Catching up - Thai Bugs

I'd like to think that the slowdown in posts here is just a reflection of how busy I am doing things. And this week has been busy. There was the meeting of the NGO's in Chiang Mai on Wednesday and Thursday (I only went Wednesday), an all day meeting with farmers to talk about the Bangkok Demonstrations Friday in Lamphun, and today (Saturday) Swe picked us up at 7:30am to take us to his village about 2 hours out of Chiang Mai, just below Doi Inthanon, Thailand's highest mountain.

There are lots of pictures and some video, just no time to go through it all and post. And then there was the rain, the first rain since we got here in early January. But I'm going to start with a post on bugs. A few I have stored up and not yet posted and some beautiful ones we saw today. I'm also going to give a nod to malaeng.com. Maleang means insect in Thai. It's a website with all sorts of information on Thai bugs in both Thai and English.


Wednesday night, coming home after dinner, we saw this great swarm of flying things around most of the lights. We'd seen this thing last year at the Sunday night market once too.

Mr. Deraek, Thursday night after work, was sitting with a baggie of red ant eggs. He said that the black ant larvae are the ones that swarm the lights. Oh yeah, the eggs were for Tok, who supposedly loves them. You have to wash off the mature ants and the larvae first. Then you cook them.



And here's from our trip today with Swe.

A small honey comb.

This was one of those cases where my Canon drives me crazy. I just could not get this damsel fly into perfect focus. It certainly posed ok, but it was always a little blurry. I finally took a short video and maybe I'll just have to post that.

And the butterflies wouldn't hold still at all so I gave up and used the video.



I also have some audio of cicadas which are probably hitting the 60 or 70 decibel level at times. I haven't gotten it post ready yet, but those were quieter cicadas in the background of the butterfly video.

Filling in Some of the Gaps in my Knowledge of Thai Land Reform

Time is moving faster than last year. I think that I’m doing more, clearly I know more, but the more you know, the more you realize that there is even more out there that you don’t know. Yesterday was a meeting of NGO folks in the north and discussions of the aftermath of the Bangkok Protests.

It’s been hard getting information about what all actually was accomplished. I basically heard that my boss and 20 or 30 others had met with the Prime Minister, but the only concession I’d heard about was that the government paid for the buses back to the North. That became a bit of a joke. Well, of course, they’ll pay for them to get out of Bangkok and stop the demonstration. It doesn’t amount to much money at all.

But getting to meet with the Prime Minister itself is a major achievement. And yesterday I got to see the report that was written for the other NGO leaders summarizing what has been accomplished and what else needs to be done.


Of course, the reports are in Thai. But I’ve mastered enough of the most frequent vocabulary that I can get through the pages recognizing the majority of the words. I sat next to Ping who would patiently help translate the words I would circle.

I only got through a few pages - even if I know the words, it takes some time to read them - while trying to also listen to what was going on in the meeting. Basically, there are 360 villages identified throughout Thailand, with specific land ownership issues. These are disputes of one kind or another that the coalition has asked the government to help resolve. I’ve written about the key kinds of problems, as I understood them, in a previous post. These aren’t situations where the farmers are simply asking the government to give them land. But rather there are varying levels of complication of farmers having farmed land for generations, in some cases, but having disputes because the land has been declared a national park or a protected reserve, or because of corrupt practices in which well connected, wealthy Thais managed to get title to land the farmers’ land, and other such disputes. The government has to be involved because they issue the documents stating who owns the land.

One task that I’ve decided I want to follow up on is just trying to understand the history of land ownership in Thailand. I vaguely understand that in the past most land belonged to the King, but I’m not sure about that. Ping did say that in 1954 a land law was passed to allow people to gain ownership of the land they farmed, but again, I’m not sure and need to look all this up. One report I saw said

10 % of the Thai People own 104 Million Hectares of Land (6.5 Million Rai)
90 % of the Thai People own only 9.8 Million Hectares of Land (0.6 Million Rai)

That’s not a very equitable distribution if it is accurate.

So the meeting proceeded with people reporting on the villages that they monitored - how close they were to the various goals they were working on and what problems remained in achieving them. I always amazed at how much work my organization is doing and, despite appearances to the contrary, how incredibly well organized their data are. You can see one page of long chart of all the villages in the picture.

Another document in the report that I made it through was the Prime Ministers declaration of the formation of a committee to study and resolve the farmers’ problems. It includes the Prime Minister and high level officials from a variety of related ministries and about 30 of the farmers - including my boss and the farmer that spurred my interest in trying to find out if we can export mangoes to Anchorage. That isn’t moving too fast because the staff is so stretched on other work. I’ve gathered a fair amount of information, but I need the Thai staff to go with me to meetings so they are sure what is said and because they will have to follow through on this when I leave.


