Terrascope Radio

Here we feature the work of first-year students – these are the final pieces produced over a semester for subject SP.360 – Terrascope Radio.

May 2016 Rebeldes: A Journey through New Mexican Agriculture

Posted at 19:00h in Radio by terrascope
Photo credit: Ari Epstein

Photo credit: Ari Epstein

An engaging and informative look at farmers in a desert landscape, and at how their individual farming styles reflect their personal values. Explores modern industrial farming, centuries-old collective water-distribution organizations, ancient Navajo corn customs and semi-urban organic farming.

First aired: May 11th, 2016 ·

 

 

Transcript

[wind]

[rattlesnake]

David: In a land dominated by desert, some things are easy to find.

Nalani: Sand?

David: Check

Nalani: Sunlight?

David: Check

Nalani: Tumbleweed?

David: Check

Nalani: But in New Mexico, you might find something else you wouldn’t expect.

David: Farmers

Nalani: Agriculture

Food

Life

And just about everywhere, but how?

David: My name’s David.

Nalani: And I’m Nalani.

David: We’re students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nalani: We’re part of a group that spent the past year researching solutions to some of the biggest problems in food security. And we went to New Mexico to get a better understanding of one of them: desert agriculture.

David: It might sound like an oxymoron, but looking at the crops in New Mexico, it’s clear that life finds a way.

Speaker: These sweet peas are what we call *rebeldes*, “rebels,” so they planted themselves. Whenever we get a random guy that pops up, we call them *rebeldes* because they just wanted to go for it, and they went for it.

[jazz music]

Nalani: It’s impressive enough that crops managed to grow in the dry climate.

David: Sure, we marveled at the carrots and the onions, but behind the scenes, how each farmer adapted to the challenges of the desert landscape is what really stood out.

So we drove across the state to explore a variety of places for farmers who, for one reason or another, chose to plant their roots

Nalani: From the highlands to the vast plains, from fields of alfalfa to little plots of radishes and carrots…

David: …we wanted to talk to the people who work this land.

Nalani: And after hearing about their struggles and their tough decisions…

David: …about their inventive ways of farming…

Nalani: …and, most of all, how much they care about their way of life and the work they do

David: There was something that we realized.

Nalani: The farmers of New Mexico…

David: …they’re *rebeldes* too.

[action-inducing guitar music]

[sound of wind with soft musical accents]

Lorenzo Candelaria: What we try to pursue here is not necessarily a head of lettuce, or a tomato. Because of the ancient properties of this land, because of the uses it’s been in for thousands of years, the work that we do here is sacred. When we plant something, we’re not necessarily producing a head of lettuce. Because we’re consuming this living, breathing creature, living energy becomes our own consciousness.

[flute sounds]

So what we raise here on this farm is not necessarily lettuce, or tomatoes, or chili, but consciousness.

Nalani: That was Lorenzo Candelaria, the owner of Cornelio Candelaria Organics, a farm near Albuquerque.

Travis: We just watered and we had a leak today, so just be careful, it’s a little wet, just be prepared for mud. Can you guys identify any of these crops?

[Travis continues talking in the background]

David: And this is Travis McKenzie, his employee, introducing us to the farm.

Nalani: Travis leads us through the densely packed rows of lettuce, kale, and arugula, picking leaves and eating them off the plant as he talks. Looking just ahead, the crowded rambling green of the farm fills our view.

David: Looking just a little farther, orderly rows of suburban houses come into view. In some ways, this farm is just a plot of land surrounded by a subdivision.

Nalani: Travis and Lorenzo view the land as much more than that, though.

Travis: We are totally organic, so if you want to pick a leaf and try it, please feel free…

Lorenzo: This farm has been in my family for a little over 300 years, and the care and nurturing that it has taken over a period of 300 years is very intimate. So this has become truly my mother.

Travis: This is all just live food. It’s just veggies. Like when Lorenzo was saying, it’s pure life. So really, what we’re doing is we’re harnessing the energy of the sun, the potency of the seed, the sacredness of the water, and the nutrition and the sustenance in the soil to create life. It’s beautiful.

Nalani: Here, nestled between suburban backyards and the growing sprawl of New Mexico’s largest city, their farm is advocating for an unconventional approach.

Travis: We’re all about keeping ancient practices and blending them with modern technology and techniques, but having a nice balance, and always respecting Mother Earth in those endeavors.

David: They have built a system based upon respect and recognition of the land, treating it as a living, breathing person.

[soft music, animal sounds, birds chirping]

Travis: Mother Earth will continue on.

[music intensifies]

We all gotta remember, by taking care of Mother Earth, we are taking care of ourselves and our future generations.

David: Life in the New Mexico desert can seem like a competition against the land. Travis and Lorenzo’s philosophy, working with the land instead of fighting it, stands out as different. It’s why they let the *rebeldes* grow instead of pulling them out.

Nalani: And this farm, in the middle of suburbia, provides a place for their philosophy to be shared.

Lorenzo: I’ve seen… people are coming here very anxious and very stressed and spend a couple hours pulling weeds. And by the time they leave, they’re happy people again. It’s a beautiful way to connect.

Nalani: Travis and Lorenzo have worked hard to make sure that a deep, personal connection to the land is not lost.

David: They keep this connection in an urban area. We visited another group of people who maintain a similar philosophy, far from the big cities.

[high anticipation string music]

Desiree (translated): My name is Desiree Descheniei. I am of the Tangle People Clan. I was also born for the Tangle People Clan. And my maternal grandfather, he’s of the Water Coming Together Clan. And my paternal-grandfather is of the Nicaraguan people.

David: Desiree is a member of the Navajo Tribe who grew up in the Northwestern New Mexico city of Farmington.

Nalani: The Navajo built their society over the course of centuries. The Navajo Nation currently spans a vast tract of land that occupies parts of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah.

David: And the Navajo have used this land to their advantage. Farming is deeply ingrained in their society. In fact, their nation contains one of the largest irrigated farms in North America.

Nalani: In Farmington, the sandy brown of the desert land is broken up by expansive circles of green. This is a network of commercially irrigated fields.

David: But moving farther into Navajo land, the industrial fields disappear altogether. Instead, you might run into a small field, and a mother and father outside tending to it.This is a family farming on a small scale, growing native crops as they have for generations.

Nalani: Traditionally, the Navajo are known for growing corn, beans, and squash. These crops are often called “the Three Sisters” and the people use them to sustain both themselves and their cultural practices.

Desiree: Much of Navajo philosophy and life revolves around farming. There’s just a lot of sacred foods that you grow and then you utilize those for your nutrition, for your physical health, but also your spiritual health. Corn’s a big deal among the Navajo because we eat it, but we also pray with it. And so, to grow your own corn is just a very mindful way of trying to provide for yourself.

Nalani: This corn culture extends to daily routines. For example, at the school where Desiree runs a community garden, the students and teachers use corn in a morning ritual every day before classes start. This corn ritual is common among Navajo people, as she explains.

Desiree: The holy people, *Diyin Dine*, they are most listening during the dawn. And during that time, you’ll usually say a prayer. Sometimes you’ll have either corn pollen or even corn grindings to just kind of offer as a blessing.

David: She also told us about another, even more personal ceremony.

Desiree: It’s called *Kinaaldá*, it’s when a girl becomes a woman, and during that time, you spend 4 days preparing to bake. One of the big things is that a way to demonstrate as a woman your ability to cook, also to provide, is to make this cake made out of corn. Before you’re making this cake, you’re grinding the corn physically with rocks.

David: The continuation of Navajo culture relies on access to corn. So what happens when the corn that they use for ceremonial purposes is threatened?

Nalani: In the summer of 2015, a chemical mine spill released toxic waste into the river that feeds much of Navajo land. They responded by closing irrigation ditches to protect their fields. But the loss of water devastated production and posed a serious health threat.

David: We spoke to a Navajo Farm Board official, Joe-Ben Jr., to get some insight on how the spill has affected the community and the agriculture that supports it.

[machine whirring]

Joe-Ben: So if you have a culture that consumes corn for ceremonial purposes, and for domestic purpose—table use—and if you have only 10% of your normal yield, and you’re gonna still need to pray and need to do your ceremonies, you’re going to use that 10% for that. So what should’ve normally gone on your table will be gone, missing.

David: And yet, when it came to the survival of Navajo culture, he was optimistic.

[machine whirring]

Joe-Ben: The Navajo people come from a culture that has never been severed. A culture that has never been severed since the introduction of western culture. For that reason, you have to have hope. If it has gone this far without being broken, you hang your hope and your faith on that past history of endurance and resiliency.

[hopeful piano music]

[soft guitar music]

Nalani: There’s something we’ve been leaving out of this whole equation so far. Remember, we’re in New Mexico and getting food requires more than just putting a seed in the ground. You need a secret ingredient. One very specific chemical that’s a little hard to come by in a desert.

David: It’s called dihydrogen monoxide: water.

