[JOHN MCGREEVY] I'd like to thank the CCC.
They funded me to do this research,
and it's been great working with them.
It's a really interesting program
if you don't know much about it.
It brings together graduate students, practitioners,
faculty,
to really
decide what is collaborative conservation
and how to apply it.
So, my talk, obviously, is "TET ANSANM".
That's Haitian Creole.
Might seem similar to French, some of these phrases,
if I use any.
That's 'cause
it was a French colony, as any of my students
could tell you.
And it's,
this is working together, working with heads together
in Haitian reforestation.
Whenever you talk about working together in Haiti,
they love to use "tèt ansanm ".
That means heads together.
I love that visual,
love that idea, and we're going to go
with that today.
So, all these pictures,
except for the ones with me in them
I have taken. So..
Obviously.
So, just to give people
a quick background on the tree problem in Haiti.
A lot of people know
Haiti as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
And we'll talk about that a little bit.
Some people know Haiti
for the massive environmental degradation.
Various factors,
we're going to go into them a little bit.
But basically, from 80% to 1.5%
since the arrival of Columbus in 1492.
And yet, there's still this Haitian reliance on trees.
They still rely on them for
many different uses.
A big part of my thesis research,
this went into my master's thesis in anthropology,
was how Haitians use trees,
why they use trees, and what is overlooked,
when we looked at this from strictly a business aspect,
because I went with some business students.
And I was looking at the more cultural or
nontraditional market economy
uses of trees.
And then there's been reforestation attempts
for 50 to 70 years.
And yet, that number of trees cut down to seven times as much
as the trees planted.
So, there's some disconnect there.
There's something that's missing.
And that was the question of my research.
Started out very vague.
And then, as I went through with this kind of grounded
approach of talking to the people
and letting them tell me what those issues are.
Came up with some of what that was.
So, I broke it down into these different,
a lot of this,
introductory stuff I go into a lot deeper in my thesis.
If you're really interested in it,
I can give you a copy of that.
But I'm gonna kinda fly through this so I can get to
the heat,
the heart of working together.
So, there are four stages
in Haitian history as I broke them down,
each with 200 years, 300 years, 130.
Something to note is that back in the early days,
actually when the Haitians ruled them,
right before the Haitians ruled themselves,
there wasn't that much deforestation.
It wasn't until more recently that that occurred.
There's many different reasons for that.
We'll be talking about some of them.
Something interesting to note
is that was- there was anywhere from
one million to eight million people on the island,
and they still had 80% tree cover.
So, this whole idea that,
Haitian, like before
slaves came, before colonizers came,
there was 80% tree cover, one to eight million people
on the island.
So, this whole idea that Haiti is just too overpopulated,
that does come into play,
but people have shown that you can live on that island
without deforesting it.
So why Haiti, why trees?
I just kind of happenchance, got into Haiti.
My aunt called me up one year and said,
'Hey, we're going to Haiti on a medical mission trip.
Would you like to come?'
And I said, 'Yes.'
It was my first time out of the United States,
and I was floored.
I just was,
I've always had a passion for the environment,
and I thought I wanted to be a doctor
before I went there,
but after I saw the deforestation,
that's what I wanted to do.
I wanted to work
with local people to figure that out.
I was there during 2010 earthquake.
If you guys want to talk about that sometime, I could.
And saw a lot of stuff, did a lot of,
medical things that I would not be allowed to do
in the United States,
and really connected,
a lot with the local people.
Saw how NGOs worked and how they didn't work.
And we're gonna talk about that.
So, why anthropology?
Some people, especially if you're a numbers person,
might think that,
"Hey, this is kind of just lofty ideas,
why are you doing this?"
But anthropology
gets to the root of local uses of resources.
So, as Berkey says,
"People who are dependent on local resources
for their livelihood are often able to assess the
health of the environment
and the integrity of ecosystems
better than any evaluator from the outside."
So, that mindset
is something that's very counterintuitive to us
and counterintuitive to a lot of NGOs working in Haiti.
That's why I focused on anthropology is 'cause
I believe, and research supports,
that the big missing factor, one of them is culture,
one of them is history, one of them is sitting down
and talking with the local people.
And the Center for Collaborative Conservation
was a great place to do that.
So, it gets at the local and the outsider knowledge.
It doesn't rule out either of them.
It talks about the lived experience of people.
And then, Haitian reforestation projects that haven't used
local understanding have failed miserably.
Ones that have used local understanding,
a little bit more collaboration, though,
I'm going to argue that they can all do more
as we can in any project,
have done better.
So, this is my research methods really quick.
Interviews in different regions, three different regions.
28 in-depth interviews.
That might seem like not a lot to some people,
but that entails a lot of sitting down
and talking for hours and then
four hours of writing that up
and then a couple more hours of picking out all the codes.
It's actually very time-intensive.
So, 40 hours of recorded audio,
take about seven hours of added work
onto each hour of those audio,
and that's a lot that comes into play.
Field observations, participatory observations,
working in the fields with people.
That, more than anything, helped them to just trust me
and to work with me. It was really great.
Focus groups and then a little bit of website analysis.
Which we'll talk about here.
So, I went to these three different places,
Petit Bois, Deschapelles, and Anse Rouge.
Very distinct, different ecosystems.
That's kind of what I was going for,
see how projects in these different ecosystems work.
So, some of, most of this I go into my thesis.
We're gonna pull out
the bottom part and focus on that,
'cause we are focused on collaborative conservation
and Tet Ansanm could be substituted in there.
So, what is missing from the literature,
from my research,
from these interviews?
I came up with culture
and the lived experience of people,
the local context, local uses.
Systemic causes,
so causes that aren’t direct causes,
but throughout history, how have-
how has deforestation taken hold?
And then, local knowledge,
and we'll talk about that a little bit
in comparison to scientific knowledge
and this Tet Ansanm Mindset.
Shifting completely this mindset.
