Studying Hindi in the Clouds

If Mussoorie is the queen of hill stations then Landour is the fairy princess, at least according to the neat tourist information signs posted at several locations in Landour. Landour is perched on a high hilltop above the horseshoe shaped ridge of Mussoorie, and due perhaps to its height above the main town, and perhaps due to its continuing association with the military – it was founded by the British in the 1820s as a soldier’s rest home (and named after a town in Wales – thankfully with simplified spelling) and is now the location of the Military Institute of Technology Management – Landour is much quieter and more peaceful than the busy tourist resort below.

I’m not sure why, but it seems that 6000 ft is a magic number in the Himalayas – the height at which malarial mosquitoes disappear, and where the climate, at least when the worst summer heat holds the Gangetic plain in its thrall, is idyllic. The main mall in Mussoorie – a 2 mile road running along the ridgeline, crowded with restaurants, 300+ hotels, and stores selling the kind of chatchkas that Indian tourists like to buy when on vacation – is located just a tad higher than 6000 feet. Again, according to the tourist sign, the top of Landour hill is 7800 feet, although my GPS registers only 2250 meters at my cottage, which seems pretty close to the top. Since the shops in Landour don’t sell mangoes (a major constituent of my diet these days), nor other fruits and vegetables, I have a strenuous walk to go grocery shopping, and a more strenuous walk back loaded down with okra, roma tomatoes, mangoes, and bananas.

Kulri Bazaar, Musoorie

The British really had two criteria for locating their hill stations. First, they wanted to get out of the hot, dusty, malarial plains, and second, they didn’t want to go too far. Mussoorie satisfies both criteria admirably, going a long way to explain its continuing popularity. A 1.5 hour taxi ride, consisting primarily of switchbacks and hairpin turns, separates Mussoorie from the state capital of Dehra Dun, a bustling city that is a scant 6 hour train ride from Delhi. Dehra Dun is famous for two things – the Doon Valley is reputed to grow the best quality basmati rice in the world, and the city is home to the Forest Research Institute, India’s premier forestry school. The British established the Forest Research Institute in the late 19th century and it quickly rose to prominence as the most important forestry research center in the world. In the early 20th century the Indian Forester was the most widely read and well reputed forestry journal in the world, and Indian trained foresters, British, French and German, spread their ideas back to Europe, to other colonies, and even to the US, where Gifford Pinchot followed models tested in India in setting up the U.S. Forest Service. If the FRI has faded from the international scene, it is still a major center for domestic forestry research.

Mussoorie has its own famous educational institutes: the Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy of Public Administration is the training school for India’s most elite civil servants – the Indian Administrative Service, as well as the related Indian Forest Service, Indian Police Service, and Indian Foreign Service. Landour has its own Hogwarts - a boarding high school named Woodstock, which supposedly follows an American model, although it has a suspiciously large number of English place names. Woodstock also hosts an environmental education center, and I’ve seen posters advertising for a Wilderness First Responder course, run by NOLS, to be held there in August. Finally, there is the Landor Language School, which is why I’ve come here – it is reputed to be one of the best places in the world to study Hindi.

Landour, it seems, is elite, albeit small, and is a curious mixture of military personnel, wealthy Indian vacationers, missionaries, and students. The few shops (the ones that don’t carry mangoes) do carry loads of the two things apparently most desired (and most difficult to find) by western travelers: toilet paper and peanut butter. As I mentioned, Mussoorie is filled with shops selling the kinds of chatchkas Indians buy on vacation. There are only a few shops specializing in westerner oriented chatchkas, and they are all near Landour. The chai shops I walk past every day on my way to the language school, at the little market called Chardukan, feature western junk food – fries, pancakes, and pizza – rather than Indian food, and the wealthy Indian tourists, the Woodstock high school students, and the Language school students, gather under the tree to enjoy one of the cleanest, most smog free markets I’ve seen in all of India. Fortunately, I found one shop that offers a veg thali in addition to the western comfort food – which I wouldn’t eat at home so why would I eat it here? By and large, Mussoorie is short on the two things I expected from hill stations – perhaps from friends’ stories from Dharmasala & Manali – Tibetans and western hippies. Although the Dalai Lama’s first exile capital was here, and there are a few Tibetans, this is primarily an Indian resort, run and oriented towards Indians, and perhaps due to the absence of Tibetans, marijuana, and major treks in the immediate vicinity, seems to be off the hippie trail.