[flowing water]

Nalani: Tucked away in the Northern New Mexico highlands is a town called Chimayo, where agriculture means a lot more than just producing food…

David: …and where water is handled a little differently.

[birds chirping]

Nalani: The red-streaked hills nearby are covered in brush. Along their sun-beaten tops, small wooden crosses stand watch.

David: Further off in the distance lie snow-capped mountains whose spring melt will fill this valley with life.

[distant bells]

Nalani: Down here, a collection of fields, well-trodden dirt paths, and a cluster of pastel-colored houses. This is El Rincon Farm.

[shoveling]

David: And that’s the sound of a ditch being cleaned.

Nalani: To all appearances, it looks just like any old ditch.

David: But this is an *acequia*, part of a centuries-old tradition of irrigation and community governance in New Mexico.

Nalani: On the surface, an *acequia* is just a network of irrigation ditches. But what makes them special is the way that communities band together to maintain them and share the water.

David: For instance, here is how the acequias are cleaned.

Nalani: A group of 20 to 30 members of the *acequia*, or *parciantes*, line up in the ditch 10 paces apart and clear up all of the debris from their section.

Teodoro Trujillo: As a person finishes his portion of the 10 feet, he stops and when everyone stops, you know they’re ready to move. And to move, the way we do it is yell out *“huerta,”* meaning shift.

David: That’s Teodoro Trujillo, or Ted, a farmer from Chimayo,

Nalani: As an *acequia* farmer himself, Ted is an expert on the philosophy and practice of the *acequia* tradition.

Ted: Everyone lines up at the beginning of the *acequia*. And the *acequia*, of course, is the irrigation ditch, but it’s really a bigger word in that it’s almost a form of government, it’s a form of land-based philosophy and practices. And actually, the whole business with water is sharing. You know, what else can you do with it? If someone else needed water, you need to accommodate them. It’s just sort of basic common sense that we’re here to help each other. So it worked out fairly well, and it’s probably the most important thing we’ve done because we’re trying to conserve water on the assumption that there will be less of it over time. *El agua no se vende, el agua se defiende.* Water isn’t to be sold, water is to be defended.

David: Ted is also an attorney who specializes in water rights law.

Nalani: His daughter Pilar is a Project Specialist for the New Mexico Acequia Association, an organization that works to protect the *acequias*, honor their cultural traditions, and feed their communities.

David: To learn more, we went right to the source of water for Chimayo’s *acequias*…

[flowing water]

..the Santa Cruz Dam.

Nalani: There, Pilar told us all about one particular success in the fight to preserve the *acequias*. A law passed in 2003 that gives the *acequias* more control over the water that flows through their ditches.

Pilar: A mechanism in the law was put in place to protect *acequias* from water transfers happening outside of the community. And so it’s a really crazy concept that there’s wet water and then there’s paper water. And that’s what we call—the paper water is the water right. And then you can take that piece of paper and sell it to somebody else. It can be a hard concept for some of our people to grasp because water can’t be separated from the land. That’s not how it works.

David: But that’s just it. What sets the *acequias* apart is that in other parts of the Southwest, water can be separated from the land.

Nalani: With the *acequias*, the community owns the water. They decide how to divide it up so that everyone gets their fair share.

David: And they almost lost that.

Pilar: And it creates a drive for all of these people who have traditionally been very cash poor and all of a sudden they find out that they can sell some water for some money, but you’re not actually removing the water, it’s still there, so it’s hard to be like “oh, that’s not a good thing to do,” it’s hard to get the concept that you will never be able to use that water again on your land, ever.

Before, all you had to do was show up at the State Engineer office with an application and say “I want to transfer my water, I want to sell it.” And then that was a loss to the community. And if four or five people on an *acequia* do that, that could just threaten the whole *acequia*, you know, because there’s not enough people farming. The land dries up and it’s a sad situation. We lose a lot of things.

Nalani: Five people may not seem significant, but with every *parciante* that leaves, some of the independence that fills the *acequias* leaves too.

David: And even if just a few people leave, that’s a lot of water that the *acequia* can no longer use to support agriculture in the community. It’s just gone.

Pilar: Now, the only thing we did is say “Listen, *acequias* have always been autonomous, they’ve always been sovereign, they’ve always governed themselves. Let us decide whether or not that water should be transferred out of the acequia.” So now, that’s it. That’s the simplicity of the law.

[chill music]

If you’re not from here and you don’t have a real understanding of the *acequias* then you can have a hard time understanding why we’re just gonna, why are we going to protect this ditch, you know?

Ted: It’s really a joy to see the water in it. It’s like having a waterway next to your house in, you know, in a desert. Can’t beat that.

[intense guitar music]

Nalani: At this point, New Mexico might seem like a patchwork of small self-sustaining farms.

David: The reality of farming today is that not all food comes from the Travises and Teds of the world.

Nalani: So what’s the other side of the story?

David: We visited some farms that were a little different than the ones we’d seen before. Like Lack Farms in the Southern part of the state. Just driving through the fields takes a while.

[car driving]

Nalani: Driving on dusty dirt roads, our path cuts through sharply-defined fields. Row after row of trees and plants are ordered with eye-catching geometric precision.

David: You could find yourself getting lost in the seemingly unending expanse of, well, food.

Nalani; We passed by pecan orchards, cattle corrals, vegetable fields, and processing plants.

David: At a stop to the side of an alfalfa field, we spoke to Clayton Creese and Jake Welmsma of Lack Farms about what farming means to them.

[machine whirring]

Clayton Creese: I’d say farming is really about feeding the world, you know?

Jake Welmsma: Grow the most possible in the least amount of land in the shortest amount of time.

Nalani: The truth is, by 2050, we will have two billion more mouths to feed.

David: Two. Billion. And being right there, surrounded by a sea of green in the middle of a desert, it’s not hard to see why Clayton and Jake have an appreciation for scale.

Nalani: But isn’t something lost in this kind of production? It’s hard to picture Travis or Pilar being on this farm.

David: It’s a hard question to answer. Larger farms like Lack, using more conventional, industrial methods do produce a lot of food.

Nalani: And that food ends up feeding a lot of people.

David: To the guys at Lack, modern technology is what makes it all possible

Clayton: Yeah, we use lots of different herbicides, well not “lots,” but you know. Everything has its own herbicide. You know, we have a herbicide that we spray on the grasses, we have a herbicide we spray on broad leaves. But you gotta keep your plant healthy, and insecticides, herbicides, and fertilizers are part of that.

David: For them, pesticides are just a tool to produce a quality product.

Nalani: When it comes to making decisions about what goes on their plants, the farmers at Lack speak from their own experiences.

Read More

May 2015 Power From The People

Posted at 17:00h in Radio by terrascope

Power_200x174_10ptTimesBold

A warm, personal story about the lives and challenges of energy workers “behind the light switch,” especially those who operate Pacific Gas and Electric’s solar, hydro and nuclear power plants.

First aired: Spring Semester, 2015 ·

Transcript

[upbeat music]

[power failure]

Elisa: What the…

[switches being flipped]

Elisa: …no! Ugh, why now? Mom, the power went out! 

Cleo: Everyone knows that feeling of agonizing frustration when they’re in the middle of something really important, and bam! the power goes out.

Elisa: Ugh, I hate that.

Cleo: But have you ever wondered who’s behind the scenes to make sure the electricity comes back on?

Music: And the world is made of energy / And the world is electricity…

[”Energy” by Apples In Stereo continues]

Cleo: My name is Cleo.

Elisa (sp?): And I’m Elisa.

Cleo: And we’re students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We took a class that focused on the growing global demand for energy.

Elisa: Our professors and mentors took us to Northern California on a whirlwind tour of the state’s electricity generation. 

Cleo: They coordinated with Pacific Gas and Electric…

Elisa: …or PG&E for short…

Cleo: …a main supplier of energy for the area.

[uplifting music]

Cleo: Over the course of a week, we toured PG&E’s solar, hydro, and nuclear power plants. We learned a lot about how various energy sources worked.

Elisa: But something else really surprised us: just how interesting it was to talk to the people operating the plants.

[plane flying overhead]

Cleo: Our plane flew into San Francisco early Friday afternoon. The next day, we woke up at 5am and drove high up in the Sierra Nevadas to Spalding Lake, which serves as a reservoir for a hydroelectric facility.

Elisa: Those of us who fell asleep on the way woke up to a dramatic change in scenery.

[optimistic piano music]

Cleo: Suddenly, we were surrounded by pine-covered mountains.

Elisa: It was so beautiful. One minute, we’d be surrounded by trees, and the next, a valley would open up in front of us, enclosed by huge mountaintops. 

Cleo: It was apparent that our love for the scenery was shared by the employees we met there.

Elisa: Phil Lee is an engineer who works in the drum powerhouses, where water from Spalding Lake ends up.

