(Don’t) have a banana
May 26th, 2009We are barely out of the marina, heading into the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge for a day of research in the mangroves, when Joyce Mazourek, the refuge manager, gets a “rescue-me” call from one of her staff. Her outboard has died. Can we give her a tow? We motor over to the boat, listen while the motor is fruitlessly cranked, agree sagely that it is definitely not starting and tow it back to the boat ramp.
We set out a second time, idling through the manatee protection zone (boat propellers are one of the chief causes of manatee injury and death), then Joyce pushes the throttle down for a high-speed slalom ride through the mangrove-fringed islands that make up the refuge. Ten Thousand Islands, adjoining Everglades National Park, has some of the best preserved mangrove habitat in the US.
Ten thousand islands? Well, no. More like a few hundred, but who’s counting? I first came across this island maze off Florida’s south-west coast while scouting for mangrove sites on Google Earth. From the air, the islands looked like cells under a microscope.
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Andy From changes batteries in one of his water-level recorders.
Then I found out that Andy From, a GIS (geographic information systems) guy with the Fish and Wildlife Service, would be spending two days in the refuge downloading data from his water level monitoring sites. He invited me along.
This first day is devoted to checking the island sites; tomorrow we will go into the marshes by airboat. Andy occasionally consults a satellite map, but mostly navigates by memory—this is his 17th trip to collect data. His monitoring equipment consists of a PVC pipe sunk into the mud, with mesh-covered holes near the surface so that water can flow into them, and an ultrasound distance recorder in the top of the pipe.
GOOGLE EARTH
Sunglint creates this optical illusion in a satellite image of part of the Ten Thousand Islands wildlife refuge.
While Andy downloads the sea level data to a handheld device, Joyce sucks up groundwater from three different depths to measure temperature, salinity and electrical conductivity. All this data provides baseline information for a coming restoration project. Decades ago, canals were dug in the watershed north of the refuge as part of a massive real-estate development that never got off the ground. Those canals deprived the marshes of fresh water, disrupting the natural hydrology and changing the flora and fauna. The plan is to restore sheet flow of fresh water across the refuge, and Andy’s data will allow environment managers to measure the effects.
I busy myself with the mangroves themselves. It’s high tide, and tree-climbing crabs have clustered around the trunks of the trees, some of them several metres up. I try to photograph them, but as soon as I get within range they sidle to the opposite side of the trunk. When I move around that side they scuttle back to their starting point. I keep up this game of hide and seek for a while, then give up. They are too nimble for me.
As the day proceeds we have some lucky critter sightings. We startle a spotted ray, jet black polka-dotted with white, and watch it wing away through the murky water. Crossing a shallow area, we see horseshoe crabs, those ancient armoured arthropods which have changed very little in 400 million years. The air temperature is in the 90s Fahrenheit, and I’m eyeing the water for a dip, but change my mind when a two-metre bull shark swirls around the boat. The area is known for them. They are an unpredictable species, and the turbid water pretty much rules out swimming with them. I don’t want to end up a case of mistaken prey identity. Bulls don’t have the megadentition of great whites, but no way would you want to have their pearly whites sunk into your leg.
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Joyce Mazourek, a victim of Cumulative Banana Syndrome.
We stop for lunch. Andy has made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for him and me, and is alarmed to see Joyce eating a fruit salad with banana. Like many fishermen, he considers bananas to be bad juju on boats. “Oh, oh,” he says. “We’re in trouble now.” Joyce says she’s been eating bananas on trips into the refuge ever since she started as manager a few months earlier, and has never had boat trouble. “But maybe it’s a case of CBS—Cumulative Banana Syndrome,” I suggest. “All that pent-up banana karma is about to be unleashed.”
I spoke truer than I knew. As we started for the last site of the day the motor started making a gnashing noise, and eventually cut out completely. Something had seized in its innards. We ended up paddling the last mile to the marina, past the mansions of the Port of the Islands resort, watching for manatees and listening to the chattering call of a bald eagle.
It was a pleasant way to end the day, but we agreed that, tomorrow, no bananas!
Over Amazonia
May 23rd, 2009It is by turns exhilarating and depressing to fly across Brazil. I took off from Salvador and stared down on a mosaic of farm and forest as the plane tracked north-west, bound for Panama. I closed the window shade and dozed, and when I slid the shade up again an hour later we were still crossing the same landscape. Huge fields with ruler-straight boundaries, red-dirt roads connecting them them, and islands of rainforest adrift in that agricultural sea.
