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Orderly in its own peculiar way

I don’t like things too orderly, at least not in the usual sense. I have to emphasize, not in the sense usually understood.  I have been reading and studying for the last couple of years about randomness, chaos and spontaneous order. Most systems have an element of self-organization and all are subject to randomness. I am beginning to think that there is a higher order, a more subtle one but one more appropriate to the complex and changing situations we generally face. There is much we cannot control and it is probably better not to try. Instead of making plans that won’t work, it is better to have robust processes in place that take advantage of many situations. If you want to plan, maybe optimize it for the most likely scenario, but be ready to adapt.  

I have come to accept and even celebrate my ignorance, uncertainty and lack of detailed plans. It can be difficult to explain to others. I sometimes find it useful to have a profound plan that I can explain. Who knows?  It might work. But I rarely believe that. I know with moral certitude that I will have to vary the plan, so it really is not a good idea to get too detailed into the planning. I suppose it is related to the “don’t spend a dollar to make a dime decision” rule of thumb.  Don’t spend a lot of time and resources on something that is likely to be overtaken by events.

Things have been working out very well for me with my belief in the contingency nature of planning.  I trust it will continue to work like that.  People with plans seem to have things better in hand, but when those plans work it is merely a species of my random contingencies.  

It doesn’t mean I don’t have any plans of my own, but I keep my goals firm and my methods flexible.  IMO, some planners get this exactly wrong. They are less clear where they want to go than about the steps they will need to take to get there.

I was thinking about this today as I was weeding my “garden”. You can see the pictures of my flowers.  It is disorderly in some senses, self-organizing and others and goal oriented for me.  I pull weeds all the time and I move plants around. For example, I am establishing that ground cover you see with the blue flowers. Once in place, there will be no grass to cut in that place. The grass never grew very well there anyway.  I have been gathering plants from other parts of the yard. The flowers come from seeds I gather when I ride my bike and then spread. They are all volunteers. I weed out what I don’t like, so it is not unplanned, but I do depend on what grows. My system is maintained w/o any power tools and I compost everything, so there is no garbage going out.   

When I briefly had a gardener, we “exported” several bags of organic waste every week. I got rid of the gardener because he dissed by disorder and composting. I have not cut the whole lawn since May of 2012, although I knock down parts with my hand mover and scythe. There are lots of bees and butterflies and I suppose perhaps some of the nastier denizens of nature too, but they need a place to live too.  The disorder gives us more diversity and more of everything in its disorder. 

I think that is a good metaphor for life.  It might be easier just to mow everything down, as it was when I got here.  It would seem much more orderly, but it would be less interesting. Next week it will be different in ways I can anticipate but don’t control. I am always interested to see what will grow and how. I get to play in the garden every day and exert my influence, but there is the aspect of randomness. I like that. I established order in my peculiar way.  

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Fracking stimulus: real energy for the real economy

American energy is booming and energy is driving the economy. It is a stimulus much larger, more effective and sustainable than anything the Obama folks have done. And it is reaching all over the U.S. Fracking is lowering energy costs and reducing pollution. It is giving business to railroads, jobs to truckers and money to rural landowners. Beyond that, the fracking boom is stimulating a renaissance in heartland industries, such as fertilizers, plastics and other petrochemicals. In my native state of Wisconsin, the western part of the state had some problems in rural areas. Then came the fracking boom in North Dakota. Fracking fluid is mostly sand and water and Wisconsin sand is particularly well-suited for fracking.

This story is being repeated all over the American heartland. I suspect that the immense proportions of the success are under reported because much of the value and the jobs are going to smaller cities or rural communities outside the general purview of the bicoastal elites. But it is real and sustainable. This is not cash for clunkers or Solyndra pipe dreams. This is real and sustainable. And instead of costing billions, it is providing billions in earnings and taxes.

Of course there is also the conspiratorial reason to think it is under reported. The bicoastal elites tend to dislike both fossil fuels and the “hicks” in the heartland. Beyond that, if we understand the true engine pulling the American economy, how can politicians take credit?

W/o the fracking stimulus, our economy would be even more in the dumps and it may be fracking and its less expensive energy and abundant petrochemical complex that pulls us out.

