I’ve moved!

I’m putting this site to bed, and renewing my resolve to post regularly even though my readership is mostly interested in hearing about pirate attacks, and I’m not likely to experience another from back in BC.

From now on, go to janeboles.org

4 More years of this and we’ll be in the 50s.

Sometimes big environmental crises and other types of crises can feel more like thought problems than emotional problems to me, in a manner that makes me empathize with this fellow, and I think is in part because big crises are usually very hard to understand.

But some crises are not at all hard to understand. Some are so overwhelmingly dumb in an across the board meta-ideological kind of way where the hardest thing to understand is how they arose at all, and it is for these that I reserve my anger. One such crisis is the BONE-HEADED PLAN TO TWIN/REPLICATE THE PORT MANN BRIDGE FOR 3.1 BILLION DOLLARS.

This kind of planning is so bone-headed that it doesn’t even belong in the complex-nuanced-conflicted pile with most other bone-headed decisions, like no-to-STV or yes-to-fish-farms. How can it be so out of synch with everything else? Mayor Gregor Robertson wants to make Vancouver the greenest city and there is no way he can ever do this when seemingly all the provincial heavy hitters have joined the  1950s urban planning  frenzy.

I’m not terribly up to speed on the New Urbanism,  but I know enough to know that adding lanes to the highways that link a city with its ever-reaching sprawl is going to get you the very very opposite of a green city.  Adding lanes adds traffic.

The story of the Cypress Viaduct, which famously collapsed during the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, is a handy way to illustrate the point. The Cypress viaduct was a double decker stretch of Interstate 880, and it carried hordes of commuters in and out of Oakland. After the collapse, one of the big challenges was to decide where to put it, since the double-stack was no longer considered safe. Surveyors set out to find out which alternate routes the Interstate traffic had shifted to, and what they found was that IT HADN’T GONE ANYWHERE; it had just gone.  The increased bottle necking on the remaining routes had shifted incentives for drivers, a certain percentage of whom had made the choice carpool or transit or move away or stay home.

Of course, no one should have to move away or stay home because of bad traffic, but in our case, that wouldn’t be necessary. Because for anyone who might have missed it, here is what else 3.1 billion dollars of provincial money can do to address congestion in the Lower Mainland .

The reason this gets me so angry is that the choice at hand, with billions on the table, for a while there represented an epic, momentous, and potentially very exciting decision to either build the kind of Lower Mainland that lives up to its geography and its modern green ambitions, or to keep plowing myopically towards a 10 million person gridlock .   And once the call to go ahead on the bridge has been made (which by all accounts it seems to have been), there isn’t really any going back on it.  Maybe it’s just the sallow afterlight of the election that’s tainting my vision but I feel a little disenfranchised in this great town.  Though if anyone can prove me wrong it is probably the good folks at Rail for the Valley, so maybe I should ask them.

King of Disciplines

In response to the various calls one hears for more/better collaboration between disciplines, I give you:

Geography.

Where else but the faculty page of a Geography department could you scroll down a list of research interests and find Dr Cowling’s “Physiological significance of low atmospheric CO2 for plant-climate interactions” directly after Dr Cowen’s “Welfare Warriors: Towards a Genealogy of the Soldier Citizen in Canada”?

Or a little further down the page, find Dr Gough’s “Interannual variability of Hudson Bay ice thickness” followed directly by Dr Goonesardena’s “Spontaneous Romantics of the World, Just Do It!”?

Instead of tinkering with our institutions to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, maybe it makes more sense to just have one very very big discipline, and put everything else inside it.

(photo: Brent Danley)

Wildwood

road in

This weekend I tagged along on a visit to Wildwood, the famous British Columbian model for sustainable forestry, and a famous little chunk of British Columbian history. I’m a bit embarrassed to note that fame, because I had never heard of the place. Nor had I heard of Wildwood’s famous visionary and founder, Merve Wilkinson, who began managing the place in 1938 (yep), and is still there.

As is the case with many pioneers of conservation (Ducks Unlimited comes to mind), Merve didn’t start out an ideologue. Rather, he was a man with a wood lot, who just happened to be paying close enough attention to notice that the trees grew better with the whole ecosystem intact. Ecoforestry as a philosophy seems to be as simple as that: ecosystem function trumps timber volume; but as a methodology it takes knowing your forest intimately.

Because Merve has logged enough hours (ouch) in the field to earn a rest, Wildwood is now run by Jay and Nina Rastogi, who give weekly tours, and do indeed know the forest intimately. Individual trees are selected for harvest based on what job they are doing in their area – who they’re shading out, competing with, sheltering, housing, and if they if they have already done their job then they can retire as an expensive table, or a beam for Merve’s house.

Hugh Stimson enjoying cookies with Merve

Before going and meeting the old man himself for a few stories, Jay showed us around and it was a great field trip. One thing I learned is that kids are usually bored by sustainable forest management (admittedly not a sexy discipline) unless you let them eat ants, which makes it fun and cool. Another thing I learned is that eating ants makes sustainable forest management more fun and cool for adults too. I also learned that the most lucrative Non-Timber Forest Product in BC is field trips, so if you are looking to subsidize your sustainable woodlot and the chanterelles are a little too soggy to sell this year, you might try fieldtrips. Or maybe ants.

One of my sillier new habits for 2009 is to constantly relate everything to Cameroon, and so the obvious thing is to try and map Merve’s (and Jay’s) model for forest management onto forests there, but that’s the thing with site-specific ecoforestry: it isn’t applicable elsewhere. Not only are growth rates and species interaction are all different, but market conditions and all different, and so is land ownership/tenure.

But so long as I am insisting on relating everything to Cameroon, I will say, with mind to my conservationist friends over there who believe that the only sustainable timber harvesting is absolutely none at all: there is such thing as doing it right. Wildwood is not a cashcow, but it has kept a family afloat for generations, and still looks like a lot of old growth. Part of that might be related to another fundamental harvesting principle.

BC relative to Central Africa

The Canadian International Development Agency, which sponsored my time in Cameroon, offers ‘re-entry workshops’ to help people mitigate ‘reverse culture shock’. I neglected to attend, because I figured there could be no more shocking transition then from professional Tokyo Nightlife Agent to interior British Columbian treeplanter, and I thought I navigated that one quite gracefully back in ’03.

The things one notices after transitioning from developing- to developed- world are well known I think: less life on the street, more space, consumption and waste ranging from overt to obscene, reliability, predictability, punctuality, bad weather and the like. These things I expected to notice, and did.