This was the sobering part, to see the diminishing remnants one hears about whenever the statistics of rainforest loss are mentioned.
Then the exhilaration of crossing a swathe of untouched Amazonia. The cliché about the “lungs of the planet” smacks home when, at 30,000 feet, you inch across this enormous expanse, with its tapeworm rivers riddling the somber forest. Not a road, not a village, not a house for as far as the eye can see. I found myself whispering the word “untrammelled” for the sheer pleasure of it, because how often do you get to say that about a landscape any more?
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Not much of a shot, to be sure, but flying over Amazonia was impressive.
The forest itself is sculpted into whorls as if by an oil painter’s palette knife. You see the ghosts of rivers past, now recaptured by the land and reforested with the next generation of trees. The rivers twist across the landscape in tight oxbows, with dozens of spindle-shaped islands dotting their course. On the upstream edge of each island, and on the tighter bends in the river, is a splash of white, a sandbar, that beckons as a potential campsite. What wouldn’t I give to be on a raft down there, like in a Werner Herzog movie, with a pack of chattering monkeys on board.
Speaking of Werner, during a stopover in Manaus I paid a visit to the opera house made famous in his film Fitzcarraldo. Opened in 1896, during the rubber boom, Teatro Amazonas is a magnificent Renaissance-style edifice. Wikipedia provides some construction details:
ELAINE CORETS
A touch of a cappella outside Teatro Amazonas in Manaus.
“Roofing tiles came from Alsace while, from Paris, came furniture and furnishings in the style of Louis XV. From Italy came Carrarra marble for the stairs, statues, and columns. Steel walls were ordered from England. The theatre has 198 chandeliers, including 32 of Murano glass. The curtain depicts the junction of the Rio Negro and the Solimões to form the Amazon. On the outside of the building, the dome is covered with 36,000 decorated ceramic tiles painted in the colors of the national flag.”
This year’s opera season, held annually in April, was over by the time I arrived, but I sang a snatch of “Pie Jesu” outside the pink-and-white walls to mark the visit.
On the 25th, Memorial Day in the USA, I will be in Florida for the next stage of the journey: the Ten Thousand Islands.
Leave the suntan lotion, take the umbrella—2
May 22nd, 2009I am typing this in the middle of a lake. The lake isn’t very deep—about an inch—but it forms over the kitchen floor of my son Jeremy’s apartment whenever it rains in Salvador. It has been raining in Salvador solidly for a month, according to the taxi driver who brought me here from the bus station. Seven people have died and several houses have been washed away.
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Bucketing down in Salvador.
I have been amazed by my good luck with the weather so far. In two weeks of travelling through Brazil and Ecuador I have not had a day of rain. I arrived in Parnaiba the day after the torrential rains stopped, on May 6, and left Caravelas yesterday under blue skies. During the 10-hour bus ride north, I moved from one climate zone to another, and now it’s emphatically umbrella time. The cloud is so low the tops of the church steeples are disappearing into grey.
Salvador’s colonial architecture is stunning. The twin bell towers of the Convent of Carmo, 50 metres from the kitchen window, are crusted with lichen and wear the black patina of age and decay. The hands on the tower’s two clocks look as if they haven’t moved in a hundred years. I lean out the window to watch people hurrying down the cobbled streets, holding newspapers or jackets over their heads in the rain.
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View from the kitchen window.
The whole purpose of coming to Salvador is to prove to those who think otherwise (are you there, Heather?) that I can take a day off. In this case, two. I fly to the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge in Florida on Sunday, but I’ve diverted to Salvador to see Jeremy’s last day of capoeira training before he returns to New Zealand.
Salvador is Mecca for anyone who is serious about capoeira Angola, the more traditional of the two forms of the game. Capoeira is crudely described as “ritualised mock combat,” a label that gives no hint of the subtlety and complexity of the game. Encounters are backed by singing, the twanging of berambaus—single-stringed instruments made of a gourd, a stick, and a piece of wire excavated from the rim of a truck tyre—and the beating of drums and tambourines. It is an intense, vibrant experience. Jeremy has been training here for three months. Last year he was here for six. I watch him play with a parent’s pride and an outsider’s bafflement. After a game he will explain some nuance to me—a particular gambit that paid off, a stylish move his opponent made—but I’m in smile and nod territory. I find the moves as difficult to fathom as the jumps my figure-skating daughter used to perform. Was that a single Axel or a double Lutz?