Chardukan. Chardukan, incidentally, literally means four shops, so of course, there are five shops in Chardukan.

The church in Chardukan dates to the 1840s, and occupies the largest piece of flat land I’ve seen in Mussoorie. Landour seems heavily Christian – there are three churches (including one which the language school is actually located in – it seems that the language school has taken over the church – I have classes in the belltower - but apparently services are also held there on Sundays), and I’ve met a number of American missionaries, along with some other folks who seemed to be missionaries, but didn’t identify themselves as such, perhaps because it is much easier to get a tourist visa than a missionary one, a tradition that dates back to the British, who wisely saw that making money and saving souls in India were incompatible activities (except in Kerala, the rich people were Hindus and Muslims, while the likely converts were the poor), and chose to focus on the money. Landour’s churches, however, appear to have been, at least originally, built by the British for the British, who were the first permanent residents of the area.

I’ve often wondered why previous north Indian rulers did not build hill stations. The British were not the first rulers of India to come from colder places. Most of the Muslim invaders, beginning in the 10^th century, arrived via what is now Afghanistan, including most importantly the Mughals, descended from the Timurids of central Asia. All the information I’ve been able to find about past inhabitants of this ridge was that there were migrant pastoralists who grazed their cattle on a bush known locally as Musoor – hence Mussoorie. Perhaps one explanation is that only the British were crazy enough to imagine building towns in a place like this. The road up to Landour is one lane, and all hair-pin turns. In places, they have built walls 30 feet high to guard from landslides, and I’ve seen homes on the downhill side of the road with parking on the roof, and four or five stories going down the hill all in the same building (including the building in which Chardukan’s five shops are located).

A view through the oaks of a typical road. You can see how steep the land is here. There is basically no flat anywhere.

At the moment, Landour seems like paradise. The view from the cottage I’m renting features several stately deodar trees – the Himalayan cedar which is the dominant vegetation in wetter areas here, along with deeply sculpted oaks, reminiscent of California’s live oaks, although the leaves are long and pointy, much like a tanbark or chestnut oak. According to my tree book, deodar can grow to heights of 75 meters and girths of 10 meters dbh, although the biggest I’ve seen are no more than a meter in diameter. Still, their size and growth pattern remind me a lot of Douglas fir, and combined with the steepness of the surrounding mountains, I’m reminded of the interior coast ranges of northern California and southern Oregon, which I’ve always thought were among the most rugged and beautiful places I’ve ever been. Through the trees, one catches glimpses of the city of Mussoorie below, and when it is clear, endless ridges extending to the north and west. I’m told that on very clear days, the snowcapped peaks show behind these ridges, but it has been hazy, and the only glimpse I’ve gotten of the high Himalaya was early morning, jogging on the other side of the mountain, where the snowpeaks are closer. Every night I sit and eat mangoes, review vocabulary, and watch the sunset, until I hear the dusk call to prayer from the mosque down in Mussoorie, the signal I’ve adopted for beginning my evening meditation.

Elsewhere, particularly on drier slopes, I find huge rhododendrons, 30 feet high, whose brilliant red blooms have mostly dropped to the ground. The horse chestnuts are blooming now, and I’ve found trees of many familiar genera, including maple, fir, spruce, walnut, and pine. At 30.5 degrees north, and 7000 feet, it shouldn’t be surprising that the vegetation is deeply reminiscent of the temperate mountains I’ve called home. Blue whistling thrushes warble in the dawn, when the temperature is a pleasant mid 60s, and the other day, while hiking, I was buzzed by one of the largest birds I’ve ever seen – I think it was a Himalayan Griffon Vulture. The temperature does not rise above the low 80s, and it is almost always crystal clear and sunny with a light breeze, although my Sunday hike was interrupted by a big thunderstorm which dropped dime sized hail. Fortunately I was able to take refuge in a little chai shop by the side of the road.