It's not just a little band-aid,
it's complete shift from,
we’re coming to do work,
to we’re working with these people.
So, the literature on Haitian reforestatoin
talks about land tenure and charcoal production.
They talk about things that the local people are doing
that are impacting the deforestation.
And they're talking about corruption,
and these things do have an impact.
But, when I talk to people and ask them,
'Why do you cut down trees?'
These didn't make the top list.
Charcoal production did, but that was an afterthought
from these systemic causes
that we'll talk about in a little bit.
'I needed money to feed my children.'
'I needed money because of the influx of USAID.'
'My food crops are no longer viable.'
'I needed money because of the changing climate.'
'My food crops no longer produce as they used to.
So I need to cut down trees for easy money.'
And so there’s,
the mindset is a focus on
current citizens and increasing-
there's a little bit of increasing emphasis
on local needs
but there's a lot of,
'we need to educate people about how important trees are.'
I think that mindset should be shift,
as supported by my research.
People talk to me all the time about how important trees are.
"pyebwa yo se lavi" Trees are life.
They would throw that out there whenever I talked about trees.
So I'm looking at more how to
talk about interacting factors, historical influences,
and how to really work together.
This, we're not going to go through everything.
This just shows you a little bit of how I broke down
four different NGOs
working on deforestation in Haiti.
And I looked through-
from Kathy Sherman.
She's actually in our department.
She has these barriers to Tet Ansanm,
or participatory mindset.
And I'm sorry, it might be Berkey's too.
I forget which one it was.
But, one of those great authors,
and they come up with this,
and then I broke them down on what barriers there might be.
That's a lot there.
If you want that e-mail to you, I can.
But we're just going to, I broke them down a little bit
into some issues from projects.
A lot of these projects did really good work.
Some of them, they've been planting
a lot of good trees.
But those trees aren't staying there.
And there might be something that's not connecting.
So, IK stands for indigenous knowledge.
SK stands for scientific knowledge.
So, issues from many, but not all projects.
I'm not throwing all projects in the same loop.
And, I didn't really look
at any projects that are based here in Fort Collins,
because I have a bias.
I'm close with them
and I feel like that might get in the way of my analysis.
So anything from here can be applied to all projects,
but I don't focus on them.
So indigenous knowledge is occasionally recognized,
but it's rarely implemented.
People are interested,
'Oh, you think that spirits live in these trees?
That's interesting.
Well, we're going to plant something different
and not worry about that.'
Some projects were better at than others.
Most of them focus on hard science and numbers,
'cause that's what the donors wanna see.
They want to see numbers.
Some of that social spiritual expression
about the spiritual uses of trees
was talked about but not taken into effect
or just completely ignored.
Outsiders coming in who has heard,
what people in the community,
most often it's people that speak French,
because a lot of NGOs that come into the country
don't take time to learn the local language,
and so if you have that,
the people that come up to you and say,
'Hey, I'll be your translator,'
they're most often the people you work with,
the people you listen to.
That's the funnel through which all the interviews are fed.
If they speak English, even better.
So I tried to go out of my way to talk to people that
hated NGOs, people that,
to get a whole different wide view,
'cause there is wide view.
NGOs do a lot of great things.
They also do a lot of bad things.
And so,
some people call Haiti the Republic of NGOs
just based on the number which is more than,
more per capita than any place
throughout human history is in Haiti.
And then there's this perceived
benevolence of people.
You hear a project is doing work in Haiti.
It's perceived. It must be good work.
But just like any business,
any organization, not all of them are good.
And so, there's this lack of checks and balances.
The interesting part, if you want more on this,
you can read Mark Shuler.
He talks about how the reason that so many NGOs
came to the country
was we wanted more increased transparency
and we wanted to be able to,
so we wanted to be able to see what people were doing.
We wanted less corruption.
And yet, these groups don't come together.
There's not much feeding back.
There's not much of that transparency going on.
So, we have that problem being fed
over and over again.
Moving on,
into the heart of what I want to talk about,
Tet Ansanm, working together.
Sorry, I blew flew some of that stuff about my research.
But these are suggestions from the local people
and from, myself
after meeting with local people,
after meeting with NGOs,
after reading the literature and working that all together.
So, just some quotes because I feel like they're more powerful
when they come from the people.
When I asked them after getting to know them over months
or a month,
'Sit down and speak with people before doing projects.'
Sounds pretty simple.
These people live here.
They're the ones that you're impacting.
If somebody came into the United States and said,
'You see all those cars that you have?
That's really destroying your environment.
You need to stop doing that.
So we're just going to shut that all down.'
What would that do to our economy?
If you put it in that perspective,
it's a little different.
Then you come and say,
'See all these trees that you're cutting down?
Stop doing that. It's bad for the environment.'
It's a little bit different when you shift that mindest.
You need to consider the day-to-day needs,
not just the long-term.
So a lot of these projects look at long-term,
but they don't think about what happens if,
maladies come up, illnesses. If-
Since now schools are not taught in the home,
or not taught in the community,
you need to purchase schools.
Don't think about what happens each time you need to buy
schooling.
Have multiple NGOs that people can choose from
so that people can choose
who is the best job. I love that idea.
Not just one NGO coming in, staking the territory,
saying, 'This is my region. All the NGOs stay out.'
But multiple coming in, the people saying,
'Hey, which one should we choose?
Which one works best?'
It's what we do in the United States
for business practices.
We want to build a school.
You have a bunch of contractors come in.
Which one can do what we want to do
for the least amount of money?
"Keep promises."
I saw this one over and over again.
I should have that in bold.
I myself,
have not done the best of this from time to time.
I have gone back to the community,
keep my promise of coming back
and bringing my results back there.
But that was the biggest thing.
And you see, I call it NGO contamination.
The places that NGOs have been over and over again,
there's kind of hardened hearts there towards outsiders.
There's this mindset of,
'Are they going to be just like the last people
that promised that they would bring something back,
but didn't and left.'