I've begun a preliminary search and found a few items relevant to what I've been learning on the ground. It's nice when your experiential understanding of things gets confirmed by the evidence.

The legal pattern of Thailand's land tenure is a product of a long historical process. According to Thai traditions and its laws, all land and natural resources belonged to the King and he grant* ownership in the land to his subjects who has* cleared and cultivate* it. the traditional concept of land ownership which is establish* through occupation and prodctive use is illustrated by the following passage from an early Chiangmai palm leaf legal text which purports to restate the traditional law passed on by King Mangrai in the 13th century which is as follows1:

"If a peasant has claimed riceland, has cleared the fields and built homes and orchards on the land, after he has used the land for three years it is right to collect taxes from him. If one man has worked on the land until it is a decent piece of land and there is another man who comes to snatch it away by offering a price for it, this is not proper, so do not remove the man. No matter how much he seeks to impress you with his wealth or status, you should not be persuaded because of those things. If you give in, then the peasant will truly be discouraged from creating and producing in the future."

[*In strict academic formating I should write [sic] to show that the typos were in the original document. But this was from a paper written by a non-Native English speaker and there are several typos, but I really don't want this to look like I'm saying, "Hey, screwed up again." I know my Thai would be littered with typos. So I decided to indicate the same thing less obtrusively with asterisks. Besides, this is a blog, not an academic paper.]


Wow, sounds like people were having the same sorts of problems 800 years ago when rich, influential people tried to get legal title from officials to land already possessed by poor farmers. I'm not sure of the date of the palm leaf document that copied this older declaration. The paper goes on:

This means that any Thai can claim ownership to a plot of land he cleared out and cultivated and he has only to register his claim for a small fee after cultivating the plot for three years, whereupon it becomes his property.2 [You can see get the pdf of this article by Adibah bte Awang of the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia at the link.]

That's nice in theory, but the experience of our farmers is that things are not all that easy. And I should say that the article goes on to discuss changes in the law since.

According to a document published by the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada which I found at the website of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees:

According to Nabangchang-Srisawalak, the Land Code of 1954 remains the most significant landownership legislation in Thailand (ibid., 84) and it describes the steps that must be followed for the issuance of title deeds "in non-forest areas" (Giné 2004, 4). By 2004, approximately 40 percent of the total land area of Thailand had been classified as private property (Nabangchang-Srisawalak Jan. 2006, 84). However, according to Xavier Giné, an economist with the World Bank (World Bank n.d.), it is estimated that it could take up to 200 years to properly document all current Thai landholders (Giné 2004, 5). [Emphasis added]

The document goes on to list different land ownership documents. The most secure is:

Freehold title deed (Nor Sor 4, NS-4)

The Nor Sor 4 (NS-4) (chanod or chanote) document is an "unrestricted legal title" (Giné 2004, 4) or freehold title deed (Siam Legal n.d.) which grants the owner the right to sell, transfer and legally mortgage his or her land (Giné 2004, 4). According to the Bangkok International Associates law firm, the NS-4 is issued in duplicate, with one kept by the bearer and the other held by the Land Department (BIA n.d.). The NS-4, considered the "best evidence of ownership," contains a description of the property (including area, boundaries and marking posts) as well as a history of all relevant transactions (ibid.). NS-4 documents usually concern land in built-up areas (ibid.).

But then it documents various levels of less secure documentation of land use. The next level, for instance, Nor Sor 3,

is alternatively known as a "confirmed certificate of use" (BIA n.d.) or as an "exploitation testimonial," and demonstrates that the bearer has "made use of the land for a prescribed period of time" (Giné 2004, 4). The document allows the bearer to sell or transfer the land, and (like NS-4 and NS-3) can be used as collateral for loans from financial institutions (ibid.; Siam Legal n.d.). NS-3K documents were introduced after 1972 when officials began using "unrectified aerial photographs" to map deed plans (Giné 2004, 4). The maps used have a scale of 1:5,000 (Siam Real Estate n.d.) and authorities identify the exact boundaries for NS-3K titles (Siam Legal n.d.). The bearer of an NS-3K may request an upgrade to a full title deed at an Amphur (District Office) (BIA n.d.), which may be granted by the Land Department if no objections are raised by any other party (Siam Legal n.d.; Chaninat & Leeds n.d.).