My landlord is a retired professor, who purchased the mostly ruined Wolfsburn Estate as a summer home in the early 1980s, just before Mussoorie was discovered by wealthy Delhites. He tells me he could never afford a place like this now. In addition to repairing his home, he has built seven little cottages, connected by stone pathways and gardens, which he rents to language school students.

My cottage. Note the rain barrel, used for flower watering.

Prior to retiring he taught English literature & applied linguistics in Europe and Ethiopia, where he met his wife who now works at the Woodstock School. After retiring here he taught some classes at the Academy of Public Administration here (I’m hoping he will take me there at some point), but now he spends much of the day attending to his gardens, or perhaps I should say, supervising his gardener, because his arthritic knees prevent him from doing hard labor. One day I watched the gardener spend all day digging up the grass that has grown up between the stones of the stone paths – work that never gets done in my garden, where I can’t afford a full-time gardener. He uses the sun porch of my cottage (a nice place to sit in the morning, but too hot when it catches the afternoon sunlight) to grow petunias, begonias, and sweet peas, so my room is always fragrant.

A gardener learns something new about plants wherever he goes, and here I’ve learned about a new kind of pest. Back home, I have to worry about deer, who can jump high fences. But at least I don’t have to worry about langurs (big monkeys)! The langurs like to eat fruit trees, and have completely defoliated the professor’s plum tree. Obviously, it is fairly difficult to build a monkey fence. The apples are surviving, but only due to the constant vigilance of professor, gardener, and tenants, one of whom has purchased a slingshot to scare away the langurs who hang out in the deodars just out of stone-throwing range, waiting for an opening. The dogs also help chase away the langurs, but the langurs have a dimensional advantage over the grounded dogs. The more aggressive rhesus macaques seem to leave the fruit trees alone, but I did see one eating someone’s house plants this morning, and they will steal food left ungarden, even from inside of your kitchen.

My real reason for being here, of course, is not to revel in the temperate weather, the beautiful hills and trees, nor to chase monkeys, but to study Hindi. I was able to sign up for four hours of daily Hindi one-on-one tutorials this week, and hope to continue for several more weeks. The teachers are experts, and they work out of a textbook that they themselves wrote. Learning a language is hard work, and I’m using parts of my brain that have not been exercised for many years. Already this week I’ve learned most of the 53 character alphabet (but then there are endless permutations of “conjunct characters”, and can say useful things like, “whose red pen is that?” and “the book is on the big table.” I also have figured out why Indians always ask you for your good name (a better translation would be auspicious name), call you sir, and add only to the end of half their sentences. With so many hours of one-on-one time, I feel like I’m progressing very quickly. It is exciting to be on the verge of understanding a language spoken by so many people who I’ve met in the past, but been unable to communicate with. But after hours of trying to piece together a new logic and push my tongue into a new shape, it is a relief to come home and write in a language I already have some mastery of!

Observations from Delhi

I am in the blistering hot construction site that is India's capital. Today's paper reports yesterday's high at the nearby International Airport as 45 Celsius, which is approximately one bijillion degrees Fahrenheit. And even more so than when I was here last summer, everything here is under construction. The chief reason is the construction of Delhi's rapidly growing Metro system, which according to last week's New York Times, is emerging as one of the world's best urban public transportation systems. It is slated to be completed this fall, prior to the Commonwealth Games in October, and if it is, it will be a remarkable accomplishment, doubling the size of the network that is functioning today, and connecting the distant airport and suburbs into the urban core. Compared to our aging east coast subway systems, the Metro is a breeze - fast, clean, efficient, well air-conditioned, and not even all that crowded. And way cheaper - it costs me about 40 cents to take a train from where I'm staying, at the north campus of Delhi University, to where the line currently ends, in central New Delhi. An autorickshaw ride over an equivalent distance might cost four times as much, and take four times as long.