And then this is kinda paraphrased,
'Only do projects that address the day-to-day needs,
not just long-term benefits.'
I believe that talked about that up there too.
So, one suggestion from all that,
bringing together all that they say,
alter donor relations.
A big part of the reason people do what they do
in these NGOs is because donors give them money and say,
'I want it for this. I want it for that.'
Big example of this,
the first time I went to Haiti,
I went to this rural, rural village,
and there was a big generator there.
And it hadn't been used in years.
And I asked, 'Well, why is there a big generator here?'
It looked brand new,
but it was inside this
really nice concrete building,
the only concrete building in the village.
And they were like,
'Well, somebody gave us $40,000
but said it had to be used for a generator.'
Had to be used for a generator.
Because in America,
the donors were telling them, they need electricity.
That is what they need right now.
They will be okay if they have electricity.
Well they didn't take into account
is that it's an eight-hour drive
through bumpy roads.
Diesel is very expensive.
And they didn't fund for the increasing cost of Diesel.
So, some people even said,
We are slaves to the donors.
We are slaves to the people,
particularly large-scale donors,
that tell us what we need to do.
Change that, change of that,
presentation to donors can happen in multiple ways.
Can happen in websites.
I've looked through a bunch of websites
and looked how people, the local people were presented.
Most of it was presented as,
'We're going in to help this country
that we've never been before.
The U.S. hasn't really been involved with.
And we're going to basically,
save them from their environmental despair.'
Not with all of them,
but with some of them, that's what came across.
Most of them had some sort of,
outsiders teaching these people how to farm their land.
And very rarely, did I see
local-to-local connections
or a sort of,
talkback and forth,
a collaboration, if you will, going on.
This idea of education, we'll talk about a little bit.
The US is infallible.
If the US brings something, it's assumed to be correct.
And it's the only country with the last name
used over and over again.
And it is true.
The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
But if that's all you hear,
over and over again
about the Haitian people,
the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere,
what does that make you think about their ability
to work,
and to really build their own country up?
So, understanding historic reasons
for this, all of these, this deforestation, or for,
which is a whole different thing.
But, I'm gonna talk about
two local resistance.
So if you go into, I've had a lot of NGOs say,
'We come here and we bring these projects,
and these people just don't want them.
They're not appreciative of us coming here.'
From an outsider, I can completely respect,
from that point of view, that can be very troubling.
You spend a lot of money. You spend a lot of time.
You really work really hard.
You want to do good things.
And yet,
they don't want you there.
And there needs to be an understanding
of why that might be.
So, really quick,
I'm going to ask, and it's okay
if you didn't know this.
My class, if I told you this, it doesn't count.
Raise your hand if you knew that the United States
ruled Haiti, ruled over Haiti, kicked out the government,
and stayed there for 20 years last century.
Anybody know that? A couple of people. 'Kay cool.
Did anybody know that the amount of deforestation
during those 20 years was more than the entire history
of the country of Haiti? 'Kay.
I didn't know that until I researched it.
Did anybody know that we
sent funding to dictators,
but we didn't fund the only Democratic-elected president?
I did not know that.
Did you know that, in the '80s, this is the '80s,
'this is in the past,
we decided that we wanted to teach them about their pigs,
which were having swine flu all around the Caribbean.
So we killed all the millions of their pigs,
brought them white pigs, and all the white pigs died.
And that was their farming, their system of banking.
I didn't know that either.
Did anybody know that we,
this is very controversial, so I'm not gonna say we did it,
but we were present during a coup d'état,
and flew the only democratically elected president
of Haiti from Haiti to the Central African Republic,
and forcibly made him stay there.
Also that U.S. businesses have encouraged
minimum wage to stay at a low,
below a couple of dollars a day,
including Disney, Old Navy, other places like that.
And also that Monsanto has delivered
tons and tons of seed as aid,
and the Haitians were, right after the earthquake,
and the Haitians were like,
'We are fed up with this,' and they burned it all.
So, this stuff,
some of this is done with good intentions,
is maybe why these Haitian people,
they know this stuff, we don't know this stuff.
Maybe why they're a little resistant to another
white man coming to their country and saying,
'You're doing it wrong,
I'm going to show you how to do it.'
So that needs to,
we need to have a humble attitude.
We're not coming there to save these people.
We're coming there with people
that have really screwed up stuff in the past,
for our history,
maybe not as personally, and we can work together.
Some anthropologists say,
'Don't go to the country at all. Don't go do development work.'
And that's a different mindset.
Some of that is valid.
I'm not that way.
I think that things can get better
by working together,
we can prove these relations,
but we come with a mindset of,
'Why don't these people want us to help them.'
That's not going to do as much good as
if we come in and have a humble attitude.
In my opinion. My humble opinion.
So,
rethinking this
model of educating and training
local people.
So, there is this idea,
a lot of donors say,
'Hey, we need to, we're going to fund this,
but we only will fund it
if there's a big portion related to
educating local people.'
Educating them about proper farm techniques.
Educating them about
the importance of trees.
Well, like I talked about earlier,
I haven't met many Haitians
that didn't know the importance of trees.
There were even people that almost broke out into tears
talking about how they had to cut down the trees
that their grandparents had planted,
and they felt so sorry about that.
But they just had to feed their kids.
Rethinking that mindset of,
"Do we really need to educate these people?"
One example of this,
that there's still videos coming out.
I showed my class one the other day
of a USAID-funded—millions and millions of dollars,
huge impact,
telling them that monocropping,
you hear, you see one Haitian that's interviewed,
and he says,
"Well, I learned that I've been doing it wrong
my whole life,
and that monocropping is the only way
to really get good,
value out of my crops."
And you have these scientific tests that show, yeah,
next year, their crops went up.
They got more and more crops.
And then we're starting to learn here in science,
'cause science isn't infallible.
It's constantly changing, just like local knowledge.
We're starting to learn, maybe monocropping
isn't as good as we thought it was.