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Jeremy prepares to play Mestre Valmir.
There’s something about the switching of roles between parent and child that I find deeply satisfying. For 20-odd years you play, however erratically, the part of the sage, the teacher, the Decider, and then you’re the one who’s being taught, who’s being taken in hand, being guided through an exotic city, with its exotic tastes.
Acarajé was number one on the must-eat list of street foods. Mashed black-eyed peas formed into a ball and fried in palm oil, then filled with shrimp paste, these little flavour bombshells are a Salvador speciality. So, too, açai, the pulped crimson berries of the açai palm, sweetened and served ice-cold mixed with granola. Unbelievably good. One night we ate the classic Brazilian fish stew called moqueca, brought to the table bubbling in a clay dish that has been blackened through soaking in a decoction of the bark of the red mangrove. (See, even on my days off, mangroves find me!)
It was my great good fortune to catch an exhibition of the work of Carybé, an artist I had never heard of, but will now never forget. This astonishing genius could work equally powerfully in paint, sculpture, mural and stage design. His sketches of capoeira capture the elegance of the game far better than a camera can.
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The old burro can still eat.
At the end of the roda I attended—the three-hour capoeira session—the mestre (literally master, the leader of the capoeira school) made some comments which resulted in everyone looking amusedly in my direction. Jeremy explained that he had joked that since I was clearly the oldest person in the room I should have the last word. “Say something in Portuguese,” Jeremy said. Reaching into my paltry stock of one-liners, I came out with “Beleza!” (Beautiful!) Everyone clapped. Which goes to show the truth of a sign I saw in a Salvador junk shop: The old burro can still eat.
PS The fact that I’m posting this on the 22nd and it is now the 29th is probably as confusing to readers as it is becoming to me. Lately I have been putting in long hot days in the field and have lacked brain space to write, and internet access to post. I hope that the posting date and the actual date will start to be more congruent soon.
Below: a striking sculpture outside Salvador’s museum of modern art, which was hosting the Carybé exhibition, and one of Carybé’s capoeira paintings.
Home ground
May 21st, 2009Again today I have met people for whom mangroves are their “home ground,” the material and spiritual centre of their lives. Raised as children in the mangroves, they raise their own children the same way. “Father to child to grandchild,” said Janilson, 49, who talked to us with a friend who goes by the nickname Piaba, a type of fish.
Janilson said there were 150 families around Caravelas who live in the mangroves. They don’t have regular jobs. The mangroves are “their industry, their business, their life,” he said.
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Piaba takes us upriver to a mangrove community near Caravelas.
These men were acute observers of nature. Their eyes lit up when they talked about creatures they’d seen in the mangroves over the course of their lives. Snakes weighing 7 kg. Fiddler crabs whose local name means “call the tide,” because that’s what they seem to be doing when the males wave their supersized pincer. Crab-catching raccoons. That’s right—at low tide raccoons go into the mangroves and catch crabs by inserting their tails into the burrows and waiting for a crab to latch on. Piaba delightedly mimicked the yelps of the raccoon as it withdrew its prize.
Some of their stories crossed over from the natural to the supernatural. They claimed that fishermen sometimes catch in their nets the spirits of dead children, which refuse to show their faces. Piaba said that one night in the mangroves he had once seen a ball of fire which pulsated among the trees as he watched.
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Seu Silvano, 86, raised 21 children in a mangrove community near Caravelas.
Later, Piaba took us up the river bordering Caravelas to meet 86-year-old Seu Silvano and his wife. They live in a mud-walled hut in which they have raised 21 children. Silvano came to the land as a young single man, cleared and planted it with fruit and shade trees, built the house and will live in it until he dies.
It was some of his upriver neighbours who sold their land to Coopex for a shrimp farm. One of Silvano’s sons told us, “They were crazy to sell.” Crazy because they knew what the farm would do to those who remained. “The effluent would have affected everything. Once it was contaminated, the river wouldn’t have served anyone,” said the son.
