Halfway between exotic travelogue and economics field report, John Ghazvinian’s book Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil is a terrific story about the next frontier in petroleum exploitation.

Africa has long been known to hold vast oil reserves in a few regions (principally along the western coast); but a mixture of obstacles have made these reserves unappealing (high population, at least compared to Arabia; powderkeg politics; fragile ecosystems; and very deep ocean floors for offshore drilling).

But long-term high oil prices, the spectre of terrorism, and increased competition for new leases from China and India—and the race is on for Africa’s Oil.

Ghazvinian travels from Nigeria to Angola to Sudan, among other places, visiting impoverished neighborhoods adjacent to compounds, skyscraper offices, and interviews people at all ends of the ladder.

Nigeria’s story was the most interesting—because it’s so wrapped up in all of Nigeria’s other problems. The gist of it is that the federal government and the local tribes have been quarrelling over the money for many years, with the most of the oil benefits accruing to the government, and disappearing in corruption.

Nigeria’s oil is concentrated in the delta of the Niger River, a singular patchwork of small waterways, jungles, and fishing villages on stilts. Transportation is by small boat in narrow creeks—which opens the door to guerilla attacks and vandalism.

Ghazvinian hires a boat into one of the villages, but has to travel in secret, because the government, the oil companies, and the rebel armies alike all take interest in foreign journalistic snooping.

The fishing villages are destitute, with their livelihood at stake whenever oil is spilled. Ghazvinian describes half-hearted public works projects sponsored by oil companies: foundations poured and never completed, and so on.

This is where the internet works best. Flickr user Justice In Nigeria Now! has published several images from the Delta (including both of these), which made me believe the stories a little more.

I’m back, after a four-week exile from my computer. Thanks for the patience! I’ll start up again on Monday.

My computer spent nearly a month in the shop, a period coinciding with my first month in grad school. During that time, the best I’ve been able to do is give you token reading material, written from infolabs and kiosks. It’s been unnerving to discover how dependent I am on fragile machines.

If you ever wanted a visual from outer space (courtesy of Google Maps) of the consequences of politics on land usage in the US, here's one: it's the boundary between the Menominee Indian Reservation (to the right) and the neighboring communities.

The Menominee resisted, at some cost to their short-term wealth, the lumbering craze of the late 19th century, as their ancient forest got clear-cut all around their small reservation. But over time, they've gotten much greater wealth from that same forest, through selective logging. After all, the wood from a three-foot-diameter tree is much more valuable than the same board-footage from one-foot-diameter trees.

Today, they operate a tribal college with an internationally recognized sustainable forestry program; when I visited a few years ago, students from East Asia were taking classes there.

I’ve just attended a series of terribly fascinating lectures on the geography of the Indian Ocean world—the area from the Zambezi River on north, through Swahili, Arab and Persian lands, to India and Southeast Asia.

Building off a terrific paper he wrote on the topic, professor André Wink was trying to correct two main errors in Western understanding of Asia:

• That stable landscapes are needed for stable societies; and
• That cities are the engines of civilization.

Especially when compared with the Mediterranean world, the Indian Ocean area has an incredibly unstable landscape. Catastrophic floods and Earthquakes, along with shifting rivers make for a very small number of permanently inhabited cities; the exception, perhaps, Varanasi.

Up until modern times, cities rarely lasted many centuries: Calicut, Malacca, Angkor: these are, for the most part, insignificant places today, and largely because of natural disasters.

Second point, related to the first: Cities have never looked, to visitors from Europe at least, like “cities”, until the 20th Century, that is. There was no real boundary between city and country; houses were made of perishable materials, and even the densest populated areas retained a degree of agriculture in the middle of all the hubbub. It makes more sense to speak of densely settled villages for most of Indian history. Hence the neologism “rurban”.

What this means, then, is that few cities are “eternal” like Rome. India is a massive graveyard of cities, and yet: Indian Civilization is unbroken from ancient times. What this means is that we have to drop our western prejudice toward cities as engines of civilization: Indian civilization wasn’t reliant on cities.

Wink proposes an alternate lens to replace the two he’s just done away with: the interplay between settlement and mobility. On two fronts—in sea-travel, and in nomadic grasslands and deserts—the collision between peasant societies and mobile societies provides the greatest impetus for change in this part of the world.

Once upon a time, a friend and I were discussing our entertainment-saturated culture, in which people increasingly seem to view themselves through the hypothetical lens of a camara, and we came to the question of authentic experience, which neither of us really understood, at the philosophical level, at least.

To the question, do we have authentic experiences anymore, we posed the crowd-and-tribal experience of a Badger home game (we were both living in Wisconsin at the time).