And things get dicier as we go down the list of less and less secure documentation. The next two on the list, for example,

Nor Sor 3 (NS-3)

NS-3 documents, otherwise known as "Certificates of Use" (BIA n.d.; Giné 2004, 4), are similar to NS-3K certificates (ibid.). They were issued between 1954 and 1972, when officials used tape surveys rather than aerial photographs to trace land boundaries, which allowed the representation of a land deed by "an approximate diagram showing the shape of the parcel" (ibid.). The boundaries of an NS-3 document, however, are less reliable than those on an NS-3K certificate (Siam Legal n.d.) since property owners, rather than the government, placed the boundary markers, which increased the risk of inaccuracies (Chaninat & Leeds n.d.).

Nor Sor 2 (NS-2)

The NS-2 document or "Preemptive Certificate" allows the bearer to occupy a parcel of land temporarily, but does not confer any transfer rights (except for inheritance); this document can therefore not be used as collateral (Giné 2004, 4).

The names of these documents (Nor Sor are the names of the Thai letters นส) are well known to all the people working here. When I showed this document to Swe, the student J was tutoring in English before his nine months trip to Japan, he pointed out that some of the land in his village was Nor Sor 3 Kor, some was Nor Sor 2, and some Sor Kor 1. But most was nothing at all, because it cost money to register and money was scarce most of the time.

Our farmers are caught up in these sorts of document difficulties. Pascale M. Phélinas, in Sustainability of rice production in Thailand, explains a little more about why poor and less educated Thais are less likely to have the proper documentation than wealthier, better educated Thais.

...ownership security also raises questions of equity. The establishment of property rights as well as the procedures required to prove legal ownership are always complex and involve significant transactions costs. During the survey, farmers often complained about the delays and costs involved before they could get through the whole official procedure. Since these costs vary little according to the size of the farm, larger and wealthier landowners are better placed to afford them. Transaction costs have thus biased the acquisition of titles in favor of large and wealthy farmers. Furthermore, because of differences in educational levels and, consequently, differences in access to the state administration, some segments of the population are exposed to the risk of exclusion from access to land because they are unaware of the implications of registration or are unable to have their existing land rights recorded. The history of Thailand reveals tha in many cases land records have been manipulated by powerful government officials to allow elite to obtain ownership of land (Feeney, 1982). [Emphasis added.]

For the farmers in the forest land there are other issues as well. From the FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation] Corporate Docuent Repository, we find Decentralization and Devolution of Forest Management in Asia and the Pacific... This comes from Chapter 3.3.3

Land Code of 1954 has the most important bearing on the question of land ownership and by implication on the process of centralization. Pah sa-nguan or the public forest land had many users or squatters for a long time. The Government by promulgation of 1954 land code provided the option that anyone occupying any forest land as of November 30, 1954 can receive a land using claim certificate provided he can prove his claim within 180 days. Few provincial farmers had been aware of this time stipulation, failed to take advantage of it and thus became encroachers. In 1961, the Thai government decided that 50% of the country should be forest land and as such started evicting encroachers to reach the target. In 1985, the National Forest policy reduced the target of forest land to 40% to release some land for other purposes but the objective was not realised. In fact, the Forest department undertook a programme of planting up the degraded forest which resulted in more evictions resulting in a political crisis (Lynch and Talbott, 1995). The net result of all this is that the centralization process for forest management continued in Thailand.

The Thais I work with know all this and take it for granted. As I've written in earlier posts, I believe them, but I also want to see the documentation. This sort of material helps make the case that the farmers aren't having problems with land ownership because they are lazy or because they are illegitimately claiming the land. Rather, the power structure, the education system, and the red tape is stacked against them and wealthier, better educated Thais have often been able to take advantage of this situation to get control of the land of villagers.

The Air Was Thick

"The air was thick" is a cliche that no one should ever write. Except when the air is so thick that it embraces you the way water embraces you in a pool. Wednesday it was like that all day. Hot. Sticky. No one really wanted to move much. They put the air on at the office, but when I went out the air was again a living presence. The sky was greyish, but who knows how much of that was March haze and how much was actual cloud?

It finally rained late that night, accompanied by thunder and lighting. But it was a pathetic rain, nothing befitting the prelude. It happened again Friday afternoon. But this time when the rain came, it came pouring down. We'd had dinner and had walked up the street to buy some things when the first drops came, here and there, dotting the ground. There were flashes in the sky. The street market folks went into a flurry of pulling things down, packing things up, and heading out before it started for real. We made it back to our bikes, the locks off, when the floodwaters came pouring down. So we slipped back into the restaurant we'd eaten in 20 minutes before and waited for things to settle down a bit.

Twenty minutes later, with the pounding on the overhead covering lessened, we got our bikes and rode home in the rain. It was cool and refreshing and not so heavy that we were soaked. But even with all that cleansing, Saturday morning's view of the mountains was still not particularly clear.

