Canoe construction

Several wood and canvas canoes have come to life. Two canoes were built together in class. Later, on our own, the first two were built together with Sarah, while the following ones were built alone. Being able to combine the knowledge from the shipbuilding education and the construction of several canoes, I helped out others who took on the big task of building a wood and canvas canoe. Here are some pictures of the wonderful process.

All wood was sawn from slabs of wood. In the picture above the spruce planking is planed to a thickness of 4mm. The plane wasn't of the best quality so the wood had to be pushed and pulled through it. Afterwards the planks were sanded with a belt sander.

Drawing the middle line.

The ribs are steamed, bent and nailed fast on the inner railing. Especially the ribs at the ends are difficult because of the tight curve, several ribs tend to brake before finding a good one.

All the planks have to be handplaned to make a tight fit before they are nailed in place. The most interesting part starts from 4 planks down, when 4 planks start at full width in the middle but are reduced to a width of two planks at the ends.

Here the teacher Bo explains, he was one of the first to construct wood and canvas canoes in Europe.

Stretching the canvas. It should be tight but also not too tight, after a while you get the feel for it.

Good friends building a guide. This is a longer and more flat bottomed canoe than the prospector.

Middle thwart after applying the varnish.

The inside of the canoe is nearly finished.

The final step of attaching the outer ash sterns.

The first finished canoe, just before the maiden voyage.

Sweden Dalalven

Sarah took this picture from her canoe.

Friluftsliv

The nature in Sweden.



We had two great canoetrips this last month.

In between these trips we live in a tipi, yesterday night it was full moon and with the mist and the lake everything looked really magical.

Indigenous people in danger

Hadza
Bad news for the Hadza hunter gatherer tribe of Tanzania, one of the last peoples living in harmony with their surroundings, will be evicted from their land because rich arabs bought the hunting rights for their lands from the government. Read more about it on

http://northstatescience.blogspot.com/2007/06/hadza-tribal-lands-being-confiscated-by.html

http://www.bushcraftuk.com/forum/showthread.php?p=308731#post308731

Guatemala
Yesterday I heard on the radio, from someone who works with an organisation called Solidaridad, about the Guatemalan maya's being evicted from their land for gold mines. Not only were they evicted from their lands but life has been made impossible in the remaining maya villages around the mines. One mine uses as much water in one day as the surrounding villages use in 4 years, this in a land which is quite dry. On top of that, the mine pollutes the water with tons of lethal cyanide which is used to extract the gold.

This is a link to Solidaridad: http://www.solidaridad.nl/indexvoorgeengoud1.html?=voorgeengoud.html

Coincidentally, my girlfriend Sarah is right now in Guatemala.
I had just some days ago written a text to her in email from Derrick Jensen's book "Strangely like war: the global assault on forests" :

We can tell similar stories of countries, people and forests the world over. Take Guatemala -the transnational corporations certainly have. As Marcus Colchester and Larry Lohmann put it in their book The Struggle for Land and the Fate of the Forests, "The violent subjugation of the Guatemalan Indians was... integral to the imposition of export-orientated economy that the metropolitan centre required. The
extent to which the Indians resisted, by all possible means, this enforced assimiliation into the market economy has not been sufficiently appreciated. One indication of it's depth may be gauged from the fact that there has been an average of one Indian rebellion every sixteen years since the conquest of Guatemala in 1524 to the present day." These rebellions have been met, and continue to be met, with force. Every attempt by the people of the forests of Guatemala to maintain control of their lives and landbases, or at the very least to hold on to the value of their own labour, is met with goons and gunboats and coups, and perhaps even more deadly, bankers in suits wielding the full force of the law. And there has been no shortage of mechanisms in Guatemala (and elsewhere) to move the indigenous off their land and into the labour pool. These include the (often forced) privatization of communal lands; tax schemes that force people out of subsistence and barter economies and into the cash economy ( which means into the wage economy: how do you pay taxes if you grow food only for your own family, plus enough to barter with neighbours?); vagrancy laws that force people to pay rent, which is a way to force them to get jobs; and racial requirements for land ownership. All of these have guaranteed the rich not only acces to resources but acces to landles peasants for cheap labour. indeed, Guatemalan Indians have been routinely sold along with the haciendas.
The government of Guatemala - and this is really true for all third world governments - has been forced into an unworkable situation. The country's experience with United Fruit (UF), an American transnational corporation, shows how people and governments of the colonies are kept in place. United Fruit arrived in Guatemala in 1899. BY 1930, UF was the largest landowner and employer. In 1931, the government, at the urging of large corporations, decided to break traditional communal lands into
private plots, including Indian lands UF wanted to exploit. IN 1954, when UF faced the nationalization of 387000 acres of land - the government was, scandalously enough, going to pay UF the precise value the company claimed the land was worth on it's tax rolls - the Guatemalan government was overthrown in a US backed coup, leading to thirty years of bloody dictatorship, and the murder of at least half a million Guatemalan Indians.

In 1960 three quarters of Guatemala was covered by forest. In the next decade, as the result of oil money and international loans, cattle ranching increased (even as domestic beef consumption fell by 50 percent: the average american housecat eats more beef then does the average Guatemalan).
Agribusiness, oil exploration, nickel mines and hydroelectric projects pushed back the frontier. Indian massacres were followed by colonization schemes transferring even more land to the middle and upper classes and to the military leaders who oversaw the massacres. Two percent of the farms now enclose two-thirds of the land in the country. 88 percent of the farms are too small even to support a family. There are 300.000 landless labourers without permanent jobs.

By 1990, about a quarter of the country was forested, and perhaps 2 percent of the original frontier forest survived. Some specifics: the Peten forest once covered the northwestern third of Guatemala. Between 1964 and 1984, a third of the Peten was deforested, the population increased from 27000 to 200000, and natural resources came to be controlled by the military.

86 percent of Guatemalans live below the official poverty line. Half of the Guatemalan children show retarded growth. Infant mortality runs 80 per 1000 births. Subsistence standards are now lower then during the colonial era 350 years ago.

What is the response by those in power? Well, just as increased logging, we're told time and again, will cure logging-induced forest health and fire problems, so, too, according to the World Bank and the Inter American Development Bank, will debt, deforestation and exporting resources help Guatemalans. Money is pumped into agricultural factories - they're not farms, really - that produce broccoli, peas, melons, berries and flowers for export. These crops require lots of water and petrochemicals. And they require lots of soils: typically, an acre that is denuded of tress and heavily cultivated can lose 5 to 35 tons of topsoil per year. The people starve. The forests and people die.

One organisation which reports about the situation of many wild people around the world and assists them legally:

http://www.survival-international.org/

Wilderness living

My blog goes about living wild. Enjoying experiences in which we get a glimpse of how life was for our prehistoric ancestors.

Our life today is very remote from this distant past. We enjoy certain comforts which our predecessors didn't have but we also miss the clean and unpopulated nature which existed before.

There will be tougher times because crucial resources are getting expensive and this will cause more and more people to gather food in nature, cook themselves, go fishing, building their own houses and producing their own clothes. Time and again this has been the case in rougher times.. Instead of looking in fear to this depression we might just as well take the opportunity to get back to basics and enjoy the wild life.