Maybe we're having problems here in the United States.
Maybe for these countries that have very thin topsoil
because of the deforestation, monocropping,
a couple years good, done,
desertified.
And that's something we're seeing in the Northwest.
That, coupled with the changing climate,
is leading to people
being unable to feed themselves,
being unable to even harvest back enough seeds
to plant crops the next year.
So they need to buy them, cut down more trees,
the cycle continues.
Because of this,
idea that we need to train them to use monocrop culture.
So this was a monocrop farm, right here.
Climate change came up the next year.
Some of the more drought-resistant plants
weren't there.
They were told that they would compete,
overcompete with each other.
They should be out of there.
And so this farmer lost all of his corn crops,
100% of them.
So, then what do you do?
Do you apply for a loan?
Do you get indebted to that?
It's a very tough situation.
Most people, if they had trees, they cut them down.
So, if we're looking at why, this comes full circle,
if we're looking at why deforestation happens,
are what we're doing
when we're telling people they need to be educated
on our uses of land,
does that increase deforestation?
And so when we're funding these projects,
are we funding more deforestation?
So,
my thought,
and it's not my idea,
it's ideas from local people,
is have conversations.
People in one ravine of the mountains
are really good at
splicing different
types of mangoes together to create a tree
that's very profitable,
has lots of mangoes in it.
Other, on the other side of the mountain,
they're asking me,
'Do you know how to do this? Can we pay somebody to do this?'
And yet on this side, they know a little bit more
about permaculture,
how to use different groups together.
And so,
creating a sort of dialogue between people
that have this local knowledge,
and if we have stuff to add
that we feel like is pertinent, we can put it out there.
If they tell us that that's not right,
then we have to be okay with that.
And so these are ideas that local people had.
"Hey, how about we bring people together?
How about we talk about this as a community?"
So, rethinking who's doing the educating,
who's doing the training.
And if there should be really,
a training or a group growth.
So, (John sniffs)
We don't need to really understand this a whole lot.
This is the basis of my thesis.
But, understanding complexity and connectedness.
Understanding that there's these causes
that are not directly apparent.
That there's causes that have occurred over time
that might be still impacting from history.
Causes like,
which I'll go into in just a second,
but just that it's really complex.
That you can't really say,
"Well, these people that are living there right now,
they're cutting down the trees.
They're the problem. We need to educate them."
Goes back to that learning more about our own history.
History of connection.
So, this is a cycle that, by working with local people,
we came up with this.
I, from research, came up with some things.
Went to the country, talked about it, talked to them.
Was like, 'Hey, is this what you're seeing?'
And they were like, 'This, this, yes,
this, no, this, heck no.'
And then adjusting all of those.
And then bring back.
And then, 'this is the new model that I have.
Is this what you think?'
And they're like, 'Yeah, it looks a lot better.'
That's what my focus groups were about.
So, does poverty, illness, and hunger
leading to the need to deforest
leading for charcoal use and timber,
leading to soil erosion,
leading to more degradation, leading to poor crop yields,
disaster vulnerability,
leading to more poverty, leading to this cycle.
So, it is a cycle.
I call this the "pwoblèm pyebwa" cycle,
which is the "tree problem" cycle.
And then I've identified
factors that initiated this.
A loss of indigenous stewardship
when all of the million,
at least, people on the island were killed
through mainly disease, some slaughter, initially.
So the people that best knew, through generations,
how to really work this land were gone
'cause a lot of the species
that they worked with were endemic.
They're not on other islands.
Sugarcane plantations.
When the United States came and occupied the land,
they said that, 'Okay, you're doing it wrong.
We need to put a whole bunch of sugar plantations here.'
So when that occurs,
you deforest a whole lot of land.
Timber exportation, mahogany deaths,
that sort of thing.
Post-independence foreign relations,
the fact that, after Haiti
became its own nation,
nobody wanted to trade with them.
They refused to help them in any way.
They refused to trade with them because they thought
black people should not be able to rule themselves
and they wanted to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And then the foreign occupation that we talked
a little bit about.
So, if you see from what we looked at
in the very beginning with those numbers,
most of this deforestation came before this generation,
before the way of living
that is currently there.
So, that were factors that initiated this cycle.
And then there's factors that catalyzed this cycle.
Climate variability.
The number one reason
people told me they cut down trees was
"lapli pwoblèm pyebwae" the rain doesn't fall.
And they used that as a, kind of a
whole overarching theme
for climate variability in general—changing amounts
of rainfall, when the rainfall occurs,
leading to them,
lots of little bugs coming up and eating their shallots.
I've told people this before, but they call these
shallot-eating grubs AIDS
'cause they are the worst,
is what I've been told.
So, they told me that
AIDS, AIDS, AIDS is a problem.
And there's a little translation error there.
I was like, "AIDS? I don't really understand that."
And they're like, "Yeah, AIDS. They're going in,
they're eating our shallots." And stuff like that, so.
There was a lot of funny things like that going on, and-
Natural disasters.
When a big hurricane comes, it wipes out a bunch of trees.
It wipes out a bunch of
people, unfortunately.
And you see in Haiti this
susceptibility to natural disasters.
That a lot of people argue is not their own issue,
that came about from outsiders.
The earthquakes in
2010, terrible, right?
Hundreds of thousands of people died,
depending on who you ask, 300,000.
And yet,
there were five other earthquakes
of that magnitude that year.
But it was the most devastating for
hundreds and hundreds of years.
There was a Hurricane Jeanne,
a lot of people talked about.
Was a class four hurricane. It hit the Dominican Republic.
Two people died in the Dominican Republic,
400 people in one town died in Haiti.
And so why is it that they're so vulnerable?
And so a lot of this has to do with the trees.
It all comes full circle.
I'm talking about this complexity.
It comes back to the fact that it's really complex.
And if you want to address the issue of reforestation,
you have to talk to local people
and talk about their history.
Water tenure and access is very big.