Cleo: After speeding down the mountainside in huge tubes, the water runs through large wheels and turbines that spin PG&E’s generators.

Elisa: Phil had some really interesting things to say about how he started working in power generation.

Phil Lee: I kinda fell into power generation. I had the choice when I graduated to go into manufacturing cars or going into power gen, so I worked at a steam plant. But I would say that out of all power generation, hydro is one of the most beautiful ones to work in. You know, driving out, this is what you do on your weekends when you hike, right? You go to these reservoirs and you look at them.

Cleo: Phil is one of a handful of workers who are on site at any given time. Because there are so few people and they spend so much time with each other, it was clear they were all really good friends. After all, they’ve gone through many stressful experiences together…

Elisa: …which we got to hear about. Even without understanding all the mechanical details, it’s easy to imagine what the situation must’ve been like.

Speaker: We get into some crazy scenarios. I’ll give an example of one: we overtraveled the TSV on Spalding Unit 2. We had to pop it back the other direction, so what did they teach you in engineering school on how to do that, Phil?

Phil: Don’t get yourself in that situation to begin with.

[laughter]

Speaker: So we find ourselves in those situations quite often, right? And this wasn’t, it wasn’t really our fault. We’re sitting there scratching our heads like “how are we gonna do this.” Literally, we had sledgehammers beating on this thing and that’s not gonna work.

Phil: And I’m just like “just go do it man, it’ll be fine!” and they’re like “No, dude, we can’t just go push on this.”

Speaker: I was sweating bullets.

[laughter]

Elisa: Watching them joke around with each other gave us a good sense of how close the plant workers were.

Cleo: It was really fun.

Elisa: We ended up staying for a while after the tour just listening to them tell stories. 

Cleo: But eventually we had to leave. 

[guitar music]

Cleo: From high up in the mountains we traveled more than 400 miles south of the California coast to the charming city of San Luis [unintelligible]. The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant sits close by.

Elisa: But much like the drum hydro plant, Diablo Canyon seems far removed from any civilization. 

Cleo: Perched 85 feet above sea level, overlooking the Pacific ocean, Diablo is tucked between two hills in California’s southern coastal range.

Elisa: The majority of the view was taken up by two tall concrete domes and a huge imposing brown building with narrow slit windows.

Cleo: We were led outside by Brian Cunningham, the plant supervisor of Nuclear Environmental Services, to see where the water comes from that’s used for cooling within the plant.

Brian Cunningham: Out here you’ll have some seals hanging out, we often have otters rafting in here, so our intake coves created somewhat of a marine sanctuary, and then our break waters have actually created a habitat as well. We have a robust marine monitoring program — I’ll talk about that a little more — we manage debris and do a lot of oceanographic surveys, and that’s a lot of fun.

Elisa: I would love to work in a place where I can glance outside and see otters. But the plant does have some effects on the environment.

Cleo: That’s true. Brian told us that the warm water flowing out from the plant is affecting the environment around Diablo.

Brian: There have been impacts, the most dramatic being that you can look at the rocky area along here versus rocky areas you’ll see elsewhere on the coast and they’re relatively barren. There’s loss of algae there.

Elisa: We were told that when the power plant stops operating, the plant and animal life will return to normal within two to three years. While the employees get to work in beautiful natural settings every day, the locations also create challenges.

Cleo: In the case of Diablo, because it’s located on the water’s edge and surrounded by tectonic faults, people are worried about earthquakes.

Elisa: Which is a legitimate concern, right? The Fukushima disaster happened because of an earthquake that led to a tsunami.

Cleo: But really, it was just the tsunami that the Fukushima plant couldn’t withstand. At the Diablo Education Center, John Lindsey, a media relations representative for PG&E, highlighted the difference between Fukushima and Diablo. 

John: When the earthquake hit, it was a 9.0 on the Richter scale, and the plant did fine. Problem was, the plant was built almost at sea level. Thirty minutes later, they had a 45-foot tsunami that came and it flooded their basement generators. Diablo Cave, if you look over there, we’re actually built 85 feet above sea level. The largest tsunami we’d probably ever see along our coastline, at most, would be 30 feet. 

Elisa: However, people aren’t just worried about earthquakes because of Fukushima. There are concerns that Diablo’s seismic risks have not been well-assessed.

Cleo: Staff at the plant say they’ve added features and structures so the plant can better withstand a major earthquake.

Elisa: But the issue certainly hasn’t been resolved. 

Cleo: There’s also public concern about nuclear waste. Nuclear waste remains dangerous for a very long time after it’s generated, so it must be handled carefully. 

Elisa: Finding long-term solutions for storing the waste is a problem that hasn’t been solved.

[introspective guitar music]

Cleo: Another issue that California power generation is facing is the drought. 

Elisa: California has been in a drought for almost four years now. The lack of water is affecting agriculture and increasing the possibility of wildfires. 

Cleo: It’s affecting the lives of many people, too. We talked to George Matsumoto, a scientist and educator at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, who told us how the drought is constantly affecting his daily life.

George Matsumoto: Everybody’s trying to do their part. I don’t water my yard, I’ve got rain collection buckets underneath all my downspouts and, to my son’s great shame, I even have five-gallon buckets in the shower, so as he’s waiting for the water to heat up, I ask him to save that water so we can use it to water the plants that we do have in the yard.

Elisa: Hydroelectric plants use water to generate electricity by harnessing the energy of the water as it travels down from higher places, so the drought has been causing big problems for hydro as an energy source. 

Cleo: At PG&E’s headquarters, the employees told us that demand for energy peaks twice on a typical day: once in the morning when people are getting ready for work, and once in the evening when they come home. 

Elisa: Careful management of different energy sources is needed to handle this double peak. 

Cleo: Consistent energy sources, like fossil fuels or nuclear power, can produce power whenever needed, but sources like solar and wind can only produce power when there is sun or wind. 

Elisa: When there isn’t enough of those, something else needs to kick in. 

[educational music]

Cleo: Here’s how it works: your home and all the power companies are connected to the grid. When you wake up and start using energy, power companies increase their electricity production. 

Elisa: But when solar panels start producing a lot of electricity in the middle of a bright, sunny day, power generated from hydro or fossil fuels can decrease. 

Cleo: Then, when the sun goes down, solar panels stop generating electricity, and another power source has to pick up the slack.

Elisa: Otherwise, people’s lights go out. Hydro power can make up for other energy sources during times of peak demand. A hydro plant has the ability to store water in reservoirs. 

Cleo: But Brandon [inaudible], one of the hydro operators, told us that because of the drought, hydro can currently supply only one of the two peaks per day.

Brandon: We’re simply meeting demands. We don’t even have enough water right now to supply a double peak. We’re only doing the afternoon peak because of the drought situation. We’re relying heavily on gasses and nuclear.

Elisa: And the drought is affecting more than just hydro power, as C.B. Hall, a manager at PG&E, explained.

C.B.: So the drought is serious right now for us, but hydro to be honest is not the high priority when it comes to water. Water is– it’s first about people, it’s about agriculture. Power is third-tier priority.

Elisa: Cleo and I thought it was really interesting to hear about how the natural setting…

Cleo: …the mountains, the geology, the recent drought…

Elisa: …are affecting power generation. 

Cleo: Some of our classmates have a different takeaway.

Elisa: We’ll let them tell you about it.

Jake: Thanks Elisa. I’m Jake.

McKenzie: And I’m McKenzie.

Jake: For us, one of the coolest parts of the trip was seeing what it was like to work at one of these power plants.

McKenzie: One of the workers, [inaudible] is the generation supervisor at Drum Switching Center, which manages generation at the local hydro facility.

Speaker: Hydro-operations is interesting because it’s real-time, and it’s happening all the time. It doesn’t stop; even when we take our two-week outages, that’s only a two-week outage on the Spalding Drummer 5 unit. All the other units are still run, we’re still delivering water in other areas. It makes it fun. Something you never even thought about comes up every day, and you’re learning.

[country music]

McKenzie: Speaking with Willy really opened our eyes to the fact that power generation is real-time. Energy demand is constantly changing during the day. 

Jake: At the drum switching center, we spoke with John James. He’s been a hydro operator for over 10 years. From the control room, he can remotely see every stream and power station that PG&E has in the area. He and his coworkers adjust the hydro generation on an hour-by-hour basis. 

McKenzie: This schedule is based on two factors: predictions of demand and power generation by other types of energy — particularly renewable, since they’re more variable.

Jake: But anything can happen. If a machine at another power plant happens to break, the power demand doesn’t change. So that plant might call hydro and ask them to cover for them for an hour until they fix the machine.

McKenzie: John James said being an operator is a 24/7 job. There’s got to be at least one person on shift at all times, and there’s usually many people there on a weekday. 

[steady beeping]

McKenzie: Beeping alarms, accompanied by descriptions on his computer screen, would alert him if something was off. 

Jake: We only talked to him for about 15 minutes, and it beeped quite a lot.