I asked Seu Silvano if he still collected food from the mangroves, but he said his body was too tired now. But he still knows how to sweeten crabs for market. As we walked back to the river he lifted a wooden slat from a box under a mango tree. Several dozen blue crabs scuttled away from the light. Silvano feeds them plantains, leaves and coconut to improve their flavour before his children take them by boat to Caravelas.
It’s a process that has been happening forever, down among the mangroves.
Below:
Below: Protesters against Caravelas shrimp farm proposal carry placards saying “It’s a lie,” “Respect my nature,” “We don’t want [shrimp] nurseries, we want to live,” “Our mangroves need help” and “Foreign shrimp stay out.”
Photo by Elaine Corets
Brothers in arms
May 20th, 2009Dó, Dedê and Jaco Galdino Santana are three brothers who work to promote the Afro-Indigenous culture of Bahia, on the eastern seaboard of Brazil. They live in Caravelas, a quiet colonial town near the southern border of Bahia state.
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Dó Galdino Santana with the first letter of a magnrove font he designed.
Ten years ago, it would not have occurred to them that mangroves could disappear. Mangroves were part of their life, as they were for everyone in Caravelas. “We couldn’t imagine living without them,” said Dedê. Then came Coopex, a consortium with a plan to build a 1500 ha shrimp farm on land between two rivers adjacent to the town. It would be Brazil´s largest shrimp farm yet.
The developers claimed that the farm would not have a negative impact on the mangrove ecosystem, but bitter experience elsewhere in Brazil suggested otherwise. A delegation from shrimp-devastated communities in Ceará visited the Caravelas community to urge them not to allow shrimp to get a foot in the door.
The threat of environmental degradation and mangrove loss caused the brothers to evaluate their priorities. As well as helping mobilise the community to oppose the shrimp project, the brothers decided what was needed was an affirmation of cultural identity. It was not enough to be against something from the outside that threatened their way of life, they wanted to assert what made Caravelas unique.
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Teaching Afro-Indigenous culture to the children of Caravelas.
They had already started a cultural centre offering the children of the community classes in everything from drumming to carving, silk-screening to sculpture. A fourth member of the family, brother-in-law Itamar dos Anjos, taught drama and dance. They decided to explore the artistic possibilities of mangroves.
“We saw a need for cultural education to strengthen the idea of preserving the environment,” said Itamar. “Instead of offering intellectual argument, we chose artistic expression.”
“Nature is integral to the Afro-Indigenous identity,” said Itamar, and because mangroves and marine life were directly threatened by the Coopex proposal, the brothers and community members, in collaboration with the Mangrove Action Project, decided to make a short film celebrating the spiritual and cultural significance of mangroves. The film evokes the three orixas, or African deities, which are jointly responsible for mangroves: the goddesses of fresh water (Oxum), salt water (Yemanja) and mud (Nanã).
A current of mysticism runs through the film. As well as the orixas, there is a mythological figure called Caipora, who lives in the mangrove branches, protects wildlife and comes to the aid of people who are lost. In the film his cackling laughter terrifies the businessmen who expect their briefcases of money to sweep all opposition before them.
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Dedê Galdino Santana helps a young student with his drawing.
In reality, opposition from the community caused Brazil´s federal environmental agency to reinvestigate Coopex’s proposal, and to rule that the siting of the farm was an inappropriate land use. The proposal has now been abandoned.
“The shrimp farm proposal re-awoke in the community the importance of mangroves,” said Itamar. The outcome has been not just a threat averted, but a deeper vein of cultural identity revitalised.
Words and expressions
May 19th, 2009I’m back in Brazil. After a week of saying “Gracias” it’s back to “Obrigado.” Instead of shrugging apologetically and saying, “No hablo español,” I have reverted to shrugging apologetically and saying “Na falo portugués.” Interestingly, some words stay the same. Por favor is por favor, whether you’re speaking Spanish or Portuguese.
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The classy Spanish word for tyre repair shop.
During the last couple of weeks I’ve been collecting the odd phrase or word that amuses me. For example, when driving in Ecuador you often see a tyre standing on the roadside with the word vulcanizadora painted on it. Show me a tyre repairman who wouldn’t prefer to be called a vulcaniser. It sounds almost operatic.
I also saw a number of ferretarias. Ferret farms, I wondered? No, ironmongers, after ferrous, for iron.