Even aside from the Metro, Delhi is under construction, with streets and sidewalks being dug up for repaving, apparently as an additional beautification effort prior to the Commonwealth Games. With the weather so hot, and the rains still a month or more away, everything is dry, and dust swirls everywhere. In the morning, crews of street sweepers sweep the dust that has settled on the street back up into the air, where it hangs as a dense, unbreatheable fog, before settling again. The leaves of all the trees are coated with dust. I'm wearing a dust mask, and I'm still congested, but somehow life goes on for the 20 million people who live here. I need air conditioning, and sweat profusely while sitting in the breezy shade in the back of the cycle rickshaw. The rickshaw-wallah, meanwhile, barely breaks a sweat while he cycles the km from the Institute of Economic Growth, where I am staying, to the Metro station.

Today my big errand was to register at the Foreigners Regional Registration Office. This formality is required of all foreigners staying in India on visas longer than 6 months, and of all Afghani nationals, regardless of the length of stay. Apparently, the Indian government feels that it is important to insure that any foreigner staying in India for an extended period of time be familiar with long lines and arbitrary bureaucratic procedures. The foreigners in the office came from all over the world. I met people in line from Korea, UK, Congo, and Uzbekistan. As I proceeded through the various lines (I had to speak to 4 different officials to get registered), each one became progressively friendlier and more helpful, until the last one handed me back my passport and registration card, and asked me where I was going to stay when I went to Nagpur, which was where she grew up. The whole process took about 3 hours, which was only slightly longer than it took to check my bags and go through the security line at Newark International Airport a few days ago. I guess India isn't the only place with long lines.

My next task is getting a mobile phone number. Since terrorists use mobile phones, there is now a complicated registration procedure required to purchase a sim card. I think it is now more difficult to get a mobile phone connected in India than it is to purchase a sub-machine gun in the United States.

In the morning, the Koel, an Indian relative of the European cuckoo, wakes me with its ringing song from the Cassia fistula trees, now nearly leafless and covered in a profusion of yellow flowers. Rose-ringed parakeets scream across the sky. As the sun sets, throngs of people fill the streets, buying mangoes and saris and mobile phones.

No pictures yet...

Observations of climate change in southern New England

When my parents were married in mid-June, 1974, near New Haven, Ct., they gathered a bouquet of wild oxeye daisies. I took this picture this afternoon. More than a month earlier, and nearly 100 miles north. Of course, I believe this daisy, which is spreading rampantly from a few my mom planted many years ago in our backyard, may be a hybrid, which could explain some of its early blooming. I have not been privileged to live in one place continuously as an adult, so I have not been able to make careful observations of how the seasons are changing as a result of climate change. Returning to Amherst in May for the first time in 12 years has offered a bit of a shock. Somewhere, I have some fairly detailed naturalist notes I made as a middle and high school student, and could verify these timings, but my memory is that the apple orchard bloomed in mid May - maybe peaking between May 10th and 15th. Trees were definitely not leafed out in early May, perhaps reaching full leaf only by May 20th. Daffodils would be blooming in early May. Bobolinks returned around the same time as full leaf out - around the 15th or 20th. Hermit thrushes, black-throated green and blue-winged warblers, and chimney swifts returned a little earlier - perhaps corresponding to the apple blossoms on the 10th to the 15th.

I came back to Amherst on May 4th. That morning, I jogged down the Lawrence Swamp access road, behind my house. The apple blossoms were finished, the trees were fully leafed out, the daffodils in mom's garden were finished. I heard bobolinks bubbling in the meadows, blue-winged warblers calling from the hedgerows, and black-throated green warblers and hermit thrushes singing in the hemlocks.

These informal observations seem to indicate that the onset of spring in New England has advanced approximately 15 days since I was in high school - a startlingly rapid rate of about a day per year.