But I’ll tell you what really stood out this time, wandering through downtown Victoria after 6 months in the Congo Basin: Do we ever have a lot of homeless people. No kidding. This is a town that as a Vancouverite I have dutifully mocked for it’s sterile, pleasantville retirement community vibe, lacking the grit of my favorite gentrification-havens on the mainland. And it may well be those things. But for all of the wealth and docility, this town (like the rest of the province, and maybe the whole country, and probably America too) lets a ridiculous number of people through the cracks.

During my time in Limbe, whose population is roughly one half Victoria’s, I was asked for change exactly one time. It seemed so out of context that it actually took me a moment to remember my lines (“Sorry, you want what? Some of my money? ). That first evening stroll through Victoria I was approached a handful of times in 40 minutes or so, which come to think about it is not that unusual in many areas.

This isn’t to underplay poverty in Cameroon; in fact I suspect the people living out of shopping carts in Victoria are better fed then about half of my 9-to-5 colleagues in Limbe. But there is something in-your-face about BC homelessness that I had forgotten about until I saw it with my post-Africa goggles.

A few usual explanations that come to mind: A tighter weave on Cameroonian family structures keeps people in family homes even if they have tendencies that would estrange them in these parts. Also there may be a bigger cultural taboo on vagrancy that keeps Cameroonian homeless people off the street and in the shadows where I don’t see them. The other half of the coin is BC’s housing crisis (I can barely afford to live here), employment crisis (don’t get me started), something about substance abuse which I’m not prepared to get into, and a social services system that seems to fail the people who need it.

It would be interesting to hear the take on poverty of a Cameroonian visiting BC for the first time. Maybe I should go find one.

The genius of No Comment

It seems my stays in Yaoundé always play themselves out against a background drone of looping headlines on international network TV. Today it is Euronews; less familiar to me than BBC World Service or Al Jazeera, but the same formula.

This probably isn’t news to many people, but I’ve just now been exposed to No Comment, and I am sold. For anyone who hasn’t seen this, or any other equivalent, No Comment is an approximately minute-long segment (or a couple of segments stuck together), consisting of breaking news footage with -you guessed it- no commentary.

No voice introduces or concludes, and nothing is written on the screen except time and place. The scene unfolds itself in silence leaving the viewer to, remarkably, interpret the events on their own. What I just watched was an antiwar demonstration in Munich, which turned violent in some relatively minor way. Or that is what I gather. It looked to me like in a peaceful, organized crowd of a few hundred demonstrating against Europe’s involvement with NATO, and a small handful of punchers, mostly a few police taking down a guy with a green Mohawk. I was enthralled.

This may just be me reacting to a novelty technique, but it seems reasonable that leaving people to think and conclude on their own will yield better thoughts and conclusions generally, in much the same way as removing all of the traffic signs and lanes on the roads lead to better driver awareness in that Dutch experiment that anarchists are so fond of citing.

Now that interesting and educated and commentary is free and prolific online, (most places) it may be that best service TV broadcasters can give to an audience is slick, high-resolution, first on the scene, professionally shot footage broadcast quick and wide. We interpret first and follow up on the facts later, if we care to. Could Show-Don’t-Tell reporting be the new big thing in TV journalism?

Unlikely; not all stories are suited to being told without words (how ever would we talk about climate change?), and of course if we remember our Chomsky, networks would not be doing their jobs if they let us do too much critical thinking.

Also, yes I know that filming and editing are subjective persuasive arts with or without narration, but there is such there are degrees of objectivity, and this new thing has less.

The link to no comment tv is here, although I do prefer thinking of it as a tube thing rather than an intertube thing.

Mount Cameroon messing with my head

To those considering the quick transition from hot humid jungly seaside air to subzero mongloianesque winds 4 kms up in the sky, beware your face:

Morning, Day 1, Sea level

Morning, Day 2, 3200m

Morning, Day 3, Down from 4100m

A Fowl Industry

With apologies to the pun-allergic.

There’s been some talk in Old Limbe Town lately about the unfortunate evolution of the local poultry market. As recently as a few months back, chickens and eggs came to people in Limbe the same way plantains or cassava did, via some small producer who grew a bit and sold it at one of the local markets, or even out of their home. The last time (only time really) I needed a whole chicken on short notice, we called up a colleague of mine who keeps about 40 ‘table birds’ (chickens and ducks) in his back garden, ready for slaughter on short notice. Great.

But over the course of a few short months the local market has been completely flooded by the birds and eggs of a certain non-national, who has started a battery farm in a certain other town, and has proudly declared that any chicken you eat in a Limbe restaurant these days is his (I’m told). Now our yolks are paler, our breasts more meager and our local producers are presumably in big trouble.

I have just left Limbe for good, but it seems the same thing is going on with chickens right now on a national scale. The other night in Yaounde I met a Canadian who was brimming with excitement at his new Cameroon-wide battery chicken venture. Apparently by 2010 we can expect the whole inhabited country to be dotted with high-tech battery operations churning out 30 000 birds per day, each. He could barely contain his glee about the coming era of higher meat-to-bone ratios and industrial sanitation standards (proudly insisting “our chickens NEVER see the light of day”!).  To my very predictable query about effects on local producers he gave a very predictable answer about hiring locals in the factories and paying them well.

For me this is a gloomy little story how headless and steamroller-like development can be. Why can’t we choose what to include and what to leave out? Given the choice between a localized organic food market that provided a little income to a lot of people with minimal eco-footprint and animal cruelty, and a foreign-owned, small-farm-squashing poultry monopoly, I don’t think most people would have to think very long or hard. Even the Canadian in question, who seemed nice enough, would probably go with the local/diverse/healthy economy option if one had asked him some time last year when he was a web-designer.

I seem to be bowing slowly out of the blogosphere, and rather quickly out of Cameroon. It has been a pretty great run, although each time I check in with my CIDA comrades Kim and Larissa over in Sierra Leone, who seem to have single handedly adreneline-injected national ecotourism and willed a couple of diamond-mind reclamations into existence (respectively), I feel a little less bold about what I’ve got done.

On the other hand, say Boles, is that 5 laptops with shiny new ArcGIS9.3 that you managed to collect into a single Limbe room there?

(In fact software credit goes mostly to Global Forest Watch and WRI.)

just send nets (a sad little rant)

I know that the idea of there being “Not enough computers in Africa” became dull once Brian Eno declared there was “Not enough Africa in computers”, and that that became passé when Ron Eglash declared that in fact there’s just “not enough Africa in Brian Eno”, but hey, you know what?

There’s not enough computers in Africa.

Similarly, I know that when I took my dicky little intro GIS class in school they were keen to point out that “GIS is not just software”. Sure, but you know what? You need software to do GIS.

And again similarly, I know that in academic development discourse, “technical fixes” are pooh-poohed as the most childish oversimplified bandaid non-solutions to deeply political crises, disguised as apolitical while covertly inoculating institutions for neoliberal agendas, but hey:

Would somebody throw me a technical fix? Just a little fix. I’m trying to run a workshop here.