Local colloquialisms are always fun to discover. Speed bumps in Brazil are called “molar breakers” or “sleeping policemen.” There are lots of them. On each side of a town, the main highway will have two or more, sometimes not signposted, in which case they really do jolt your jaws. They are often preceded by a sonarizador, literally sound-maker, what we call a rumble strip in New Zealand. The word for pothole (of which Brazil also has a plethora) is the same as for crab burrow, which I appreciated, of course.
There must be dozens more. Any suggestions?
Shrimp v mangrove
May 18th, 2009For the factually inclined, here is some background data on the shrimp vs mangrove conflict from a conversation with Lider Góngora, president of the Ecuadorian organisation C-CONDEM. As well as fighting for mangrove protection and empowerment of mangrove-reliant communities, Lider and his staff operate a newly opened seafood restaurant in their office complex in Quito (see earlier post).
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Lider Góngora, fighting for protection of mangroves and mangrove communities in Ecuador.
* Ecuador was the first country in Latin America to jump on the shrimp bandwagon. The first farms were established in 1977 near Huaquillas, my first port of call in Ecuador. From there the industry spread north, cutting down mangroves as it went. Labour was cheap, profits were high and destruction was rapid.
* By 1998 Ecuador was the world’s largest exporter of shrimp. Shrimp was the country’s second largest export, oil being first.
* Ecuador originally possessed 364,000 ha of mangroves. By 2001, 70% had been destroyed. Of the 108,000 ha of mangroves remaining, 20,000 ha have been granted as concessions for communities to co-manage in conjunction with government agencies.
* It is illegal in Ecuador to cut down mangroves or to site a shrimp farm within mangroves. With reference to these laws, many of Ecuador’s 254,000 shrimp farms are illegal operations.
* More than 1 million Ecuadorians live and/or work among mangroves, and 150,000 depend directly on them for their livelihoods.
And here are some more pictures of the shrimp v mangrove situation in Ecuador.
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Shrimp farm buildings glimpsed through gaps in the mangrove 'beauty screen.' (Click to open slide show)
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The major predator of mangroves: earthmoving equipment.
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Shrimp farm near Huaquillas, where Ecuadorian shrimp farming began.
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A crab collector—one of 150,000 Ecuadorians who rely on mangroves for their livelihood.
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Processing the catch.
The culinary mangrove
May 17th, 2009It is hard to believe that out of the sulphurous black mud of a mangrove forest come delicacies as sweet as mangrove mud crab and mangrove cockle. I have been chowing down on these gifts of the mangroves recently—see photos below. The crab can be served whole, either plain, with an accompanying salsa or vinaigrette, or slathered with a coconut curry sauce. For a less messy dining experience, serve only the claws, legs and the two meaty parts inside the carapace, discarding the rest.
The cockles work well in a ceviche. The shellfish are steamed open and then mixed with lime juice, vinegar, spring onions and other raw vegetables. I suspect that you could use any fish ceviche recipe, substituting for the fish whatever your local cockle equivalent happens to be. In a small restaurant in Quito called Martin Pescador, which specialises in mangrove and mangrove-related seafood, I saw cockles being sizzled on the half shell, and they looked delicious, so that would be another option to try.
Any recipe suggestions gratefully received! Send to laststands@kennedywarne.com
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Mud crab in the hand. (Click to open slideshow)
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Mud crab on the plate.
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Cockles in kit.
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Cockles on the half shell.
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Cockle ceviche.
A stone in the shoe
May 17th, 2009Peter Segura had been in hiding for a month when I met him. His home is in Olmedo, where I had stayed while visiting the giant mangroves of Majagual, but it wasn’t safe for him to meet me there. So he came to the capital, Quito, and told me his story.
Peter Segura opposes shrimp farming. He is, as Pedro Ordinola had said, “a stone in their shoe.” When a powerful person has a stone in his shoe, he likes to get rid of it—which is why this quietly spoken 40-year-old Afro-Ecuadorian and his family were in hiding.
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Peter Segura—a marked man.
What is interesting about Peter is that for 10 years, from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, he worked on shrimp farms, so he knows something of the inside story. The work, he said, was difficult, dangerous and low-paid, and the living conditions were spartan. Typical tasks included cleaning algal scum off the pond walls and water filters, keeping down weeds, spreading food and agrochemicals and hand-harvesting the shrimp. The workers handled hazardous materials such as fuels, growth hormones and the preservative metabisulphite without protection. If a worker complained, he was down the road.
