John Matel's Memorial Blog
We attended Mariza’s dance show last night. She did a good job organizing it and seems to have about broken even, which is a great result for this kind of event. It was hard for me to get good pictures because of the lighting and the quick movements.
Wildlife needs edge communities, places where different biomes meet, where resources are varied. There are several natural places to put food plots. One is under any transmission wires that cross your property. You cannot use this land for much of anything anyway, so it provides a good, long narrow wildlife area. Other natural areas for food plots are landing zones.
Landing zones are where loggers set up equipment to stack and process harvested timber. There is not much sense in planting them in trees, since subsequent harvests will squash them. But you don’t want to just neglect them. Because of the soil compression of the heavy machines, plants will not easily regenerate on them naturally. You need to break up the hard surfaces and plant in some wildlife plots.
The additional advantage is that the landing zones are spread out in the forest. They provide little islands of food and variety within the forest.
Food plots play out over time. You have to replant them every 3-5 years. I am lucky in that the guys at the hunt club do that on my land. They study this. I get the magazine that has different studies and possibilities. But each site is special. It is an art and not a science. The hunt clubs and I have common interests. They like to make the food plots to improve wildlife. I agree. They also seem just like the joy of doing it and I am happy to have them “play” with my land. One of the guys helped his granddaughter plan a food plot on our CP land. She won some kind of 4H project.
My pictures show the food plots ready to be planted or in growth. The top shows the plot on our new property. I have not yet though up a name for this place, so I am just calling it new forest. The trees are twenty-eight years old. Below that is the plot under the wires on the Freeman place. That food plot was planted last spring. The trees in the background are sixteen years old. The bottom is CP, our “original” land. Those trees are nine years old. All the stands look pretty good.
Our forests in Virginia, mine included, are not very intensive. Notice all the stuff growing under and among the trees, weeds. But the weeds are what the animals eat. They are better for the environment. I have seen much “better” managed forests, where the trees are planted closer and there is much more production per acre. I am happy to leave some space on my land for the diversity of nature. The only thing I worry about is that our business model will not be competitive. People more clever than us will figure out ways to make things more efficient. It would take away much of the joy of forestry for me. I like the easy management, less control.
That is one reason I think we have to maintain other values. One of the most important is hunting. W/o the hunt clubs, I could not mange the way I do. The hunters are really the stewards of the rural environment. I am glad they are there and that I got to know them.
There seem to be lots of spiders around here. Maybe it’s just spider season. I don’t know. They throw their webs across the trails at about face height. You usually don’t see them, but you walk into them and get the threads in your mouth. It is not pleasant, although I suppose ruining all that work impacts the spider more than the walker.
We are down here to look at the farms and especially to look at the new one. Everything is looking good. The trees look healthy and have put on good growth this year. Usually it is not so long between visits, so I am seeing a little more growth than usual.
There is an interesting change in the streams on the CP place. As the trees get bigger, they suck up more of the water that falls on the land, so it doesn’t run off so quickly. Some of my formerly full stream beds are now just wet, even with the extensive rain we had here in the last couple of months. There is still water pooled up in some places, so it is not a general dryness. I like one particular place where I sit under some really big beech trees. This place now has a spring, where it used to have a surface stream. The water evidently follows the stream bed underground and then if forced to the surface by some really big rock formations. It flows down the rocks. Very nice.
The new farm is 137 acres just north of Hwy 58. It is good land with around 100 acres of twenty-eight year old loblolly, another maybe twenty acres in five year old and the rest in mixed hardwood SMZ. There is relatively little SMZ, so a more generally useable land. We could harvest the pines at any time, but we would ideally do this in about five years. I want to be around to watch the harvest and the replanting, so maybe after I retire would be a good time. That is not that long away now.
I probably have to modify my planning to account for retirement and mortality. My forestry planning goes out to times when I will probably be dead. The thing that is fun about forestry is the long term perspective, but you cannot manage events past your lifetime. The other problem is just getting around. Yesterday I was climbing around over rocks and streams. I was getting tired. I take good physical condition for granted. How much longer can I do this?
