The 17 hour drive into the Nehes Liah Bing over rough and windy roads, some parts dirt and some parts paved, was at first targeted to be longer than anticipated. But when our drivers and leaders learned another, faster route was open, the trip was actually truncated by a couple of hours. It was a harrowing ride, though, given the fearless drivers, residents of Nehes, and the multiple near head-on-collisions. Granted, the drivers are not only fearless, but they are highly skilled, and if vehicles share a lane in the opposite directions, generally someone slows down before the worst occurs.
Along the way we passed miles of deforested land containing spindly trees, scrub bushes and grass, although there remain patches of richer, more diverse vegetation. The soil here is apparently not conducive to rich regrowth, which I can vouch for in a sense, now that I’ve now had the pleasure to run on the clay surfaces here, a great running surface, but not the best for the vegetation, I must say.
We arrived at 10:30 pm. Some stayed up for the villager’s welcome, while others went straight to bed, myself included. I laid out my air mattress on the upstairs floor of the Nature Conservancy building at which we are staying for a night or two, before we are re-located to our home-stays for the duration of our visit. At 4:50 am, I could hear again the haunting Muslim call to prayer, which I had heard for the first time in Balikpapan, the first real indication to me that I was in a very different country; different from the similar climates of Mexico and Costa Rica where the people even are physically similar in appearance, it seems to me. The call-to-prayer is a beautiful piece of music, which I may like to learn at some point simply for the pleasure of repeating its haunting melody. That said, I’m told the population of Nehes is predominantly Roman Catholic.
This morning was breakfast downstairs with a view to the muddy waters of the Wehea River, once pristine, a stone’s throw away, where villagers bathe and do their laundry. The rivers were once clear, apparently, prior to deforestation in the 70s, and now are nearly perpetually murky as soil is easily carried off and sent unceremoniously to travel for miles of river waters. Where they end up, I am uncertain. I had some clothes to wash, so I joined them for a short time. It seemed necessary to wash my feet and my Doggers rubber shoes too, though I have yet to try the bucket shower and outhouse method – a pending inevitability.
It sounds like I may be able to organize a small group of runners to join myself and Sheryl, the two runners in our group. I would like to acquire a bicycle soon too. It sounds like I may be able to.
Now, for a group tour of the town…
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Friday, May 27, 2011
Balikpapan and Samboja
Well, I arrived safely in Balikpapan after 30 hours of largely sleepless travel time. The twelve hour flight to Hong Kong from Vancouver went by quickly and I was able to substantially complete a submission to the 2011 AAAI CAS conference (my paper being on information transfer in mass-start bicycle racing) conference during that time, and I can now turn my focus to Borneo and the course-work ahead. After a mostly sleepless layover in Jakarta, where I tried unsuccessfully to sleep on the airport floor, the balance of my travels went smoothly and the Hotel Sagita staff retrieved me and Paul, a fellow student arriving through Singapore, drove us back to the Hotel Sagita, where we met the instructors, the two translators, and the other students with whom will be working for the next six weeks.
Despite much travel fatigue and jet-lag for all of the students from various locations across Canada and the United States, Brent Loken and Sheryl Gruber, resilience course instructors, took us through some of the readings and laid the theoretical groundwork for the course. We discussed cycles of growth, increasing brittleness, collapse and regrowth in complex adaptive systems, among other things. We have since been asked to develop our research question more fully, and we will be refining it more in the next couple of days. Andrew, a student from Alberta, and I are looking at collaborating our research projects so as to centre around the government policy effects on patterns of crop rotation / shifting cultivation / land tenure. Andrew wants to look at the governance/policy aspects and investigate how government policies have affected the communities' use of land for agriculture, and how the government policies have been influenced by larger forces like palm oil plantations and similar disturbances. While to the time of writing Andrew and I are still tweaking the exact research question, it looks like my focus will be more quantitative, while Andrew's looks to be more qualititative.
We also met today to discuss our assignments for the ethno-ecological course, which is a separate course from the resilience research study. While much of the data gleaned from one course may be transferable to the other, we are told we may research a very different subject matter for the ethno-eco study. The idea for this course is to apply qualitative research methods (largely anthropological in scope), such as participatory research ("hanging out and doing") with the villagers in order to gather information and data about our research subject. I am considering perhaps looking at some linguistic component, such as comparing some basic words of the Dyak villagers to the more broadly spoken Indonesian, although it may not be doable - still needs some thought and consultations with Janelle Baker, our instructor.
On another note, yesterday we shifted locations from Hotel Sagita to the Samboja orangutan preserve, and spent some time observing orangutans and sun-bears, which have been rescued from wild. The orangutans were across water moats, which they will not cross as they apparently hate water, so we could not get very close to them. The sun-bears are small orphaned black-bears, largely kept in cages and pens.
On yet another note, I went for a half-hour run today, which felt incredible in the warmth and after nearly two months without running! I ran some clay trails nearby and found a 200 foot fire tower at a high-point in the land. At the top was an incredible view of the forest canopy below and I could see a mountain or volcano, which appeared to be on an island across the water. No pics for that, unfortunately.I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my foot will hold out after that run.
