You Stay Classy, San Francisco

“And still, after all this time, the Sun has never said to the Earth,

"You owe me."

Look what happens with love like that.

It lights up the sky.”

-Rumi

Well, I'm writing this blog entry from a concrete building in the middle of a swamp in Southern Vietnam, battling away mosquitoes and curious children. However, there's still lots more to write about my last few days in California. Which I'm sure is just as interesting.

The second week of this program was packed to brim with as much activity as they could possibly pack in. The earliest finish for us was around 6PM. It's a far cry from normal college, where it's at most four to five hours of class every day. On the other hand, we only had two actual class periods that week, and the rest of it was composed of guest lecturers and site visits that were (at least tangentially) related to our topics of study. It turns out that SIT has some pretty high-up connections, because we got to meet with a number of really interesting folks. 

We met with Miguel Altieri , a UC Berkeley professor of agroecology, who gave a talk on traditional farming practices and gave us lots of his opinions on monoculture, GMO's, and several other things as well. I'd heard several murmurings about the dangers of monoculture farming, but I did learn quite a bit more interesting (and disturbing) information. I did think he romanticized traditional farming practices a little too much (there's a reason we invented tractors, yo), but overall I enjoyed the presentation. Unlike many of my classmates, I didn't enroll in this study abroad program because I have a burning interest in food production. However, it's an interesting thing to learn about nonetheless, and something it seems we'll be focusing on more and more.

Our last full day in the Bay Area, we met with Kevin Danaher, a social activist, in his office with Global Exchange. His main claim to fame is as an anti-globalization activist and self-proclaimed radical, so I was a little bit leery at first. However, he actually turned out to be really cool, and his definition of "radicalism" wasn't quite what I expected; he basically sees it as acknowledging that the system itself needs to be changed, but not necessarily abolished. I still have mixed feelings on globalization and free trade, and that's something I want to learn more about over this coming semester.

One fun outing we took was to the Santa Cruz area, where we took a look at several farms there. Central California was really the birthplace of the "Green Revolution", in which new agricultural technology heavily industrialized farming and led to a huge increase in productivity. It also involved a lot of pretty unhealthy practices involving pesticide runoff and overuse of fresh water, so I guess it's a mixed bag. It really seems to me that our agricultural system is going to need some pretty sweeping changes if we want to continue feeding ourself, but there's far too much to write about that to fit here. However, there is a fast-growing organic and sustainable food movement going on in California, so that's a bit encouraging. Not to mention the produce is delicious.

On another outing, a small group of students headed south to Petaluma, to see their composting facilities and wastewater treatment plant. In short, it was a day of lots of interesting information coupled with really terrible smells. The composting was especially interesting to me, as I've worked in a recycling center at Middlebury for a while and I wanted to see how our compost is processed. Our presenter was a very enthusiastic Dutch guy who was very, very into compost and incredibly knowledgeable. Composting involves a lot more heavy machinery than I would have imagined, but I guess it makes sense if you think about it; we're talking about the organic waste of several hundred thousand people being processed in the same place. 

Following the composting facility, we visited the Petaluma Waste Treatment Plant, which is on the cutting edge of dealing with wastewater in a sustainable way. The director showed us water at three stages of being processed: the water at left in the picture below is untreated sewage, the water in the middle is after being separated and treated with microbes, and the water at right is what it looks like once it's done. We got a tour of the facilities as well, and got much more in-depth on the technicalities. However, the whole place (predictably) smelled really badly of poop, and it was really hard to concentrate on anything. I'll only show a few pictures, because I'm trying to keep this a civilized blog. 

A praying mantis in the swamp outside the plant- less disgusting!

Finally, we all decided to take advantage of our brief time in the Bay Area to explore San Francisco a little bit. The program happened to be taking place in the middle of the America's Cup race, so we got to watch some of that; even when you're so far away from the boats, it's surprisingly exciting to watch them speeding up and down the bay. It was also an opportunity to gawk at rich tourists bedecked in Oracle gear and watching the race through expensive binoculars while simultaneously watching a live feed through their smartphones. I wish I had gotten a picture of that.

Another picture of the Mission

We're looking at many millions of technology right here....

This building is so beautiful... But apparently it was built as a temporary installation several decades ago, and is kind of falling apart now.

My friend Kathy enjoying the architecture...

Somewhere along the way Kathy and I got the idea that we should just walk from the Embarcadero (where we got off the subway) to the Golden Gate Bridge on the other side of San Francisco. The only problem is that San Francisco is a very, very, very big city, with lots of hills in the way of those two places. But distance or impracticality never fazed us, so we did it anyway, and continued on to Sausalito on the other side of the Bay for good measure. It was about a 15-mile walk in total... But in my opinion, worth it.

We saw this pair crossing the Bridge with us; I'd say he's got pretty good hippy credentials.

Yes, those are real rabbit ears on her hat. Not sure how I felt about that.

Other side of the Bridge!

Farewell, San Francisco. You will be missed.

I'll hopefully have a blog entry about Vietnam up soon as well; the internet in Southeast Asia is predictably a little dodgy, and we've been steaming right ahead with our academic activities since I got here. However, I'll be working diligently on it nonetheless.