I do remember forty years ago in Kamphaengphet at the end of the dry season that the sun went down fiery red behind a grey haze. Farmers burning rice fields in anticipation of the rainy season were probably part of the issue. In recent years hill tribes and Thai farmers have been blamed for burning the fields. But I can't help wondering how much factories and auto and motorcycle emissions are part of the problem.

And what blows in from Burma and Laos where there is much less control over burning?

Here's Doi Inthanon, Thailand's highest mountain, yesterday, the day after Friday's heavy rains.

People Looking for Steve Keudell

[Update: Thursday morning Thai Time/Wednesday evening Oregon Time: I got the following messages. From Sue at the Stayton Area Relay for Life:

Those looking for information on Steve Keudell's condition can do so at: http://stevekeudell.blogspot.com Thank you!

Rebecca sends the same link and adds (dated 3pm Wed. March 18 Oregon Time:

This is the site for Steven's family blog. Steven is undergoing 8-12 hours of extensive surgery today (3/18) and can use all the prayers he can get. Hope this helps! ~Rebecca

The latest update at that site (7:30pm Oregon time Wednesday) begins:

Steve was in surgery for approximately 8 hrs. today. His surgeon said "it went very well...like text book". They were able to complete the free flap with a skin graft to his head injury. The blood supply to that area after the surgery is looking great. He feels very good about how it all went.

You can get the whole report at the link above.

I've had trouble connecting, or I would have had this up sooner. Here's hoping for Steve's (we Steve's have to stick together you know) full recovery.]




I'm not sure why they are getting here, but I've had several people today get to this site looking up Steve Keudell. So I googled to find out why the interest. Here's a short article I found. You might be able to get more current news through the link to Capital Press.

Farmer hospitalized after power-line accident
Steven Keudell, a farmer in Turner, Ore., remains in critical but stable condition after serious burns and head trauma in a tree-trimming accident.

Keudell is being treated at Emanuel Hospital in Portland, where he is to undergo surgery Monday afternoon.

According to Turner Fire Chief Kevin Henson, Keudell was on a tractor working to remove tree limbs on Thursday, March 12, when a branch fell onto a power line, bringing the live wires down on top of him.

Steve, get well soon. Working with an organization that helps Thai farmers, I'm sure they all wish you well too.

[Update: It's Wednesday in Thailand Tuesday evening in Oregon: A fair number of people are getting here looking for news. I'm in Thailand and don't even know Steve. So if anyone knows where there is another website or other place to get current news, or if they have more current news, please leave a comment or email me and I'll post it.][I've fixed the email link, so try it again. Sorry.]

Gibbons at Chiang Mai Zoo

Gibbon calls are pretty impressive and I recommend you click on the yellow arrow and listen while you read this post.

AKRaven's 10th mix by AKRaven


Esther Clarke, Ulrich H. Reichard, Klaus Zuberbuhler studied wild gibbon calls at Khao Yai National Park and said:

The vocal abilities of non-human primates are relatively unimpressive in comparison, with gibbon songs being a rare exception. These apes assemble a repertoire of call notes into elaborate songs, which function to repel conspecific intruders, advertise pair bonds, and attract mates. We conducted a series of field experiments with white-handed gibbons** at Khao Yai National Park, Thailand, which showed that this ape species uses songs also to protect themselves against predation. We compared the acoustic structure of predatory-induced songs with regular songs that were given as part of their daily routine. Predator-induced songs were identical to normal songs in the call note repertoire, but we found consistent
differences in how the notes were assembled into songs. The responses of out-of-sight receivers demonstrated that these syntactic differences were meaningful to conspecifics. Our study provides the first evidence of referential signalling in a free-ranging ape species, based on a communication system that utilises combinatorial rules.

These cages do give the gibbons some room to swing around as you can see in the video below, but they are pretty dreary.





Fortunately, the "gibbon island" is scheduled to open later this year. I'm assuming that all the gibbons will get out of these old cages and onto the islands.

Externalities, Time, and Why the Public Interest Often Loses Out

The Gist:

On any given issue, 'the public' interest is diluted by the many, many issues out there in which everyone has a small, but real interest. Each person is affected in a relatively small way by most decisions. Except for a few special interests that will be greatly benefited or harmed by the new policy or statute or action.

Most people say: "The variance to allow an apartment building in a single family home neighborhood doesn't affect me because I live far from there." "The changing of school boundaries in that other neighborhood won't affect my kids." So we do nothing, until it happens near us. But then no one else comes to help us out, because they aren't affected.

So the few highly affected people spend a lot of time and money to pursue their vested interest, while the public-at-large is either unaware of the issue or sees the impact as minimal.

But collectively, all those nibbles (and sometimes big bites) into the public interest, have a large impact and soon there is nothing left but a bit of core and maybe a few seeds of the public interest. Those seeds may dry up or may be nurtured to bear more public interest fruit in the future.


