Building a small proa

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For sometime now I have wanted to build a small proa suitable for experimenting with different sail and aka/ama configurations. Here is a first look at this effort. Fun project.

Planting Trees

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Planting trees is not always a simple process.

Planting trees on islands

There are thirteen unpopulated small islands off the coast north of Nasugbu, Batangas, Philppines. Fortune Island is one of them. Most were deforested during the era of the Spanish Galleons, when nearby Cavite was a center for ship building.

In 250 years, 108 galleons crossed the Pacific, but only 50 were constructed for the
Manila-Acapulco trade. In the beginning, ships were sent from Mexico. But from the
1570s, galleons were built in several shipyards in Pangasinan, Cavite, Marinduque, Albay, Camarines, Masbate—all of them safe ports—with access to plentiful supplies of timber and native labor. Thousands of natives were assembled to build the galleons, while supplies to feed,clothe, and arm the crew were requisitioned by the government from the provinces in the form of levies and taxes.

It was in Cavite that most of the galleons were built, repaired, and refitted for each new voyage.The shipyard, which was 10 miles from Manila, was guarded by the guns of San Felipe and protected by the mountains from strong gales.An order in 1679 prohibited the construction of Manila-Acapulco galleons outside the Philippines.

The skeleton of the wooden ship is a complex system, with timbers joined together to form the frame, to which the planks and decks are attached. Shipbuilders used hardwood from the islands, which were excellent for shipbuilding.

Declares Father Fray Casimiro Diaz, OSA “The best that can be found in the universe... and if not for the quality of the timbers, so dangerous voyages could have not been performed.”

So many years ago, a few far sighted individuals, more of them in later posts to this blog, began to plant trees on these  islands. This effort contiues. Planting trees informs all of the other devlopmental activities I shall report in this blog. Trees provide both a long term goal and a monthly rhythm that drives our efforts.

When one is involved in diverse engineering and ecologicaql work then one needs a natural form of managment of one's time and energy lest one dissappate one's creative efforts across too many projects. Serving the trees and their underwater cousins, the coral, provides focus and rhythm to our efforts.

At this moment 5000 mahogany seedlings are waiting outside my door for transport to the islands. They  arrived a few nights ago from the plantation during a torrenitl downpour. Their presence creates an urgency since these seedlings will begin to put down roots within days so they must be moved to the islands. This in turn involves further trucking and then the seedlings are loaded on to a bangka for transport to the islands. One of our most important projects involves refurbishing a 47 foot bangka as a service boat to support ongoing tree planting and care.  

So a small army of planters is being organized to truck and boat the seedlings to the islands. Later today I will go along and photograph the operation.

Follow this blog for further information on our efforts and how you can be involved.

Sea Gliding

One of the things I enjoy most about this new island project is exploring all kinds of new technologies that may be relevant. Because I am fortunate enough to  have a good education in physics, electronics. computer systems and software, I can review quite a wide variety of technology in some depth and ask, "Is this relevant?" A lot of it is not, but occasionally a new technology appears that looks potentially useful to us islanders. Sea gliders is such a technology.

The core physics is very simple. If an object weighs more than the water it displaces the object will sink. Any child knows this. So we take and object that is barely floating, add a little weight and down she goes.

So how do we get back up? Well throw a little weight overboard. One could simply drop some lead weights from the little submarine and she will float back up to the surface. In practice, one usually pumps water in and out of a ballast tank in order to control bouyancy.

All of this is very easy to control with simple electronics (or even mechanical systems for that matter.)

So now that we see how easy it is to go up and down, what is this business of gliding?

Well just add some wings. Now as one drops down the wings induce forces that cause our little sub to move horizontally. Wow, we are flying underwater.

That is a seaglider in a nutshell.

Seagliders are remarkably efficient. For instance,

"During a mission in the Northeast Pacific, Seaglider 144 propelled itself for 292 days, covering 5,528km (3,435 miles) through the water. Operating independently, without any intervention from its operators for repair or cleaning, Seaglider 144 averaged a speed of just over .75km per hour (0.5mph), stopping for only a few minutes about every 9 hours to send back its data via satellite. During this mission the Seaglider got the gasoline equivalent of over 30,000 miles/gallon from its high-energy Lithium batteries." More

That's right the energy equivalent of 30,000 miles per gallon!

Right now they are being used for deep sea research, acting as low cost probes of the far reaches of the ocean. But what if we were to build large ones?

Imagine a seaglider the size of a modern tanker, like the floating storage and offloading unit (FSO) Knock Nevis, formerly the ULCC Jahre Viking, which is the largest vessel in the world. The supertanker is 458 metres (1504 feet) in length and 69 m (226 ft) wide.

Obviously this seaglider would operate in the deep ocean. Still I suspect its fuel efficiency would be remarkable. That may not matter much at this scale though since issues other than fuel costs may well drive the cost of transport.

I anticipate returning to the seaglider again soon since I see them as a fascinating research opportunity ... maybe this is the project we will work on here on the island.

A-B-Seas

In today's Philippines Starweek magazine Nathalie M. Tormada has written about the Sailing School of the SEAs, an extension of the experiential training center on the environment, renewable energy, and sustainable living in Bantayan, the biggest island in the Visayan Sea.

