Been pretty busy with work, lots of fundraising to do at the moment - lots of writing. Last week, I got to go to the national park that we are focusing on now with one of our conservation experts. It was about a two and a half hour drive east from Bangkok, toward Cambodia where the plateau that separates the countries abruptly ends, creating a steep, mountainous landscape that is still well forested and now protected by a series of parks. Protected is a relative term of course - one of the parks, called Khao Yai, receives a lot of money and is thought of as a 'model park' by the Thai government. Unfortunately this isn't a good thing for wildlife – the park is full of tourists, the park managers easily take quite a bit of the extra money they get for themselves or to construct new bungalows and resorts to draw even more visitors; rangers become guides and shirk their real responsibility to actually patrol the park; poachers find that its really easy to go in and hunt; and the park has slowly become nothing more then a pretty forest. Next door to Khao Yai is the park, That Lan, that we are working in, which is not provided much funding at all. It’s a large area that has been forgotten and ignored by the government and tourists alike. Communists used to control the area in the 70's and kept the local population away, while the government encouraged resettlement of growing rural populations in other areas. These have been great for wildlife.
We drove into the park from the north on a dirt road that slowly vanished among the forest. The forest was thick and green - not exactly jungle, or at least what I would think of as jungle because trees here were not evergreen and branches were bare this time of year - but bamboo and other plants seemed to fill up all spaces. The reason for being there that day, besides having a look around, was to change the film in camera traps that were set up along the road and a little ways into the forest. Because of the nice path the road cut and the few people who actually used it, the road was actually a convenient highway for all the wildlife that lived around it. There are paths cut by wild elephants around all over the place, and those are handy as well, but the road presents them with a nicely graded path to the river. The camera traps have a movement sensor that sets them off whenever something passes by.
The story behind all this was that we were previously working in Khao Yai, the famous park next door. We were training rangers but getting frustrated by their disinterest in doing their jobs. We set up a program that would create a permanent training center there on a small budget. In the end, the managers there decided that they couldn't afford it and used the money to paint the bungalows or something. At the same time the manager for That Lan attended one of our training sessions and kept asking us to come visit his park, because they have wild tigers. Tim, the conservationist guy I was traveling with on my trip, had originally thought he was making stuff up to get money. There were no tigers found in Khao Yai in years, why would there be any in the ugly stepsister of a park next door? After subsequent pleadings from the That Lan manager though, he agreed to set up some of these camera traps. In one month (last October) they had identified 7 individual tigers who had walked in front of cameras that were only spread in a line about 3 km on the road. In addition, there were elephants, civits, leopards, wild dogs and huge amounts of wild pigs and deer (which tigers like to eat, as well as stray dogs). It was an amazing find - a forest that had no resources applied to it, that had been thought to be empty, and was just a few hours from the center of Bangkok turns out be one of the most intact ecosystems in South East Asia. Our focus has switched from Khao Yai to Tat Lan rather fast.
So we collected pictures and I learned about the forest. It was amazing how many animal tracks and signs were all around us. Tim is an expert at this stuff and pointed them out along the way. I didn't see any actual animals (they tend to get out of the way), but I did see tiger poop, elephant poop, assorted animal tracks, elephant wallows, places that wild pigs and elephants had scraped against. Oh, I saw what Tim called a 'jungle chicken'. I also saw a wild ginger.
So, one of my many missions now is to get us a little bit of funding to help support rangers in this place. The camera traps can be used to measure activity and density of wildlife throughout the park. More information about this, combined with GPS data (each trap location is mapped out on google maps using GPS data), helps rangers target their patrols where they are needed the most. This requires a little money to support the rangers, give them the equipment and show them how to use it. In a park like this, rangers are actually grateful for the help, unlike Khao Yai where they are annoyed they are wasting time when they could be raking in tourist dollars. It could work. The fact that there are tigers here is very good - tigers=money as the [recently attended] conference showed. Everyone loves the tigers (even the Chinese, who love to eat them). Yes, the Chinese year of the tiger has a lot to do with the push to save them too, but I think the last report I saw was that the last remaining Chinese tiger had been killed and eaten by a rural farmer. He had to pay a fine. China would tell you that they had hundreds of tigers - in farms though. Not the same thing.
Last weekend I went with Tom to see his Buddhist teacher. She was an impressive old Thai woman who I guess goes against the grain of most Thai Buddhists in that she is a woman monk, she doesn't believe that meditation is necessary and she doesn't believe that Buddha statues are necessary. She sort of quizzed me right away on what was reality, which was not what I was expecting and gave a few weak answers. I don't think I am any wiser but I guess I have a better idea about what Buddhism is about. There was another person who was there for the first time, although he went to a Buddhist center in San Francisco apparently. He had very hardened ideas about what Buddhism was all about (because as an American living in San Francisco, he's gotta be an expert) and took umbrage at a lot of what Tom and the teacher was saying about ritual and all this other gobblity-gook. At the end he turned to me and told me that 'I shouldn't get the wrong impression because this is NOT what Buddhism was about!' before he stomped off. Tom and I found that amusing. Seemed a little self-righteous for a Buddhist, but what do I know?
Not much else to report. I will be sure to read the Gladwell book [Outliers]. I'm in the middle of 'What the Dog Saw' which is a collection of his New Yorker articles, some of which I had read but not really known the author. He definitely has a unique perspective, I like how he is able to see connections between things that aren't on the surface similar, in order to somehow make his argument clearer. Usually, going out on those asides confuse things and are edited out, its got to be a rare talent that can do what he did. Wish I knew how to do that.
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