རྟིན་འབྱུང 

Trenjung: A Journal of Interconnections

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DBfIyD0uZw

This is a song called "Remember (Always)."   One might imagine another song called "Forget (Always)." Questions about time, and memory, and the persistence or lack thereof of memory are always interesting ones. Nostalgia can weigh one down in its beautiful amber casings, so that the new no longer makes it through the outer shell and into the inner soul.  And yet, what would be the point of anything existing if by its nature it is to be forgotten and as such, in a way, never to have existed at all?  What was, was; what is, is; what will be, will be, and yet all of those are but bloomings of something much more centrally placed, a non-place, a non-time from which these well-fleshed dreams emerge.

རྟིན་འབྱུང Trenjung: A Journal of Interconnections

I probably should have had more wisdom not to go ahead and share some of the rage and loneliness and yes, beauty I saw and felt as a much younger human being, but I have found delightedly, that as I have gotten much older -the liberation of truth approached if not apprehended- (and the loss of false shame) more than makes up for my slower times in the 100 yard dash. I commend this slim volume of poetry to whomsoever wants a good laugh at the occasional purple line interspersed though with a bit of lusty-spiritual good humor!

https://books.pronoun.com/pieces-of-the-moon/

རྟིན་འབྱུང 

Trenjung: A Journal of Interconnections

Downpour

he loved words.

not in the sense in which

love is so easily professed these days

but in an old-fashioned

genuinely romantic sort of way

spiritual

but with a material component

the word made flesh

so to speak

and flesh become word

in a way

it was not in the least

an abstract obsession

with some ideal Logos

no, the articles themselves

where his articles of faith

while the verbs in all of their doings

screwed up his soundest vows

of silence

and inaction

to use an expression

it was the real utterances

misspoken and squeaking

that he was enamored of

it was their

ineffably mysterious grunts

seeming to make sense

when in fact

they were the merest puffs

of clunk and whimsy

(oh, that meaning could so be written

in the air!)

and so he despaired

when he could not find

the right one

inanity though it be

but loving them as he did

he did sometimes seem

to put them at their ease

and they would come

unannounced

speaking for themselves

telling their own stories

almost

verbatim

and it was in this act

(no act at all

but genuine interest and concern)

that they at last perhaps

relaxed into his embrace

and there, mumbling

all the way

he would caress them

one by one

let his lips pout and pucker about them

reveling in their

fricatives and diphthongs

his tongue

would tease and tap out

codes from the sleek cavities

of their open vowels

until for lack of a better word

their meaning howled

and then stretching and intertwined

vowel harmony or not

they’d string each other out

in a long foreplay of whispering

a sotto voce

lilting and building

until it passed

that singular point. and emerged

full voice

at the beginning of a new sentence

some of them he found to be

much deeper than he had expected

others turned out to be

rather vapid and even

tepid, but in a lovely way

a denouement

of simplicity and overstatement

a giggled shiver of pretense

but no longer tense

just become

a plainspoken

“it is what it is”

straightforward declarative

as poetic as any

comparative

and so it went

not so much a verbal promiscuity

as a desire to use them all

in fevered raidings of the OED

and tricks he’d learned from how to manuals

he dabbled even in the dark arts

of neologisms and foreign loan words

of mantra and trance-dictated scat

oh how he moaned with

the heaved utterances

of heaven-sent glossolalia

a hundred and one peaceful and wrathful multilingual deities

no longer sure who was saying what to who or how

while all along

a million velvet ears convulsed

and maybe it was this

Passion

that lead him to a dawning angst:

he kept recognizing words

he’d used before

and the thrill was gone

he noticed that the more

he spoke clearly

the more he clearly spoke

what was now too

literally understandable

it was making too much sense

in a sense

and the mystery of the not quite said

the not quite inexpressible

was now gasping like a fish

on sand

so much for understanding

in his desperation

to reignite the flame

he began searching

in exotic corners

for languages not oft heard

he hired a Navaho

to translate his selected verse

into the language of The People

and would sit nodding sagely

as it was read back to him

restoring the harmony

of the Hrozo

of the veil of unknowing

his selected essays

he had rendered into an untranscribed

Bushman sub-dialect

to hear again in the pattern of the

clicking and the glottal stops

something of what he had meant to say

but even to these sublime obscurities

he eventually became habituated

and raging for his ineffable fix

he fixated on yet more radical plans

of translation:

he placed microphones in the woods

to pick up the sound of wandering winds

digitized the output and

randomly assigned them based on direction and decibel level

to trigger

famous passages of

Thai love poetry and Tibetan opera

but more and more

it was the sound of the winds themselves

which seemed to soothe him

he wanted desperately to be saying what he was saying

not alluding to it, not pointing to it

not describing it

he wanted the saying itself

to be the saying

or at least to be

an inextricable part of the saying

and it must be perfectly clear

all walls down

and yet and yet

perfectly indescribably

strange

a whatness without a witness

a wildness imbued with suchness

so he collaborated with a

quantum physicist

and a hidden wizard

to scan each raindrop

into a database

cross-referenced with every baby name

in every known tongue and

every name of every god and goddess

and heck some really quite minor deities

thrown in to be sure

so that the sacred falling of each drop

would sing its uniqueness

to each of the other falling perfections

and it was a beautiful

music that spanned the electromagnetic

rainbow

a lyricism that swelled and awed and yet was

wet and humble

and yet

it too at last

did not suffice

and so he wept

and laid his head down in the grass

and turned to face the downswelling sky

and opened his mouth

and swallowed it all

and so was born his peace

no telling of

no yelling out

the telling now was seamless with the told

and what was told of

was also what was telling

was the telling itself

was the loudest quiet never heard

was better than

a god in rut

was the magnificently

simple coitus

of the rain

རྟིན་འབྱུང 

Trenjung: A Journal of Interconnections

Some Preliminary Thoughts on “One River, One Destiny:” The Mekong, The MRC, The LMI, The LMCM, Tibet, Climate Change and the Superpower of Water

D. H. Garrett

The Asia Institute

“Men may dam it and say that they have made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have its way; the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents.” —Wendell Berry

Introduction

A sad story may be told of the death of the Mekong: a river that 60 million people depend on for their livelihood.  A river, that a rough guess at an ecosystem services evaluation would give a worth of perhaps tens of trillions of dollars. And yet a river also, in its natural state that is truly beyond that sort of evaluation, just as something that is living is incomparably more valuable, than something that is dead, although all the same material parts may be in both the corpse and the living being.  And yet, this sad story of strangulation by an old technology –dams, known not to be cost effective, known to be damaging ecologically, known to be destructive sociologically- is one that need not be told. There are better ways of providing clean energy; there are better ways of controlling flood; there are better ways of storing water for dry times; and there are better ways of making this river a lifeline during the ravages of the Anthropocene.

Geostrategically, we must also ask ourselves, why would a country poison its relations with its neighbors out of a misuse (perceived or otherwise) of its ability to hegemonically control water, when water, water in plenty, is available for all?  There are many answers to this question. Obviously the search for water security and hydropower is part of the reason. Beyond that though, dams seem to be the most readily available tool in the toolbox of the mind for most. Moreover, those who make money from dams want to make more money from dams, and those who think that big dams mean development -instead of really its opposite- are perhaps too much in positions of power. Most importantly though the answer is that we aren’t thinking creatively and innovatively.  We are stuck in the mindset of a technology that is centuries, even millenniums, old. Instead of “rivercide” we have the ability to save, and enhance the river, and still have enough water for all of our endeavors.

It must be asked if the collapse of the Syrian state would have occurred if its upriver hegemon, Turkey, had been a little bit more sharing of the water it had husbanded behind its dams.  That drought is settling permanently in the Middle East is no surprise. All of the climate change predictions call for it, and call for it to worsen.  As I write, the temperatures in the Middle East have in fact gotten to just a few degrees short of unlivable.  The same dire predictions are true for Southeast Asia.  Does China really want to live with failed states and anti-Chinese actors on so many of its borders? No of course it doesn't.  It wants economically able trading partners, and peaceful coexistence as it refashions its near world into a harmonious vision of prosperity for all.  The Mekong, and the other rivers China shares with its neighbors, lies at the heart of successfully fulfilling this vision.  The phrase, “one river, one destiny” is more than apt, it is the truth.  The question then is how to turn a tarnished, degraded destiny into a shining, abundant, healthful one