BirdwatcherWatching

3 male migratory north atlantic whitefaces

Just as I find soccer hooliganism often more entertaining then the soccer, and sweaty high-shorted tourists often a more compelling subject then the monument they’re standing next to, I recently tagged along on a trip into Ma’an National Park loaded up with binoculars and bird identification books to watch…. Birdwatchers.

Birding is of course an activity that gets slated alongside stamp collection and trainspotting for being eccentric and inane. And in truth I’m no more interested personally in beefing up the number of species I can spot in a day then I am in collecting stamps, but the birdwatcher sure makes a more exciting travel companion then those other types, and I should know because I’ve travelled with train spotters.

My travel companions were some pretty serious experts too. Robbie can ID over 400 Cameroonian species, sometimes just by hearing them from the forest while he’s ASLEEP IN THE CAR.

I didn’t learn very much about birds on the trip, probably because I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but here is what I learned about birdwatching:

-There is absolutely no correlation between the fancy exotic appearance of the bird and it’s value as a Thing to Spot. If the little brownish one that looks like all the other little brownish ones except for a black bit by the eye and it is rarer then the crazy one with the royal blue Mohawk, then the brownish one is the prize.

-assuming birwatching itself is not nerdy, keeping a written inventory of the birds you’ve seen most definitely is.

-Should you require the services of a guide in the forest, you should be prepared for them to find you hilarious and ridiculous, especially when you whip out the birdcall mp3s and broadcast them back to the canopy.

-It takes a long time to learn what these guys know.

end of the road

mbanjo docks, downest part of downbeach.you can see some of the goings on by the river on the right hand side there by looking at a big version of this photo (go ‘all sizes’).

Project Generation

At this time there is nothing novel or probably even contentious about the bag of theories referred to variously as NGOization, conference mentality or even dependency theory [misnomer] –basically versions and symptoms of that the idea that the continued provision of services like healthcare or education or conservation from foreign organizations does nothing so much as guarantee the continued provision of services like healthcare or education or conservation from foreign organizations. This is said mostly to happen by destroying local incentive bases for said service provisions and by frothing up a lot of attractive activity and income around this thing called international development.

Cameroon ain’t Uganda, but ‘development’ as an end in its own right sure has carved out a little home here.

Over the past few months I’ve been approached by a handful of people- mostly young and moderately tech savvy people- who want to talk ‘projects’ with me. Let’s begin a collaboration, foster an understanding, build some capacity. Let’s do some Sustainable Development. It gets more intense then that, but never more specific.

One of these people, older and better educated and better off then usual, has for quite some time now been eager to talk about his pet non-profit non-governmental and eager to work with me on the ‘funding enterprise’ end, although it’s never been clear to me what brand of development he does.

Today he brought me a document, apparently to set me straight on what the NGO was all about. I’ve recreated it here minus the official looking stamps and the specific names.

[the NGO] is registered with the government of Cameroon and is a civil society organization.

Governing Structure:

The General Assembly is the highest government body; it is followed by the board of directors, advisory, a Program Coordinator, a Program Director, and a committee for Projects management with members elected when ever a project is to be implemented and is headed by the Project Director.

Prime Activities:

To create awareness

To out reach and contacts

The studies and planning of projects

The running of projects

Humanitarian Services.

The funny thing is that the right person probably could take that piece of paper and turn it into money, and then even if the organization never got past the outreaching of contacts and the planning of projects, it would have been some income.

It’s certainly not more abstract then subprime lending, for god’ sake. And yet it makes me want to crawl into a mud hole or do more piece work or something. Maybe I think everything is zero sum game and it’s wildly dangerous to make money from things you can’t see or lick. Can you lick sustainable development? Where is the Ministry of Development in all of this?

In other news a human corpse washed up next to my home today, and several employees at the botanic gardens were successfully absorbed into the government fold, which means they can look forward to a stable salary by mid 2010.

I’m back in Limbe after a too-long stay in Yaounde. the first week I stayed here:

out my window in Biyem-Assi, Yaounde

the full sized picture is better.

On Standards and Representation

I don’t have anything specific to say about Binayvanga Wainaina, except that I think people ought to be reminded about him occasionally, so I’m pointing him out again. He a smart funny writer, and a useful antidote for people who see Africa as a sick patient. He also turned down the World Economic Forum’s “Global Youth Leader” award, which, as someone who dies a little every time I hear the worlds ‘global’ and ‘youth’ in the same sentence, I find hard not to love.

Last week he recorded a little response to his excelent  How to Write About Africa, more musing than response, I think from the Texan University he teaches at, but I’m really not sure about that part. It isn’t hilarious but it is good. It is here.

As if 830 000 ha would slip under the radar.

It wasn’t that I thought I was the only person who noticed this massive unallocated chunk of elephant and gorilla infested rainforest, it was just that I couldn’t find anyone else who had.

I asked around, really. I asked people in the ministry of forests and wildlife, and the ministry of environmental protection, and people at Global Forest Watch Cameroon, and WWF, and none of them had anything to say about the status of the 830 00 ha (actually my maps say 867 000 ha) of land between the Dja Forest reserve and Congo Brazzaville, except for that yes, it sure is big, and no nobody seems to be using it for anything, and no, it doesn’t seem to have any protection status.

So I gave it the staring role in my ultimately inconsequential report potential Cameroonian forests for carbon finance, and went on to the next thing. It seemed possible to me, I admit, that the whole area had just fallen through the cracks of public/international attention for the time being, as things can do, especially in countries where people only ever use the internet to check their yahoo.fr inboxes.

I finally met some other humans who new about the area, and here is some of what I learned:

For one thing, it has a name, and it is not any of the names I had given it in the absence of better suggestions (variously ‘Haut Est Nyong’, ‘South Dja Region’ or my favorite: ‘the 9 Forest Management Units’). It is called Ngoyla-Mintom, and its recent bio reads like a a Short History of  New Conservation.

The condesnced version is that the government offered it up for sale way back in ’01, marketed to conservationists but available to anyone, and no conservationists took it because the asking price –$1.6 million/year , or just bellow $2/ha/year, was too high. Apparently you can get rainforest in Ecuador for a fraction of that. Some people blogged about it, mostly to very helpfully suggest that forests are precious and sacred and should never have a price tag. But the lasting message was that the Cameroonian government had offered to forgo the higher price they would have fetched from timber concessioners, and that BigEnviro (WWF and the Nature Conservancy in particular) failed to step up.

In addition, ‘my’ idea that the land was ripe for REDD also turned out to be far from novel.