Peter worked for several farms in both Guayaquil and Esmeraldas, and came to the conclusion that they were operating outside of the law. Farms were supposed to be a maximum of 250 hectares, he said, but by creating multiple subsidiaries a shrimp owner could achieve a spread of 3–4,000 ha. Many shrimp operations had politicians, ambassadors and councillors as partners or directors. The alliance of business and government “could do whatever it wanted with the laws, the ecosystem and the people,” he said.
And what it was doing was frightening. Peter began hearing of mass fish die-offs, the causes of which were never established, but were considered by locals to be the result of chemical spills. One of the farms he worked for stopped mangrove fishers such as crab and cockle collectors from entering the mangroves adjacent to the farm on the pretext that they were thieving shrimp. There were reports of trespassers being killed. Peter claimed the number was as high as 300 across three provinces. And mangroves themselves were being laid waste as the farms proliferated.
In 1996 he renounced the industry and returned to his home in Olmedo. He started working with the community to protect their health, livelihoods and environment, and this put him at loggerheads with the shrimp farm that had been built adjacent to the village. He claimed that the shrimp farm had ordered the destruction of community gardens, that its activities were contaminating the village water supply and poisoning fisheries and even that it had tried to exterminate green iguanas on the grounds that they were digging nest holes in the pond dykes and weakening them.
Protest action against the farm made him a marked man. Friendly messages began to reach him, saying he needed to be careful or something might happen to him. Four times since 1997 he has been obliged to leave the community because of such threats.
The threat to him is direct, but Peter believes the wellbeing of his entire community is at risk. The laws relating to environmental protection are explicit, but there is no institutional will to apply them, he said. “Big business can buy anybody off.”
I asked him what he thinks the future holds for him. “My future is decided,” he said. “It is to fight for mangroves and for the thousands of forcibly displaced families in the poor provinces where the industry flourishes.”
Peter Segura remains a stone in the shrimp farmers’ shoe.
The cockle collectors
May 16th, 2009A line of women walked across the mudflats in front of Tambillo village, carrying woven cockle baskets and coconut-palm smoke torches. There was laughter and gaiety, the esprit de corps of an expedition about to commence—despite the fact that these women have been making this expedition since childhood.
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Concheras at the cockle beds, about to climb the mangrove scaffold.
At the boat the owner checked off the names on his list as the concheras climbed aboard. He poured cups of fizzy drink, noting that down in his book as well. When everyone was aboard the boat headed for the mangroves, first crossing open water then navigating ever narrower channels until coming to a stop against a clump of prop roots.
Torches were lit and the concheras climbed up the root scaffold, pushing their way deeper into the forest. I joined them, orienteering across the strong, springy roots. I photographed for a while, then tried my luck. Unlike catching crabs, where you plunge your arm full length into the mud, with cockles you probe down only a hand’s depth until you feel the shell.
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Aracely among the mangrove roots with a cockle.
It took me several minutes to find a single cockle, and that was undersized. In the interests of replenishing the stock, concheras, in consultation with a biologist, have agreed to a minimum length of 45 mm—though they grumble about the fact that their decision to forego smaller cockles is not reflected in the price.
“We are being more selective and providing a higher quality product, so we should be paid more,” Aracely said.
There was little chance of that happening. Where middlemen control prices, producers don’t get such breaks.
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Conchera boat negotiates narrow mangrove channels.
I noticed that several concheras weren’t doing much better than I was. I didn’t hear any of the singing Aracely referred to, with the women calling out as they picked up each cockle. Today, it would have been a very slow song.
Later, back in San Lorenzo, Edgar Lemos was talking about how to create change in the economy of places like Tambillo, and how to improve the lot of the concheras. He used an expression that had particular resonance, given the clambouring around in the mangrove maze I had been doing that afternoon. “It is difficult to climb an old twisted tree. Better to plant a young tree and grow it straight.”
For change to come to the communities of the mangroves, the focus needs to be on the young: educating them and equipping them with options beside the traditional livelihoods and economic models. Clear-thinking, outspoken people like Aracely and Edgar are spearheading this move. I can only hope that the “young tree” they plant grows fast and strong.