McKenzie: True, the ones we heard were just low-level alarms, but it made us realize that there are a lot of people who are actively acknowledging these alarms and making sure that everything is running smoothly. But you know, for me, it was at Diablo when I realized just how intense power generation can get. Nuclear operators need to closely monitor the reactors by looking at temperatures, pressures, and more. And the most intense part? They have to make decisions in seconds.

Jake: For some operators at Diablo Canyon, out of every five weeks they work, they spend one week just training. 

McKenzie: John Lindsey helped put this ratio in perspective.

John Lindsey: Our operators spend 20 percent of their time in training. So if your physician spent 20 percent of his or her time in training, you probably couldn’t afford to go see a doc. If your airline pilot spent 20 percent of their time in training, you probably couldn’t afford to fly, right? In fact, our operators get over 400 hours of training per year. It’s phenomenal.

McKenzie: Jeff Davis, one of the supervisors in charge of training the operators, explains why training is so tough.

Jeff Davis: We have no requirement for them to be perfect. We have a requirement for them to be excellent. The only way we’re gonna get that is to just kick the living snot out of them as often and frequently as we can in as many different ways as we can. We need them thinking. The more they’re thinking, the more they’re reacting by using thoughtful, considered actions to be successful. That is our goal for training.

Jake: It sounds exhausting.

McKenzie: But it’s just part of the job. And the people working at the power plants, be it at Drum Powerhouse or Diablo Canyon, were just so passionate about working there.

Jake: Here’s Ray [inaudible], a [inaudible] operator at the Drum Spalding Hydro Facility. 

Ray: I think my favorite part is showing people these places we have. A lot of people think PG&E owns Spalding Reservoir and it’s just a recreation facility. A lot of people that come there don’t even know that we’re constantly monitoring the lake elevation and they don’t even realize that there’s powerhouses connected to the downstream side of it, so it’s really neat to show them how we’re providing power and water for the whole county to use.

McKenzie: I think it’s cool, knowing that your job directly affects your community. But it wasn’t just Ray. All of the workers we talked to were so excited about their own power plants. 

Jake: C.B. Hall had a story about that.

C.B.: When I first started working for PG&E, I got to visit hydro, solar, Diablo, and at every single one of those places, the people working there looked me right in the face and said, totally sincerely, “this is definitely the cleanest, cheapest form of energy.”

[laughter]

Jake: Of course, they can’t all be right. 

McKenzie: At least we know that they really do believe in what they’re doing.

Jake: To the workers, power generation isn’t just their job, it’s their life. Often, we hear about the challenges of the energy industry. The people we met are working on these challenges on a daily basis.

McKenzie: Hearing their stories made energy production feel more personal to me. I may not think of our experience with PG&E every time I turn on a light switch, but each time I think of hydro power, I’ll remember Willy and Ray.

Jake: And when I think about nuclear power, I’ll think of John Lindsey talking about how much time is spent in training. I could never imagine putting 20 percent of my working time into just training.

McKenzie: We learned a lot about energy on our trip, but what made it memorable was meeting all the workers and learning about their stories.

Jake: It’s really the people that make it all happen.

Music: And the world is made of energy / And the world is electricity / And the world is made of energy / And there’s a light inside you / And there’s a light inside me…

[”Energy” by Apples In Stereo continues]

Speaker: This program was produced in Terrascope Radio. It’s a class developed by the MIT Terrascope program in collaboration with the MIT program in Comparative Media Studies. Terrascope is part of MIT’s Office of Experiential Learning. Thanks to Samuel Barring, the director of Terrascope, and the administrator, Deborah [inaudible]. We’d also like to thank Ari Epstein, the instructor of Terrascope Radio, the teaching fellows, [inaudible], as well as the wonderful people at PG&E. Special thanks to Hal Gustin, our alumni mentor, and C.B. Hall of PG&E for organizing our amazing trip.

Music: And the world…

This radio piece was produced by:

Elisa

Jake

Sarah Grenzel

Alexa Jaeger

Jennifer Lo

Cleo [inaudible]

McKenzie McDonald

Robert 

Laurel [inaudible]

This story and others from Terrascope Radio can be found on the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org.

[music fades out]

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May 2014 The School that Had No Water: Water Security in South Africa

Posted at 17:00h in Radio by terrascope

school

In this music-rich piece, Terrascopers start at a South African school that once had no water–none for drinking, flushing, cleaning–and go on to learn that water security isn’t just about water: it’s about education, poverty, history and politics.

First aired: Spring Semester, 2014 ·

 

 

Transcript

[South African acapella singing]

They have what they call South African barbecue over there. It’s called… is it *brie*? Yeah, it’s called *brie…*

And it’s, basically they just take a whole bunch of meat, just barbecue it all up, and it’s glorious and it’s amazing.

Beyond that, just being able to see the beauty of the nature and the ocean and the coast that we got to experience. The elephants, the animals, and everything that you just don’t get to see back here in America.

The tons of fruit. Oh man, the fruit was so good. I’ve never had better bananas in my life. I must’ve been eating four bananas a day.

Just seeing the nature is so beautiful there. Oh my gosh, it was warm. It was definitely great.

We went to South Africa as part of Terrascope.

Terrascope is a program at MIT where freshmen embark on a project largely on their own. Independence is encouraged rather than having us follow a strict syllabus. Our year, we studied global water security problems.

Sometimes when you study a country or try to come up with a solution, you can’t just read something on the paper and get it. You have to go there and see it and experience it yourself and talk to the people who actually live there.

So we actually went to a place where this problem is reality.

We went to South Africa for the Terrascope trip this year.

We came there and we learned about the natural ecosystems in the area, we learned how water was connected to everything there.

We collaborated with students from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.

Something that was really important in Africa was the idea of speaking to people and getting the people involved in solving the problem.

We gained a perspective that we wouldn’t have gotten any other way.

Just kinda walked in with the concept of water and just walked out with so, so much more.

[singing fades out]

We traveled to South Africa expecting to see the water issues we had studied for the past semester. We ended up seeing a lot more than just water. In addition to water security, there were problems of poverty, education, sanitation, and politics. 

[music]

During our trip, we were taken to a school where all of these issues seemed to intersect. 

Our group of about 50 people from MIT, along with 20 from the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, visited the Charles Duma school, where the principal, Mam Sume, spoke to us. Before arriving, we were only told that this was a school without water. It didn’t take long to see that there was far more behind the story of the school than just the water problems it faced.

Now you can see, we are trying to give quality education to the poorest of the poor. It’s not the middle-class, it’s not kids that are coming from these houses, it’s from the squatter camps. And obviously, it is those kids especially that need to be educated, because there is no other way they are going to make it in life without education. Because you want to say to them, “Forget about where you’re coming from. You are the crafter of your own future, and whatever you are going to do in life, it depends on you. You don’t say ‘not having resources is going to limit us.’ Nothing has to limit you in life just because you don’t have anything.”

[sad violin music]

It’s hard being a student at this school while growing up in a poor informal settlement. These settlements are often called “townships”, a term left over from the apartheid regime. At that time, black South Africans were forced to move into segregated townships, where they faced severe inequality in education and employment. Before visiting the school, we had explored the Mission Vale townships, where many students lived. One of our guides of the area, who was a former resident of the neighborhood, described the conditions there:

This area, it’s called Fairplatz. It’s one of the underdeveloped areas. Lot of people here are unemployed, and there are few who can  jobs. Not a sort of ease around.

It was easy to be discouraged by the state of the townships. We saw scattered shacks and piles of accumulating trash. 

Several goats and packs of malnourished dogs roamed about freely.

Our guide told us about government projects in the township.

One of the most visible projects was building houses for those living in shacks. However, some people we talked to felt that there was a lack of communication between people’s needs and the execution of the government housing project.

This led to problems in Fairplatz.

Someone will be looking at a house, a nice built house. Then he will say or she will say, “no, I cannot stay there because I don’t know the place, and that place is far from the community.” From anything that they’re used to. Some of them were a year were like that. They were given some houses but they didn’t want to go.

Despite these conditions, the people were incredibly friendly and brave. One of the townships we went to was nicknamed “Soviet,” because it was a center for the resistance against apartheid. Many of the adults in the community spent years fighting in the struggle. 

Unfortunately, according to one of our guides, many people who fought in the struggle didn’t go to school. He explained one of the reasons why.

The reality of those that were in the struggle, that have not had any improvements in their own personal lives, is mostly because comrades did not have time to go to school. They sacrificed their life. Most of them spent time in prison, spent time in exile, spent time running away from the police, couldn’t sit in the classroom and start. Very few have been able to do that, and those are the ones that are benefitting now. 

We also talked to a man named Gosi Nati, who was an activist during the struggle.

Let me sing you the song that we used to sing from Mandela when we was in prison.

[singing] Holy sa sa Mandela

[singing continues in background]

I was very enthusiastic about the activities in my early days. Spent about the whole week not attending classes, going from meeting to meeting. Because now, I’m an activist now.