Not being able to get enough water to plant trees
even if they want to.
Dependency on outside food sources,
making those prices change
for their crops.
Population growth is definitely something.
Commoditization of goods and services,
things that they used to just
make or get off the land, now they pay for.
Medicine, education, food.
And then Haiti's stock market crash,
what they call it,
when the pigs were eradicated in the country.
'Cause that was a method they have of,
keeping some money
in case somebody got sick,
they would kill a pig and sell it.
It's very common in a lot of different cultures.
Once the pigs were all gone, all they had was trees, so.
And then I argue for a fundamental mindset shift.
Not just the band-aid.
Not just let's do a couple interviews
and then do what we want to do.
A fundamental mindset shift
on local knowledge and local culture.
That just like our knowledge that we told them
monocrops are great, just as one example,
that changes what we understand about that.
Local knowledge has been based in local culture,
based in the local environment
for a very long time.
And it might change too,
or it might be the correct things.
So, valuing that, valuing that
these people
have lived here a lot longer than we do.
And if we work in 20 different countries
and do reforestation projects in each,
we might not know about the specific pieces, so.
This is just one example from Alma, a great woman
who knows a lot about medicinal and spiritual uses of trees.
'If there are no trees in the country,
then I'm already dead.
I need trees to help my children survive.'
Medicine. Shade. 'Cause it was really hot.
I thought that was just a superficial thing to begin with,
but they really need it for shade.
For preserving water sources, for bringing the rains,
for protection against evil spirits.
That's their local knowledge and we need to respect that.
And then this is Poppy standing up and saying,
"lapli pwoblèm pyebwae"
and just repeating it over and over again
when we're trying to talk about when different NGOs are saying,
maybe we should do this and this and this.
He's talking about the issue is the rain.
It's not that we don't know about the trees.
So, couple more
contributions of my research and my thesis.
If you guys want to learn more, I have my e-mail up here,
at the end and I can send you my thesis.
It's very long, 100 pages. Don't read it all.
Read the abstract, and whatever you want.
But, I provide this model
called the "Pwoblem Pyebwa Model"
and it puts that,
let's see if I can do this.
Puts this in a historical context.
And it looks very crazy.
And it looks,
lots of arrows going everywhere.
Probably could have made it a lot simpler.
But I wanted to get at that complexity and it looks at,
on one side.
What events were happening through history,
and on one side, how much deforestation
has occurred,
and it links them together.
It links together how it's not just the current population,
how it's this history of systemic causes.
So that's one thing I provide,
and I provide that as a-
an education tool and get this,
this is going to blow everybody's mind,
not to educate the local people,
but to educate the people coming into the country,
about what's going on in the country.
And so, even I go further than
just a little bit of collaboration,
but actually, maybe who's being taught
might need to be those people that have worked
in 20 different countries,
don't know anything about the local country.
And so, also,
local knowledge on trees and different uses.
I broke down a lot of different tree species,
different types of tree species,
and what they're used for, so that can be used
in project planning,
understanding that these tree species,
they like to build along the road.
So don't take something that we have,
we found in Asia, worked pretty well,
and put that along the roadsides.
Use what they know and what they're likely to use.
And then, even the idea of-
a research process
with research partners.
So this research that I did,
I argue, was different
because I treated the local people as partners
in the research, not as people
that were participants
or subjects,
which has all different connotations but,
people that know more about it than I do.
And whose names should be up here,
probably instead of mine
because they taught me on this information.
I'm just synthesizing it and presenting it
to people in the United States.
And this Tet ansanm Collaborative Conservation.
So,
So I think I,
did fly though that a little bit 'cause, okay.
Well,
that's okay.
Yeah, time for questions.
I'd love to have a dialogue.
Sorry, I planned on that going a bit longer.
I could lecture more,
in a little bit if you guys want to, so.
Questions about working Tet ansanm?
Working with heads together.
Yeah.
(unintelligible)
Mmhmm.
(unintelligible)
Definitely.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm sorry if I misrepresented that
'cause that's more along
what I was talking about.
And that's definitely a good point, is that
the main thing they were saying was that day-to-day needs
were just ignored completely.
And so the idea is that if you have a project
that says we're going to put a bunch of trees over here
and you can't touch them for 50 years,
that those look pretty enticing
when people in your family are dying
or when your crops are failing.
That sort of thing.
So what,
the local people were saying was to bring more of,
we can have that,
but some of the trees we're allowed to cut down
or we can plant crops underneath them so that
land isn't just lost for that amount of time.
But that's definitely important, is that
in ecological restoration,
and perhaps this is something that
scientific knowledge does bring to the table.
I'm not saying scientific knowledge is irrelevant,
is that it is a long-term look at it is needed for sure.
Cool.
Anybody else? Yeah. Sorry.
(unintelligible)
Yeah.
That's a very good question.
A lot of different reasons.
A big part of it is the deforestation itself.
Not necessarily the earthquake, but when you see hurricanes,
one of the main uses people say in Haiti
for having trees is that it protects you from hurricanes.
Natural wind blocking,
natural holding of soil
if a hurricane does occur.
So if that hurricane comes in
and wipes out all the soil on your land,
for the next few years,
that land is irrelevant, obsolete.
And so that's a big part of it,
is having these blockades of trees.
We're actually going to do something in class
where we do a hands-on experiment about what happens
when you have less trees.
So, it'll be a little bit different than me
just lecturing to you guys.
In a couple of days, on Tuesday.
But,
yeah, that's a big part of it.
The other part of it is
the-
lack of some infrastructure
coordination in Port-au-Prince.
So, if you're talking about the earthquake,
a big part of that is,
the local government,
while corrupt at times,
has not been supported throughout history.
It's been undermined again and again
as part of this neocolonialism
is that 1% of the money that went to Haiti
out of the billions and billions of dollars
actually went to the government.
And so, if you take that into history,
that's not new.
That's a trend throughout history.
