This has been a bumper year for pine nuts. The pine trees are in great shape and cranking out pine cones. (Some say this portends an especially severe winter, but I prefer not to think about that.) When you drive anywhere here now there are people selling bags of pine nuts, kids eating them on the bus, etc. All well and good, right? Everything seems fine until you're hiking in the woods and start seeing odd contraptions that look like battering rams up against the trees. The pine nut collectors travel from tree to tree, battering the trunks with a ram to shake down the pine cones. And then they move on, leaving hundreds - if not thousands - of trees with huge oozing wounds. I was actually starting to feel a little sick on some sections of our hike on Sunday, seeing the painful, gaping wounds on tree after tree. And to make it worse, we came upon a grove of trees late in the hike that were smoldering. It appears the nut collectors had been setting fires at the roots to loosen the trees and make them easier to shake. And then left the forest burning and walked away. It is this kind of short-sighted attitude that makes me crazy. Do you have no interest in the survival of the forest? In your children knowing what a tree even looks like, after you've spent your time destroying and burning them? Or even, if you need a more selfish motive, what about next year's crop?
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Disposable Nature
One of the things that drives me absolutely crazy here is that the Mongolians have such an incredibly beautiful country - and they treat it like it's disposable. I know that's the common "first world" lament about how a less developed country is destroying their heritage in the rush to modernize, etc, etc.... But that doesn't mean it's not true. This is a country where within my lifetime, the majority of the population was still nomadic herders. Now, the majority of the population lives in the impressively dysfunctional, congested, and polluted city of Ulaanbaatar. A country with no need for a sanitation system, because nothing came packaged and everything was used, is now dealing with a thirst for bottled drinks, imported candies, and a wrapper on everything. And this brings me to the pine nuts, which is what started this whole thought.
This has been a bumper year for pine nuts. The pine trees are in great shape and cranking out pine cones. (Some say this portends an especially severe winter, but I prefer not to think about that.) When you drive anywhere here now there are people selling bags of pine nuts, kids eating them on the bus, etc. All well and good, right? Everything seems fine until you're hiking in the woods and start seeing odd contraptions that look like battering rams up against the trees. The pine nut collectors travel from tree to tree, battering the trunks with a ram to shake down the pine cones. And then they move on, leaving hundreds - if not thousands - of trees with huge oozing wounds. I was actually starting to feel a little sick on some sections of our hike on Sunday, seeing the painful, gaping wounds on tree after tree. And to make it worse, we came upon a grove of trees late in the hike that were smoldering. It appears the nut collectors had been setting fires at the roots to loosen the trees and make them easier to shake. And then left the forest burning and walked away. It is this kind of short-sighted attitude that makes me crazy. Do you have no interest in the survival of the forest? In your children knowing what a tree even looks like, after you've spent your time destroying and burning them? Or even, if you need a more selfish motive, what about next year's crop?
This has been a bumper year for pine nuts. The pine trees are in great shape and cranking out pine cones. (Some say this portends an especially severe winter, but I prefer not to think about that.) When you drive anywhere here now there are people selling bags of pine nuts, kids eating them on the bus, etc. All well and good, right? Everything seems fine until you're hiking in the woods and start seeing odd contraptions that look like battering rams up against the trees. The pine nut collectors travel from tree to tree, battering the trunks with a ram to shake down the pine cones. And then they move on, leaving hundreds - if not thousands - of trees with huge oozing wounds. I was actually starting to feel a little sick on some sections of our hike on Sunday, seeing the painful, gaping wounds on tree after tree. And to make it worse, we came upon a grove of trees late in the hike that were smoldering. It appears the nut collectors had been setting fires at the roots to loosen the trees and make them easier to shake. And then left the forest burning and walked away. It is this kind of short-sighted attitude that makes me crazy. Do you have no interest in the survival of the forest? In your children knowing what a tree even looks like, after you've spent your time destroying and burning them? Or even, if you need a more selfish motive, what about next year's crop?
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