Someone even started a little facebook discussion board about Ngoyla Montom (I am such an asshole), where 1 of the 4 commenters said “Gee, this appears to be the type of project where carbon finance could play a role in.” [‘Gee’ mine]

Rhett Butler at Mongabay.com wrote a piece about how “Carbon traders, not conservationists, could become the saviors of Ngoyla-Mintom forest”, and he made the point before I really knew Avoided Deforestation schemes existed.

I would like to believe his point that carbon financing is the most lucrative thing Cameroon could do with the land, but I think his calculations are a bit lumpy. For one thing, he’s got his REDD baseline scenario wrong. He says that because Cameroon has lost about 1% of its forest cover over the last 5 years, and 1% of 830 000 ha is 8300 ha, the area would fetch 8300 x [160 tonnes of CO2 per year] or 64 million over 30 years. (he uses 30 years because that’s how long Cameroonian timber concessions last).

Setting aside the fact that the 1% comes from FAO data which people seem not to trust these days,  (according to GTZ the figure is closer to 0.2), there is no reason to apply the national deforestation rate to an area with no detectable deforestation. Which brings us back to the zanier side of REDD, where potential target forests have to be quantified by the risk they face.

Also he assumes 160 tonnes of carbon released per hectare and I’m told that’s a little high, though I have nothing to back that up. Then again the price of an offset tonne has gone way up, as high as $25.

Whether Ngoyla-Mintom is worth more or less then what he said, he sure under reported the value of the timber concessions by a long shot. I have seen the numbers, and timber companies pay somewhere between CFA 2500 and CFA 5000, or between $5 and $10 /ha /year. That means more than $199 million over the course of 30 years, as opposed to the $26 that Butler quoted. Can REDD live up to that?

Makes me wonder why the Ministry of Forests and Wildlife even considered selling it for conservation in the first place, not that I doubt their commitment to Forests and Wildlife.

Having None of it

Nadege works at my local haunt, and she is excellent.

This weekend on her way home she was stopped on a dark street by 3 big cops who demanded to see her ID card for no specific reason. She told them she wasn’t doing anything wrong and was just going home , which was 2 blocks away, so she didn’t have ID with her.

Not a big surprise that they were unmoved by her logic, and when they started to to push her around a bit, she decided to take them all on.

Not a big surprise that they over powered her pretty quickly; she got hit and scraped up, but not before landing a few herself. It wasn’t that she had been caught without her ID card – which was in her pocket all the while – it was that she objected to being jerked around by power-crazed momos and wasn’t too intimidated to act on that.

Nor did she cave when they hauled her off to jail where she spent the night.

In the morning the momos conceded that she could go if she had her family come pay for her release, and her response was that they could keep her for as long as they felt like, because she had no family (again, not true) and no one would be paying them anything.

Did I mention Nadege is excellent?

I’m pretty sure if everyone were like her then neither police brutality not corruption would thrive for long, but it is a lot to ask of people.

How they do it in the NorthWest.

Traditional

sign'am

Cameroonian weddings have 3 parts to them: Traditional, Legal (‘sign’am’)and Christian, which happen on different days, often spread over months. This week I abandoned my post to travel up country and attend the first two parts of a particular marriage.

Of course I can’t speak for all Traditional Cameroonian weddings, and I bet there’s a lot of variation across regions, but in Bamenda, in this particular place, it was quite a thing.

The main event was a sort of live metaphorical debate between the two families. Someone from the bride side would get up and say something about a ripe plantain that is coveted but too high up, and then someone from the groom side would come back about how a particular elixir that is needed to soften it, but only the bride side could provide it, and on and on. It was all about proving dedication, and it was all very clever and funny, but my grasp on the pidgin, as ever, was thin.

When the extended metaphorathon was done, the bride team announced that the bride was too tired to show up and needed money from the groom side (for a taxi), which they gave. A woman covered in a sheet was ushered out from a back room, and when she was unveiled, she was rejected because she was not actually the bride. More money was requested, another false bride was unveiled, 5 times over. If I am making it sound serious, it was not. The less the presented woman looked like the bride, the more the crowd roared. So the funniest part was when they trotted me out. Rejected! Send her back!

The sign’am wedding was scheduled for 8:00am the next day, so I showed up at 8:45am and things kicked off around noon. Other than the timing, this part was fairly unexotic to my mind, but I like the part where they each state whether they are applying for a monogamous or polygamous marriage.

If I were a Village Explainer I would say things about kinship and gender and faith. But I’m not, so not.

No hope for the large but deeply troubled adolescent?

One of the smarter attacks on the offset market comes from Nick Davies at the Guardian, who describes said market as a “large but deeply troubled adolescent: Confused, unpredictable, and difficult to trust”. As much as it pains me, I would have to add ‘arrogant, meddling, and lacking regard for tradition” to the bio.

But it gets worse. The teenager analogy is apt because most of its vices are symptoms of awkward youth, and could conceivably be addressed as the market matures. Things like insufficient monitoring methods and insufficient regulation are all ugly disasters, but they are, after all, growing pains. So fine.

The much gloomier news is that the Additionality problem (I am calling it a problem) is so inherent and fundamental in the structure of the offset market that there will be no working through it or growing out of it. It is, to extend the analogy, in the genes.

Additionality is the idea that in order for a carbon sink project to constitute a legitimate carbon Offset, it has to be something that wasn’t going to happened without the funding. If it was going to happen anyway, then the money is aid or sponsorship or something, but it hasn’t affected the atmosphere even a little bit. This makes perfect sense and if we are going to look to offsetting as a serious response to climate change then Additionality absolutely needs to be there.

The problem is that, especially where places like Indonesia and Central Africa are concerned, Additionality really undermines the possibility for meaningful local decision-making or self-determination.

I heard this point about remote transactions affecting local land use before, but I mostly shucked it off at the time because everyone’s land use is affected by remote transaction in one way or another. Now I think Additionality makes it even more explicit then that.

Let’s say people in village X are engaged in slash and burn agriculture because that’s the way for them to get good abundant food with low-tech agriculture. The people of village X might be eligible to receive technical assistance through an offset project to do agroforestry or something, but only if they don’t want to.

If they have ever expressed an interest in doing agroforestry, or tried to go about it themselves, then you can’t be sure it wasn’t going to happen anyway, and the idea of calling it an offset becomes a sham.

It is the most elegant catch-22 I’ve come across since the original.

Climate change might be number one on the planetary list of Very Important Issues, but deep democracy and political self-determination in the global south is probably number two, and I might even have the order wrong at that. Somebody should look into this. Is anybody looking into this?

All that is soft and cuddly and benign and nostalgic about empire.

If one were to gather up the essence of all things flavored British Empire (India, tea, black pepper, tea plantations, black pepper plantations, Gurkas, war memorials, complaining about the French, Hong Kong, etc) and then distil those essences into a pulp, and then mold that pulp into a man, and then set that man loose on the 21^st century, that man would be Dick Scott, and he would live right here in Limbe.