Everything about fracking appeals to me. My blue collar heritage loves jobs for honest working people in an America is making real things, wealth through creation, not artificial stimulus or redistribution. The environmentalist in me sees the carbon reduction and the clean burning gas energy. My inner economist figures the potential salvation for an economy still in slow recovery from the great recession. My spirit of enterprise is excited by the courage and imagination of the men who took this technology discarded by big oil and made it great. My sense of fairness is enamored with the spread of prosperity to my people of Middle America and my patriotism is exalted by American energy letting us give the middle finger salute to despots and tyrants that control so much foreign oil and gas. We did it again.

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A legend in my own mind

A lot happened in Brazilian-American relations while I was here.  If asked to predict before I got here, even if asked to be extravagant, I would never have been so bold as to predict all the things accomplished in education and English learning.  The numbers are impressive.  Our English teacher exchange, for example, grew 54 fold in the time I was in Brazil.  This is not 54%, but 54 times.  By the time I leave, more than 20,000 Brazilian students will have gone to the U.S. on SwB.

I am in an unusual position.  Usually, I am trying to figure out what why we couldn’t get everything we hoped.  In this case I am trying to figure out my/our contribution to something so massively big that those unfamiliar with our operation do not believe it.  There was an interesting example last year when I reported about the increase in English teacher exchanges I mentioned above. I wrote to Washington that we expected to go from twenty to 490. My colleague in Washington thought I made a typing mistake and reported up 49.  Actually, I was wrong.  By the time I corrected the correction, our Brazilian friends had agreed to 540 and soon after that wanted to do the program twice a year, bringing the total to 1080.  The English w/o Borders program in general is expected to reach 7 million Brazilians over the next four years.  When you throw around numbers like this, it is no wonder people don’t believe it.

My analysis challenge is trying to figure out how much of the success over the past years would have happened without our contributions and how much my team and I did.  I have come to a nuanced answer.   We didn’t do anything in the sense of making it happen.  Our Brazilian friends did it.  American universities made the connections. Fulbright coordinated and IIE and Laspau made placements. But we facilitated all of them. We were necessary but not sufficient.  Necessary but not sufficient is not a satisfying answer.  This kind of ambivalence doesn’t look good on our efficiency reports and will not get the recognition we “deserve.”  Nobody gets promoted for being necessary but not sufficient. We prefer the illusion of control, but isn’t it better to be a necessary part of something really big instead of in complete control of something vanishingly small?

Why bother trying to figure it out at all if we are getting good results?  Results matter, but if you don’t study the process you cannot estimate to what extent those results came from your efforts, from what others did or from luck & serendipity.  It is always a combination but the mix matters.  You want to be able to duplicate success and avoid problems.  Unfortunately, much of our success cannot be duplicated. It was based on conditions which will not be present again. Ironically, our success altered the landscape in such a way that my methods are no longer effective. Knowing this is worth the time it takes to understand the process. Maybe I don’t exactly know what to do to achieve future success, but I know that I cannot continue to apply unaltered what worked so well the first time around. Knowing this is worth knowing.

This leads me back to my title.  As I get ready to finish in Brazil, I am feeling the usual mix of pride in a job well done plus the strange brew of simultaneously feeling humble at being so lucky, i.e. not deserving much recognition and feeling aggrieved for not getting much recognition. I didn’t say it was logical.  The more effectively you achieve something by working with others, the more others think it is simply natural and inevitable. Maybe it was. Maybe I am only a legend in my own mind. Maybe I just shouldn’t care.  I often joke that I need not worry since they cannot fire me and they will not promote me. That really is true.

Being necessary but not sufficient implies that you are part of a big team. There is often a distributed decision network at work and many members of the team are only vaguely aware or even unaware entirely of all the others. There are lots of necessary but not sufficient players.  My FS career is almost over. I would really like a big success to top it off, but I don’t think I can have one. If it is “my” success it won’t be big and if it is big I will share it with so many others that it won’t be mine. Good enough for me.  

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Driving around Rio

You always pay more for taxis in Rio. They are used to tourists and they know that there is a kind of differential tourists are willing to pay, or maybe don’t know they are paying.  But this time I got by w/o too much trouble.  I suspect the driver that took us from the airport to the hotel was taking us for a ride.  When I noticed we seemed to be going the wrong way and commented to him, he told me that there was a big music festival and we could not take the usual shorter route.  Maybe that was true.  I ended up paying more for an extra-long ride and when he gave me change, he did so with small bills, pausing each time until I just told him to keep the rest.   But on the way back from Sugar Loaf, we got a driver who actually used the meter and it told the right amount.  We went with the notorious “flat rate” to the statue of Christ.  I didn’t mind paying, since the guy waited for us and took us back down.  When I came with Espen a few months ago it was hard to find a taxi back.  The convenience was worth the price and the taxi driver was interesting.