Tomorrow morning we head out to one of the Dyak villages - a 17 hour drive over, with 7 hours of it over a dirt road filled with potholes. An adventure to be sure.
Note, I do have some photos to add, but there is currently an issue with uploading them at a manageable size, and I should get this post out. I'll try to resolve the issue and post some photos asap.
Despite much travel fatigue and jet-lag for all of the students from various locations across Canada and the United States, Brent Loken and Sheryl Gruber, resilience course instructors, took us through some of the readings and laid the theoretical groundwork for the course. We discussed cycles of growth, increasing brittleness, collapse and regrowth in complex adaptive systems, among other things. We have since been asked to develop our research question more fully, and we will be refining it more in the next couple of days. Andrew, a student from Alberta, and I are looking at collaborating our research projects so as to centre around the government policy effects on patterns of crop rotation / shifting cultivation / land tenure. Andrew wants to look at the governance/policy aspects and investigate how government policies have affected the communities' use of land for agriculture, and how the government policies have been influenced by larger forces like palm oil plantations and similar disturbances. While to the time of writing Andrew and I are still tweaking the exact research question, it looks like my focus will be more quantitative, while Andrew's looks to be more qualititative.
We also met today to discuss our assignments for the ethno-ecological course, which is a separate course from the resilience research study. While much of the data gleaned from one course may be transferable to the other, we are told we may research a very different subject matter for the ethno-eco study. The idea for this course is to apply qualitative research methods (largely anthropological in scope), such as participatory research ("hanging out and doing") with the villagers in order to gather information and data about our research subject. I am considering perhaps looking at some linguistic component, such as comparing some basic words of the Dyak villagers to the more broadly spoken Indonesian, although it may not be doable - still needs some thought and consultations with Janelle Baker, our instructor.
On another note, yesterday we shifted locations from Hotel Sagita to the Samboja orangutan preserve, and spent some time observing orangutans and sun-bears, which have been rescued from wild. The orangutans were across water moats, which they will not cross as they apparently hate water, so we could not get very close to them. The sun-bears are small orphaned black-bears, largely kept in cages and pens.
On yet another note, I went for a half-hour run today, which felt incredible in the warmth and after nearly two months without running! I ran some clay trails nearby and found a 200 foot fire tower at a high-point in the land. At the top was an incredible view of the forest canopy below and I could see a mountain or volcano, which appeared to be on an island across the water. No pics for that, unfortunately.I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my foot will hold out after that run.
Tomorrow morning we head out to one of the Dyak villages - a 17 hour drive over, with 7 hours of it over a dirt road filled with potholes. An adventure to be sure.
Note, I do have some photos to add, but there is currently an issue with uploading them at a manageable size, and I should get this post out. I'll try to resolve the issue and post some photos asap.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Preliminary Thoughts
In a week from Monday, I'll be travelling to Borneo to participate in an ethno-ecological field study. The field-study, organized through Ethical Expeditions, and accredited through Quest University, based in Squamish, B.C., is at once two-pronged and a blended ethnological/ecological study, as the adjective suggests. It is two-pronged because the group of students, led by instructors Sheryl Gruber (Quest), Brent Loken (Simon Fraser University), and Janelle Baker, of Athabasca University - through which I am also a part-time student - will diverge into two groups of which one group of eight or so will venture into the Wehea forest reserve and document the diversity of life they encounter, while the other eight or so, and me included, will venture into Dayak villages to document their cultural, governance and economic systems; it is a blended study because the approach is systems-based, premised upon examining the mutual influences these systems undergo. The research question, as I understand it, is therefore: how do the human and ecological systems and their subsystems interact, what is their mutual impact, and how resilient are they in the face of impending forest clear-cutting, corporate and local and foreign disturbances that potentially may damage both these systems. How sensitive are they, and how may their resliience, to the extent that they are resilient, be sustained?
The study is of great interest to me because it takes a systems-based, complexity theory approach. Of course it will be an amazing experience for so many reasons, but I find myself with particular interest in this approach because my own research into the dynamics of pelotons, which is an example of a complex adaptive system - or so I have sought to demonstrate, having made a number of presentations on the subject at conferences - has led me to understand aspects of complexity theory. Broadly, complexity theory is interdisciplinarian and encompasses physics, evolutionary biology, ecology, economics, and any field of study in which there are many interacting components which exhibit behaviours and aggregate patterns not predicted from an examination of the components in isolation from each other. But I will delve further into this as we go along.
It is worth mentioning too that the Borneo study has much relevance to the degree I am finishing, which is what Athabasca University terms a Bachelor of Professional Arts, in Governance, Law, and Management, through their Centre for State and Legal Studies. Throughout my studies, I have taken a particular interest in economics and international relations. So, it is highly relevant to me that we will be studying the governance/economic systems of the Dyak peoples.
