Wrap-up

It has been too long since my last post, so here's  brief summary of some things I can remember. As I walked into the office in the Agronomy department a few weeks ago, I discovered a circle of maybe 25 people, students, faculty, and staff, reciting prayers from photocopied programs, and a small altar against the windows with an image of Nuestra Señora de Carmen, flanked by candles. It was a reminder that the university takes seriously the Catholic bit in its name. This wasn't a one-time deal, either, since it was the Mes de María and a roving prayer sessions hit every department on campus once a week. The month ended, of course, on December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception. December 8 is a national holiday here, and because it fell on a Thursday, most people took off Friday as well to make it a long weekend. Not anticipating this, we failed to make timely plans and spent most of the weekend in Santiago, enjoying the blaring horns, piercing sirens, and the 30+C heat (I have come to love SI units). This did mean I was able to do my Saturday morning bike ride to the top of Cerro San Cristobal, following the signs toward the virgin. The comuna de Providencia is kind enough to block the park's roads to auto traffic on Sat and Sun mornings, so it is the safest riding in town. On the descent, I do have to watch the dozens of feral dogs who appear abruptly from the woods and wander across the road.

A couple of weeks ago we traveled to Vilches, a small community in the Andean foothills where new friends, Ted and Maruja, have lived for many years. The contrast of rural living with the amenities we become so accustomed to in Santiago was stark. The first morning I was greeted by a friendly tarantula in the kitchen. I bravely ran away and let Deidre sweep it out the door. I know they're generally harmless, but why do they have to have so many legs, and move so unpredictably?

One day we hiked into the Reserva Natural un the road a few km (see, isn't that smoother than 'mi'?), where the views were stunning. I'm always surprised by the amount of camping happening in Chile, and there were plenty of campers here. I just don't remember seeing tent camping in Peru or Bolivia. With the excellent bus service, you can get almost anywhere without a car, it seems, and there were a lot of people packing out of the park in time to catch the last bus back down the hill.

On the way out, we stopped at an interesting house built in the form of the famous churches of Chiloe. the reason for stopping was to see the sewage treatment system. It is called a Toha system, and this one was, as I understand it, designed by a professor at the U. de Chile. Rather than deal with graywater, which can be relatively easily re-used for flushing toilets or for irrigation, this system treats the real sewage on site. This one was a little wooden hut filled with sawdust and the same red worms we use in our worm bin at home. The toilet waste is pumped into a primitive sprinkler system above the sawdust, and the liquid that drains out the bottom is purified with UV light and discharged. Amazingly, there was no smell at all. I want one for my house! 

Otherwise, we spend a lot of time walking, to go swimming, to take the kids to Spanish lessons, going to museums (the kids are saturated with museum visits). We sit in the ubiquitous little parks, snacking on bread and cheese or empanadas, though I'm the only one with any interest in eating them.

There are some creative names for stores, restaurants, and food products, sometimes intentional, that entertain us.

Christmas season is upon us, but it is easy to forget that with the hot summer weather. The weekend newspaper is filled with all of the expected temptations for the compulsive shopper. Yesterday's paper included, nestled between ads for electric razors, high tech desk lamps, and a list of online shopping resources, and article "con menos regalos y más dedicación, la Navidad puede ser sustentable"which seems like a good thing to throw into the dialog, even if the context seems kind of absurd. There are plastic trees popping up all over, and we even have a Charlie Brown type thing sitting on our coffee table. Kind of pathetic, but it serves the purpose just fine.

Patterns

There is something comforting about having a regular pattern in life, though it does decrease the enthusiasm for writing about it. M-F I ride to work in the morning, enjoy a very basic almuerzo at the cafeteria next to my building (everyone takes the time each day to have a meal together at lunchtime, a tradition that seems counter to the intense "I'll eat a sandwich at my desk while working and therefore be more productive" wheel-spinning that governs my life back North), and ride my bike home around 5 or 6 pm. A couple of times per week we meet up at a pool and swim for an hour or so. So you see, there's not much interesting there.

 I have only had one real work-related field trip, to a town called Ovalle up north, near La Serena. It's in the Elqui valley, known for its wine and other produce, and for attracting an eclectic crowd of new agey visitors. I of course was more taken by the civil infrastructure we visited, a dam, small hydropower plant, diversion structures, and of course, penstocks. I don't think it is so much about conquering nature or anything so overtly masculine like that. But seeing a steel pipe running down a steep hillside in the Andes, carrying little flow but at a tremendous pressure, I appreciate the power of nature, and seeing how we can take a piece of that to generate energy to do something really useful, like run a television set or crush grapes into pisco. I also have a desire to take my hydraulics class here to show them these incredible installations.