The Long Version

Mountain View Forum has an important post today on the dumbing down of Title 21 - the land use planning section of the Anchorage Municipal Code. There's a chart which shows how public space requirements for developers have, year after year, been watered down until they no longer exist. And how private open space has shrunk to almost nothing.

There are pictures of this kind of development springing up in Anchorage. Anchorage will be voting for a new mayor in less than a month. Read the post and start developing questions to ask mayoral candidates.

But why does this sort of thing happen?

"The public interest" is a vague phrase. It refers to a theoretical communal best interest. The dominance of the market system in the US society has led to the point where some people deny that there is such a thing as a communal interest. After all the dominant economic and political theories in the US have offered a story that posits such a communal best interest is the result of everyone fighting for their own personal interests.

But except for the most extreme anarchists, everyone seems to find something that is a communal public interest. Minimally it is national security or public safety. And, of course, individuals can't buy roads and bridges so we build those collectively too. And one of the most revered institution in the US - the various branches of the military - are highly communalized organizations where people defer many of their personal freedoms to a perceived collective public interest that they serve. Even to the point of giving their lives for that greater public good.

So, why does the public interest often lose out? While there are many factors, there's one that is structurally pretty basic to the problem, though articulating it isn't quite so simple, but I'll try.

"The public interest" is something that we all enjoy (or lose) collectively. There are many things that we have a collective public interest in:

Clean air
An educated, active, and responsible citizenry
A safe environment (safety from crime, dangerous situations, health hazards, terrorists,etc.)
As convenient means of transportation as possible
A monetary system that enables us to raise money to buy a house, start a business, pursue an education, etc.
Protection of collective goods - public recreation areas, our wild resources like salmon, natural resources, cultural heritages, etc.

I'm sure you can all think of other things that we enjoy collectively, but individually could not create, buy, or protect. In Anchorage we have some unique collective goods - easy access to wilderness, spectacular scenery, wildlife that connects us to nature in special ways, lots of space for each person, to name a few.

But the problem with collective goods include:

1. We each have many of these collective goods to enjoy and protect, too many for each of us to monitor on a regular basis.
2. Many of these things we take for granted and don't even realize how much we cherish until we lose them.
3. There are people with very specific interests in personal gain which often conflicts with our collective public interests.
4. These people stand to gain considerably (in the case of open space, developers will make more profit from their investment) if they are allowed to diminish the collective good.
5. Thus, these people are focused on a very specific issue where they have a highly concentrated vested interest.
6. While most people's collective public interests are so widely dispersed that they can't track what is happening in every area.

Thus individuals focusing on their own private benefit spend more money and time in pursuit of their interests, the side effect of which is to lessen our public collective good. Often these are nibbles at the public good, which, collectively, over time, result in significant loss. Anyone who has lived in Anchorage for 20 years or more has seen how our views of the mountains keep disappearing as open space is filled in with larger and larger buildings.

There is a name for this in economics. Externalities.  Externalities are identified by market economists as one of the failings of the market system. Tutor2U explains it this way:

Externalities are common in virtually every area of economic activity. They are defined as third party (or spill-over) effects arising from the production and/or consumption of goods and services for which no appropriate compensation is paid.

Externalities can cause market failure if the price mechanism does not take into account the full social costs and social benefits of production and consumption.

The study of externalities by economists has become extensive in recent years - not least because of concerns about the link between the economy and the environment.

Tutor2U goes on to give more details. This is a market version of the axiom often attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes,

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.

But with externalities, the harm to others is often not immediately or so tangibly noticed.

For instance, if a car repair shop dumps used vehicle oil into a stream instead of paying for the legal disposal of the oil, there is the extra cost of pollution cleanup for the collective public, but that shop's costs are reduced. So they can charge less, hurting shops who pay the price of legally and safely disposing of waste. The rest of us collectively pay for the clean up. And we may individually pay for the health side effects too. And legitimate businesses may lose customers.

If a new development of 200 housing units is built, there will be additional traffic in an area, greater demand on the local school, loss of the vegetation and open land which served to clean the air, buffer noise, and serve as a natural drainage system, among other things. All these problems place extra costs on the collective public good as well as on neighbors whose basements may be flooded, so that the developers actually do not have those costs as part of their costs and so can sell the units for less than the actual total costs.

Determining the costs of externalities is something that economists and others have worked on and can calculate with some, but not complete accuracy. What happens, though, is that the developers have a vested interest in changing the law to minimize the requirements for them to absorb these externalities as part of their costs. So, after the initial public interest and excitement over a land use planning document is over, the developers continue to pick away at those provisions that serve the public interest and cut into their profits. The public is generally unaware, or their individual personal loss may seem relatively small compared to other issues, and so they don't keep track, and the laws get changed. And one day that buffer of trees they thought was protected by the Municipal Code is gone and their backyard looks into a parking lot.