The View from Up High

In truth, whatever the future holds, China is already a superpower: a superpower of water. It holds in its hands the destiny of perhaps 2 billion people who depend on the water in the rivers originating on the Tibetan Plateau.  And the picture that climate change paints of water from the Tibetan Plateau, originating as it does from glacier melt, from fast disappearing glaciers is a grim one.  With temperatures rising twice as fast as the rest of the planet, polar regions excepted, the high arid zone of Tibet is fast becoming a permanent high desert, while the glaciers themselves are disappearing faster than anyone had predicted.  China is perhaps, the world’s only real, natural superpower, but it’s own natural inclination for dealing with this resource, has been one of self-preservation. In doing so though it risks, even if it saves itself, being surrounded by desperate, thirsty peoples.

Waking from the Illusion of Paris

You might say, that all of this is well understood.  That the Paris Agreement has saved us from the worst of the warned-of climate change hells.  But this is an illusion. Paris has done very little, certainly not enough, and what is worse, it has perhaps instilled a sense of complacency, that all is solved, and we can get on with manifest, consumer consuming, destiny. In fact Paris itself was a well-crafted political compromise. Climate change physics itself though is not susceptible to compromise. Given the fact that pollution (acting as a form of cheap and dirty geoengineering) has already suppressed temperature rise by about 1 degree, then in fact we are well past the 1.5 degree target and already at a 2 degree increase. This confirms that ESS (Earth System Sensitivity) is at the high end of estimates. We are in other words in uncharted water, in a no-analogue state, in which the fairly stable climate of the last 10,000 years is wobbling like a top at the end of its spin, and climate chaos has begun.  We see it everywhere: forests burning up, ice receding, methane from melting permafrost being released, and 1,000-year flood and rainfall events occurring on a regular basis.

All of the Acronyms Add Up to Nothing

You might say, that the MRC (Mekong River Commission) and the LMI (Lower Mekong Initiative) are organizations that will optimize river use while taking due consideration of climate change.  Even the LMCM (Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism) has opened itself to a willingness to discuss water issues.  But the MRC has no enforcement ability; witness the construction of the Xayaburi Dam in Laos, definitely a deathblow to the river.  The LMI on the other hand -viewed somewhat nervously by China as a U.S. means to consolidate Southeast Asia as a reliable, coordinated anti-Chinese hedge- is in fact best characterized as amateurish and inept. Probably the only thing really keeping it together is Chinese intransigence to acquiescing to internationally accepted shared international water basin norms.   

The Only Solution to the Near Future is a New Future

The near future, really any day, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, is going to bring some new climate change driven calamity.  And these are just the beginning.  The only solution to this radical new Earth, is a radical new level of human ingenuity when it comes to food, and particularly water.  All of the dams constructed to date are outdated.  They were designed for a different state of the earth.  But stationarity is dead.  Existing dams are either dangerous in the face of ahistorical levels of flooding, or uneconomical in the face of extended and mega-droughts, or more likely they are both unsafe and uneconomical. Dams built with expected lifetimes of scores of years, need to be decommissioned as soon as possible. The rivers need to be set free, need to be given room to ebb and flow as they will in their extended range of less flow and more flow.  It is not the rivers that can or should be controlled.  It is the nature and manner of human settlement and expansion that poses the danger.  The new super-rivers of the Anthropocene cannot be stopped.  The new periodically drying up rivers of the Anthropocene cannot be damned for power.  

So What Do We Do?

1) First we form a virtual super-transparent all-sector river basin organization.  The capabilities that satellites and drones provide make real-time water quantity and quality monitoring possible.  We link this information with smart-water point of use information and so determine optimum water use strategies based first and foremost on high-tech water efficiency technologies.  Water efficiency is the low-hanging fruit, and this must be applied basin-wide and across all sectors including industrial, agricultural and private and in all this a robust maintenance of the ecosystem, which is the true matrix for preserving water, must have an equal vote.

2) Next we must look to Tibet. Although only about 25% of the water in the Mekong comes from China, this figure rises to about 40% in the dry season, and most of this comes from the snow and glacier meltwater from Tibet. If it is in fact too expensive to put in place a space-based solar radiation screen for the plateau, artificial north slope glaciers should be constructed. "Snowmaking-Snowdam" technologies should also be examined. Sadly and dangerously because the rate of climate change is too fast for natural adaptation in many if not most cases, investigations of hybrid and genetically engineered plants capable of surviving high temperatures and drought at high elevations probably needs to be examined. Local peoples must be empowered to undertake these adaptations as a way of preserving the plateau and in compassionate service to their downstream neighbors.