[laughs]

You know, the person who mentored me in ? used to be my teacher. Always wanted to emphasize to me that “you will be a better activist if you get education.” I would disagree with them on that and many other things. There was this thing of “liberation now, education later,” which was not a correct strategy.

[continues singing]

Show us the way to freedom / In our land of Africa, in our land of Afri… / Mandela, Mandela, Mande– Mandela, Mandela shall fight for… / Mandela says freedom now / Mandela says freedom / Show us the way to freedom / Show us the…

[laughs]

In addition to education issues, water access has proved itself to be a problem in many South African communities. One of the graduate students who was traveling with us, Thomas Mundi, told us about changes in water access in his hometown in northern South Africa. 

I grew up in Limbombo. To fetch water, we had to travel a long distance. You needed to have your wheelbarrow to get water, so if you don’t have a well that you draw in, then you have to have a wheelbarrow to go and fetch water. I think now we are a little better in Limbombo because there have been a lot of dams that have been built in the past two years, so I think that everyone will be able to access water from now on, but I’m not sure. A lot of people now, they are drilling these wells and building tents for themselves so that they don’t have problems with water.

Despite the positive changes in infrastructure, much work remains.

But if you are from the ?? area, not a lot of things have changed because still a lot of people have to queue for water. A lot of taps on the roads, on the roadside, and then they have to queue. A very long queue. And then there’s a limit, maybe you have to get three or four barrels of water, and then you do not have more than that. Because other people, they have to get water as well. Because water come in a certain time. They say maybe from trough to truck walk. Then water, there’s no water anymore.

One of the bus drivers on our trip, Ryan Bauers, told us about the poor quality of water in his suburb. We talked to him one evening while most of our group was relaxing and chatting.

You don’t have a fault of your own? You’re drinking poison, sorry. Now you can actually see when you pour water to the tap, it’s all green. Water’s green. So you can’t drink that. And it’s amazing what it does to your skin. I know mine has gone all dry, and you actually have white marks on your body. Like a calgae? or something. Like pool water. That’s what it looks like after you shower. So definitely there’s something wrong with the water.

We also encountered problems with water and sanitation in the Mission Vale townships. Some of these neighborhoods had only one tap per block.

But amidst this struggle, there are people doing good things. Our guide was optimistic. 

Like some people are drinking for themselves. For example, I saw a lot of ??? also wait for another transition all those things and metric environment. And our community, we search for  Actually, a lot of stakeholders, the NGOs, and community members. So yeah, there are people doing good things in the community. It’s just that maybe those stories are not reflected one-hundred percent in the mainstream media. 

?? , the principal of the Charles Duma school, is one of the people doing good things for her community. The failures of the school’s water infrastructure forced the school to cancel frequently, making students fall behind. Sume knew she had to find a way to keep her school going all day.

[music]

As we stood in a big crowd in the open schoolyard, she told us about her incredible journey. 

When I came in here in 1998, the pressure system was very low, so if you flush a toilet, it would take about– more than 30 minutes for the system to fill in, and also, if you opened the tap, it was only a drop of water that was coming. So it would take a long time for even a bucket to fill up.

Sometimes, the water would fail completely.

Once, the pipes collapsed and they had no running water for months. 

Each and every time we’re bathing with water, and each and every time, we’re having challenges with our toilets. We had to release the kids early. And I know people will say “why didn’t you close the school”? But you close the school and the kids are going to be out there. Are they all going to come back?

She gathered volunteers from the community of parents to help her get the school running. 

So I talked with the parents and I had 80 volunteers in January. But by June, you know, it was 27. But out of the 27, it was only females. You know men never want to volunteer.

[laughter]

So it was females, and we had to connect a hose pipe to the community one. So that we manually put the water in toilet buckets and the parents had to manually flush the toilets every day. Then we had a normal school day. 

After speaking at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University about her work, she was approached by someone from Coca-Cola who was impressed by her accomplisments. 

And after my speech, she said “you know, we have a program of rainwater for schools at Coca-Cola. But unfortunately, your department didn’t give us your school because they had schools already. But she said “okay, I will see what I can do and I will make your school number one.” And she contacted Coca-Cola Atlanta, and they came on board. And obviously, the money was not enough, so the school had to reach in in employing labor but at least now you can open any day. On the 15th of July last year, we opened our dams for the first time and we had water.

[clapping]

?? successfully managed to turn her struggling school into a source of hope and change in the township. Stories like this make us believe that there can be a better future for those living in townships, and show us how to make that happen. 

These kids are not waiting. They are continuing and they are passing. And you want to make sure that by the time they leave here, at least it’s quality education that has been offered to them. So that is my biggest vision.

Another thing on the trip that really struck us was the warm and welcoming culture of South Africa. 

We witnessed the strength of communities through visits to many community gardens. In these gardens, people from the local neighborhoods spent much of their time growing fruits and vegetables. 

Any extra food was given out to the neighbors. Selling crops for money was virtually unheard of. 

On our trip, we heard many stories about South Africa’s cultural diversity. 

South Africa hosts a large variety of languages and culture, with 11 official languages and hundreds of unofficial ones. We talked about this diversity with one of our Mission Vale guides, Zim.

This is really a rainbow. It’s a rainbow nation, this one. We live with the Nigerians, people from Somalia, people from Congo, Zulu, Urdu, different kinds of nations are living all in the one place. 

The people we met were also very enthusiastic to teach us about their culture. On the last day of the trip, ???, a friend we made in South Africa, taught us a song in Shona, the main language of her home country, Zimbabwe.

[?? speaking in the background]

It means “children of the world unite. Come together to protect the earth. Unity is power.”

[singing]

Despite many of the problems we saw in South Africa, the township conditions, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, we saw a lot of hope. 

We met many incredible people working hard to give themselves and their children the best possible futures.

In the midst of the harsh conditions, there were many good stories to tell.

[singing continues]

[clapping]

[acappella music]

This piece was created by Terrascope Radio, a class in the Terrascope learning community at MIT. The class was developed in collaboration with the MIT program in Comparitive Media Studies. Terrascope is part of MIT’s Office of Experiential Learning. We would like to thank Professor Sam ?, director of Terrascope, and Debora Axel, without whom the Terrascope program would not be possible. We would also like to thank the students and staff of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, especially Professor Martin DeVitt, who organized our trip to South Africa. 

[singing continues]

Of course, we cannot forget to say thank you to the wonderful people we interviewed, even those that did not make it into our story. 

Finally, we would like to thank Dirk Stalker, our undergraduate teaching fellow, Sabina Madila, for helping us at the tenth hour, and Ari Epstein, our Radio instructor, for guiding us throughout the whole process.

I’m Anthony

I’m 

I’m Shinjini

Thanks for listening!

[acapella music ends]

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May 2013 Digging Deeper: The Miner Details of a Major Industry

Posted at 17:00h in Radio by terrascope

mining

Mining provides the resources for many products we use every day. Listen in for a look at the lesser-known people and processes that make up the heart of the operation. No headlamp required.

First aired: Spring Semester, 2013 ·

 

 

Transcript

Picture yourself in a cave. What do you see? It’s dark. You might feel lost or alone, surrounded by rocks and rubble. Here, pop on this headlamp so you can see a little bit of the mysterious space around you. Hope you’re not claustrophobic. Some of the tunnels down here can get a little tight. I hope you’re pretty brave too, because you’re in a mine, and mines, according to the news–

[TV being tuned]

It could be many weeks, even months underground for 33 Chilean miners —

[television tuning]

A gas explosion in a coal mine in Central China has killed 29 miners.

Lead from illegal gold mines is sickening thousands of children.

Deaths at the gold mines have been on the rise.

There was another explosion today in the mines.

It has already killed and cripped more men —

78 men have been trapped for almost ten days —

— an industry more hazardous than any other —

More than 400 kids have already died —

The miners are reported to have died almost instantly.

[television static]

It seems like the only time we hear about mining is when a horrible disaster kills dozens of miners or threatens the safety of the surrounding community. Other than that, mining isn’t really on most people’s radar as something to talk about or care about. On the off-chance it does come up, it likely isn’t considered to be one of the most interesting or exciting industries.

Katherine: I’m Katherine, a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And these are my classmates Holly…

Holly: Hi!

Katherine: …Dirk…

Dirk: Hey!

Katherine: …Reuben…

Reuben: Hey!

Katherine: …and Jordan.

Jordan: Hey!

Katherine: We were all involved in Terrascope, a program which focuses on finding solutions to complex global problems. We were assigned the challenge of finding solutions for the impending shortage of strategic natural resources, which ranged from rare earth and fission elements to phosphorus and platinum. It was no small feat, seeing as these resources are used in technology, energy production, and everyday products. After spending months researching the impacts a shortage of these materials would have, and the role that mining them plays on a global scale, we ended up largely seeing mines as a source of problems and hazards. 