So, if you have a government
that hasn't been able to function,
yes, corruption has occurred,
but who put those corrupt leaders in power?
People that came in, occupied the country
for 20 years,
and then said, 'Okay, you guys
are doing the kind of things we want you to do,
so you're in power.'
So, this history of corruption, not necessarily locally caused,
leads to less money being put into infrastructure.
And if there's less money into infrastructure,
people build their own houses
out of materials that they have.
And these are very heavy concrete bricks.
So, at the most immediate level,
it was the materials that they used,
how those were used.
No building codes, which comes from
governmental stuff.
No support systems,
no readily,
like after the earthquake,
there was still a big delay before stuff
actually started to happen to,
to make a difference there.
I was there for three days of chaos,
not in the sense of violence, not in the sense of
the people were actually very peaceful.
People after that, which I was floored by.
But not much was getting done.
There was people that were dying,
and having their legs amputated
without anything but aspirin to help with it.
And so, you're thinking, in this day and age,
in three days, you know how does it take
three days to get there?
And so, a big part of that is
the local government.
A big part of that is,
why is it that we can go and deploy in one day
a military strike,
but it takes us three days to get antibiotics
to a different country,
which is a different question you could ask.
Those are a couple of things.
It's unfortunately, not very simple.
It's very complex.
And part of it also is the long-term impacts
of that is that there's not a sort of system
that people have to fall back on,
like the pigs, like the trees, that sort of thing.
So if something happens wrong to us,
we have insurance, we have places we can go,
we have family members that have money
that can give us money to support us.
That might not be the case in the country.
(unintelligible)
I'm talking about a couple different things.
So, there was the-
(unintelligible)
I was there for the earthquake. Yeah.
[SPEAKER ONE] Were you there during it?
[JOHN MCGREEVY] Yes. Yeah.
So, I in a,
I was out in the central part of the country,
and then,
and I was doing
work on solar cookers, and,
kind of, when I look back on it,
I'm like, oh gosh, what was I doing?
But, you learn.
And so, I was an undergrad.
And then, after it happened,
I went into the city the next day
and was there for eight days.
So, I got to see very few white people there.
So, I got to see, or blondes, as they call them,
so I got to see from ground zero
all the way up eight days afterwards
what it actually looked like.
And in those first few days, I was amazed by the way that
local people bonded together, created their own hierarchies,
created their own
different people to do different things,
which were immediately, when other people came in,
instead of working with those communities
that knew how to get stuff around and this
lack of infrastructure, was totally
wiped out and said, 'Okay, we're gonna take control now.'
So, and then, four days later,
they came to us anthropologists
and us people and said, 'We're really messing up,
and we need somebody's help.'
We have no idea how to transport stuff in this country.
We have no idea how to work with these people.
So that's when they started to look at
smaller NGOs,
people that have been there for 12 years.
That sort of thing.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
(unintelligible)
Okay so,
we're talking about what caused them
or what their impacts are?
Yeah, that's
that was another big part of my research,
was what the impacts
of not having trees on your land are.
And that goes a lot back to what are the uses of trees.
A big one they talked about was keeping soil on the land.
There's are many stats out there.
I don't know right offhand about how much soil
is lost every year, and it's an incredible amount.
And so, people that
in the rural areas that live a subsistence lifestyle,
maybe sell some things,
that is a big deal when their soil erosion goes away.
That leads to their quality of life.
And so, a big part of it is soil erosion.
A big part of it is
the things they get from the trees.
So trees they use for different food sources, mangoes, are huge.
there are an incredible amount of mangoes in the country.
First day that I was in the country,
they were like, 'Well, we don't have
a lot of food to give you, but do you like mangoes?'
I had never had a mango before in my life.
I ate 10 the first day.
'Cause they had just this huge
bowl of the ripest, juiciest mangoes.
Over.. 100 varieties of mangoes on the island.
We only see one.
We only see mango francis, mainly.
And they're all edible.
Cachiman, and corossol and passion fruit,
all different types of foods,
so when they lose trees,
they oftentimes don't just lose a tree.
Like we would say,
'Oh, that's a pretty oak tree that, or on our oval.'
We have trees, they lose resources.
They lose a substitute of food.
They lose vitamins, they lose minerals, that sort of thing.
That we now are trying to,
instead of dealing with that issue,
we're trying to bring in food aid,
which has all different sorts of implications.
That's part of it.
Another is spiritual uses of trees.
I looked into that as an anthropologist.
It's hard to really break through,
to get people to talk about that because
they've been talked down to a lot about how voodoo is evil
and how voodoo is terrible.
The more and more I learned about voodoo,
the more that I learned that
it was very similar to Native American religions.
It's just been personified as a really an evil, evil thing.
A lot of animism, a lot of spirits in the trees.
And so people believe that the Mapou tree,
which is this huge tree,
that'd be crazy.
You walk through
the middle of nowhere.
There's no trees, no trees.
And then there's a tree that I cannot grab my arms around.
I'm like, 'What's that tree there?'
And we're like, 'Well, evil spirits
live in that tree.'
I initially wanted my thesis to be about,
'Well, why don't we plant more Mapou trees?'
Then I learned that they're not goodfor anything.
So which came first, the chicken or the egg?
The beliefs about their spirits
living in there or the fact that
they can't be used for really anything?
Don't know, but those are just a couple.
They plant trees
next to sources of water,
all along canals.
You'll have trees.
And so that prevents evaporation from occurring
so their water can get to their crop lands.
It's a lot of different,
The number one thing, though, that they said again and again
was shade.
Mainly because this was a really hot region.
Oh, perfect picture.
Hiking for miles and miles and miles.
And then you get to this one gayak tree,
which is a hardwood tree.
It's actually called (unintelligible) to them
which is 'God's Tree'
'cause it's so many uses. It's three times harder
than any other charcoal they can make out of it.
And so you're there, and it's a actually help thing.
It's a thing that after you work in your field for hours,
you go and sit by that.