I talked to Larry Walker who runs the hunt club and works in local forestry. He told me that the market for pulp and timber has improved a lot recently, especially over the last month. I don’t know if this is a leading economic indicator, but it is local good news.
Another piece of good news is that Dominion Power will begin using wood chip biomass to replace coal in its power stations in Altavista, Hopewell, and Southampton coal-fired power stations. Wood chips are a completely renewable resource & carbon neutral, i.e. they soak up as much CO2 as they produce when burned. This move will also provide a market for slash and other forestry byproducts and steady the market prices for pulp wood. It makes sense to burn biomass in a place that produces so much of it. This is the fundamental principle of energy. You should use what works best in the local conditions. There is no single solution.
The two top pictures show our new land. I am standing near the trees to give perspective. Below that is my usual corner on the CP property. The bottom picture are my sycamores along the road. I have been thinning them into a kind of colonnade. I am vaguely allergic to sycamore. If I do a lot of work cutting branches etc, I cough and sneeze. So I can do it only a little while before I need to take a breathing break. Sycamores have a distinctive smell, which I suppose it the same thing that causes me trouble.
Dom Pedro didn’t really found Petrópolis as much as just built his summer palace up in the hills outside Rio and the city formed around it. There are nearly 400,000 people in the town today. It has a kind of European flavor. Some people say it is like Germany. I suppose it is like Germany if you discount the palm trees. It is not as tidy as Germany. The Brazilian city that really looks like Germany is Blumenau, but that is another story. Petrópolis is more reminiscent of Sintra near Lisbon, which makes more sense as a parallel.
You drive through some sublimely beautiful country to get to Petrópolis and it would be worth the trip if all you did was drive up and back. You have to go up one road and down another, which is really a good thing since it means there is no oncoming traffic on the twisted roads. Mixing Brazilian driving habits with this kind of road often would be fatal with oncoming traffic. I recall driving the old BR 101 in Santa Catarina. It was also a beautiful road but not safe. It has improved.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, our ostensible reason for going to Petrópolis was to pick up papers that Dom Pedro II produced while visiting the U.S. in 1876. We got a lot more. Mauricio met us at the Imperial Museum and gave us a tour of the summer place. It is not a really big place as some I have seen. It is much more manageable. You can imagine that people actually liked to live here and like to visit here. There was obviously a ceremonial element, but this was also a place to live.
Petrópolis today lives mostly by tourism; it depended on Dom Pedro when he was living there and it does still. But I also met a guy from GE aviation. He told me that they employ 1600 people in Petrópolis and make airplane parts and turbines. We talked about workforce. It is hard to find qualified people, so GE works with a local technical school to train workers. Airplane manufacture is a strange industry. Airplanes are made internationally. Parts are made by specialist all over the world. Sometimes engines actually move between countries in a kind of external assembly line. I really cannot understand how this can be economically viable, but evidently it is.
The basics haven’t changed. You have to get out and meet people. When Emperor of Brazil Dom Pedro II went to the U.S. in 1876, he was doing public diplomacy. Of course, he was a bigger deal than we are when we travel Brazil, but much was the same. We were up in Petrópolis, where Dom Pedro had his summer place, to pick up notes and pictures from Dom Pedro’s trip to the U.S. 136 years ago. It is still paying public diplomacy benefits.
Dom Pedro went for the great Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, celebrating the centennial of the United States. It was the first world’s fair to be held in the U.S. and Dom Pedro was the only head of state to attend. He also went all the way across the U.S. and back, in those days more of an adventure than it is today. He made a good impression on American and you can see why.
BTW – Library of Congress has a really cool system and you can read old books on line. There is a contemporary book about Dom Pedro’s visit. Check out this link.
He was nearly a perfect diplomat in temperament, looks and behavior, a patrol of the arts and science. Brazil has a constitutional monarchy, so Dom Pedro reined but didn’t really rule. He was on the throne for 58 years and is credited to some extent with keeping Brazil a unified country. It did not have to work out that way. Spanish America broke up into many often hostile states. Portuguese America, i.e. Brazil, could have done the same. You can think of several possible separate nations and some like Rio Grande do Sul managed to declare and maintain independence for a while.