That's not to say I'm swayed by the massive hydropower projects being crammed down the public's throat here, about which I defer to the sober, thoughtful reflections of Dr. Peter Goodwin, someone I was fortunate to take some classes from at UC Berkeley long ago. For hydropower, it seems that scale is important.

The picture below shows one reason why large dams can be problematic here: in a dynamic landscape like this there is tremendous erosion and sediment transport down the rivers. the river bed and valley here are meters deep in loose gravel and sand, which will diminish, or at least complicate, the ability of a large dam to provide a long-term sustainable solution to energy or water supply. A couple of days ago I visited in the civil engineering department at the Católica a physical model of a proposed dam that included a few measures to try to cope with the sediment load that would enter the dam. Not an easy problem to solve. Not for me, anyway.

Delays

I have been so busy with work lately that writing in this blog has become a distant second in my priority list. There's the spiral of few entries reducing the number of views, and a small number of views providing little incentive to spend an evening writing here. Also, the difficulty in simultaneously finding the device I snapped a photo on, the appropriate cable to download it, and a functioning computer has been a frequent barrier.

So I have a few photos at my disposal so I'll post them now, without worrying about giving any commentary of any interest. A small group of us from the PUC went for a bike ride, my first off-road riding in many years. We were dropped off  on the outskirts of Santiago in a small town (if that) called Ermita. We crossed the Mapocho and found the trail was much rougher than anticipated, with lots of rock slides and impossibly steep sections. But the views were amazing, and despite several technical difficulties, we did reach Santiago again. It took almost 6 hours instead of the 2 that had been estimated. Very fun, and a high point of the month for me.

 

Aside from that, life has been fairly ordinary. No teargas exposure this week, at least for us (another Fulbright fellow who is at the U Chile (which as a public school has students on strike) was letting us know how the Carabineros (the national police, basically) have been very aggressive with teargassing and spraying water (apparently the water is laced with an irritant, so it's more like a chemical wash than just water) canons onto the campus, even disrupting a major hydraulics conference happening on campus. Of course, their aggression is predictably met with some rocks and paint from a handful of 'encapuchados' (literally 'hooded ones') which allows the escalation of the exchange, and the news follows the script by showing how out of control the students are with dramatic selective footage, looped to give the impression of endless chaos.

We visited someone who lives in the neighborhood of Renca, where we saw a 'dog show' on the plaza. Random people marched their untrained dogs (all Jack Russells, so I guess it wasn't completely random) around inside a small fenced area, while an occasional stray wandered in as well. They were promoting spaying and neutering, a desperately needed service here (I mean for pets), and other novel concepts like not abandoning dogs, and picking up the crap they leave behind. The street dogs are not very mean here, at least, probably because they appear well fed, though we were also warned that feeding street dogs causes them to consider the street their home and then they'll be defensive of it. I still prefer Bolivia's policy of feeding the street dogs to the large cats at the zoo.

OK, I know everyone (OK, I mean in case there is anyone) who reads this, hydroclimate, while featured in the title, has been getting short shrift. I did participate in a trip up north to a small town called Ovalle, near La Serena. We visited a reservoir and surveyed a complex water storage and distribution system to satisfy the cities and the agricultural orchards (avocados and pisco grapes for the most part, though white wine grapes were expanding too). I have some photos, but they were apparently downloaded somewhere else, so I'll post them later. It was another time where, traveling with faculty and research staff from the PUC, and meeting with a very accomplished faculty member at the university in Ovalle, that I realize how strong a research community they have here, highlighting my occasional pondering of what I'm even doing here. But here I am anyway, and nobody seems to mind.

I started with the concept of freedom last entry, and there's more where that came from. My typical bike route to campus includes a few sections that are like that shown here, where people express their own vision of freedom. The car coming at me head on is driving on the wrong side of the road (giant arrows mark the direction, so it's not ambiguous), and the bicyclist follows suit, riding to the left of the auto just to keep me on my toes. If there is no traffic using the street in the direction it was desinged for, why can't someone use it as they please? It's really just freedom to use things as we see efficiency demands.