That's why we have public interest groups, where a group is dedicated to keeping watch of the public interest in a specific area and warning people when that area is in danger. Such groups are all over the political spectrum from the National Rifle Association and the National Right to Life to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Daughters of the American Republic, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Some people say there is no such thing as the public interest. Others that there might be, but it can't be measured. Or that there may be a public interest but 'public interest groups' are all seeking their own private interest. There are legitimate questions about details, but I would argue those organizations that work on behalf of the public good and that do not gain any benefit that isn't available to everyone else, more or less falls into the public interest group category. More or less allows for some disputes on the edges, but not much in the center.


So, go to the Mt. View Forum website. Read the post. Look at the pictures and the table. Write your questions, and send them to all the mayoral candidates.

Some questions I have for candidates include:

How do you calculate the cost of loss of views, loss of sunlight (from tall buildings on the south of your property), increase of traffic and noise, loss of animal habitat and drainage, of new developments?

How do you propose to raise money to deal with the externalities (side effects) of the changes in Title 21 over the years? New taxes?

At what point do you think that the quality of life in Anchorage will be so degraded by increased traffic, loss of public space, loss of wildlife, etc. that we are simply a colder version of Seattle and Los Angeles?

Given what we know about the need to change to sustainable living, the effects of global warming, and Alaska's inability to feed itself because of the short growing season and the limited amount of wild game per capita, how many people can a place like Anchorage hold ultimately?

What plans do you have to make Anchorage more energy and food efficient, and increase our reduce our dependence on Outside suppliers? (I recognize that we will always be dependent, but to what extent can we be more self sufficient? And how do we do this?)

I write this from northern Thailand where, in a serious emergency, a huge portion of the population could sustain itself by growing their own food and simply go back to less oil dependent machinery. But Thailand is also a place with almost no zoning and officials who are easily persuaded to look the other way if someone wants to violate what little there is. And the delightfully wooded neighborhood I live in - a mix of large houses as well as small ones - is being seriously degraded by the sprouting of more and more high rise apartments, flooding the tiny alleys (they really can't be called streets) with more and more traffic and noise.

Anchorage needs to have a healthy balance between reasonable development and reasonable environmental protections. Right now, those who do the developing stand to make immediate and significant profit while those who value the natural environment do not stand to profit monetarily from their stance. So that means that the odds are stacked in favor of the developers. Unless the rest of us become vigilant in protecting the factors that make Anchorage a special place with qualities that no longer exist in the rest of the United States.

A Day at the Chiang Mai Zoo

[Sunday - well looked at my watch and it's really Monday, 12:45 am Thai time]

We were out of the house at 7:30am. Unusual for us, but it was cool outside, I was awake, and we needed to just get out. We biked over to the University of Chiang Mai reservoir. From there we could hear the gibbons howling at the zoo. We've never been to the Chiang Mai zoo. It's close to our house, but I have ambivalent feelings about zoos. The LA County zoo was an important part of my childhood. I got to see real live elephants, bears, lions, and tigers as well as monkeys and all the rest in person. It helped instill in me a love and knowledge of animals I could not have gotten any other way. But animals shouldn't suffer for our education, and certainly not for our entertainment.

So we decided to go. As zoos go, this is not a bad zoo. J hasn't been walking that much because she uses her bike and she misses walking. The CM zoo has lots of room to walk. There are large areas of natural forest. We had lunch on an overlook with a delightful breeze. Below are some of my new friends.

As nice as the rhino's cage was, it just wasn't big enough for an animal which the sign said could go 55 k/hour. And waving his head back and forth just didn't look like mentally healthy behavior. But I'm not a rhino expert, maybe they do that in the wild too.

It feels like cheating to take pictures of birds that are in cages. But I've worked this out in my own head. Pictures in birdbooks are usually one bird, from one view, at one time of the year. The more pictures you see of the same bird, the easier it is to recognize it. The zoo's generally too tiny cages allowed me to take some decent bird pictures. But they aren't good for the birds.  The exception was the giant aviary. It was huge with monster trees inside.

There are lots of different types of hornbills in Thailand. In 2007 we saw and heard wild hornbills at Khao Yai National Park. You can see and hear one at the link.

This is the crested serpent eagle. I was lucky enough to catch a wild one on the way to work a month or so ago.

The gibbons didn't look too happy in their cages. I'll add some video and audio if I have time. But there are three gibbon islands that one of the workers said would be open in a few months. Then they will be out of these awful cages, but they still won't have enough room for gibbon life.