Is there any truth to that (or is that a bunch of humbug)? How important is a college football game?

[photo credit uwbadgers.com]

I recently stumbled upon an amazing quote on immigration, one which, although spoken to a European audience decades ago, holds true for other countries and other times.

In particular I'm thinking of Latin American labor in the United States, which has a history of nearly two centuries but has almost always been associated with backbreaking work. Or Chinese labor, famously along the railroads that made an empire out of the US.

Or most importantly, black slaves, who, once emancipated, refused to return to "Africa," whatever that meant. We built this country; it's ours too, they said.

Anyway, the quote. It's Max Frisch, a Swiss novelist.

We called laborers, but humans came instead.

 My grandfather died last night. It was in Hawaii, and he was in hospice care. I was told he'd wanted to be alone. 

I barely knew him; had only seen him once in the last twenty years. All this to say: I believe my duties here revolve more around my mother than around my grandfather. In any case, he's not having a funeral. There will be a bit of a ceremony at the VFW next summer.

The stages of life! Babies are born in all kinds of circumstances, from happy family occasions to shameful, lonely, finger-pointing situations; from fast and healthy to dangerous, premature and so on.

People die in all ways too, and I know so little about it. As a Christian, I have many beliefs about life and death, but I know enough to know that Christians have thought much more deeply about death than have I.

I'm a 34-year old grad student. Which is to say, I'm in a world where I'm among the most mature, and most experienced. Then I get little windows to see how little I really know.

I've been offline all week in the 21st century, with a broken computer. (Right now I'm standing at a kiosk in a library.) While these things happen, this difficult week has opened my eyes to the problems of folk who don't have computer access for real.

This week, I

• Couldn't pay my bills or do some banking business I needed to do;
• Couldn't do my homework (which consisted of posting a reply to a reading);
• Couldn't find out when to head to the bus stop;
• Couldn't register for a conference I need to attend; and
• Couldn't check the status of my computer's reparis.

This is not a navel-gazing complaint. Rather: since I enrolled in grad school, I've been repeatedly unnerved by the sheer gap in privilege between the world I now am part of, and the world of my neighborhood, which is mostly below-working-class.

During the several years I've lived in south Madison,

• I've been burgled,
• I've had cops run through my front yard with drawn handguns,
• I've gotten to know drug dealers and prostitutes at a personal level (the former used to plow the snow from my driveway, frustrating my simple attitudes about drug dealers).

I have as neighbors alcoholics, mentally disabled folk, underemployed folk, unemployable folk, convicted felons, and registered sex offenders. They're all here, because their problems (self-imposed or not) combine to push them into poorer, across-the-tracks neighborhoods like mine.

And throughout this time, I've never been unintentionally offline. I've always participated in the broader world, courtesy of the internet. But this last week has helped me understand my neighbors better, understanding above all the isolation of poverty.

I don't consider myself poor, although the government might consider me so, due to their hard-and-fast charts for measuring these things. I don't consider myself poor because we're here by choice (the location is convenient), and our low income is a function of choice (working for InterVarsity; working for our church, etc.). In an information age, in an age where most jobs require computer literacy (even applying for jobs at Wal-Mart means sitting at computer terminals to fill out forms), being stuck outside the information world is more consequential than I'd previously understood.

The FDIC lists 64 bank failures in the first seven months of 2009. That’s more than all the rest of this decade combined (49, including no failures at all in ’05 and ’06).

Most of these failures have been small local banks, heavily exposed to either the mortgage bubble (Sunbelt, especially) or the collapse of manufacturing (the Eastern Midwest).

There is something particularly alarming about a bank failure, because it whispers about our economic security in ways mass layoffs don’t.

How should Christians think and feel about bank failures?

Pictured: A run on the bank in 1907, from the New York Public Library

In a terrific first lecture in a class I’m taking on the history of modern European religious thought, my professor gave us two contrasting quotes. We're looking at Political Theology, and William Cavanaugh and Peter Scott write, in the introduction to their Blackwell Companion to Political Theology:

Political Theology is the analysis and criticism of political arrangements (including cultural-psychological, social and economic aspects) from the perspective of differing interpretations of God’s ways with the world (page x).

Believers might call this looking for God’s hand in our power relations; Unbelievers can track the exact same histories and call it the history of religious thought.

Mark Lilla, on the other hand, sees even the study of religion as amounting to letting in the back door the evils we (meaning the West, although Lilla is dangerously close to using the Royal We in the quote below) have with great effort successfully driven out the front door:

We find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up passions that leave societies in ruin (The Stillborn God, page 3).