Louis Bromfield, Wes Jackson, and America

My land is a good land
The grass is made of rainbow waves
Its fields & its rivers are blessed by God
Its a good land so they say

My land is a rich land
Its hills & valleys abound
Its highways go to many good places
Where many good people are found

My land is a free land
its a free land so I'm told
Freedom is a thing that money can't buy
And its worth even more than gold
-Eric Andersen

I left Bloomington on Saturday morning. The pendulous honey locust flowers were spreading their thick honey fragrance, the leaves were fresh and green, and the air was thick and cool. It was a typical spring day in the midwest - the night before I was awoken by massive thunderstorms, and the morning was thick and grey, but threatened no further rain. The sun poked through holes in the clouds occasionally, and when I pulled over to eat lunch at a rest stop on I-70 in eastern Indiana, the wind whipped by, wet, warm, and luscious. I listened to Balzac & The Little Seamstress by Dai Sijie, and the miles flew by.

The destination for my first night was Malabar Farm State Park, in Ohio between Columbus and Cleveland. My parents and I had noticed this place the last time we drove from Amherst to Bloomington, and my parents stopped there on their way back from Bloomington, and urged me to do the same, so I made a reservation to stop at the IHA hostel in the state park.

Louis Bromfield was an extremely successful novelist of the 1920s and 1930s. He won a Pulitzer for one of his first novels, and many of his novels were made into well known movies. He also wrote the screenplay for the first Dracula movie. Like many American artists and intellectuals, he lived during the interwar years in France, where his home outside Paris was a hangout for the great intellectual flowering of that period. In the late 1930s, with war gathering on the horizon, Bromfield left Europe and returned to the United States, and bought a farm in the rolling hills near his childhood home of Mansfield, Ohio. It is not entirely clear why he named his central Ohio farm after a region on the south coast of India - the host at the hostel told me that his well-known novel, The Rains Came, was set in Malabar, but I found a copy of it & it appears to be set in Gujarat. In any case, Bromfield set several novels in India, and may have travelled there.

Malabar Farm became the center place for Bromfield's experiments with soil conservation and progressive agriculture, and Bromfield spent most of his later years plowing the money he earned from his fiction into his agricultural experiments & innovations. He worked closely with people such as Aldo Leopold & J.I. Rodale, and appears to have been a pioneer of conservation tillage practices now standard in much of the US. The property is now a State Park, and continues to be a working farm & museum monument to a great, though largely forgotten, writer & conservationist.
















Did I mention that it is spectacularly beautiful? The flowers were a few weeks behind Bloomington, so I got to reacquaint myself with lilacs, dandelions, and apples, and see the honey locusts still lifeless.
















As you can see, Bromfield could afford to build quite a farmhouse, and quite a barn. In fact, his farm was three old farms, which he consolidated into one. He had made quite a bit of money with his writing, and his estate was a sufficient attraction that apparently his friends Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall held their wedding there in 1946. I've always wondered about these gentlemen farmers - are their proposals for improving farms practical for the farmer whose farm has to feed the family? Thomas Jefferson is widely credited for being an agricultural innovator, and I still read in plant catalogs how he favored this or that variety, but it is worth remembering that he lived most of his life, and finally died, deeply in debt. According to a park interpreter I spoke with, Bromfield used his literary talents to explain how his ideas for changing agriculture could be implemented by the common man. But I do not know enough to know whether his goals were achieved. Often it seems to me that what is practical for a cash limited farmer, and what is desired by idealistic dreamers who don't have to pay the bills by selling corn or tomatoes, is quite out of sink.