The Dom Pedro reined until overthrown by a coup d’état on 15 November 1889. It was strange. Dom Pedro didn’t try to put it down and just left the country, commenting, “If it is so, it will be my retirement. I have worked too hard and I am tired. I will go rest then.” I suppose after 58 years on the job he was ready for a change.
The picture at top shows the CG and Smithsonian receiving the Dom Pedro papers. Among them was this concert program in the next picture. The Emperor sponsored a concert of Brazilian music for American audiences. Below is something going the other way. It is a Chickering piano, made in Massachusetts. These were evidently among the best pianos made at the time. This one still works. Chickering was founded in 1823. It was acquired by the American piano company in 1908 and the name was eventually used by Baldwin piano company which became a subsidiary of Gibson Guitars. They stopped making pianos in the U.S. in 2008. It is sad when an old craft tradition ends.
Today I am in Rio following the Smithsonian folks and I got to go with them to the Fundação Roberto Marinho. This organization works throughout Brazil broadly speaking on educational projects and knowledge creation and dissemination. This includes museums, which have a strong educational component. Its mission is similar to Smithsonian’s in these respects. They were proud of their new Museum of the Portuguese language and Soccer Museum in São Paulo. Both this museums explore the social implications of their subjects and are both creators and disseminators of knowledge.
A ground-breaking museum to be opened soon is the Museum of Tomorrow (Museu do Amanhã). It will be in the area of the Rio port district, which I wrote about before. The museum is different in that most museums preserve the past; this one will be aimed at the future, as the name implies. It will be about the science of a sustainable future. Organizers know this hard to do. It is very easy for a museum of the future to become a museum of futures past. It might just become quaint. If you visit, “Tomorrow Land” in Disney World, for example, you can see what people of 1960 thought it would be like today. It is quaint and funny, but no longer “future”. Actually, Brasília is a bit like that, a 1960s version of the future. Foundation people hope to avoid this fate by commitment to constant renewal. Let’s hope. You can see the projections of the Museu do Amanhã in my photo nearby.
I learned a few things about conservation of collections. It makes sense once you think about them, but you usually don’t think about them. First is that the big enemy of most things is humidity. It tends to encourage the growth of fungus and mold. Heat doesn’t matter nearly as much. Heating in a cold climate also tends to dehumidify as does air conditioning in hot weather. Our guests told us, however, that in Brazil they sometimes still turn the air conditions off at night. It is logical. Air conditioning costs money. Nobody is around and night and it gets fairly cool anyway, so why waste the money? If heat were the problem, it isn’t much of a problem at night.
Our Brazilian friends thought they could teach Americans a thing or two about surviving crisis. When American institutions face “hard times” they might have to cut hours or slow acquisitions. Brazilian crises have sometimes meant shutting down vital functions. Yet they have adapted, improvised and sometimes even prospered. There are usual lesson that can be drawn from that experience.
Brazilian institutions are different from American ones in the extent that they are almost entirely government funded and they don’t make much use of volunteers, which are a big deal in the U.S. Smithsonian, for example, has around 6000 employees and a similar number of volunteers. And these volunteers do substantive and important work. Few American institutions could operate if their volunteers went away.
Smithsonian is an example of public-private partnership. The government funds 62% of the budget and the rest is raised from corporate or private donors. There is an important division of labor between the two sources of funding. Government funds cover buildings and basic operations, the things that you really need to make any institution function but don’t usually see or notice as long as they are working. Private funding is concentrated on the things that show. Private donors want to fund things they can see and/or things they have passion about. Nobody wants to fund search and destroy operations for fungus or bugs, but these things are crucial. The same usually goes for hidden assets like plumbing or wiring. You need something cool to attract private funders.
What the government funding essentially supplies is the box or the venue into which privately funded expositions go. It is an effective model. The U.S. has great museums and more importantly cultural instructions are spread throughout our country. One big reason this works like this is the funding mechanism I talked about above plus the fact that we DON’T have a Ministry of Culture.