He told me that he had been driving cab for about seven years.  He was a cop before that, but police work was too dangerous.   He said that in his police academy class of seventy, twenty-four had been killed in the line of duty four years later when he decided to seek a more tranquil profession.  Of course, he was a cop in the middle of all that trouble with drug dealers in the favelas.  Things are calmer now.

Taxi drivers in Rio own and maintain their own cabs, although licensed and regulated by the city.  He can have up to two other people drive the car.    His car is completely flex-fuel.  It can run on gasoline, ethanol or natural gas.   These days by far the best fuel is natural gas.  It costs the least and gets the most mileage per unit, more than twice as much as ethanol.  Ethanol is the worst.  Mileage is poor for the price.  Gasoline is in the middle.   Natural gas also has the advantage of better engine wear and less pollution.   He asked if we use much natural gas in the U.S.   We don’t.  Busses often run on natural gas and some delivery fleets are turning over to gas, but we don’t currently have the infrastructure.  I suppose that might change with the fracking boom.   Changing to natural gas makes the cities cleaner and quieter than they would otherwise be, in addition to saving money.

Rio really is a pretty city.  Mariza is visiting and I wanted her to see it.  We went to Acre last time she was here.  That was an interesting experience, but not the pleasant one you get in Rio.   Rio is really one of the world’s most beautiful cities.

We saw a double rainbow over Copacabana.  It was gone before we got our cameras.  Would not have done it justice anyway.   But the red sky was still interesting.  Red sky at night, sailors delight. The picture doesn’t do that justice either.  

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America’s best high schools

The best high schools in the U.S. are at this link. There are charters and regular public. They are not in the “super smart” places you might guess. They are in Kentucky, Florida (2), Arizona (2), Texas (2) & Virginia.  

Two on the list are Basis charter schools. They are criticized for having larger class size and not being completely transparent about finances, but who cares? When Lincoln was told that Ulysses S Grant was a drunk, he reportedly ask what brand of whiskey he drank so that he could send it to his other generals.

Whatever they are doing, we should study and try to copy and adapt to other schools. I think we have a bad habit when talking about social problems in general and education in particular. We look at the bad performers and losers and ask what keeps them down. A better tactic would be to look to successful performers and ask what they do right.

Leo Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is not a mere literary truism. It is based on the idea that there are a an infinite number of ways to screw up, but a much smaller set of things to do right. That is it is smart to work from positive examples and avoid being tinged by bad ones.

In my experience, most negative people dislike positive ones. I think that tendency explains much of the losers’ “bad luck.” To them, a positive success is a kind of insult. It points to the fact that they are screwing up in ways the prefer not to change. There is also a lot of envy involved. Maybe we cannot avoid the deadly sin of envy in all our personal transactions, but we should base policy on copying and adapting the best.

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A language is just a dialect with an army and a navy

Language difference is the obvious but vaguely surprising thing I noticed in Columbia. Portuguese to Spanish is a one-way street.  Portuguese speakers can understand most Spanish, but Spanish speakers do not understand much spoken Portuguese.  My Brazilian colleagues told me about this and I found it was true in Bogotá. People spoke to me in a language I more or less understood, but my responses were met with puzzlement. Portuguese, especially the Brazilian variety, uses vowels in a more exuberant way. 

The boundaries of language are interesting.  Some dialects should qualify as languages and some languages are really just dialects. There is an old saying that a language is just a dialect that has an army and a navy.   When I spoke Norwegian, I found I could also understand Swedish w/o too much difficulty. Written Danish is almost identical to written Norwegian, but the spoken language is different.   

Of course, some things called dialects probably should have their own language.  I read that Chinese “dialects” are mutually unintelligible.  Like Danish and Norwegian, the written languages are the same or similar, but the spoken languages are not.  I have had some problems with English.  There were people I could not understand when travelling in the UK.