Another thing you can see in these pictures is how incredibly luscious and beautiful this part of the world is. Rolling hills, fertile soils, plenty of rain. The New Englanders who settled Connecticut's western reserve surely thought they had found paradise, and they brought with them to Ohio their traditions of political and religious freedom and dissent, and abolitionist activism. Long before Bromfield purchased it, his property had been a stop on the underground railroad, and Oberlin, to the north, was a center of abolitionist activism. Bromfield might be considered to be just another stop in Ohio's long tradition of political and cultural engagement - one that to my mind, continues today when Ohio is a center of Amish culture and other radical approaches to alternative agriculture - as is well documented, for example, in the writings of Gene Logsdon. Given that I've flitted through these same movements for a dozen or so years now, you'd think I would have heard of dozens of young couples or communes - eager for inexpensive, fertile land, close to major cities (Malabar farm, halfway between Cleveland and Columbus, must be within a 2 hour drive of 5 million people - yet the stars shine crystal clear there at night, and one cannot hear the interstate 10 miles away) - moving to beautiful Ohio. But to the contrary, I have heard self-righteous leftist activists and farmers on both coasts tell me how the Midwest is lost to corn, soybeans, reactionary politics, and roundup - how the coasts will thrive when the rest of the country sinks due to whatever the latest apocalyptic nightmare is (most recently peak oil) - and how superior their harsh, unforgiving climates and terrible soils are to the fertile Midwest. This all seems rather ridiculous, but it is real, and I am reminded of a friend of mine who recently spent a couple years as a post-doc at Ohio State, complaining about the lack of natural beauty, and praying for the day he could return to the left coast. It seems like the hip wanna-be farmers are still foundering in Berkeley and Brooklyn, while the fertile heartland remains a frontier for my generation of alternative agriculturalists. This is really a shame, as we would probably have more success if we moved somewhere where land prices were more modest, and where the climate and soils are really well suited for crops. (and just to add to my point - I kept thinking this all the way from Southern Indiana across upstate New York - all great farmland, much of it in beautiful areas, and much of it with very cheap farmland prices, at least relative to the prices I knew on the coasts, and nearly all being ignored by today's new agricultural movements in favor of areas with far less agricultural promise)

A couple days before I left Bloomington, I received an email from the hostel host at Malabar Farm, asking me when I was planning to arrive, and mentioning that the Malabar Farm Foundation would be holding an annual barbecue benefit on Saturday, where Wes Jackson would be the keynote speaker. Wes Jackson is a pioneering plant geneticist, and the founder of the Land Institute , a research center in Kansas whose goal is to revolutionize agriculture by introducing perennial grain crops that would allow grains to be grown in ways that would mimic the nutrient cycling, soil building properties of native prairies.

Of course I wanted to see Wes Jackson speak! So I headed up from the hostel (a "small" beautiful Sears kit house that Bromfield lived in while building his mansion) to the big house, where I took a tour, and then got my ticket for the dinner.

I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but Jackson wasn't quite who I thought he would be. He looked more like a slightly chubby professor than some wild visionary farmer pirate. And the audience was also not quite what I expected. It looked like there might be some farmer pirates there, but at the table I sat at I met the editor of Ohio Farmer, a trade publication which makes its money hawking agro-chemicals to corn and soybean farmers, and a man wearing a Scott's Miracle-Gro jacket and a Pebble Beach Golf Course t-shirt - whose wife, sitting next to me, kept on reapplying her makeup. This was not the hip young farmer crowd, nor was it the radical hippies - it was more the standard white bread America, and as if to confirm my suspicion, the food was about as bland as American food could get. Ribs, Chicken, scalloped potatoes, grey limp "green" beans, airplane lasagna, and iceberg lettuce with croutons. In a way I was relieved to get away from the hip gourmet every ingredient has a story world of Bloomington. But couldn't we find a middle ground where the food was both unpretentious and also good?