If one were to then add some second-tier, indirectly British Empire-themed essences (love of bagpipes and bird watching, native wife, being the world’s leading expert on some obscure slice of military/naval history,) and add those to the original man, then it would STILL be Dick Scott, and he would manage a hopelessly French-owned banana plantation as well as oversee the pension distribution for the remaining Cameroonians who fought in the World War II.

Today he would over see the Remembrance Day Ceremony at Limbe (formerly Victoria). He did, and it was lovely.

Dick is really a remarkable human being – a true patriot despite scarcely ever having set foot in the UK; born and schooled in Hong Kong, 19 years running Indian tea and pepper, 12 years in military service, single-handed rescuer of the Buea’s (Cameroon’s?) oldest European book collection, leading expert on early 20^th century British-Cameroonian military exploits, and father of a Cameroonian son who was good enough to sport a kilt today. Also one hell of a nice guy, although he might never know it because no one else can get a word in.

2 kinds of Obamalove

There seem to be two basic kinds of Obamalove going on in Africa. Both kinds are race-based, but one is great and the other actually made me snap at people the other day (although that’s my problem). The first one is about how fantastic it is to see a black man elected as US president and, (although this part is arguable:) the most powerful person on the planet. Yeah I hear that, do I ever. This version of Obamalove also includes some non-racial stuff about what an inspiration mccain’s gracious defeat speech was. And yes to that part too.

So things like the infinite Obama bags and t-shirts, the 3 Obama songs I’ve heard on the radio, or Obama : The Musical! showing right now in Nairobi, these are kitsch but in a good way.

The second kind is the one that firmly unequivocally states Obama is an African first and foremost, and that any minute now he will start doing the continent’s bidding. Why would I get impatient at this? What is my problem? I mean I get it. I get that almost everyone outside of the New World has a much more lineage-oriented take on nationality, which would make the man kind of Kenyan. I’m sure if he saw himself as Kenyan-first  he would indeed do Kenya’s bidding.

And I always thought I was good at cultural relativism. But there you go; I managed to stumble into a shouting match with people at work who were claiming that next a Cameroonian minister should replace Sarkozy, and who were having none of it when I tried to claim Obama for the States.

Other examples of this variety include a 4^th Obama tune written and performed by a Ghanaian radio personality Black Rasta, who when interviewed about the song said (I’m paraphrasing): ‘Yes, I know Obama never mentioned Africa in his campaign but I’m confident that that is because he needs to get the America stuff out of the way first’. Also, today mean old Mugabe announced that he’s ready to re-establish a dialogue with the USA. Has he EVER said this? What does he imagine will be different? Oh, and a british lady who’s been here for 12 years told me that she knew Obama was bollocks as soon as she saw that the rest of his staff was white. I couldn’t answer.

I think my own small-minded lunatic  outburst (which ended, insanely with “Genetics? GENETICS? That’s not what America’s ABOUT, man!) came from hearing a bit too much jubilation on the radio,then getting jealous and possessive of Obama.

Me, who has surely spent less time in America then he has in Kenya. This might mean I’m unfit for oversees work.

It’s not like variety 2 dangerous (although I suspect there will be sore disappointment in 4 years when America’s relationship with Africa is mostly unchanged).

I’d like to hear what Kim and Larissa have to say from sierra leone, and then after that I don’t want to talk about race again until my 30^th birthday.

A bad idea worth seeing through

I’ve completed a report for Cameroon’s action plan for the Convention on Biodiversity about the potential for synergies between Carbon finance schemes (particularly avoided deforestation) and the protection or reintroduction of biodiversity.

Conclusions, basically:

-It will almost certainly be a gong show.

-That probably isn’t a good enough reason not to give it a shot.

It seemed like such a beautiful fit; Avoided deforestation schemes map forest cover and give areas values based on ‘carbon stock’ and ‘risk’, then pluck out the high-risk, high- carbon stock areas for protection. And if countries want to, when they are planning their REDD-Readiness Mechanism, they can include a ‘high biodiversity’ theme in there.

Sadly the amount of CONSTANT monitoring and inventorying (and corresponding technical capacity) required isn’t really available here, or probably in any of the ‘non-annex 1’ countries that are eligible for REDD financing from the big bad world bank.

And this is not to mention any of the problems with carbon finance projects in general. In the worlds of Daniel Welch author and Ethical Consumer researcher,

“Offsets are an imaginary commodity created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.”

and there’s just no getting around that one. Additionality, the idea that the carbon wouldn’t have been sunk without the project, is just inherently subjective and speculative. Another thing is that offset markets lack the critical competitive check found in normal markets, wherein the interests of the buyer counter that of the seller. In offset markets, both parties just want MORE PROJECTS, which, especially with the difficulties in monitoring and enforcement, and in the absence of enough standardized regulation, means people selling the same offset more than once, or over pricing it, or even selling offsets from a project that never existed.

All of that said, the payment-for-ecosystem-services thing has really gotten under my skin, and seems like too good of an idea to pass up on the grounds that it’s big and messy.

So back to Yaoundé (soon) to find out who else agrees this is probably inappropriate.

point and shoot

Pieter Hugo is proof that if you have a good subject you don’t need a good camera. Or even a eye for composition or color. You do need some kind of camera though, and I am still working on that.

We were a backward people in 2005

The topic of bushmeat comes up over and over in Central Africa, especially when you hang out in that intertidal zone between consumers and conservationists, like I do. A couple of days ago someone asked me if we ate bushmeat in Canada and I said no.

Then today while going through some old photos I found this:

(yep, squirrel. And I wouldn’t have posted it if I weren’t implying we ate it. We ate it.)

And then I thought about the house I lived in this summer:

An open letter to Healthy Skepticism and Reckitt Benckiser

Healthy Skepticism is an international association of doctors who work to stop harmful and misleading drug promotion. They started out in the 80s, doing letter-writing campaigns to stop some really hideous drug misuses like the prescription of anabolic steroids to malnourished children. But they were so effective at threatening pharmaceutical companies that most of the really audacious examples got taken care of in the first decade of the campaign.

Now they work on less dramatic (but still harmful) things like the overprescription of antidepressants or the unintented bias towards new drugs for the sake of their newness. They do lobbying instead of letter-writing because those things are just harder to get people all frothed up about.

But I happen to think there is still some low-hanging fruit out there.