My first language shock came when I was nineteen.  I hitchhiked from Wisconsin to South Alabama.  It was a dumb idea.  I was not prepared and I had only about $15.  I was trying to go to Florida, but I didn’t have a map or much of a plan.  I ended up on State Highway 10 and got a ride from a guy in a truck.  I understood nothing the man said.  He didn’t take me very far and when I got off a farmer was standing near the road.  He started to talk to me (People of rural Alabama very friendly).  He had one of those Civil War accents, but I understood him well.  He was a little put off when I told him that I was glad I understood.  He laughed when I explained that I had understood nothing from the man who had just dropped me off.  “Oh, that’s old Butch.  He’s the town drunk.   Ain’t nobody understands old Butch.”

Accents and languages can be fun.  I am not very good at accents, but I did find an interesting performance by a woman who does 21 accents in a few minutes.  She is at this link.

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Conference in Bogotá

I didn’t get much time in Bogotá but from what I saw it was a nice city and people were friendly.  It is very clean and looks a lot like some places in the Eastern U.S.  You can see pictures interspersed in the text. I was there for a PAO conference.  It is useful to learn about my colleagues’ challenges, since our jobs are mostly similar.

Budget cuts and sequester will increasingly constrain our work.  I could adapt to the cuts in money, but the threat is staff.  The 2 for 1 is still in place.  That means that we can fill only one position for every two that fall open.  It ratchets down our staffs, but that is not the most immediate problem. The conditions we face are changing.  It would make sense to reconfigure my staff to adapt to the changes. But if I change the job descriptions sufficiently, they become “new” positions, subject to the 2 for 1 rule. I will leave Brazil next July.  The rule will last longer than I will. This means that I will be unable to do any real restructuring.  I don’t want to use this as an excuse, but it is a reason.

On the plus side, I can live with limits on travel.Fortunately, the travel ceiling is based on 2010.When I arrived in 2011, I reformed the way we travel.It was not rocket science.We simply shop a little for better fares and never change our plans.Fares vary depending on the day and even the time of travel.A little flexibility in scheduling saves thousands of dollars.On the other hand, changing tickets once issued is expensive.A little more rigidity here also saves thousands of dollars.The bottom line is that we are travelling more, which is necessary for our expanded jobs, and paying less.We could save even more if we didn’t need to use the government booking system, but that is another story.

Brazil is the big dog in South America.  More than half the population in South America lives in Brazil and we are our own region with three, soon to be five consulates in addition to the Embassy.  Our situation is a different.  Our neighbors do a lot more “international” cooperation than we do.  It is a lot like our consulates cooperating, however.  They speak that same language externally, as we do internally, and a combination of countries often have smaller populations than a combination of our consular districts.  Anyway, putting Brazil into a mix changes the dynamic.  Portuguese is similar to Spanish but not the same and people cannot easily communicate.

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Know the place for the first time

Many people would like to be farmers at five in the afternoon, but few want to be farmers at five in the morning.  Farming is hard work and it was even harder work years ago. It is still hard work for many of the small farmers in the Amazon.

These guys, or their parents, came up the new Brasília to Belém highway thirty of forty years ago.  They sometimes walked from places like Goiás of the Northeast looking for a new life in the new lands. Some made it big and there are a lot of productive large and modern farms on this Brazilian agricultural frontier. I talked to some of the smaller farmers.

Paragominas has a program that tries to help small farmers.  The municipality guarantees that they will buy their produce for use in the schools, i.e. provides a certain market.  But it is hard to keep them down on the farm and easy to understand why.  It is hard work.  The couple I talked to, the one you see in the picture above, were originally from the NE, I think they said from Ceará. They worked their whole lives on the farm, but their kids were college educated and unenthusiastic about keeping up the tradition of farming. Birth rates in Brazil are dropping and it seems likely that fewer and fewer farmers will be on the land as time goes on. This is probably good. More will be produced on fewer hectares.

I keep seeing parallels between American environmental history and what is happening today in Brazil.  We are pioneer nations, taming the wilderness. It is out of style these days to tame the wilderness, but we have the luxury of it being out of style because we have tamed the wilderness.  We cannot go back.  Our challenge now is to adapt what we did to make it sustainable. Forests are growing back in the U.S.  There are now more trees growing in Eastern North America than there were in 1776. Marginal lands have returned to forests and our agriculture is becoming sustainable. Brazil is on this path.  We passed through the time of maximum destruction and we now it will begin to reverse.  In the U.S., the nadir of forests was around 1920.  Then things got better.  I don’t know if Brazil has turned the corner yet, but it will soon.