At the age of 42, one may understandably ask how it is that I come to be finishing an undergraduate degree at this time in my life. I currently hold a full-time position as an adjudicator with Office of the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles, and I have also been employed as a paralegal in different capacities with the Province of British Columbia and with private practitioners for many years now. When I chose to attend Capilano College (now a university) to complete a two-year diploma program with a six-month practicum as a paralegal, the decision was made largely on the basis that I wanted some sort of reasonable/respectable career that required a relatively mimimal education so that I could pursue dreams I had at the time to be a competitive cyclist at an elite level. What I needed was a good sit-down job that paid half-decently and that allowed me to recover well from training and to race frequently.
Generally that was fulfilled, although I ended up putting cycling itself on hiatus for a few years while I trained as a runner and duathlete, and ultimately achieved only modest success as a cyclist, with my best season resulting in a 4th place in the B.C. Cup standings in 1999, if I recall the year correctly. Granted, I did garner a few top-10 marathon results, and compete for Canada at the World Championships in the sport of duathlon, but the sport is small in Canada, and not as competitive as other sports like triathlon, cycling or running events, and the standards for achieving national team status were within the reach of those like myself with only mid-level talent.
So, with that and the passage of time, in 2007 I applied for and received a government scholarship to finish a degree, and have been working at it on a part-time basis since then. Now, with only a few courses remaining, while transferable for a total of 6 credits toward my degree, it appears I will receive only 3 such credits. But the value of the experience itself will be immeasurable, and there is also much that I will be able to apply to my peloton studies and to increase my understanding of complex systems generally.
And while I am a scientist at heart, with the odd artistic bent, a journey such as this must ultimately be viewed through a philosophical lens more than anything, it seems to me. For it was T.S. Eliot who said that it is at the end of all our travels, when we return to the place where we started, we will know that place for the first time. I am not certain yet what I will return to and see for the first time, or ultimately when that will happen, where the beginning of the journey really begins, and when it really ends. But I do know that when I am in Borneo, there is much that I will see for the first time, and that when I return, there is much that I will see very differently.
.
The study is of great interest to me because it takes a systems-based, complexity theory approach. Of course it will be an amazing experience for so many reasons, but I find myself with particular interest in this approach because my own research into the dynamics of pelotons, which is an example of a complex adaptive system - or so I have sought to demonstrate, having made a number of presentations on the subject at conferences - has led me to understand aspects of complexity theory. Broadly, complexity theory is interdisciplinarian and encompasses physics, evolutionary biology, ecology, economics, and any field of study in which there are many interacting components which exhibit behaviours and aggregate patterns not predicted from an examination of the components in isolation from each other. But I will delve further into this as we go along.
It is worth mentioning too that the Borneo study has much relevance to the degree I am finishing, which is what Athabasca University terms a Bachelor of Professional Arts, in Governance, Law, and Management, through their Centre for State and Legal Studies. Throughout my studies, I have taken a particular interest in economics and international relations. So, it is highly relevant to me that we will be studying the governance/economic systems of the Dyak peoples.
At the age of 42, one may understandably ask how it is that I come to be finishing an undergraduate degree at this time in my life. I currently hold a full-time position as an adjudicator with Office of the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles, and I have also been employed as a paralegal in different capacities with the Province of British Columbia and with private practitioners for many years now. When I chose to attend Capilano College (now a university) to complete a two-year diploma program with a six-month practicum as a paralegal, the decision was made largely on the basis that I wanted some sort of reasonable/respectable career that required a relatively mimimal education so that I could pursue dreams I had at the time to be a competitive cyclist at an elite level. What I needed was a good sit-down job that paid half-decently and that allowed me to recover well from training and to race frequently.
Generally that was fulfilled, although I ended up putting cycling itself on hiatus for a few years while I trained as a runner and duathlete, and ultimately achieved only modest success as a cyclist, with my best season resulting in a 4th place in the B.C. Cup standings in 1999, if I recall the year correctly. Granted, I did garner a few top-10 marathon results, and compete for Canada at the World Championships in the sport of duathlon, but the sport is small in Canada, and not as competitive as other sports like triathlon, cycling or running events, and the standards for achieving national team status were within the reach of those like myself with only mid-level talent.
So, with that and the passage of time, in 2007 I applied for and received a government scholarship to finish a degree, and have been working at it on a part-time basis since then. Now, with only a few courses remaining, while transferable for a total of 6 credits toward my degree, it appears I will receive only 3 such credits. But the value of the experience itself will be immeasurable, and there is also much that I will be able to apply to my peloton studies and to increase my understanding of complex systems generally.
And while I am a scientist at heart, with the odd artistic bent, a journey such as this must ultimately be viewed through a philosophical lens more than anything, it seems to me. For it was T.S. Eliot who said that it is at the end of all our travels, when we return to the place where we started, we will know that place for the first time. I am not certain yet what I will return to and see for the first time, or ultimately when that will happen, where the beginning of the journey really begins, and when it really ends. But I do know that when I am in Borneo, there is much that I will see for the first time, and that when I return, there is much that I will see very differently.
.
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