Monday, July 22, 2024

Dam Mammals

Beavers, that is! Yesterday my favorite librarian and I went with our dog to a café opening in Rutland, Massachusetts. (Read all about our friends at Coffeelands-Rutland on GeoCafes.) To make a proper outing of it, I looked for a place to walk the dog in Rutland, and found a section of the Massachusetts Central Rail Trail, appropriately located on Depot Street, where presumably there was once a depot. 

We rightly guessed that our dog Crumpet would enjoy this wide, shady walkway with us. She is shown here on a causeway between two ponds, one of which I later learned is named Thayer Pond. At the western edge of the pond, I noticed what looked like a beaver lodge, but I was confused. 


The pond is large and the railroad folks had built a causeway next to it over a century ago. I was guessing that the pond was about 10 acres, but checking Google Earth, I see it is more like 40. In any case, it seems it is much too big and too old to be formed by a beaver dam -- whose constructions tend to be on a smaller and more temporary scale.

(Note: the café we were visiting was too new to appear on the map. Coffeelands is at 249 Main Street in Rutland; tell them I sent you!)

In any case, that lodge was too far from the path for us to get a good look without some serious bushwhacking, so we stayed on the main path, and a minute later we saw a much smaller pond with a very definite beaver lodge on it!



Dead trees in standing water are another indicator of possible beaver action, since they are most likely to be upright only in the first few years after inundation. 

We could see the lodge pretty well from the main path. The dam was easy to see, but difficult to photograph. In this image, the dam is only evident by the fact that standing water is present to the left and not to the right.


Looking at the map, we can see that the lodge on the bigger pond is very close to an outlet known as Mill Brook, which is also the name of an inlet on its northeast corner. This is not only further evidence that beavers did not build the big pond, but also provides some insight to what this place must have been like a century or so ago. 

It seems that the lodge that first caught my eye is easily accessible from the unnamed pond just downstream of it. Easily accessible to beavers, that is!

Lagniappe: back to that first time

I should mention that my master's thesis involved in-depth measurements of 33 different artificial ponds in the vicinity of the Miami Whitewater River. I measured them on every available map and aerial photograph and I physically measured the sediment in them. So became fairly adept at identifying ponds and their dams, and can sometimes spot beaver ponds with confidence from New England highways, but I was in this region for 25 years without seeing any. 

So I was happy -- downright giddy -- to see a textbook example of a beaver dam in May 2022, when my favorite librarian and I were on the Vermont Inn to Inn Walking Tour. The dam was much easier to photograph.

This was such a treat -- I stood there transfixed for quite some while. 

Tuesday, July 09, 2024

Siegried in Vietnam

I endeavor to learn something new about coffee every day. *Today I got a very early start. I was grinding some excellent Honduran coffee during the opening seconds of BBC Witness History when I thought I heard coffee and Vietnam mentioned. 

East Germany's Coffee from Vietnam
9-minute radio interview

Đắk Lắk province
I do know a bit about the geography of coffee in Vietnam, but I had been missing a significant chapter of its history. BBC journalist Michael Rossi spoke with Siegfried Kaulfuß, an East German government official who had been instrumental in bringing 10,000 hectares (about 25,000 acres) of land in Dak Lak Province into production in the 1980s. 

I can be forgiven, perhaps, for not knowing about this important chapter in Vietnam's coffee history; even the Wikipedia article on the subject gives it only a brief mention and a link to a separate article. And although the project was huge, it accounts for less than two percent of the land now under coffee cultivation in Vietnam.

The story bears out a few things I knew about coffee in Vietnam -- it is indeed the second-largest producer of coffee, for example, but it was not a significant player in world markets prior to the 1980s. The interview emphasizes the role of a fellow centrally-planned (communist) state in its growth; my understanding is that significant investment from global capital was also involved.

I had a brief conversation a decade or so ago with a fellow who had been somewhat involved but was by then running an art gallery in Nantucket. He averred that the rapid expansion of coffee in Vietnam had been encouraged by the World Bank as part of an effort to reduce the country's political isolation by increasing its trade. 