[singing]

But then, our class visited the deserts of California and Nevada, and got to see some of those mines firsthand. As it turns out, there’s really no such thing as a “typical mine” or “typical miner.” There really is a heck of a lot more to mining than the tragedies that make the nightly news. Long story short, most everything you use every day relies on minerals from mines. 

Fertilizer

Laundry

?? that goes in the microwave that withstands heat

To improve oil recovery

Flat screen televisions

Water softener regeneration

As televisions get thinner, the more boric acid that’s in those screens to make them thin and strong

Rechargeable, lightweight batteries

iPhones, your Galaxy tablets

They all have:

Borax

Silica

Boric acid

Soda ash

lithium

The list just keeps going on and on.

So those are all things you wouldn’t have without mining. But there are tons more, and I’ll bet most of them are more near and dear to your heart than soda ash. Try laptops, wind turbines, hybrid cars, solar panels, household appliances, cellphones, and pretty much everything else that beeps, buzzes, or lights up.

So we know that lots of products depend on material from mines, but what exactly are these mines like?

Welcome to Rockwood Lithium Silver Peak Operations

That was Melissa Jennings, one of the geotechnical engineers of Rockwood. There, we saw a real lithium mine for ourselves. Except we didn’t actually see what looked like any lithium.

You’re gonna go out there and you’re gonna say “where’s the lithium?” because you won’t be able to see it, but it’s in the groundwater.

So there was no actual metal to dig out of the ground. Instead, the land around us was covered in water. As we drove through, we passed by a series of ponds sitting in the desert. Some of them measured more than a mile across. But it wasn’t the size of the ponds that surprised us as much as it was the brilliant blue-green color of the water. These ponds appeared as if they were painted to reflect the color of the cloudless sky. Quite a stark contrast to the arid desert landscapes surrounding them. We asked Hector Maya, a civil engineer who works at Rockwell’s other lithium mine in Chile’s ?? desert why they were so brightly colored. 

As you have a mineral, and you are operating water, some mineral precipitates and these are white salts, so that’s why you see this color here.

And then curiosity got the better of one of us. 

Speaker: Would it be safe to swim in?

No!

[laughter]

No?

No. I don’t think that’s a great idea, no, no.

So with all that water, and all those ponds, it would be challenging to understand the exact path the lithium metal takes to get from start to finish in the mining and refining process. We found out it’s a pretty lengthy journey.

[music]

It all starts beneath the ground in aquifers that contain a high concentration of dissolved salts, notably ionic lithium, sodium, and chloride. 

This ion-rich water called brine is then pumped up from the ground and through a series of ponds. As the water sits in the hot desert sun, it slowly evaporates away. Lithium ions get left behind, and combine with carbonate ions to form a solid lithium compound that separates from the remaining water. Dr. Lianne Monk, a professor of geochemistry at the University of Alaska, explains this phenomenon.

Lianne Monk: It likes to stay in solution, so like if you guys have taken a glass of water that’s salty and let it sit out and the water evaporates, you end up with a salt crust, right, in the bottom. So that’s usually sodium chloride and you can see sodium is underneath lithium, so they do have similar geochemical behavior. But the lithium would be an element that would want to stay in that solution till the very last bit.

This evaporative process takes a lot of time and a lot of added chemicals to get to the desired lithium product. 

It takes about two years for brine to come into this first pond, 11 East, and then move around to this pond system and get to the point where it can be produced into lithium carbonate. Two years’ time. 

As you can probably imagine, the lithium mining process is really different from other mining processes. Really different. 

The beige tint of California desert filled the windshield as we drove into the Rio Tinto mine in Boron, California. When we arrived, we learned that the element boron, the town’s namesake, is a component in chemicals called borates. Borates, and borax in particular, are much more common than I thought, appearing in water softeners, glass, soap, and other household products. It really put the mine’s importance in context, as we put on our hard hats and fasten our seatbelts for the descent into the cavernous open pit that was the mine.

[rock music]

Our driver and guide, Quentin Vondo, took us for an in-depth look at the heart of the mining operation. A cool California guy? He didn’t strike me as the miner type. But he sure knew his borax from his tinkle as he explained while we drove down the loud and the bumpy roads.

There is high-quality, one-hundred percent product in our pit with all processing ,it’s 36 percent grade B3, and that is borax. Tank alcanite is not quite borax because it only has 20 to 25 percent B203, so it’s tank alcanite or “tinkle.”

As he talked, I looked out the window into the pit surrounding us, where all that tinkle and borax was buried. The sides look like stairs, each 50 feet high, and streaked with white minerals, waiting to be extracted. A giant water truck passed by us on the other side of the road. 

[truck driving by]

We have two of these water trucks to keep dust emissions down. Those are 20,000 gallon water tanks, so it’s like the size of a swimming pool in there, and it takes about 15 minutes to empty them all. And if you notice that the water trucks spray on the road in intervals, they don’t just lay it on real thick because it’s borax and soap is very slippery. If this was all wet, you’d be slipping down the ramp and get out of control. If it’s raining you have to be very careful. You’ll get out of control. Whole trucks sliding sideways.

I tried to imagine a haul truck sliding down the soapy roads. You see, when Quentin says “haul truck,” he’s talking about your run-of-the-mill pickup truck here. These are mining trucks. And a single tire is nearly 12 feet in diameter, the word “big” seems inadequate to describe them. Quentin told us more.

Their payload is like 140 tons, loaded they haul in between 8 and 12 miles an hour. For the most part. Loaded up a hill, they can only go about three or four miles an hour. Really crawl up the hill. They burn like 40 gallons of fuel an hour. It’s unbelievable.

These monstrous vehicles seem to be the lifeblood of the operation. After miners blast out each new section of mine, minerals are loaded in the haul trucks and carried up to the surface for processing. We saw several haul trucks rumbling past, towering over our little van.

[large truck driving by]

We loved listening to the hearty growl of the massive engines. I really wanted to see a shovel: the machines that dug into the pit and the trucks. We unfortunately weren’t allowed to witness any of the digging. It would slow down the mining operation. We were told they were gigantic, though, pulling ?? tons in a single bucket. But even for an operation this enormous, there was a high degree of precision. High above the towering size of the pit lies a dispatcher, coordinating each vehicle 24/7. 

All thos trucks have high precision GPS plus meter accuracy on these high-precision GPS’s. We know exactly where all of our haul trucks are at every single moment of the day. We run 24/7/365 for the most part. We have someone in that seat kinda overlook the operation all day long. 

With these massive things maneuvering around, I knew that some care had to be taken to ensure everyone’s safety. Quentin first explained a crazy speed limit sign we noticed earlier. Why 37-and-a-half miles an hour, rather than an even 40? Because it’s what people remember. If I were driving, it would’ve stuck in my head. They even had regulations for things that never would have occurred to me. 

We always yield to haul trucks. We have to stay 300 feet back from them. So you see in the burn back there, that white sticking up? I have to be at that white stick and he has to be at the white stick in front of him. We have to stay that distance apart. Those are safety stakes: you know your travelling distance. I always drive so that the driver can see me in his mirror when we’re in the middle of the road. He can see me right now. 

We continued following the haul truck, while Quentin told us another surprising story.

We do have interesting– like, the Mars rover. About five or six years ago, we had people from NASA: scientists, geologists, and engineers of all sorts came in, and they needed to find muds that they thought would be similar to what they drilled on Mars. They came here and they grabbed some clays and they brought them back shales and brought it back to their lab. They wanted something that would gum up the drill bit on the Mars rover. 

And in many ways, Mars might not be too different from the borax pit. It almost was like we were in a different world. Driving ??? feet below the surface, nothing but desert sunlight over your head, monstrous vehicles roaring past. It’s a complex dance of trucks, shovels, and workers, all moving from place to place with a fine-tuned precision, all to get borates mined and ready for use in products we depend on.

Lithium and borax are both dynamic materials that have many uses in very common products. But not all mines produce things we use in our everyday lives. Welcome to Oceanview Mine: a hill speckled with some colorful plants and some orange trees welcomed us to the operation. We became well-acquainted with this hill that houses a visitors center of sorts. A small gift shop lies and a big open space beside it for visitors to try a type of mining for themselves. Below this hill sits a network of tunnels blasted by miners hoping to strike it rich. Mining at Oceanview is a bit of a different game than rockwood lithium or rio ?? ‘s borax mine. Oceanview’s CEO, Jeff Swanger, explains.

This is a specimen mine. We don’t produce commodities.

So what else comes out of the mine? Pretty rocks! Also known as mineral specimens. After all, it’s those glittering gemstones that make up expensive jewelry, and it’s those huge, beautiful crystals that are featured in natural history museums. Gemstones can’t be found everywhere, but they can be found in Palo California, where Oceanview Mine is located. The guys at Oceanview spend a lot of their time looking for concentrated ??, or pockets, of a rock called ???. It comes in many different colors, but the type we encountered most had a pinkish tint. Pegmatite has an indicator for finding valuable gems, but its presence doesn’t necessarily mean that the mine will strike it rich. Jeff informs us that it’s pretty normal to find nothing worthy of notice.