Yesterday night my neighbor gave me some Dettol (made by the British Reckitt Bneckiser) to take care of an infected wound.  THe label says, (among other things) this:

“Proven to fight against germs such a:

Herpes 2

HIV

[Blah blah blah]”

The HIV rate around here is something like 5%. That strikes me as pretty murderous information. In that vein:

Dear Reckitt Benckiser,

Please stop marketing your cleaning products as cures for AIDS.

and:

Dear Healthy Skepticism,

Please use your knowledge and influence to stick it to them.

An open letter to Paul Biya and Ephraim Inoni

Cameroon is, in a regional context, stable and peaceful and even functional. It’s a funny little paradox then, that they rank at the very top of the Transparency International corruption index, and every now and then I devote a little time to wondering why that is.

I’ve heard a few people (nationals) make the case that Cameroon is actually not stable in any reliable or substantive way, that things are in fact terrible and on the verge of collapse but are propped up artificially by fertile soil and an abundant food supply. “You get angry but at the end of the day you go home and eat something” according to my no-nonsense neighbor julianna. And why not be angry? Consider the case of the president’s son, who allegedly celebrated his birthday party in a Paris hotel room and left useless piles of Central African francs, not as a misguided tip but because he couldn’t be bothered to scoop the piles up and take them with back to Africa where they might be used to buy things. The story goes that the hotel staff had to call him back from the airport to come clean up.

But I digress. Cultures of corruption are real whether Cameroon is stable or merely appears that way, and they are very tricky things to explain let alone fix. Lots of people smart people write about corruption, so I had just assumed all of the obvious structural incentive-based fixes had been tried already.

But check this out: It seems like if you wanted to ensure corruption in government rather then prevent it, one thing you might do to get the ball snowballing is to withhold the salaries of civil servants for their first two years. Create an expectation that they present themselves as professionals, not to mention feed and clothe their families, and then inject them into a bureaucracy without any legitimate means of income. Stir and let simmer.

I had heard someone (a non-national) say a while back that this was the case in Cameroon, but it sounded like a lot of nonsense. But last night I asked a proper government man and he confirmed it. He is the boss of a lot of people at a big ministerial research institution and he takes remittances from his mom, god bless him. Apparently The Man just takes its time processing peoples’ papers and 2 years is about how long it takes to get paid. Unless you can find some way to speed things along I guess, wink wink.

Dear Your Excellency Mr. Biya, and Your Excellency Mr Inoni,

Maybe if you paid people money they wouldn’t have to take bribes?

An Open letter to ex- Rogers Pass overlord, Maple Ridge Mayor-re elect hopeful Gord Robson:

Congratulations sir, on being the first person in a long long time to employ the phrase “mammoth industrial expansion” in the positive.

Hey CBD, put me in you!

Kolinsky pointed out that it was uncharacteristic of me to convince people not to do things (like cut down forests) and he might be right but anyways that project is pretty frozen stiff for now. In the mean time it seems I’m writing the book (proverbial—just a report) on carbon finance for Cameroon’s National Strategy under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Who let me loose on this country?

The CBD is that thing that happened in Montreal a few years ago where every country in the world except Iraq, Somalia and the USA signed on to protect their stuff and be try to be equitable and sustainable about it.

Article 6 of the CBD says that signatory countries should have an action plan (these are called NBSAPs. ) and that they should “Integrate, as far as possible and as appropriate, the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity into relevant sectoral or cross-sectoral plans, programmes and policies”.

Relevant cross-sectoral programs? You mean programs that inadvertently safeguard biodiversity? I know this one. That’s us.

But combing through the latest edition of Cameroon’s charmingly xeroxed and scanned NBSAP document, I notice that carbon finance isn’t mentioned. And THAT’S because (I’m repeating myself here) THE STUFF’S JUST TOO YOUNG.

In undergrad they said it’s a rare treat to identify a ‘gap in the literature’. Out here they’re canyons and you fall into them. Hoo-rah.

The Bird Club is Not an Apartheid Bar

Limbe is home to a small and cliquish coterie of white folks, the majority of whom are here to save the drill, or the lowland gorilla, or the chimp, but especially the drill which they can’t seem to get enough of. These are not bad people, and I respect what they do despite never having met a monkey I didn’t hate.

But I’ve been shunning them with all the righteousness I can muster because they all spend their evenings at the bird club, a handsome little Shangri-la built onto a rocky outcrop over the Biafra Blight, which I had been told was whites only. It seemed preposterous and almost impossible, but the information came to me straight from a couple of members, so I was inclined to believe it. They club enforced its policy through a system of membership, wherein technically only members who pay 20 000 francs (lots), or the invited guests of members, are allowed in. Unbelievable

My plan was expose their institutionalized hate crimes by first turning up solo, blending in as it were for a few gin and tonics, then showing up with a local and getting to be both belligerent and right when they shut us down. But I accidently made friends with  and told people what I was doing there.

They were suitably appalled– not to find out I was a mole, but to find out I had been so horribly misinformed. They complained for a while about how locals don’t come because they don’t like the lighting or the absence of blaring music.

So it’s not only for whites, but only whites go. And I am publicly declaring that I’m convinced, and that’s good enough for me. Is it wrong? I don’t think so. Maybe. I don’t think so. Anyway it’s nice there and now I have peers who drink as much as I do, which is significant because I will soon run out of money.

The greatest part is that Hans, the Dutch owner, has gone back to the Netherlands for 10 days, and if all goes well, will arrive back in Limbe with a new camera for me very soon. That was very nice of him and I sincerely regret having called him a Nazi so many times.

big topic

October 15th is Rural Women’s day and this year the theme is Climate Change, specifically how the smoke in fish smoking houses damages the eyesight of the fish smoking ladies.

I guess it’s true, everything really is about climate change.

Illegalness

Please enjoy this photo of TOTALLY UN-RELATED illegalness while I work on securing another camera.

Today I inserted myself into the world of Community Forest management and oh what a time.

Cameroon is reported to have one of the most sophisticated and broadly implemented systems of Community Forestry in the world, along with India. India actually has the oldest and biggest community forest management in the world, but just like they have the biggest democracy in the world, and Concordia has the biggest political science department on the continent, it says nothing at all about quality. For now I’m putting my money on these guys here.

The place is called  Bimbia Bonadikombo Community Forest—3500 ha of rainforest managed and used by 5000 people. I went out with a couple of ‘operations’ people whose job it is to monitor infractions. The whole place is divided into compartments by permissible use—here’s the charcoal burning part, here agroforestry here conservation and research, etc.  And the operations guys know the place so well that if anyone is taking the wrong thing from the wrong area they know about it, which makes them a little like forest cops or park wardens.

Except they are nothing nothing nothing like forest cops or park wardens.

Our task today was to check in on a remote patch where they’ve planted some high value timber saplings in place of an illegal one-acre banana plantation. They told me they had cut the farmer’s illegal bananas trees down and I imagined all the weeping that would go on back in Victoria’s Comosun College, which had sponsored the replanting through adopt-an-acre, if they knew they were sponsoring small-farmer-brutality and livelihood-murder.