Our system essentially decentralizes cultural decision making. In a county like France, which prides itself on culture, decisions are made by erudite professionals in Paris and it is no surprise that Paris is full of great cultural institution. Not so much the smaller towns. The American system distributes money and decision making power. It is the best system in our very large and diverse country. I observe that Brazil is more like the U.S. than it is like France and our experience will be useful.
Brazil often tries to be centralized but doesn’t always succeed. There are historical and cultural obstacles. Brazil, like the U.S. is just very big and then there is the drift of history. The U.S. was lucky (& leaders like Jefferson and Madison were foresighted) in that the financial & cultural center was not also the national capital. This makes it more difficult and less natural to concentrate everything in the capital. In the U.S. the most money, best brains, most important culture and political power never pools up in the same place.
America’s financial capital was in Philadelphia and then New York, never in Washington. The United States has never had a cultural center the way France does. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and lots of others can claim to have the best of one thing or another, but none predominates, and you can find world class cultural offerings all over the place, in Milwaukee, Kansas City or Minneapolis as well as New York or Washington. Even when there are troubles, the system is strong.
Things are not so dispersed in Brazil but the principle holds. Brasília is certainly not the financial or cultural capital of Brazil. Even when the capital was in Rio de Janeiro, there was a strong rival in São Paulo and there were alternative centers in Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais and Bahia. Much political power could be officially centralized in Brasília, but Brasília, like Washington but unlike Paris, Rome or even London did not have the force of its own cultural and economic gravity. This works to the benefit of a big country because it includes many more people in decisions and takes better advantage of diverse conditions and the imagination and intelligence of people all over the country.
Anyway, I believe that the contacts fostered between Smithsonian and various Brazilian friends will pay dividends for everybody involved. Knowledge is a wonderful thing. It actually increases when shared and the more of it you “consume” the more you have. We took steps in the creation of more knowledge and understanding.
My picture up top shows the model of the Museum of Tomorrow; below is rain outside the Foundation.
Smithsonian signed an agreement with Ibram, which is the closest Brazilian counterpart. They will exchange scholars, cooperate on collections and generally build joint capacity. This is a good example of a sustainable exchange, a win-win where everyone gives, everyone gets and the total good increases. There is a link to a story about it here. My boss Ambassador Shannon had a good statement, which I will steal and use myself.
He said it originally in Portuguese – “Essa parceria firmada entre Smithsonian e Ibram é um ato de respeito mútuo que abre espaço para todos os nossos povos entenderem melhor a importância da cultura e das democracias e começarem a construir uma rede de acordos conectando os museus em todas as Américas para realizar nossa capacidade de sermos americanos no sentido original da palavra”
My quick translation – This partnership signed between Smithsonian and Ibram is an act of mutual respect which opens a space for all our people to better understand the importance of culture and of democracies; we are constructing a web of agreements connecting museums in all of the Americas in order to achieve our capacity to be Americans in the broad sense of the word.
My picture is only tangentially related to the text. I took it in Petrópolis, where we went, among other places, as part of the Smithsonian project.
It has not rained for more than ninety days and that was an unusual rain. I remember because it rained on the day Espen arrived in Brasília, June 16. I told him that it would not rain while he was in Brasília. I was wrong but rain in June is a rare occurrence. We have had not much rain for four months and none at all for three. Within a two or three week, however, the rain will start and then is will rain every day until next April.
It is springtime in Brazil or will be in a few days, but it has the feeling of fall, since many of the trees are now dropping their leaves. There is not a long time of bareness. In this tropical climate, they just drop them and replace, but having the leaves underfoot seems like fall. Of course, the anomaly are the flowering trees. This gives us a springtime feel. Very confusing for a child of the temperate forests like me.
This is the hottest part of the year. The sun is strong and there are few clouds. When the rain comes, it gets cooler. It is also smoky this time of year, enough to make your eyes hurt, as there are lots of grass and brush fires. Generally, I will be happy to see the rain, although the dry season has the advantage of certainty. You can go somewhere secure in the knowledge that it will not rain nor will the temperature vary much.
The picture is my backyard. I don’t water the lawn, as you see, so the grass doesn’t grow. The yellow trees are ipé. They are very pretty. Mine are not very big. A few days of rain will make all that brown grass turn vibrantly green. It is a spectacular & very rapid change.