Commodity mines are ?? where the money’s at. When they know how much every ton is gonna bring them. We don’t know when our next museum specimen’s coming. No drilling, no finding. No food, no pay for us. 

But sometimes, the brilliant green and red tourmaline, or sparkling ??, offers a sweet reward for their endeavors.

We sold one recently for $1000 for one crystal. 

We then plunged into the tunnels to see for ourselves. We were thankful for the headlamps we were given because it was completely dark inside. These tunnels form a maze of rocky twists and turns. In comparison to the industrial commodity mines we had previously visited, it felt much less commercial. Instead of haul trucks, we saw what looked like souped-up golf carts. These vehicles dig up Oceanview tunnels that were?? or dug by as far back as the early 1900s. As we descended, Steve Carter, one of the miners, talked about how some of the tunnels came to be.

This tunnel was dug probably a hundred years ago. They always trimmed it; you can see the pick marks on the sides. We don’t do that nowadays so much. They were very meticulous about what they did. It’s a well-done tunnel. 

While the old methods of blasting led to structurally sound tunnels, they did have one problem: height. The ceilings on these tunnels were probably low enough to give some people some neck pains. Steve explained why this worked for the people who used to mine here.

I’m told that the average height of a miner back then was about 5’6’’, 5’7’’, that’s why we’re all stooped over right here. 

Fortunately, the newer blast sites gave a little more headroom. Steve told us how they find the gems in these new tunnels.

If you’re drilling to blast, and all of a sudden you’re in the hard rock and you just plunge forward, you know you’ve plunged into a pocket, so then we blast around it on the outside, drill some extra holes, find out what the shape is. Hopefully, you don’t blow the gems away.

Touring the mines is fascinating, but the coolest part about being at Oceanview was hunting for watermelons. It’s not what you think: we weren’t going around shooting wild watermelons in the jungle. Well, I guess that’s probably not what you were thinking either. Let me explain: part of the draw to Oceanview mine is their unique visitor program. Guests are able to sift through ???, the dirt recovered from blasts, and keep any gems they may find. And the best part is that the earth beneath Oceanview Mine is filled with a mineral called tormeline, with a large green outer ring, and a small pink center, resembling a watermelon. Jeff told us how to sift through the tailings to find watermelons and other gemstones.

[dirt rustling]

And you can see, shake it thoroughly where there’s no sand left in there, and the best little turmelines can often occur on this screen. 

[rocks mixing around]

You see how I’m working? It gets easier to work with once the big rocks are removed, and at this point, I’m gonna get into it with two hands, here’s some more ?? on quartz, little small green ones. Some of these could even be watermelons, it’s got a little light. Yeah, watermelons on these quartzes are fairly common. Watermelon tourmaline .. pink center and a green rind. Nature did that, go figure. How? 

Watermelon hunting, gemstone finding, and tunnel blasting are awesome. And it seems that Peter Rennec, one of the miners on the coast agrees. He gets so into it he forgets about everything else sometimes. 

You know I’m prospecting and digging away and just so concentrated on what I’m doing, and didn’t realize things that are right behind me. Y’know, there’s a big snake or I’d have a couple of scorpions on my back. A friend would say “hey, you got a couple scorpions on your back” and little things. They wouldn’t kill you, but they’d make you sick, probably. 

Peter is definitely not the only mine worker who absolutely loves what he does. Almost every miner we talked to, whether they mined commodities or gemstones, had similar feelings. 

I like wearing blue jeans and boots and getting my hands dirty. You can definitely do that out here.

It’s all part of the fun excitement, the adventure. 

The adventure is my office.

Really like the 

Makes me not be stuck in a desk office, which is not where I want to be at all. I want to be outside.

I like having the being outside, work with my hands.

I couldn’t enjoy anything more than the work that I do. 

It’s just a love of doing it. It’s like a hobby. You know how some people have an expensive ship and they take it out every weekend? Well, we really love looking. 

You know, every day is a full-on treasure hunt. It’s pretty hard not to like it.

Not only do these miners love what they do, but they also seem to truly understand the importance of their trade. Many of the materials they retrieve are essential to global markets. But it’s so easy to lose sight of this when you’re not directly connected to the process. The average consumer is only concerned with the finished product, and why should they care beyond that? Dwight Bradley of the US Geological Survey puts forth a pretty convincing argument.

I guess the thing is, in general, most people are simply unaware of where anything comes from. Where does it come from? The store. Where does the store get it? The factory. And that’s just the way it is. But a hundred years ago, people were way more tuned into where stuff came from. 

So now, picture yourself in a mine. The sunlight illuminates the sparkling minerals, the trucks, miners, and intricate machinery synchronized and working perfectly. Because we need them to work perfectly. Behind every battery and bar of soap is a story. Do you know what that story is?

This was a production of Terrascope Radio, a class developed by the MIT Terrascope program in collaboration with the MIT program in Comparative Media Studies. Terrascope is part of MIT’s Office of Experiential Learning. This piece was written, voiced, and produced by Dirk Stalliker, Holly ??, Katherine Buggs, and ?? We’d like to extend a huge thanks to our instructor, Ari Epstein, and undergraduate teaching fellow , as well as Terrascope administrator Deborah Axel. We’d also like to thank everyone whose hard work and meticulous planning made our trip a success, especially Professor Sam Bowering, Aaron Shay, and Annie Bower. You can find this piece, and more from Terrascope Radio, on the Public Radio Exchange at prx.org. Thanks for listening, and we hope you enjoyed the show!

[music fades out]

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May 2012 Birds in Costa Rica

Posted at 17:00h in Radio by terrascope

birdsIn this sound-rich excerpt from “Pura Vida,” conservationists in Sarapiqui, Costa Rica, take us right into the rain forest to listen for birds.

First aired: Spring Semester, 2012 ·

 

 

Transcript

Tribreasted rim. He’s actually responding, can you listen to?

People like the colorful birds, they like the difficult ones. The brown ones, they have loud mating calls. 

I feed them at home for toucans and other birds. So I give them papayas and bananas every morning. I sit in the dining room and I have breakfast. If I don’t feed them once, they get into the kitchen, searching for food. 

Well, what I’m seeing is huge climate change, this is affecting whole species of birds. Like when I was a kid, I used to go to the trail and see many, many birds. Now just a few of them, and that is because there is not enough food for them.

I don’t mind myself being in armchair, in my backyard, watching the live passage of.. No, I will be with my binoculars, birdwatching.

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May 2012 Pura Vida: Costa Rica’s Culture of Conservation

Posted at 16:00h in Radio by terrascope

PuraVidaPart documentary, part sound-collage, this story explores Costa Rica, considered one of the “greenest” countries in the world, and its national efforts to conserve natural resources, protect nature, and promote biodiversity.

First aired: Spring Semester, 2012 ·

 

 

Transcript

[tropical music]

We stepped outside after a nine-hour journey from our home in Boston. You know that movie, the Jungle Book? That’s what it looked like. Costa Rica. As our bus climbed up the mountains, the dense tropical forest bordering the winding road ?? to a valley of vegetation shrouded in fog. 

We were in Costa Rica to understand biodiversity in its richest context, to find out what conservation looks like in a country with so much to protect. Why do they do it? How do they do it? As we spent time researching with Dr. Lee Dire, an ecologist who specializes in caterpillars, we realized biodiversity isn’t as simple as the number of individual species in a forest. It’s about the intricate relationships among them, starting with something as seemingly trivial as caterpillars.

Who didn’t find a caterpillar? 

This is our second day of looking for caterpillars and I really wish I could find…

I haven’t seen any caterpillars…

It seemed to be evading me pretty successfully…

It’s not because you’re bad caterpillar-finders, it’s because it’s hard to find caterpillars out there. First day in a rainforest, I found this caterpillar that was everywhere, and I asked the head naturalist “what is this?” and he was like “oh, nobody knows what that is.” And I was appalled, I was like “nobody knows what that is?” Right then, I thought, “well, in my free time, I’m gonna read about caterpillars and figure out what those are.” I have always been interested in biodiversity, whether it’s the ecology of diversity or the evolution of diversity, of how we meausure it, genetic diversity, and functional diversity are two other categories of diversity. Interaction diversity encompasses all those dimensions. When we’re making statements such as “ecosystem services are provided by high-diversity ecosystems,” we’re really talking about interactions because we’re talking about pollinators, pollinating our agricultural crops, I think that most people do not have a good understanding of diversity, of how it evolved, of how complicated it really is. 

The people were warm and welcoming, they talk to you, and let you into their home. It was like being home. It simply felt right. There was this feeling of hopelessness, the feeling they had in La Montana, the rainforest, for Costa Rica. 

