here range below freezing for weeks at a time. The house has no insulation and many holes in the crumbling foundation. He has four kids, a wife and a couple of family members who are visiting for the holiday and as we walk in, they stare in amazement of my presence. The stares turn to smiles as soon as they realize who I am with and I am encouraged to sit down—everyone wants me to sit when I enter their homes, surely being so large I must be tired!
I take a seat and look at the children—asian kids are so cute and shy that I always find them to be the most interesting thing to look at in a room.
Moments later, his wife comes into the main room with a tray of peanuts, sunflower seeds and puffed rice pieces that taste like a weird Funion. I feel bad for eating these peoples food—they are very poor and I am over nourished, but Julian and his uncle are peeling the seeds and spitting them on the ground and I think of my mother and how she would absolutely shit her pants at the site of someone spitting seeds in someone elses home. I decline that urge to do it.
Julian explains that this man is a duck farmer. He points across the lake and there is quite a large grouping of ducks on the other side of the lake, just in my sight of view. There is easily a couple of hundred of them and I smile back at the man, he is delighted. “He just calls to them and they come in, but only at night.” He says matter of factly. I find this also amusing. I ask him to tell the man to call the ducks in.
“I don’t think they will come, they will think we are going to kill them off.”
“Just ask him. I want to see how one calls a herd of ducks.”
“As you wish.” Julian asks the man to call them. He protests, seemingly saying the same thing Julian told me, but Julian corrects him and everyone starts laughing and then he lets out a loud wok-wok-woo sound.
I look over at Julian and repeat the sound. The duck herder looks at me and laughs.
“No. Wack wok woo woo”
I nod. “Wock Wack Woo Woo.” I say loudly. The ducks move. Away.
Everyone laughs. Again the duck farmer calls to the ducks, this time I memorize it and repeat it back like a tape recorder. I begin to feel bad for the ducks. They might not come home tonight.
“So why do they come at night? Why come at all?”
“Ducks are very lazy. This man feeds them and gives them shelter in that shed. The dogs protect the ducks from other predators.”
“Wait, your telling me these dogs take care of the ducks?”
Julian appears confused by my question.
“Of course.”
“And these dogs don’t ever come to the conclusion that ducks are actually meat?”
He doesn’t have an answer and he asks the herder who responds in a brash tone.
“He says that usually they do not kill the ducks, however one of them has killed two in the past week, which means that he needs to watch the dogs and find out which one is killing the ducks and he will have to kill that dog.”
I cannot help but wonder if they will then eat the dog, but I do not want to ask. He goes on to say that he thinks it is the dog that looks the most like a wolf. This dog has been not behaving very well and he almost killed a wild goat yesterday.
“A wild goat?” Julian translates.
“Yes, there is a wild goat that had to be put in the shed because it is very afraid of the dogs.”
` We walk over to the shed and sure enough, there is a small black goat there, covered in sweat and looking frightened. I ask the duck herder why he doesn’t kill the animal and eat it on this fine holiday. He laughs at my suggestion and says that he is waiting for someone to come and claim it. I look at him and tell him that he should just be rid of the evidence that there ever was a goat here and simply eat it as a Mid-Autumn Day celebration! We all laugh together.

I want to continue on in my journey. It is getting close to dinner time and we need to be heading back and so I motion to Julian that perhaps it is time. The man picks up on my gesture and asks us to stay for dinner. Julian looks in my direction and I immediately decline the offer, we have many others waiting for us at his home. The man understands and bids us farewell. We begin to wander back after a few photos with the Duck Herder and his family.
We arrive back at Julian’s place 15 minutes later and the place has managed to double since we went off on our journey. Even Julian is surprised at the number of people that have arrived. We head directly to the kitchen area to see how much of the dinner is prepared. The kitchen area is a large room off to the side of the house. There is one large prep area where the food is cut and prepped for the woks, were in another corner. Two woks, the biggest ones I have ever seen are built into a concrete fireplace—which is full of firewood. The cook is working both of the enormous woks and the fire is heating them to the right temperature for frying. The heat is intense, but the cook is focused and keeps cooking each dish, one after the other. We are asked to go and have a beer as dinner is almost ready. At this point, Julian’s brother asks me if I like beer. I look to my stomach and nod, they understand what I am getting at.
“My brother would like to know how many beer you can drink.” Julian asks.
“I can hold my own, as we say. I can drink several if the moment is right.”
He translates this. His brother smiles.
The food begins to arrive and the women begin to shout at each other. The men begin to arrive as well. They all gather around me.
“You are the guest of honor tonight Mr. Tim. That man across from you is the mayor of this town. He is most honored to be sitting with you to have a meal.”
I nod to him and lean over to shake his hand. His face beams widely toward me. I wait for him to take his seat, but he is waiting for me.
“Mr. Tim, no one will sit until you do so. You are sitting facing the door, you are the guest of honor.” He is very proud, I am very nervous.
I take my seat and then men follow suit. I am not sure what is customary to do next, but I signal to the men to eat and they wait for me to dip my chopsticks into a dish. I will admit that most of it did not look overly appealing to me at that moment, with all the duck and chicken heads looking dazed in the various pots, so I played the western pussy and went for the familiar green beans dish.
Then the beer breaks out…..
More on this later…. Its time for bed. Read more!

Mid-Autumn Festival

The moments that are memorable, the stuff that I live for, keeps happening on what seems to be a daily experience. Yesterday was one of the days that I will remember for the rest of my life. Travelling through the countryside on the back of a motorbike, going through dirt roads, hard red clay that reminds me of being a kid in Georgia, sweltering hot, humid, sticky, sweaty afternoon walking around the countryside next to free ducklings, chickens, red roosters, pigs and wild dogs. A meal spent with a family that had never seen a white man. The Mayor of the town arrives by taxi as he hears that a westerner has arrived in town. When he verifies this information, he phones the country magistrate, who arrives just after dinner to see such a site. They have never seen a westerner out here before--and I am only one hour from the University.
So yeah, it was a grand weekend.

I will post more later, but these three pictures have the most meaning to them for me. This last one represents five generations of family heritage....
More later. Read more!