But when we got there and I asked why all the banana trees were still standing ten or twelve feet tall amongst the young mahoganies, they said that, you know, they grew back. They had just lopped the tops off; didn’t want to screw they guy after all. So when they say ‘cut his crops’ they really just mean they pruned them. That farmer helps them monitor now.

It isn’t that they’re slack or un-invested or taking bribes or anything. What I think is going on is that they are pragmatic and malleable and I suspect their guiding principle is reason. In fact proverbial ‘pruning’ seems to be what they really do. Along the trail they dismantled several of these illegally-located loading stations made of thick poles driven into the ground where charcoal porters mount impossible volumes of charcoal onto their heads. But when they pull the poles out and chuck them into the bush they don’t kick the holes in, which would be easy to do and which would make life way harder for the charcoal guys who after all, just got their zoning wrong.

We even came upon an illegally-located charcoal porter kid resting on the trail, and they slapped his back amiably, saying (paraphrased from pidgin) ‘Come on man you’re ruining my forest! But anyway the damage is done now and you look like you could use a hand getting that 100 kg load onto your head.’

So they’re actually pulling off this incredible feat of defending regulation without creating criminals, or even enemies. And things are in control.

On the way out this guy Hadisson pointed out the distant sound of a chainsaw. “Listen” he says. “Illegal!” I asked him what they typically did about that kind of thing, and he said that if it’s close by they go check it out, but if it’s very far away like this one was, they let it go. That sounds reasonable.

So long, Digital Elph

.

The above photo, which is remarkable only for how neatly it contains all of the malicious, simplistic, outmoded stereotypes of the Dark Continent, was the very last thing my camera saw before drowning to death a while back. (and so young…) I am trying to swing my jet-setting photojournalist neighbor picking another one up for me in the UK next week, and if that all goes well I’ll be back in action by the end of the month.

If not, the photo will linger on the photo page, casting old shadows. Binyavanga Wainaina, forgive me.

Never let unparalleled military muscle spoil a good booty call

They sang the Team America song twice

Since the big heist last Sunday morning, there’s been a military frigate in the bay just between Limbe and the nearby island of mount Malobo, where it is suspected the pirates may have staged from. Everyone I asked said it’s the Cameroonian military out there, and I asked a lot of people because I had read that the US wanted to beef up its presence in these waters to keep piracy in check. You see the region is very volatile because neither Nigeria nor Cameroon has a MacDonald’s.

Well it turns out I was right and it is the American Navy after all. They were not hard to spot when they came ashore en masse with their buzzed heads and teenage acne, paying way too much for beers and Fantas on downbeach. They are a crew of 180, two thirds of the way into an 18 month tour, doing specifically counter-piracy work.

I could see that being really reassuring, having a slick and mean American pirate-fighting vessel guarding your bay while you slept. Except for one thing:

They got here on Saturday.

That means that the 30+ bad guys would have literally driven their boats, loaded up with bank-busting explosives and AKs, past or possibly around the sleeping frigate, and then drove past or around it again on their way back, loaded up with loot.

None of the navy guys I spoke with seemed to make much of this. It wasn’t that they didn’t get the irony, just that it struck them as a minor screwup, like can’t-win’em-all. Their job, they said, is to board boats by day, and search them. But how did they not near the gunfight across the water? And surely they could have found someone in Limbe to hire as a night watchman?

I think that clearly defining your mission is a good way to hear god laugh.

Listening to Academics

Actually I think it looks more like Battered Forest

I’m struck over and over by how easy it is to see James Ferguson’s Anti-Politics Machine shtick, which I read about in school, playing itself out before me here in Cameroon.

Ferguson’s Anti-Politics Machine shtick is a Foucaultian take on development discourse which says that development schemes don’t fail because they’re getting their strategy wrong or because World Bank people are secretly trying to usurp poor countries in a global economic system as subservients (although those things might also be true); they fail because that’s not what the development enterprise wants to do anyway.

Ferguson says that development, like everything that exists, is concerned with continuing to exist, and it does this (inadvertently) by creating realities (discourses) where it is well-needed. He talks about the way CIDA, in its bumbling efforts to reform Lesothan animal husbandry, reinvented Lesotho as this ahistorical Thing-that-lacks-Development, its empty hills like bowls waiting to be filled with new technologies, bureaucracies, and markets. And he says there are all kind of unexpected outcomes that have nothing to do with the interests of any actors involved.

But here’s the rub: I’m kind of doing that here, with Forests-as-Things-that-need-Carbon-Financing.

The first time it was really noticeable was when I showed my forester colleague Natan the first draft of my/our report, then titled “An Overview of Threatened Forests in Cameroon”, and he winced and jolted and whined every time he saw or heard the word ‘threatened’. Ok I only chose that title because my instructions were to please prepare an Overview of Threatened Forests in Cameroon, but that’s kind of the point.

(It turned also turns out that Natan, who is francophone, was translating ‘threatened’ as ‘menacé’ which is up a notch or two on the scale of bad ways for a forest to be.)

Listening to UNFCCC types talk about Cameroonian forests, and then listening to Cameroonian foresters talk about Cameroonian forests, it’s hard to believe it’s the same place. And neither one is wrong, I know that much.

I’m confused and I want academics to tell me what to do.

If I’m not mistaken, the consensus on the influence of academics on policy is that there isn’t enough of it, (not that I’m policy making, obviously) and one of the reasons that’s a shame is that the discourses of academics are a little less tainted by career and other structural incentives than the people who actually do things rather than comment on them. And I know university research is steered in all kind of sinister directions by funding but come on, that can’t happen in the social sciences where they don’t really get funding anyway.

The dilemma is that there isn’t really any critical literature out there on REDD/Avoided Deforestation projects yet because there are hardly any avoided deforestation projects out there; the stuff’s just too young.

That’s why I’m delighted that there are at least a few clever academics scratching there heads about this kind of thing over in the Midwest, and especially delighted to be pen-paling with one of them, Brad Kinder, who is professionally scratching his head about the social consequences of carbon finance projects on rural landusers.

Brad Kinder, muller and ponderer, tell me what to do and I’ll do it.

Limbe attacked by Pirates

SGBC. (They came in from the other side)

Yesterday morning, (late Saturday night really) I was woken up by some kind of boom, but went back to sleep quickly enough because booms in the night usually wind up having very banal sources like train cars bumping together and not, say, pirates throwing grenades. This time though, it was pirates throwing grenades.