The banca uses solar and wind power. Fresh water supply is not a problem as the roof is reworked into a catchment for rainwater. Fuel use is minimal as the banca is fitted with sails. It takes care of waste disposal with its own septic tank. There’s also a hanging organic mini-garden to exhibit how, in the event of climate impacts, one will still be able to have food.

But more than just its host of eco-friendly features, the sailing school, true to its name, is on a single-minded mission to educate, going on roadshows around the coastal towns.

In a previous blog we asked "So if one is living on a tiny island, a bangka, how does one propose to fill basic human needs?" The work by the people at Sailing School of the SEAs contains suggestions and is a real model.

By focusing on a banka, thinking of it as a tiny island, we can prototype on a human scale the sort of efforts that need to be envisioned and ultimately implemented on a global scale. First we must satisfy basic human needs on an animal level, Maslow's physiological needs . Until we do that people will, in order to survive, focus upon those needs and let the devil take the environment. Thus basic human needs (economy) and ecological demands (sustainability) cannot be separated.

Bankas

From childhood on a Filipino living near the sea shore will be around the bangka, the classic outrigger "canoe" found throughout the Philippines.

Humans are tool using animals and a bangka is perhaps the most important tool for use in an island country. Like any general purpose tool the bangka comes in many sizes and shapes. Classically the term was used to describe a very narrow hull that was made from a log and balanced with outriggers. More generally the term now includes boats built will all kinds of techniques and sizes but having in common, outriggers.

Large bangkas capable of carrying as many as 100 passengers are used as ferries to outlying islands and are an essential component of the transportation system in this part of the world.

Programmer's Paradise

The evening star, Venus was occluded by the moon on Sunday, May 16, 2010. Here is how that good omen looked from Fortune Island.



Tonight we shall delve a little bit deeper into Fortune Island, an island in the Philippines.

The 27-hectare (66.7-acre) island lies about 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) off the coast of Nasugbu, Batangas, Philippines. The island is located at Latitude: 14° 3' 0 N, Longitude: 120° 28' 60 E. It just smudge of grey on Google Maps.

Such a small island is more of a place to visit, to reconnoiter, than to live. No doubt fishermen have bivouacked on the island since time immemorial but no sustained village is there. There is the vivid ghost of a run down resort that now looks for revival.

The islands of this part of the world are littered with the remnants of unsustainable dreams; high end resorts that fade away when the glitter of some charismatic fortune is gone. Fortune Island is a classic example deserving of a sustainable revival.

So a small group of people are dreaming the vision of reviving the island and its environment the surrounding coral seas and fisheries. Long years of terrible practices, dynamite and cyanide fishing. have damaged but not destroyed the local coral reefs. Now the lovers of Fortune Island have ended these practices and slowly the coral and undersea life is recovering.

But let us look deeper into the problem. What in the beginning led to these practices? Simply the reality that a poor man, ignorant and struggling to feed his family, will no look long into the future. Nor did the developers of the island look beyond it becoming a play pen for the elite as an economic mechanism, a mechanism that has proven to be unsustainable.

Sad really.

But where are we now? What can be done? Ideally the island would simply be left alone to recover. Nature unmolested is a powerful mother and would give birth to a new fresh island in a century or so. But that won't happen. Humans won't leave an island like this alone.

Still a vision that features a small footprint on the environment, a future that is ecologically and economically viable is emerging. Here are some thoughts.

First, the people I met on the recent diving trip understand that ecotourism, bringing divers and other water buffs, island lovers to these coral reefs is wholly dependent upon the coral reefs and the underwater life that these corals sustain. They know they must be keepers of the coral and protect the coral from future damage. Ecotourism is one means, potentially sustainable, that will help rebuild the island ecology.

But I want to point out another, a more radical alternative. We are developing with the Internet the technology needed to redistribute work. That component of work that is primarily communications can be done almost anywhere that one has bandwidth. Moreover bandwidth is ever becoming more widely distributed, ever more available all over the world.

Now an concrete example of this is found right here in the Philippines. Every major corporation in the world sells something, a product or a service. All of those products need support. They have 800 numbers that connect with a human on a phone, somewhere. More and more of the English speaking support goes to the Philippines and India. This business, answering incoming phone calls, is just a hint of the reorganization of business that the future is bringing. The technical means exists to locate such communication oriented businesses anywhere.

Another example is software development. Give me intelligence and bandwidth and I can do software development anywhere. The growth of Free and Open Source Software, e.g. Linux, Gnu and its many applications is testimony to the power of the net to locate skilled intelligence anywhere that there is bandwidth.
See Geographic distribution of Linux developers

Here is a table from an analysis of the geographic location of Source Forge developers

Region Developers
Africa 12560
Asia 127275
Europe 466792
North America 485679
Oceania 46422
South America 36330

While clearly biased toward historically dominant North America and Europe we see that large contributions are being made by the Rest of the World. This trend will grow as the Internet pushes more and more bandwidth to those parts of the world where intelligence is under utilized.

So what if Fortune Island were to become a Programmer's Paradise? A place where world class programmers could work in a beautiful environment, free from the harassments of urban life, in deep meditation, creating the future. Monasteries have always existed, dedicated to the intellectual and spiritual life. Why not on Fortune Island? Why not a secular monastery dedicated to software development? That I argue is a sustainable vision that could complement ecotourism.

I shall develop this theme further as this blog evolves.