My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My first Murakami book. Aside from spelling difficulties that meant it took me forever to find it at the library, I really enjoyed it (and it reminded me some of John Cheever’s short stories, though less dark, for no reason I can really explain).

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I just finished Thomas Keneally’s book “Three Famines,” which documents some history of the Irish potato famine, a WWII-era famine in Burma and more recent famines in the 1970s and 80s in Ethiopia.  In general, the book sort of outlines what I hear from talking with aid workers on the policy level and on the ground in hungry countries; food shortage is a key instigator of famine, but the problem is much, much more complex than just not having enough food to feed people in a country. In some cases, food is even shipped out of a country while people in the country starve because they don’t have enough – I was told this happened in Niger during recent food shortages. And even when there is enough food in the country, lower levels of food reserves drives up prices so the poorest people can’t afford enough to sustain themselves.

This book is rather confusingly organized and poorly written, and missing most citations that would give the author a lot more credibility, but still gives a good look at the politics of famine and the government policies and structures that elevate a food shortage or drought to famine proportions. Keneally provides a good reminder that just pouring money or food into a starving country isn’t necessarily a complete or entirely effective solution to a problem that is much broader than poor crop yield.

Bonn, Germany

A Nigerien woman demonstrates that she can read and write by writing her name in the sand in Adouna, Niger, Aug. 2010.

He ate and drank the precious words,

His spirit grew robust;

He knew no more that he was poor,

Nor that his frame was dust.

He danced along the dingy days,

And this bequest of wings

Was but a book — What liberty

A loosened spirit brings –

-Emily Dickinson

I started unpacking books and thought, "Ok, I think these will all fit, this is reasonable." And then I kept finding books ... in every box. There are stacks all over my apartment.

A new building at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. This area of town was completely rebuilt after the wall came down.

Berlin Wall/Berliner Mauer

There's a chunk of wall still standing near Potsdamer Platz at the "Topographie de Terror" exhibit.

Bikes in Amsterdam (there were a lot of these).

The Tanzanian Federation for Home Economics teaches women to grow and harvest sweet potatoes to make chips like these.

I spent a weekend in Bonn, Germany covering a United Nations conference on sustainability as part of a team of student journalists. The conference was eye-opening for me, as I’ve never been involved in a UN proceeding before; overall, it seemed somewhat disorganized and too policy-oriented for my taste, but I think that’s just United Nations operation (at least policy orientation; I’m not sure about the disorganization).

I made a few friends involved with youth organizations in Germany and other parts of Europe. I spent lunch one day talking with some young people who work with Micah Challenge and YMCA Germany (rather different from YMCA in the USA) about the pros and cons of “environmentalism” as a trendy movement.

On one hand, this falls into a category one friend defined as a “first-world problem,” which is basically code for “a ridiculous argument you wouldn’t have if you didn’t already have your basic needs met well.” And even to the extent it is a “problem,” it’s a good one to have; at least the people who buy into the trend are making consuming efforts to do things like recycle and buy environmentally-friendly vacuum cleaners and even, sometimes, buy Tumbleweed Houses.

However, I wonder what this trendiness does to the environmental cause as a whole. I’m sure there are more people like me who are reluctant to define themselves by anything (I, like many of my college cohort, am almost allergic to defining myself by a church denomination. And you have to nearly drag the descriptor “Christian” out of me sometimes). I have no real desire to be one of “THOSE people” who don’t shower, flush their toilets with dirty dishwater and (true story) skin road kill squirrels on their back porches and eat them because they don’t like waste. I ride my bicycle when I can because it saves money, I recycle because various roommates have made me feel guilty for not (which I now appreciate) and I use reusable grocery bags (sometimes) because I can’t stand plastic bags spilling out of my closet when I open the door. But beyond this utilitarianism, I can’t think of a time when I did something to conserve energy, water, waste or food — certainly not anything that made me uncomfortable.

One part — and a large part — of this reluctance is just that I’m lazy and like comfort whenever possible. But part, too, is my label allergy. If conserving natural resources were just a thing everyone did — in Germany, apparently one is fined for not recycling, which makes sense to me, though I don’t really want to argue politics — I wonder how the dynamics of conservation in the US would change?

What do you think? Is this a semantic hang-up that doesn’t make much difference or does the trendiness of environmentalism make a difference, good or bad?

Another camping shot. We were right by the water (it's hard not to be on Assateague).