I am sitting with some coffee in the lobby restaurant of the Majestic Hotel. Sakon Nakhon is a town I bet no one reading this has heard of. I don’t know exactly how big it is but it’s big enough for a few pretty big hotels, markets and even a pizza place(!).
Women pick the nuts in scalding, steamy conditions from the jatropha trees and take them into their village where they are squeezed for fuel or taken to larger processing centers.
We’re getting ready to head back down to Bangkok after four days up here in the northeast part of the country. It’s been a good productive shoot, but just very hot and humid. Yesterday was the first day we got a bit of a break. It was cloudy, rainy and only in the mid-80’s. Refreshing.
The work MSU is doing here is front-lines-in-the-war-on-climate-change stuff. This is where farmers are being paid to plant trees instead of things like rice and cassava. Communities in these rural areas work cooperatively to raise, harvest and sometimes process things like jatropha trees. The trees help get rid of the carbon instead of adding to the global problem like those other admittedly important crops.
Rice fields are great for growing rice, but many are here at the expense of
Jatropha nuts before shelling and pressing for biofuels.
forests and trees. And they emit methane, one of the worst greenhouse gasses. One of the leading causes of global warming is deforestation for things like rice fields. But people need rice to eat and live. So they need something they can plant and harvest to take its place, or at least so they don’t plant any more..
That’s where Michigan State University comes in. We’ve been specifically looking at the work guys like Dave Skole and Jay Samek from MSU are doing with jatropha trees. These shrubby specimens produce nuts that can be squished for an oil that’s used as biofuel. People have been using these nuts for fuel for lanterns and things like that forever. MSU is working with local farmers, villages and cooperatives to help grow more trees and get the processing in place to make the oil production more efficient
Picking the jatropha nuts in north Thailand.
and useful to the people.
It’s interesting to me that the goal of this work is not directly aimed at helping local farmers and their communities, but does. The goal is to stop climate change and global warming. The goal is to help save the world. They’re trying to do it by cutting down on greenhouse gasses by things like growing more jatropha trees and getting more biofuels into the mix. A byproduct of that is giving farmers a way to make more money. Win win, win.
We’ve been out in the fields, sweating like crazy, trying to tell this story. I am not sure I have ever drank so much water in my life.
So now we’re headed back down to Bangkok by van and then on to Laos for more work with jatropha trees and to see how that country is battling greenhouse gas emissions and trying to get the local to take advantage of carbon credits. Along the way we’re going to stop at the oldest temple or wat in Thailand. It’s supposed to be pretty impressive and is a holy site to the Thai people.
I’m hoping this coffee kicks in soon. It’s gonna be a long hot day in the van, I can tell.
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1 comment:
thank you for nice posting
Bathmate
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