This was despite the hypsometric and climatic challenges of growing coffee in this location. Although it is well within the global coffee belt, the temperatures are too high and the altitudes are too low for arabica coffee to be grown in most of the country, and even the lower-quality robusta requires an extraordinary amount of chemical inputs.

Back to the BBC. The interview mentions an aspect of Vietnam's coffee history that I did know, but a translation error puts its origins in the wrong century. The Wikipedia article above points to the correct timing. Rossi says that coffee cultivation dates to the French Revolution of 1789 but it really entered around the time of the French Invasion by Napoleon in 1857. This geographer notes that these are opposite kinds of events at opposite ends of the Eurasian continent in separate centuries. 

Another important part of the historic importance of Vietnam's rapid expansion into the global coffee market is that it now sits alongside Brazil as such a large producer that local conditions have global impact. A frost in Brazil has become a cliché as an example of a commodity price disruptor, since such an event can send prices of coffee up throughout the world. 

In 1999,  Vietnam had the opposite effect, with its rapid increase in production cratering prices worldwide and creating a coffee crisis that permanently altered the structure of the industry, especially in Central America. This April, a drought in Vietnam was having the effect as a Brazilian frost, contributing to a dramatic increase in the price of coffee futures

I should note that mainstream economists and the journalists who follow them tend to pay attention to the industry only when a rapid increase in price is occurring, even though the industry itself uses futures markets to shift most of the financial risks to farmers themselves

*A note about timing: I started this blog post with enthusiasm but it has lingered as a set of open tabs for many weeks. In this context "today" means "about two months ago."

American Quilombo

Woodland Plantation
Photo: Debbie Elliot/NPR

This post is an invitation to learn about the largest uprising of enslaved persons in U.S. history, which took place in Louisiana in 1811. The uprising was organized among workers in captivity in several sugar plantations along the very lowest reaches of the Mississippi River, downstream of New Orleans. 

I learned about this place and its story from journalist Debbie Elliott's interview with twin sisters Jo and Joy Banner. They are descendants of these plantations who led the effort to return this property to black ownership and to launch a new form of plantation tourism that is honest about the terrible history of these beautiful buildings. The story link includes the six-minute audio and abundant links to continue exploring this important history. The Banner sisters and their colleagues are telling a complex and layered history that connects many facets -- up to the present patterns of environmental injustice -- to the original sins of this land.

The revolt was initially successful, with the takeover of Woodland Plantation. The uprising continued, with its participants working their way along the river toward New Orleans. Their progress was soon ended by local militias and the U.S. Army, which was not to fight against slavery until another half century had passed. The brutality of slavery is illustrated by the medieval cruelty of the response.

Despite teaching a course about New Orleans for the past several years, I have not yet been to the city. When I do go, I now know that I will need to spend a couple of days to the south, in the lodgings available at Woodland

The word quilombo that I use in the title of this post is somewhat misplaced, but it came to me when I heard the first few seconds of the broadcast story. It is a Brazilian term for the usually small, very remote settlements of people who had escaped slavery. When I first heard that the Woodland Plantation story was about the largest uprising against slavery in the United States, my mind went immediately to these communities in Brazil. Although organizers of this uprising hoped to establish something like a quilombo in New Orleans, it was not to be. 

The pedestrian option in Google Maps gives some sense of the scale of the travel these revolutionaries were attempting. 


Lagniappe

Almost immediately after I posted this, an online friend asked if I had read How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, the first non-fiction book by New Orleans poet Clint Smith. I am very surprised that I had not heard of this 2021 publication, which has been very enthusiastically received by reviewers on Goodreads, whose description begins:

Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks-those that are honest about the past and those that are not-that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.

This work spans several centuries and thousands of miles. We are looking forward to reading the audio edition, read by the author himself. Often a professional actor does better readings than the authors can do, but this audio version comes recommended, and I look forward to hearing this important work in the voice of a poet. 

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