The street in front of our apartment building suffers from this tyranny of free expression as well. There are two left-turn lanes, just outside our bedroom windows, and there is a left turn arrow that stays green long after the arrow for straight traffic becomes red. But rather than wait in the correct lane, people wanting to go straight constantly (really every single light change, all day and night) ride up the left turn lane then stop at the light so they can be first in line to go straight when it changes. The pathetic rule-followers, expecting to be able to turn left at a green arrow become stuck behind these people, and lean on their horns. The city respects this individual freedom by having their only action to this being the posting of a small 'no tocar bocina' sign under a tree at the curb. I lend my support to this scene by wearing ear plugs to bed.

Freedom

Sadly, when I see the word Freedom I hear Mel Gibson's voice in Braveheart.  It is a recurring theme in Chile, from the mundane to the movement trying to fundamentally change education. The latter is ongoing, since the latest round of talks between the students and the government seem to have collapsed. The conservative government is very stubborn, and is predictably not responsive to the demand that education be free, or even arranged differently in any substantial way. The students are also holding firm, and aren't all that interested in offers for lower interest rates for loans and expanded scholarships.  So the government forces have tried to kick the students out of some of the schools they have been occupying, which spurs the reaction of rocks and paint being thrown at the police vehicles, and the liberal use of teargas against the students.

I stumbled into a scene a couple of blocks from our apartment where I snapped these photos, and then the wind changed direction and a diluted teargas cloud introduced me to the acrid smell that precedes anything intense, which our whole family ran into a couple of days later. Last Thursday, as we climbed up out of the metro toward the bus terminal, the station had very few people in it, and most of them had scarves of other clothing over their faces. As we stepped off the train it smelled strongly of overheated brakes or some kind of fire, and it quickly became much more intense. Throats were burning and eyes running, we ran, gasping for breath for the nearest exit, which unfortunately was a few hallways and flights of stairs away. It turns out the police has attempted to re-take the campus of the University of Santiago, just above the Metro station, and their liberal use of teargas filled the station. Was that a bad parenting moment?

Anyway, we boarded our bus quickly enough to escape it. We had to leave the country to renew our visas, so we're in Mendoza, Argentina for a long weekend. It's quite nice, though expensive and much more touristy than I expected. The wine is cheap though, and it is very good. This morning, while we expected sun, the sky looked gray. It turns out the Chilean volcano Puyehue awoke again yesterday, sending ash over much of Argentina again. Our lungs aren't getting a break here. And tomorrow we head back to Chile again, and there are city-wide protests planned for tomorrow and the next day. Such excitement!

A dark day

Horrible news. I will miss you, Dan.

a trip

Last week the Fulbright people brought me and the other 4 Fulbright fellows in Chile together in Valpariaso, a bohemian city on the coast a little over an hour's bus ride away. We gathered on the campus of La Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, where we each gave a short presentation on our planned and ongoing activities here. After that we were treated to lunch and a visit to one of Pablo Neruda's houses (it is amazing that a poet could own so many houses), which was thoughtfully eccentric. While everyone else returned to Santiago that afternoon, we stayed for a couple of days.

Valparaiso has many parts that are grungy, with an air of a port city that has struggled to keep an economic base alive. The streetscapes are at least as colorful as anything I've seen, though from above they all share the same rusty corrugated metal look. The street art was ubiquitous, and of pretty decent quality most of the time. The ascensores, little train car things that haul you up and down the steep hillsides for 20 cents or so, a big tourist attraction, were impressively run down.

Sadly, after less than 36 hours there it became evident that a couple of us had consumed something that was not right. Our plans to return were delayed by a day while we just laid around the hotel room waiting for our bodies to recover to the point where we could handle the bus ride back to Santiago.

It was Fiestas Patrias weekend last weekend (18 Sept), so there were parades, rodeos, traditional dancing, and lots of meat eating. We didn't have the energy to do much related to it once we were back in Santiago (and we had done some of those activities the prior weekend). We did catch the TV report covering the terremoto (a mixture of white wine, pisco, sugar, and pineapple ice cream) drinking contest, with probably 15 minutes of footage of people raising pitchers of this foul mixture to their lips. In the paper that morning we saw a picture of a 79 year old woman, a legendary terremoto chugger apparently, who they reported 'drank like a 15 year old girl.' Now my translation could be off, but it is still disturbing on too many levels.

Anyway, life is busier now. I will be leading a two-day workshop for which I am not at all prepared, so there's some pressure building. My Spanish skills are not improving, which is disappointing, though I know what is needed is just more effort. It's just hard to muster that at the end of a long day's work. Tomorrow is Dia Mundial Sin Autos, which I'm looking forward to. More on that to come. Otherwise, everybody is happy.