An unexpected treat was to see superman.

This elegant creature is a Lady Amherst Pheasant. There were several in an earlier cage, several in a large aviary that we walked through without wire between us and the birds, and this one. I'd rather a picture without the wire, but this was simply the best shot I got. And you shouldn't forget this is a zoo. And these animals are confined to prison.

Like the white crested laughing thrush (right) which we see flying around in the wild. This just isn't enough room. We think the other one is a Greater Necklaced Laughing Thrush. We're aren't absolutely sure, there wasn't a sign, but it looks like that in the book, though there is red on the one in the book.

All the big cats looked really healthy.

Most peacock pictures are from the front. So, here's from behind. This would be pretty impressive if we didn't know what was on the other side.

One of my many favorite animals. This one is not as well known as a lot of animals. It's a tapir from south America.

We managed to get home by 5 pm in time to contact Matt who was meeting us for dinner at the organic food party. That too was fun and interesting, and I'll try to post on that later. Try I said.

Yuzo Sings

There was a flier in the shop where we had the strawberry smoothies. Doc pointed it out. A concert Friday night. I could make out that it said, besides the time and location,

60 minutes
60 years

I figured the concert would be sixty minutes long, but didn't know what the 60 years meant. So last night I went after work - it was close by. J had gone off to Tai Chi and I hadn't expected it to last long. But the music didn't start until 7:30. It was at a house that had a coffee shop attached. There was food and drinks. And I met some Thais my age who were academics and also working on the same issues we're working on.

So, here's the video. Be warned - both the video and the sound are from my little Canon Powershot. On the one hand, being able to capture anything with such a small camera still amazes me. On the other hand, it was dark and the video is poor and the sound doesn't do the musicians justice at all. But you can get a sense of the evening. There's a bit of Dan Bern in the air.

Yuzo sings in Thai, Japanese, and English, though you have to listen closely. See if you can hear him singing about democracy, freeing Aung San Suu Kyithe Burmese (Pamma in Thai) people, and the Tibetan people.

Yuzo is Japanese but I was told he has been coming to Thailand every year for 30 years. He turns 60 this year, so that was the 60 years.

And I put the animation skills I learned last fall to use. It took most of the day, what with my computer pretty full and having to ditch old video to have enough space to save things, even to work the animation in photoshop at times. Anyway, if you look closely - you only get about five seconds - I have a bit of the Thai change into English. But don't blink or you'll miss it.

โฉนดชุมชน Chanot Chumchon Form of Community Ownership

I understood most of the words in the videotape I took (I'll get it up eventually, still waiting on advice on the translation). I didn't necessarily understand how they all fit together. Then there were words I didn't understand. A couple were easy to look up, but โฉนดชุมชน didn't quite make sense. I understood ชุมชน (choomchorn)** or community (though that word has a variety of meanings in English, but it's a word used often here to describe the collective spirit and physical place of the villages my NGO* is associated with.)

โฉนด is defined by thai2enlish.com as

title deed ; title deed to a piece of land

Try to think of a word to use to put those two together. As I discussed this with Swe yesterday over strawberry smoothies, the idea that seemed closest to something that we know in the US was a condo association, where people own the individual condos privately, but own the building, grounds, swimming pool, etc. collectively. Everyone has to agree on some sort of organizational fee to pay for the collectively owned parts of the property. They also have to agree on maintenance and new developments they might want to build.

Well, today, Mi (photoshopped a bit in the pictures) was in the office and I showed him the video and the words I was having trouble with.
He started drawing and writing to explain what chanot chumchon means. And it is something like a condo bylaws/agreement. So let me try to flesh out what I understood him to be saying. (That means, take everything you read next with a grain of salt.)

He started drawing a picture. And then he said a Chanot ChumChon needs five things:

1. Land - they need a piece of land for a group of families I asked how many but it seems to be flexible. He drew 11 on the picture, but said it could be from about 50 to 100 families. Smaller ones exist. So each family has rights over its own piece of land but there are also community rights over the whole larger piece.

2. There's a committee which has the responsibility to look after the everything. The members are representatives of all the farmers who maintain the agreement of the farmers, and are representatives to deal with the government. They develop the plan for what the Group is going to plant, for things like irrigation, and other communal needs. If there is a bigger Group, there might be three committees, a main committee, a management committee, etc. Committees have five to ten people.

3. ระเบียบ this translates as rules, order, regulation. If we use the condo association analogy, it would be something like the by-laws that govern how decisions are made and the structure of the organization.


