Valuating a Forest

It was very inspiring to read this Wired story about Aforestt. The idea of afforestation is hardly new. However, the idea of using tools learned in car manufacturing to accelerate the process does have a certain ingenuity about it. But not everyone who read it was impressed. Part of one comment I found quite compelling :

..the core mission of this company is to turn an entire *forest* into a commodity—not just the wood in a forest—the whole thing. What that essentially does is take a thing that is traditionally viewed to be priceless and now attaches a valuation to it. We would be remiss to view forests as anything other than priceless, and that's what this guy is hoping to achieve.

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Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

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Heartcrossings

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