700m down the shore from my room, about 30 men landed 3 boats next to Limbe’s 3 (seaside) banks, and launched at them in a cloud of automatic gunfire. The poor bastard Bank guards had only rifles, and the cops didn’t show until they heard the blasts themselves because the whole mobile network was down and no one could talk to anyone.

The heist seems like it was pretty organized; they blocked off the 3 main access points to down town with one explosion and a couple of armed guys each, and they managed to blast their way through bank walls, making off with 1 of the 3 safes they were after. In the end there were a few injuries but only one guy was killed, and he wasn’t even in the gunfight; just happened to be driving past. The night is so black in cloudy Limbe that when the pirates made there way back into the inky black sea, no one caught which direction they were going. None were apprehended. Wow.

I guess the Minister of defense took a chopper down from Yaounde because he was here in town by sunrise.

And incase it isn’t obvious that media has a way of hardening ethnic and nationalist cleavages on this continent, all the BBC and Reuters wanted to talk about was the “Port Harcourt Flour Mill Ltd” bag that was found in one of the banks suggesting Nigerians.

So the Defense Minister, in his press statement, says: ‘there must have been a few insiders”.

And Reuters says:

“About 50 people have been killed in border violence in Bakassi in the past year, including attacks on Cameroonian soldiers claimed to have been carried out by a little known group calling itself the Niger Delta Defence and Security Council”

????

The BBC said something similar but then later in the day Somali pirates seized Russian tankers and demanded 20 million dollars ransom, so the story disappeared, which is just as well.

Shiny-Shiny: Mixing God with Briefcase Gynecology

 

Pusherman

The bus from Limbe do Yaounde is about 6 hours with a stop at the halfway point in hard-to-love Douala. On the first lag of the journey we had a guy, Shiny-Shiny, deliver a well-executed mix of sermon and standup comedy. It was in pidgin so I couldn’t understand all of it, but it seemed to oscillate between a sort of sexual/marital situation comedy and fast-paced high-octane preaching. There was singing and dancing in the aisles to the worship reggae he was playing off his mobile phone, passenger-led prayers, and no shortage of banter between Shiny-Shiny and the audience. Whenever I laughed at a joke it was “Even whiteman knows.”          Great material.

And for two hours this went on. I don’t know how long church services typically last, but you can cover a lot of ground in two hours.

After the second hour a loud woman at the back shouts out ‘Shiny Shiny! How come you always talk about woman when you’re not married?” and he responds by going to his briefcase and pulling out a pack of pills saying that it was now time to talk about products.

Products?

The rest of the journey he spent promoting a vaginal suppository that helped with everything from ringworm to performance dysfunctions, the details of which I dare not repeat on the internet. Everything was acted out with charades, and like many good standup performers he had the one line he kept coming back to, which was:

“You insert. You put on your pants. In the morning, you see all kinds of things. This will help you very much. Praise god.”

Not only was no one else surprised by the content, but the pills sold like hotcakes when he was finally done. I guess everyone knew all along that he was also a salesperson, and that didn’t detract from the authenticity of the first bit.

The most interesting thing is that the religious ecstasy was not just a way to butter people up for sales. I had this confirmed for me a week later on the bus back to Limbe, when Shiny-Shiny again boarded and did the whole thing in reverse. He did two hours on miracle toothpaste (two hours on toothpaste! Two hours on toothpaste!), took a short breather and praised god all the way back to the sea. I think I preferred the second order because I’ve got particular culturally informed ideas about sales and deception, but he didn’t sell as much the second time round.

1st task declared well-defined now that it’s done

 

Haut-Est Nyong

The only part of my current-favorite mission that was even remotely well-defined appears to be done and over with after 10 days.

I, under the tutelage of a wise young Cameroonian forest technician (planters, read: ‘treeschool nerd’, with a better suit) have identified a nice big swath of dense humid primary forest on the Congolese border suitable for carbon financing under this hairbrained new REDD scheme.

REDD (don’t make me write out the acronym, which I already hate) is essentially a way to quantify the value of forests based on pools and flows of carbon, and pay people a corresponding amount not to cut them down.

So there’s these 9 Forest Management Units that would ordinarily be up for sale to the highest bidder – invariably a French or Chinese logging outfit -  which the Ministry of Forests has put on ice for the year, and are tentatively calling ‘under conservation’, but without any protection status, or plans for creating protection status. Fertile ground it seems, for an offset-broker like the one with which I’m loosely affiliated, to come in and fund protection status and all of that livelihood enhancing agroforestry/NTFP type stuff that goes toward not criminalizing subsistence.

There’s a braid of community forests running through the middle of it (Baka: the People Formerly Known as Pygmies), timber concessions on all sides, and very likely illegal harvesting throughout. The next step one of the steps somewhere in the future is to actually go there and see if the forest looks like it does in the satellite imagery, and see who on the ground wants to forge ahead unblinking into the white light of the New Carbon Economy.

Tomorrow it’s on to Yaounde to find out who in high places thinks this is totally inappropriate.

419ers in the 237: You make me want to live blog.

The sun has almost set on the golden age of the Nigerian email scammer and I admit to having been more put off hearing about the scam-baiters than by the scammers themselves. Maybe you think so too and you were utterly unsettled by the Ghanaian Dead parrot monty python skit, in which case you should definitely not listen to this NPR segment between minutes 6 and 30.

But hey guess who’s sitting beside me right now, in the cheaper of Limbe’s two cyber cafes? Scammers! Two of them, writing back to the numerous people who responded to their posts in various UK classifieds sites about Siberian puppies for sale. And Irish Bull Terrier puppies for sale. And something called a Cardian Welsh Corgi? A Puppy.

When I saw these guys the other day pouring through google images saving shots of little dachshunds in grass and of baby boxers on leopard print pillows (yep), I actually thought they might just be really into puppies. Some people are.

But then from my chair a couple feet back I could not help but read the following, from one ShellyR@somethingsomething :

“[…] Why do you not know anything about the mother of the pup? It just seems strange. Why is there an agency involved???”

Her triple punctuation suggests serious skepticism, and I don’t she’ll bite the bait when the time comes.

And just now, in another excerpt from another correspondence, presumably at an earlier stage in the thread:

“Thanks for getting back to me about my cute babies at home. I would love to meet with you personally but I am in Dundee Scotland they could be delivered to you today by a pet transportation agency…”

Don’t do it Miriam, don’t do it!

And just now, typed out in a subject box as they listen to Mariah Carrey on their surprisingly decent mobile phone speakers and debate whether or not she sings in pidgin:

“They love childrens and they are health certified!”

They are NOT!

Anyway I’ll be making no attempt to interfere with the scams. They’ve seen me seeing them, they’ve asked how much my laptop costs, and I need to continue to share office space with them. Which, I know, makes me kind of complicit. Maybe I should ask for a cut. I’m sure they could use an English editor.