So, air conditioning for your house.
Those are just a few of the things
that they use them for, yeah.
Any questions? Yeah?
(unintelligible)
Oh, me
in particular?
Yeah.
(unintelligible)
Yeah.
It's a shame sometimes
how distant academia is from what's actually going on.
And so, I'll start with that.
For, what I'm saying is not
completely new in some of the
aspects in that people in writing
have been talking about the need for a little bit more
collaboration or more local knowledge.
They've been talking about it more surfacy,
like we need to know what they use
so that we can implement our business plan
on top of that.
That's shifting a little bit.
Dr. Gerald Murray did a 20-year study
where he actually, for the first time,
looked at the local uses of trees
and what they needed for an income source
and put it in an income model, which was interesting.
I'm taking that next step of saying,
yes, we do need to work 10 ensemble heads together.
The hard part is that
a lot of stakeholders on the opposite side,
that NGOs, nonprofits—they're businesses.
They say nonprofit.
And in some senses, they are.
Also, these people make salaries.
And if you're telling them
that we need to decrease the number of NGOs
or we need to change your role,
decrease the number of personnel that are outsiders
compared to local, there's a money
real stakeholder there.
So there is some opposition to it.
It's a lot of why I didn't name names of anyone in this.
And so what I'm proposing,
and when I do my doctorate research starting
in the fall,
I'm using an applied approach
to try to implement some of this training
of local history to outsiders.
So I think,
think that that's a big starting point to get to.
'Cause I think in this room a little bit,
when I talked about things that the United States had done,
it's like, 'Oh, this
presents a little bit of a different picture.'
So that, I think, is where it starts,
seeing us as not being infallible.
And then from there, I think,
if you want a really good
example of how it's been done in the health field,
they've had some difficulties, but Partners in Health,
Dr. Paul Farmer, 'Mountains Beyond Mountains'
is the book,
he's done a similar mindset where instead of having
4,000 employees in the country,
well, for example, Red Cross had
4 or 10 employees in the country before
the earthquake happened.
After the earthquake happened, they had 4,000.
And they had the majority of the money.
But then on the other end of the spectrum,
there's Partners in Health who have 4 to 10 outsiders
working there and then the 400 local employees.
So shifting who gets the money, because
to be honest, Americans want a lot more money
than those people want too.
So if you hire more people, that's a huge step in that.
Does that answer some of it?
So, any other questions?
Did you have a different idea with that question?
(unintelligible)
Yeah.
What's being applied right now?
From me? Not much.
I am going to Haiti in May and starting,
and starting, we talked about,
Kim talked about a little bit,
a parish-to-parish twinning program
between Catholic churches.
And that's a long-term model.
Instead of coming and saying we're going to do like a trip
and we're going to fix things and we're going to leave,
it's a model of partnership coming,
saying, 'Hey, we want to work with you.'
Do you guys want to work with us?'
'Oh, You do? Okay, cool.'
We're going to work with you for a little bit
and see what your main concerns are.
The problem is,
if they don't bring up reforestation first,
as an anthropologist,
I'm supposed to not push it,
not say, "We need to reforest your area."
But maybe they're bringing up things that lead to them
being deforestation,
like having canals that are made out of concrete
rather than mud will allow them to plant more crops,
will have less need to cut down the trees.
And so,
I do want to have a reforestation program.
If they are interested in that.
Then we'll do that.
And hopefully, I'm going to apply the stuff
I have here and not
start to switch over to the other side, so.
Let's see.
You guys can keep me in check with that though.
Good question though.
I've got one in the back first, and then Kelly.
Yeah.
(unintelligible) Yeah.
(unintelligible question)
For sure.
I write a lot about that in my methods section.
As I said in class,
my methods section was a quarter of my paper,
25 pages.
So, I really love methods 'cause I think it
gets to the root of
where does this information come from?
I have a lens that I see it through.
I have a lens that they see it through.
A lot of different things.
When you go down the road, they'll yell out,
"Blonde," over and over again.
Particularly, the more rural you get,
the more little kids just run out of nowhere.
And they're just like 'Oh my gosh. Blonde! Blonde!'
And then run and tell their friends,
and then you get followed for a while,
which is great, I love kids, so
it worked out alright.
So, it's really hard to blend in.
You can't go under the radar.
So instead, the way that I dealt with that
was presenting who I was, what I was studying.
When I sit down people, I tell them, 'I'm not an NGO.
I don't have money to give you.'
Number one, I,
whatever you want, I don't have money.
I've worked with a lot of people before
that have-
I talk about how I love learning about
different religions and voodoo
and different uses of trees and that sort of thing.
That's what I want to hear.
'Cause a lot of people don't talk about that at all
when they're presented by an outsider
because they'll be chastised
if they do talk about it.
So, really being careful about how I present myself.
In all this was a big part.
I've also had, they don't like beards
in the country.
Not a lot of people grow them.
So it's a little funny anecdote, but I had a big,
full red beard
by the end of it, very big.
Walking down the road, in the middle of a city,
and somebody came up to me
and just said something and pointed at me
and then walked away.
Different cultural norms and everything.
And I couldn't understand the words that he was saying.
And then I, so I asked my translator, I was like,
'What did he just say to me?'
He said, 'Oh, he just said
you're a really, really ugly person.'
(everyone laughs)
And I was like, 'Oh, okay.'
But the funny part is he didn't seem to have
malice in his heart.
He was just telling me, 'Hey, in case you're not aware,
you're really ugly.' (everyone laughs)
And part of that goes to they just don't-
they don't have beards,
it's not part of their social norm.
But there's a lot of that.
A lot of different funny things like that.
Really quickly, one person, we had a larger woman
on one of the trips with us
and we were crossing a river and it got pretty dangerous
and they almost had to carry us, whatever.
And later he said, 'Oh, I would have carried you guys.'
It would have been great, except for you.
You're a really fat person.
You're so fat.
So, different norms.