Jackson began his talk with a famous quote from one of FDR's brain trust, and a former student of Scott Nearing from his years at Penn, Rexford Tugwell: "Make no small plans, for they have not the power to move men’s souls." Although this quote made me think of my friend Amy, and the Bloomington Community Orchard, Jackson was talking about his own plans to revolutionize agriculture. He read heavily from the agricultural writings of Bromfield. This passage is from the preface to The Farm, written as a dedication to his 3 daughters:

Dear Anne and Hope and Ellen:

“The Farm” is written for you, who were all born long after the war ended, so that you may know a little what it was like to have lived before 1914. Something came to an end about that year and I fancy it was the nineteenth century. You will never know that it was like at first hand, and you will never know the country from which your father came, because even if you ever went to visit it, you would fail to find it. You might discover a stream or hill which you would recognize from hearsay and legend, but that is all. The rest has vanished. One thing you would never find, and that is the feel of the country as it was thirty years before you were boern, anc certinaly you would never find people like greataunt Jane and Old Jamie and Zenobia van Essen. …. In your father’s childhood, the eighteenth century was just round the corner. For you, born after 1914, it has become as remote as the tenth centuty…

“The farm” is the story of a way of living which has largly gone out of fashion, save in a few half-forgotten coreners and in a few families which have stuck to it with admirable stubbornness in spite of everything…. It has in it two fundamentals which were once and may be again intensely American characteristics. These are integrity and idealism. Jefferson has been dead more than a hundred hyears and there is no longer any fronteier, but the things which both represented are immortal. They are tough qualities needed in times of crisis.

According to Jackson, when Bromfield was criticized for being a romantic, he proudly reclaimed the label - yes! a romantic, like Da Vinci, Rosseau, Einstein.

Jackson is a great visionary and idealist, like these other romantics. I do not know enough to know if his dreams are practical. I also thought it was strange to speak of imitating the native prairie ecosystem in eastern Ohio, in the depths of what was once the greatest hardwood forest the world has ever known. Perhaps a grain prairie would require less energy and chemical inputs, perhaps it would build more soil than it would exhaust. But it would not be any more natural in the forests of Ohio than the hay and corn that dot it today.

Jackson pointed to the great attention focused on the problems of soil conservation in Bromfield's time - not only by Bromfield and Aldo Leopold, but also by the pioneering generation of the Soil Conservation Service. He then spoke with sadness about how little was accomplished by these men - how the problem of soil erosion remains substantially the same today as it did back then. Thinking of Piers Blaikie (who played an important role in founding the discipline of political ecology by arguing that discourses of soil erosion in developing countries were more often attempts by certain adminstrative elites to channel the practices of peasants into practices from which rents could be more easily extracted than genuine concerns about soil losses, which were at best undocumented, and at worst nonexistent), and of the implementation literature in public administration (which attempts to understand why policies fail to have their intended effects), I asked Jackson after his talk if he could point me to any history which might explain this failure. Jackson told me that his forthcoming book addresses this issue head on. The problem, according to Jackson is annuals. In other words, our agricultural technology - annual plants - is doomed to create soil erosion, and there is nothing social institutions can do about it.

As a student of Elinor Ostrom (and less directly, of Piers Blaikie!) I find myself pretty skeptical. First, one has to ask why, if perennial agriculture is so promising, the USDA or land grant colleges or the Farm Bureau have not pursued funding it. It is not hard to imagine that all of these institutions could be disempowered by Jackson's radical approach, and therefore might look unfavorably upon it. And if this is the case now, will similar forces stifle the next stage of related innovation? Is soil erosion really such a serious problem, as Wes Jackson has argued, or is it, as Piers Blaikie has argued, an excuse for bureaucrats and well-meaning elites to dominate over peasants and extract their wealth from them? At the same time, I still am not sure that perennial agriculture would solve the problem of soil erosion if it is serious. As I pointed out, perennial agriculture is no more natural to Ohio than soybeans. And perennial agriculture would still require weed controls - an increasing problem, as noted by today's New York Times piece on the rapid evolution of roundup resistant pigweeds and ragweeds. I admit, however, that I remain fairly ignorant of the details of Jackson's plans, which sound pretty amazing (he brought with him a bag of wheat flour ground from a new perennial plant created by long breeding work with wild wheat relatives). I hope to learn more in the future, although at the moment I've got a bunch of other projects on my plate.