The “Shared Heritage” seminars in São Paulo held at SESC Bom Retiro concerned recent immigration and labor force development in Brazil and the U.S. The Bom Retiro area has traditionally been a place where immigrants landing when they came to Brazil, so holding the event here made sense.
Both our countries have been nations of immigration. Both experience big waves of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, sometimes from the same places and there are cases when Americans and Brazilians can trace their families to the same places at the same times. One group went south and the other north. The same wave of Italian immigrants, for example, hit Brazil and the U.S. about the same time.
One interesting difference is the Japanese. São Paulo has the largest Japanese population outside Japan and much of it results from U.S. policy. In 1907, the Japanese Government voluntarily limited Japanese immigration to the U.S. in the “Gentlemen’s Agreement.” Japanese immigration was redirected toward Brazil. In general, Brazil received many immigrants who would have gone to the U.S. after the 1924 Immigration Act in the U.S., which limited immigration by establishing quotas based on the composition of the U.S. population in 1890. This limited immigration for people from southern and eastern Europe, some of whom ended up in Brazil.
The U.S. went through a period of low immigration from the 1920s until the 1965 Immigration Act changed that. In 1940, only 4.7% of the American population was foreign born. Today it is nearly 12%. President Johnson said and experts agreed that 1965 Act would not significantly change the demographic makeup of the U.S.; they were massively mistaken. This gave us the immigration experience we have today and which we were sharing with Brazil.
Brazil’s experience mirrors ours. Their immigration was greater when ours was smaller and smaller in recent years when ours was higher, although for different reasons. Brazil in recent decades was a country of emigration, with more people leaving than coming. There was a lot of internal migration from the poor Northeast to the richer Southeast, but immigration to Brazil was small. This is changing. As Brazil has enjoyed sustained economic growth, it is beginning to draw in immigrants again. This trend will be reinforced by the rapidly dropping fertility rate among the native Brazilian population. Already there are reports of labor shortages.
The interesting thing about immigration is that it is changing so much that we may not recognize it. Birth rates are dropping all over the world. Places like Brazil and Mexico are now below replacement rate. The time when we had floods of immigrants may be over and we may be looking at shortages of talent and workers. It will be an interesting turn-around. We and our Brazilian friends are in very much the same boat.
Success in public affairs is not easy to measure. The paths of influence are indirect and effect may remain unknown for a long time and obvious never. That is why I am faith-based. I have faith that building contacts between the American people and the Brazilian people will result in sustainable understanding and cooperation. We do this with our support of educational exchanges, especially Science w/o Borders. But man does not live by science alone. Cultural ties can be long lasting and enriching to the lives of those touched. But supporting culture seems a luxury and it is harder to justify. IMO, the relationships count, whether we make them via science or music or anything else.
Julliard, with the support of Consulate in São Paulo, has been working with Brazilians for several years through exchanges and contacts. Now Julliard is considering opening a permanent presence in São Paulo, specifically working with a local instruction, Santa Marcelina Cultura that helps underprivileged youth. It is indeed doing good, changing lives for the better, but that is not why we should support this kind of thing with our time and taxpayer money. We are interested in the sustained connections and relationships it creates.
I attended a party last night to support the Julliard connection. The Consulate’s time and seed money is now bearing fruit. This party was designed to create relationships of a different but related kind. This was a fundraising to build support among the business community. Our part is mostly done. Our job now is to provide what I would call diplomatic cover. We show up at events which lends our prestige and imprimatur. This still makes a difference. It is very beneficial to us, since we can meet important people, see and be seen. But now the American and Brazilian nations will take up the activities and support. This kind of non-governmental support for the arts is relatively new in Brazil. Certainly there have long been patrons of the arts and other charities, but the spontaneous organization of what amounts to task forces to raise money and commit time is relatively new.
A couple did the party in their home. Two Julliard students dis a short performance. The piano was more than 100 years old. They played beautifully and obviously their love of music had enriched their lives. Also obvious was the strength of the connection between the Americans and Brazilians created by the love of music. This is a lasting and abiding bond.