And I have friends that come to the U.S.,
and I need to tell them, and they're like,
'So we're not supposed to call people fat?'
And I'm like no don't say that here, so.
Definitely different.
I'm learning more and more.
I make mistakes all the time.
But yeah, it's very interesting. For sure.
Cool. Kelly.
(unintelligible) Mmhmm.
(unintelligible)
Yeah.
(unintelligible)
Yeah. (unintelligible)
Definitely. Definitely.
(unintelligible)
Yeah. I think working with ecologists
would be a great thing
if the mindset's right, too. You know.
And there are different varying degrees of ecologists.
This particular area,
I didn't show as much many pictures from other areas.
Some,
this is in the lower lands.
This is very dry. Then some are very lush.
And I was surprised at how lush they are.
And they have a lot of trees nearby the homes.
A lot of fruit and stuff like that.
It would take a lot of rebuilding.
Part of that is
the local people have helped,
and we've thought about this a little bit,
have helped identify those trees that are best in
salty soils and soils that are very thin.
So this is one of the,
I show this because this is the extreme of the extreme.
But there were places
where only one species of tree could grow.
It might take a lot of time
where that was the only tree species
that could grow until there was more
and more depositing on the land over time.
But yeah,
I definitely am all about interdisciplinary work.
And I think that that would be great too, so yeah.
Do you want to tell me things, too?
Cool. That answer it? Yeah. Cool.
Any other questions?
Yeah, sure.
(unintelligible)
Yeah..
Mmhmm.
(unintelligible)
Yeah, you've hit on
something very difficult
in that a lot of the groups that come in
that are actually doing
work in ways that
I would tell people to do work,
in terms of having long-term,
and it's not the case for all, but having
long-term partnerships, are religious.
And so what do you do about that?
That's been something I've been struggling with.
A big part of it is how you present it to the people
that are going on the trips to do this,
the people that are partnering with it.
First of all,
the group that I'm leading is not an evangelical group
in any way.
It's just Catholic people that feel like
in their religion they're taught to
do things for the greater good.
And so,
while religions do a whole lot of
really horrific, horrific things,
there is this resource, if you will,
of people that wanna do good things.
And so
instead of totally getting out of that and dismissing it
as something that's evil,
people are still going to do it.
And so that's where I came in and said,
'Hey, I was raised in this church,
and I feel like
I can help to make these projects better,
to make these shift the mindset from it's not our job to come
in here and disregard their knowledge,
but to appreciate it.'
And I'll let you know how it goes.
But, I have been on trips with
different parish-to-parish connections.
This is not, I'm not
starting the idea of twin this parish to this parish.
I'm just starting it with two new parishes.
This is something that's been going on for a long time.
And actually, I've seen more good work done by this program
than any other NGO I've done.
I am a little biased,
but I'm really partnering with local people,
listening to what they have to say.
There is not enough of taking in voodoo leaders into that.
And that's what I hope to bring in,
is not to make it a spiritual thing,
and just make it more
that we're all fueled to do something together.
Does that answer your question?
(unintelligible)
Yeah.
(unintelligible)
Mm-hmm.
Definitely. Definitely.
So, the majority of people you talk to
when you ask them what they are,
they'll say they're Catholic in Haiti.
By far.
There's stats out there that 100% of people are voodoo.
That's not true.
That's just in popular magazines.
They say that.
But, 100% of the people,
I would say, have some sort of belief system
about their lives.
It would be similar to in the United States.
You know, if you say, 'Oh, you do good things to
other people, good things are going to happen.'
Just some sort of beliefs,
and some of them are associated with trees.
There's a lot more
that people don't think
is not Catholic that people in the United States would think,
'Hey, that's not Catholic.'
A big part of that is the veneration
of the saints.
They have saints that they believe are
almost deities, so they'd be called
almost polytheists.
And yet,
and so
I've found this group to be very,
very receptive to that.
But yeah, in Haiti, you do get a lot of
synergism of religions there, syncretic religions.
And a big part of that is worshiping Mary,
worshiping the saints.
And even some of these saints have taken the form of
voodoo gods in the past, including Saint Sebastian.
I believe he was tied to a tree and shot
with arrows.
I don't know why (unintelligible)
but shot with arrows.
He has taken the form of Grand Bois,
which is the great tree,
which is a Haitian god.
And so a lot of times when they talk about trees,
they talk about Saint Sebastian,
which I know historically leads back to Grand Bois.
So voodooism is there,
but if I go in as a Catholic church
with an open mind about what voodooism means,
or what Catholicism means, it's not necessarily shunned.
If that makes sense. Cool. Did I get it this time?
Yeah. Go, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, super nice to me.
And a lot of them, some of them did
really great work, and some of them
do do good work.
I'm just trying,
anthropology is all about
being hypercritical sometimes
and really trying to push things to the next level.
I love the NGO people.
Sometimes they did say things to me.
And some of this I use from not just my most recent trip,
but a lot of trips that I've had there.
Some of them do talk like,
'I don't know, a lot of these people are more
appreciative of us.' That's one thing.
So they're-
I did have chances though
to sit down with people and be like,
'Hey, can I teach you a little bit about Haitian history
and the history of us as a country?'
'Cause a lot of these NGOs
have worked in many different countries, so.
Great people.
I will say that when I was in Port-au-Prince,
even though there's more
outsiders working in this country than anywhere else
in the world, I didn't see any of them
on the streets.
As in zero, still, when I drive around.
I see them in
really nice supermarkets.
There's three of them in Port-au-Prince that I know of.
And I see them when I go to their offices.
So I'm wondering how much is there,
and they were really nice to me
in all those point and times and I'm wondering how much
of a local cultural knowledge is there with all these NGOs
if they're never interacting with people
except for in this charged environment
of their office?
So, any questions?
Anyone else?
Cool.
That's about it.
[SPEAKER TWO] Thank you for coming.
[JOHN MCGREEVY] Yeah, thanks. (round of applause)