Thoughts

I believe, as much as anything else, in serendipity. Within the last week I have been pummeled by climate change events. I could drone on for hours about this, but I'll try to contain myself. First, a recent article on which I was a co-author raised the ire of a visible meteorologist, someone who has long-standing disputes with some aspects of climate research (though notably, not with the effect of greenhouse gases on temperatures, or that human activities are driving rising temperatures). His main complaints relate to our willingness, despite our acknowledgment of uncertainty, to suggest ways to quantify some aspects of that uncertainty for the use of people responsible for planning. Of course, we do not state that this is the only thing planners should consider (and what representative of a water district, for instance, would plan for the future based solely on climate projections, regardless of how uncertainty is characterized?), and of course they should (and do) incorporate other societally driven changes (population growth, land use changes, and so on). That the new generation of climate (or earth system) models include some biophysical feedbacks between land cover and the atmosphere is an exciting advancement, and to see how this changes projections (and estimates of uncertainties) will produce new knowledge. So this person's inflammatory objections hone in on a frequently repeated message of his: that risk and vulnerability assessments should be pursued by communities considering all stresses on the system and that climate projections are a useless component of these assessments. Our paper by contrast summarizes how planners can determine for themselves, in ways that reflect the state of scientific understanding, for their region, time frame, resources, and acceptable risk level, to what degree climate projections should influence their planning decisions. So what’s so objectionable about that?


Occasionally in the morning we tap into NPR (thanks to this interweb thing) to listen to the tepid, moderate take on the day’s U.S. news. I was assaulted this morning by the voice of Rick Perry, an apparent republican candidate for president (are elections really over a year away?), who like so many others is fervently anti-government while suckling at the ample government teat for his salary, health care, and pension, and he even uses his political power to amass personal wealth. OK, he’s a corrupt hypocrite, but here’s the connection to my uneven line of thought: he also belched up the bile that he believes global warming is a hoax. After the experience of Bob Inglis who was willing to let the science of our changing climate affect his opinion that maybe we should do something about unfettered greenhouse gas emissions and was thus promptly replaced by a tea party representative, it is understandable that those who want to maintain their privilege as government employees will avoid facts and just toe the required line on this issue. The fact that the tea party is an entity manufactured by the notorious Koch brothers, who made their billions in the fossil fuel industry is not a secret, so how is it that this sort of disingenuous line spouted by Perry is not completely dismissed? (An aside: I've found that this isn't an issue so much in Chile. No matter what one's political persuasion there is a basic understanding of the findings of climate science, so while how to deal with climate change is argued, that it's happening and will intensify is pretty accepted. Chile essentially has no native fossil fuel industry. Could that be related?)  A study that came out of Yale this week shows most tea party members either think global warming isn’t caused by humans, or that it isn’t happening at all (but they're not alone: there's even a decent slice of democrats in this category). More shockingly, they are the group most likely to think of themselves as “very well informed” and that they “do not need any more information“ about global warming to make up their mind. So it seems like a sort of fundamentalism is the problem, a search by many people to just reach a conclusion and close the issue. There is obvious comfort in that, especially if you latch onto a belief that absolves us of any responsibility for negative impacts to the world our children and grandchildren will inherit. So, what to do? It seems that the answer lies in developing an image of a future that is actually fun, not just a list of things we really should give up. In the academic community I have seen stirs of this, cloaked in language about "intrinsic values" but really pretty good stuff. I'll climb off my soap box now.

Integrating fun and sustainability happened last Tuesday night, when I joined the Santiago ride of the Furiosos Ciclistas. One other person from the PUC and I joined several hundred other cyclists for a nighttime ride through downtown. It was a healthy mix of ages, falling between Critical Mass (though with very little confrontation with cars) and the San José Bike Party (though with no detectable alcohol or herbal combustibles). We did two loops: one through the old downtown area, ringing bells and chanting "somo ... caleta ... andamo bicicleta" (yes, there are supposed to be some 's's in there, but they are generally discarded in Chile). The second loop brought us past the multi-day vigil happening in front of the VTR TV station that lost it's reporter and crew in a plane crash last week. There were probably 15 minutes of somber silence there, which was a logistical issue since we completely blocked the entrance and exit, then we headed down the hill and back to the Plaza Italia, which is the starting point for everything here. To experience, even for an hour, a healthy crowd of friendly cyclists enjoying wide, smooth streets without cars or buses, really does give a sense that a better, and more fun, world is possible.