Sustainability sits on three pillars: environment, social and economic development.  We often forget the last two when talking about sustainably, but in the long and medium run, w/o development in the social and economic spheres, the environment cannot be sustained. We humans do not properly understand the complexity of the environment and we never will.  But sometimes we come close enough to truth to know some of the things we should do.  We come around in circles.  I recall the lines from TS Eliot, “We never stop exploring, and at the end of all our explorations we come back to where we started, and we will know that place for the first time”.

My pictures show some of the farmers. The pigs are an Amazon variety. You can see rubber trees tapped int he picture below and the supper picture is a great meal I had at one of the family farms, all with products growing locally and organically. 

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Family businesses in for the long run

Many of the businesses around Paragominas are family owned, with generations of family members working there. The small sawmill in the picture above is family owned and so is the multimillion dollar wood processing and forestry operation farther down.  I think this has to do with the pioneer nature of the society.   The founders – or more likely today grandfathers – came to this place and set up shop.  They have often gone through several cycles of business.  There were shortages of people they could trust, with the proper skills to run the businesses, so they made their own.

The saw mill has been here for many years.  The logs come up the river and are processed at this and other nearby mills in the town of São Miguel.  All the logs processed here are certified.  You can see the markings on each one.   It is a specific number so the wood can be traced.

The Floraplac MDF  plant is in a different business. They make fiberboard and wood products and require smaller trees that can be chipped and/or pulped. Originally, the factory used naturally occurring timber. But in the early 1990s, the owners saw that this would not be sustainable and started to plant their own. This created the need for different machines.  Logs from the forest primeval tended to be big and differentiated. Those from plantations are smaller and uniform. The latter are easier to process, which is another benefit of plantation tree farming.

Some of the trees are a native Amazon species called paricá.  This tree grows to harvest in around nine years.  You can see the picture above.  The wood is good and worth more per pound that eucalyptus, but eucalyptus produces more pounds per acre and has a shorter rotation of only seven years.  There is need for both but the eucalyptus is often more useful, if less popular because of its non-native status.

There are hundreds of species of eucalyptus, so the variations are almost endless.  Eucalyptus is native of Australia, but there are probably more types of the trees and more trees in Brazil than anyplace else in the world.   Vitorio is constantly seeking to improve the genetic stock and silviculture of his trees.  For example, some suffer from rot when there is too much humidity and they are now planting crossbred trees that are resistant.   They are in a perpetual arms race with bugs and diseases.  This is the way of nature, especially when you have large areas of very similar trees. 

As I have written before, I am a little sad that eucalyptus has replaced pine over the warmer parts of Brazil.  Pine is also an invasive species here, but it is familiar to me.  I like the eucalyptus trees, but pine are more the woods of home.   But where eucalyptus can grow well, pine cannot compete in the pulp & chip market.  The eucalyptus has a nice scent, kind of a fresh mint.  I still, however, prefer the pine. 

Floraplac is a vertically integrated operation of a type we see increasingly rarely in the U.S.  They own the land and grow the trees they use to supply their operation. During the 1990s anon most American pulp, paper and timber firms sold their land to smaller holders and timber investment management organizations (TIMOs). This is how I got my forest land.  Companies figured that they did not have to bear the carrying costs and risks involved in growing the trees and owning the land.  They could rely on private owners. The additional transaction costs were low compared to the carrying costs.

Brazil is not ready for this just yet.  There are probably not enough private owners for all the land around here needed to supply the plant.  I asked Vitorio about this model.  He said that they are trying to source some timber from smaller holdings, but these were not people engaged in forestry, as they might be in the U.S.   Rather they were doing a kind of silvopasture or woodland agriculture, where they would raise stock and/or crops among and between the trees.  The forestry would provide a supplement to their income but not in itself be a viable investment.

Buying from small holders is not the most profitable business possible. Floraplac does it as part of its commitment to the community and corporate social responsibility.  It is smart business in the long run.  At some point in the future, there might be calls to move the plant or criticism of its use of forest resources.  At the time, it will be good to have a significant group of people who better understand sustainable forestry and are connected by their own interests to the continued viability of the enterprise. 

They were down to earth, friendly people.  The multigenerational nature of the business ensures that they look to the future.   It seems to me a really great business and an admirable business model, so far removed from the caricature of people showing up in the forest to make a quick buck and a quicker exit.  People here are in it for the long run.