4. A fund. The Chum Chon needs money to take care of the communal expenses. The group gets money through

• ลงขัน Member contributions - I just wrote about this term at the end of the post on Tricky Translations.
• ทอดผ้าป่า Another tricky term. It literally means "fried clothes forest." (Besides 'fry' ทอด can mean to cast or drop which is the meaning here, as in leaving cloth in the woods. People often make offerings of material, especially for monks' robes.) Swe helped explain it to me today. If a wat (temple) wants to build a new addition. They might send out letters to everyone asking for donations of any size. And you would get your name somewhere at the new structure depending on how much you gave. So this category is for fundraising activities and I suspect it's not too different from fundraisers that any US house of worship or school might have including things like cookie sales and raffles. The ChumChon would do Thai versions of these sorts of money raising activities.
• Money from local or federal government funds (such as the land bank) for specific projects. This might be support for schools and a health clinic as well as information on various agricultural techniques.

The money is used for communal improvements - irrigation systems, water and sewer, etc.


5. Government support - Like any local community, the Chum Chon needs assistance for schools, health care (small government health clinics), and ways to assist when prices drop below a basic price. Of course, public schools and public health clinics are things people in local communities in the US expect from government too. And US farmers are also protected by various price support programs.


So that's a general overview of โฉนดชุมชน Chanot Chumchon. Don't rely on this too heavily, but it should give you a reasonable head start on understanding this concept.

*I've explained this numerous times on the blog, but I realize there may be people who don't know this acronym who haven't been here before. And I don't like documents full of acronyms. It stands for Non-Governmental Organization and would be called a non-profit in the United States.

**Trying to write out Thai words in western script is tricky. There are different standard phonetics systems, but they only are helpful if you understand the sounds each letter is supposed to represent. So I've tried to make it as close to what would make phonetic sense to a US English speaker. Choom rhymes with 'room.' Chon rhymes something between 'tone' and 'torn.' Of course it also depends on who's speaking. In the tape, the speaker says something that sounds like choomachon.

Translation is a Tricky and Sometimes Delightful Activity

I have a video tape of one of the farmers explaining in Thai what they were doing in Bangkok. I already put up one video tape of him speaking in Hmong. But for the Thai one I want to have a translation. I've got it pretty much translated, but I'm waiting on a few people to confirm parts I wasn't sure of.

I learned when doing research in China that translation is tricky.

• First, some words just don't have English equivalents. There are words that are similar, but don't convey the original meaning. The concept simply has not been captured by a single word in English. For instance, the formal and informal versions of 'You' in French and German, or the distinction between the word for "I" used by a woman and the one used by a man in Thai. These are still easy to understand, but the question for the translator is whether to just say "I" or "you" or to try to explain the subtlety. Other words, like
  
  
• Second, there are words that can be translated, but the cultural context is so different that the English reader would understand something very different from what the original speaker meant. For instance, 20 years ago in China, 'work unit' had connotations very different from what someone in the US might conceive. Just as we get health insurance through work, at that time in China, people got pretty much everything they needed - housing, use of vehicles, access to things like use of vehicles, and many commodities people in market economies would buy in the market place. Work units also needed to give permission for travel and even to get married. So, just translating 'work-unit' really didn't convey the significance of that word to people not familiar to China then. I would hasten to point out that things have changed a lot in China and work-units are no longer so significant in people's lives as they were before the market reforms. But while there is a lot of private housing available now in large cities, work unit housing still plays a big role.
  
  
• Third, translators might not translate your questions correctly if the translator thinks they are culturally inappropriate. In those cases you get answers that seem strange, because some variation of your question was asked.

In any case, there were a couple of terms that seemed like they needed more than a one word translation. A key one - โฉนดชุมชน (Chanot chumchon) - left me scratching my head and so today, Mi explained it to me and I'll do a post on that. But in the explanation, he used the word

ลง ขัน long khan which thai2english.com translates as

[ V ] contribute ; offer money ; take a share in the expenses

and I'm probably going to translate as 'member contribution' with a link to this post.

But when I looked at the meaning of the two words ลง and ขัน, I couldn't understand how that got to offer money or take a share in the expenses.

ลง translates as:

get down ; get off ; go down ; decrease ; drop ; fall ; reduce ; descend ; put down down ; downward write down ; note down ; register ; publish

ขัน translates as:

amusingly ; funnily ; ridiculously ; absurdly bowl ; water dipper crow ; coo laugh ; tighten ; screw tight ; wrench

So how does that get to contribute? This is where the 'delightful' part of translation comes in. The relevant term here for ขัน is 'water dipper'. As Mi explained it to me, you have your water dipper filled with water and you lower it into the communal water bowl. Or you take your money out of your pocket and put it into the communal pot.

And suddenly it makes a lot of sense.

[Update later that day - there was a water dipper at the gathering I went to tonight, so I was able to add in this picture.]