3) Because water vapor is the main component driving climate change, as much water vapor as possible must be taken out of the atmosphere. Technologies for doing this are multiple including some which do not require external power. The water derived in this way is sufficient for almost all human needs, even in desert areas. Moreover global modeling shows that even if all water vapor were removed from the atmosphere evaporation mostly from the oceans would restore water vapor percentages to previous levels in about 10 days. This is in other words an almost perpetually renewable source of water that cools the earth and also provides its own transport to the point of use.  The universal implementation of this distributed water processing (DWP) system is analogous to the switch from old-fashioned hardline telephone lines to cell phones.

4) For water storage and flood control, as dams are decommissioned flood plains must be restored as much as possible. Where human habitation exists on flood plains, innovative architectural solutions to periodic flooding are probably preferable to population relocation. To recharge aquifers, in addition to flood plain restoration, ASR (Aquifer Storage and Reuse) technologies should also be widely deployed.

5) To make up loss of power from dams, in addition to the obvious candidate of solar, widespread deployment of artificial mangrove off shore wind installations in critical areas off populated coasts is required. The will not stop multilevel sea level rise but will protect against storm surge and wind intensity from the super storms and super typhoons of the Anthropocene.

5) As part of a DWP system and to further make up for loss of dam storage capacity and empower individual families and local communities instead of large hydropower companies, funds must be made available for ever family and community to build rainwater harvesting facilities. These can be intelligently linked so that families and communities can be reimbursed for release in times of downstream or ecosystem need.

6) Because most transport of water vapor to the interior is by means of bio transport, i.e., the transevaporation of water vapor from forests and plants, reforestation and afforestation is of prime importance, not just for water transport, but also for drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and fixing the carbon in a natural process. Because drought is already devastating our remaining forests they must be seeded with autonomous water from air units to try and preserve them where feasible and necessary.

7) There are a variety of new technologies which may help most of us survive the climate chaos as the earth tips over into a new hot climate state (and we are) and until we can all work together to restabilize the climate. They include vertical farming, cool suits, biomimicking super capillary systems, hydro matting flood defenses, microwave stop-start rainmaking, and non-material radical decoupling virtual consuming new economic systems.

Conclusion

Borders are magic entities. They help us decide who is in, and who is out. They help us arrange the world into those people whom we must treat well, and those we can disregard.  Borders, of course, are a perennial inspiration for magnificent disagreements and that biggest money-maker of all, war.  These days even rivers are being taught to obey the dictates of borders.  Water on one side is mine, whatever makes it to the other side, well, you can do what you want with it, even if we have taken quite a bit and sent you polluted stuff. But this approach is fundamentally a shared hallucination.

Fundamentally this is an issue of abundance that is misperceived as a problem of scarcity.  It is a problem of thinking that an old technology, -with all of its well-documented costs- is the best solution for a new challenge, when in fact a totally new technological approach repairs, provides, and enriches all parties, including nature itself.  It is a problem of perceiving neighbors as potential enemies, instead of partners in building an ecoharmonious civilization that has the strength and vision and natural and human joy needed to last beyond the current time of troubles. 

Appendix 1: From the 31^st March 2014, report ‘Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability’, from Working Group II[1]

1. Dams and infrastructure projects contribute significantly to “non-climate impacts” which, after interacting with changing climate, exacerbate the overall impact on human societies and ecosystems

o   Sediment Trapping by reservoirs, exacerbates impact of  sea level rise

o   Hydropower affects local options

o   Climate  change and dams together affect a greater eco-region

o   Increased flow fluctuations by dams exacerbate through climate change

2. In case of Flood Protection, dams and embankments may do more harm than good. Ecological measures would fare better.

3. Dams and Hydropower projects affect biodiversity, which is critical in facing climate change challenges.

4. In the tropics, global warming potential of hydropower may exceed that of Thermal Power

5. Dams increase vulnerability of weaker sections to climate change

6. Existing Dams have to be managed sustainably, with ecological considerations

7. Hydropower itself is vulnerable to Climate Change