Tribreasted rim. He’s actually responding, can you listen to?

People like the colorful birds, they like the difficult ones. The brown ones, they have loud mating calls. 

I feed them at home for toucans and other birds. So I give them papayas and bananas every morning. I sit in the dining room and I have breakfast. If I don’t feed them once, they get into the kitchen, searching for food. 

I don’t mind myself being in armchair, in my backyard, watching the live passage of.. No, I will be with my binoculars, birdwatching.

Well, what I’m seeing is huge climate change, this is affecting whole species of birds. Like when I was a kid, I used to go to the trail and see many, many birds. Now just a few of them, and that is because there is not enough food for them.

We weren’t the only ones who wanted to explore Costa Rica’s natural beauty and ecosystem. Staying with us in the ??? Biological Reserve in Costa Rica, were tourists from all over the world, taking part in one of Costa Rica’s most well-known conservation efforts: ecotourism. 

[music]

Ecotourism

We’re going to see the volcano.

You try to basically make tourism work ecologically.

I will hike.

…with nature. 

It’s probably going to be a lot wetter.

Lots of different animals.

Hotter

I think it’s just being one with nature 

Lots of tree frogs

Lots of tourism so more of the eco and less of the tourism

Can’t even remember all of them. I saw a tarantula one time. 

More like sustainable tourism.

Toucans.

It’s also going to have a lot more fauna.

Going to the jungle or reservs

Being mindful of the environment. 

[singing in Spanish]

Ecotourism. Noun. Definition: tourism in exotic, often threatened natural environments to support conservation efforts and observe wildlife. 

Ecotourism seemed like a great way to protect the rainforest that surrounded us. It provided the people living near the forest with the financial motivation to preserve and appreciate its diversity. We saw the people around us benifitting, like an Indigenous artist and his French fiancee who made and sold pottery.

[woman shaping pottery]

It’s a bit difficult to ?? if you’re not working with tourists.

It’s hard because I could survive, but it would be day-by-day. What I earn today would be spent today. 

He’s been at this hotel for seven years. They gave him the opportunity to show the tourists how the ?? culture works and where they come from and…

A shopkeeper in town. 

Tourism helps a lot, with the conservation of trees. Tourists like you come here and help us and the planet. 

An employee of ?? Biological Research 

For Costa Rica, it’s good because as a country, we can exploit ecotourism. We can teach people that one can work, but at the same time, one can demonstrate what the country has without harming the environment. That’s something that Costa Rica can teach the rest of the world. 

And Alex Martinez, owner of a ?? hotel called Andrea Cristina.

Tourism is fun because it’s giving you a good practice of living. I don’t sell drugs, I don’t sell anything, I just sell my service.

He compared jobs in ecotourism with those of banana plantations.

Only have a few cheap paying laborers, three or four in the morning because they have to be there before six o’clock on the plantation. Maybe pregnant ladies and everything else. You think that’s better than tourism?

And Carlos Chaveria, director of the ?? Biological Reserve, told us more about the industry as a whole.

The case of the computer companies, the money, it is made by the companies. In the case of the ecotourism, because how the money is distributed to different levels, more people is involved. We said that for one job in tourism, there is at least four people that get benefits from that position.

At ???, we got a chance to talk to Willie, who works as a guide and educator for ecotourists. 

To me, I think that one of the biggest problems we have is in fact tourism.

Wait, what?

[reversing tape]

one of the biggest problems we have is in fact tourism.

Someone so involved in ecotourism had reservations about it?

People think about tourism, they always think about developing, so the developing could be a knife of two blades. One in which could create benefits for people, but the other one could basically create harming to the environment. 

It turns out, the more people we talk to, the more we realize how complicated ecotourism as a method of conservation actually is. 

They start thinking of ecotourism, but they try to sell tourism, really. There are a lot of ??? in Costa Rica, and they are but are many others who are just ???ing

Anywhere where there is human activities, there will be an impact. 

I don’t think it would make that much impact, like, if you compare ecotourism with banana or pineapple crops. Completely different way, you know. Ecotourism, it has the key to protect the forest.

Because even a nice industry like tourism, it can die. 

Tomorrow, space tourism comes up. Probably not that many people would like to come here to Costa Rica because that’s not where space tourism will be at. 

If the tourists want to come, if the tourists want to enjoy our nature, it’s going to be here for them. 

If there are more foreign people coming, eventually, Costa Rica will be losing most of its culture. 

So that’s a lot to think about. All the complexities of implementing ecotourism have not been ironed out. But despite these differences in opinion, ecotourism exists to motivate the conservation of nature, and no matter who we spoke to in ??, that relationship they have with nature is really apparent. 

But that relationship has changed throughout the years. Betto, an assistant researcher at La ?? Biological Station, remembers a time when most people didn’t realize that nature was disappearing. 

For example, when I was younger, I would travel throughout the country and see rivers and waterfalls that no longer exist. It’s things like that which people are starting to notice.

Many of our tour guides, ?? was one who actually experienced this change in awareness himself.

I was killing birds when I was actually a child. Yeah, I was a boy. Now, I’m a bird watcher right now. I love birds. You don’t see kids with thes kind of things right now, I always spend one hour telling them why they had to do that. I tell them my story.

With changes like these came a shift in formal education. Willie, for example, reflected on what he was taught as a child.

Back in time, I don’t remember getting classes about ecotourism, about ecology, about environmental issues, about things like that. We’d be getting classes about agriculture: how to cut down a tree and then cultivate something there.

In an elementary school in town, the principal said that things are different now.

We only work with recycling. Then later in middle school, we work more directly with the land. This includes painting trees and everything related with nature. In my opinion, it’s very good because they’re learning from the very beginning to conserve the land, to be more productive rather than to destroy the little we have left. 

The people in Costa Rica told us stories about standing up for their beliefs.

Actually we have a problem in ?? San Carlos. There was a big company who wanted to look for gold in that area.

They marked everything, everything. It was a mine without end. 

The whole country, we were against all that. Even with the ??

It was no secret: the mine was a total disaster. 

Some people, they were walking from San Jose, to San Carlos. Driving, it’s like four hours. They were walking from San Jose to San Carlos to protest for the company. So we didn’t want the whole company.

The judges decided to move the license permanently.

So we protected the country.

But this was just one town in Costa Rica, which lies amidst rich biodiversity. Nature isn’t necessarily viewed in the same way throughout the rest of the world. A lot of the population lives in cities, where people’s relationships with nature often seems to be a bit different. 

There’s nature in Boston?

I think we have a zoo.

There’s a couple pigeons.

Yeah, where is the nature in cities?

It’s so strange how we’ve designated nature areas in the city.

Yeah, like last week, I was in New York, and my walk felt like this: building, building, pavement, building, and then I finally arrived at a patch of artificial green. But it’s only perfect if you want to sit in the park and drink Starbucks.

But think about it. 

So you buy your coffee.

[ding of a shop’s bell]

And that money that you just handed over?

Gets transferred from Starbucks to the people who are growing it.

In the 50s,

When the international demand for coffee grew, 

Most of the people living in central ?? coffee produce.

And as a result of the production of coffee and other good, in 1977, Costa Rica had 

less than 40% of our forest covered. 

So if you and the rest of your city want more coffee, a bigger plantation, less forest, and less biodiversity.

And that’s true for medicine, wood for our houses, milk for our cereal, glass for our windows, cotton for our t-shirts, cell phones, helicopters, space shuttles, satellites, lamp shades, cars, airplanes, 

[sped-up list of items continues]

Just because it’s not next to you doesn’t mean you don’t have a strong connection to it. It provides you with what you need to survive.

Sometimes, what is right was not so apparent. 

The problem is us. The majority of the people. 

We always want to enrich ourselves.

??? and everything. Big cars. Cadillac, it’s just glamorous.

But you can’t eat gold. You can’t breathe gold.

For example, if I want to drive the latest car, I would ??? land to someone. But that someone would come and go.

People with money look for the best places to cut down forests and make their house have a nice view.

And it’s all about money.

But in Costa Rica, we saw that it wasn’t just the goods that made forests valuable to people. People had a personal connection to the forest, and over time, as attitudes about nature changed, that connection changed too. Jose Mirandez, an organic ?? farmer in ??

a local whose family used to own part of ??

Both saw major changes in how people viewed the environment through the years.

My father ? 60 years ago with his own forest. Those times were hard. There were no roads and bridges to 

Part of ?? is in what used to be mine, and what used to be ours. 

My father came to clear the forest to make this farm. This was ideal 60 years ago.

It used to be a stable. We had a stable because we had livestock. We had cattle here. This was all stable. It was a stable and nothing more. 

Now we’re doing the opposite. We’re ?? the population so we can ??. We want to live in harmony.

They started planting trees in all of that with time, it turned back into a forest. That’s how it is now.

Conserving nature is really a complex issue. Different people see it in different ways.

And yet everyone has a connection to nature.

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