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Belém to Brasília highway

They started work more than fifty years ago. Today many people consider it a kind of mistake, maybe even a ecological disaster.  After travelling along the road, I don’t agree.  This is Brazil’s Route 66, a highway of dreams. The Brazilians at that time, led by President Juscelino Kubitschek, wanted to open up the empty land in the interior of Brazil. That is why he built Brasília and why he built the road to connect the new city of Brasília with the older city of Belém and with all the places in between.You can see a stretch of the road above

It was heroic work, cutting through what people at the time called jungle. Today we have a more politically correct term – rain forest.  The people who did the work were pioneers, like those of the American west.  They came to settle their country and seek a new life.  It was hard and dangerous.  Many people died in the process.  Others are still there and they and their descendants are still there.

I learned that once the Amazon forest was cut, the soil would soon turn to rock and sand, unproductive.  My observation is that this is not true. The soils are fertile and things grow wonderfully. 

The land next to the Belém to Brasília highway has had three main and overlapping cycles. The first involved clearing the land and using the forest resources. This is very much like what happened in Wisconsin and Michigan in the 1850s and 1860s.   It was disruptive, with forests being destroyed.  Immigrants cleared the land and tried to establish farming. As with Wisconsin or Michigan, the success of the farmers was mixed.  In some places, the soils and topography supported farming; other not so much.

The second stage consisted mostly of unsustainable cattle ranching. Ranchers put large numbers of cattle on the newly established pastures.  There were not many animals per hectare. It was profitable for some, but very inefficient.  This was the nadir stage. Things had been destroyed and degraded but not yet begun to renew.  his was like Wisconsin in 1871, during the great Peshtigo fire that may have killed as many as 2500 people or the big blowout fire of 1910 that destroyed three million acres in Idaho, Montana and Washington and helped establish the need for the U.S Forest Service.  

Cattle raising in the way they were doing was indeed unsustainable and that which is unsustainable will not be sustained.  The region is now entering a third stage.  This is the stage of readjustment and sustainability.   As I have written elsewhere, sustainable does not mean natural.   The ancient forests are gone, as are the ancient forests of Wisconsin.  They will never return as they were, but that does not mean that the new systems are not sustainable. Above you can see an oil palm plantation newly established on a degraded pasture.

Cattle ranching remains an important part of the local economy, but it is becoming more efficient, with fewer hectares required to grow beef.   Some of the degraded pasture is now available for crops and re-afforestation.  This is exactly what happened in the U.S. a century ago.  Paper and wood products mills are now mostly using fiber from planted trees, which I will talk about in subsequent posts.  In the area around Paragominas, they grow soy.  This is a triumph of the Brazilian USDA equivalent, EMBRAPA, which developed soy that growing in this tropical environment.  A little farther north, where it rains more, they grow oil palm.  You can see in my picture that oil palm is being planted in degraded pasture.

It is interesting what they have learned about micro-climates.  The area around Paragominas has less rain than a hundred miles north.  It still rains a lot, but less. Agriculture is sophisticated here, because they can plan for the rain. They have a regular rainy and dry season, like Brasília, but the dry season is not as dry and the wet season is even wetter.

Having my feet on this Amazonia ground gave me a different perception.  It was also useful to come back thirty years later and see what had been done. I understand that there could be wildly different lesson learned.   The natural forest is gone over much of the land. We can mourn the loss.  On the other hand, it looks like it was been replaced with a sustainable system that supports human aspirations and endeavor.

I cannot help thinking back to my own home-place, with all its myths and realities. I grew to full adulthood in the forests of northern Wisconsin and that shaped my outlook. There are no “virgin” forests in Wisconsin. It was all cut over in the middle of the 19th Century and usually cut over and burned a few times after. Yet the forest is magnificent and sustainable.  In many places you find stone walls and other evidence of old farms in the middle of old growth forests.  Obviously, the people who tried to farm these thin soils gave up and moved away. But there is a human presence throughout in forestry, farming and cities. People live in and with nature. It is good.  

This is what I see and wish for my Brazilian friends. They will look back at the extractive period in the same way we did. They will lament the loss, but appreciate the sacrifices and heroism of those who went before. This is the lesson good people will teach their children. They do already.  I felt at home in the “tamed” Amazon in ways I never have in the “natural” parts. Human endeavor need not be destructive but it will lead to change, sometimes for the better.

One more thing about sustainable. Nothing lasts forever, not anything natural or man-made. We can strive for predictable and favorable change.