August 1, 2026

If you've ever walked into a Post Office in the United States, you've probably seen posters for the "If it fits, it ships" campaign. The idea is that if you choose from a selection of standardized boxes, anything you can fit inside can be mailed for a fixed cost regardless of the weight. One of my favorite things about spending time in Sub-Saharan Africa is watching people take that principle to a whole new level with unparalleled ingenuity and determination.

As I walked home from the market today, I was passed by a full-grown milk cow and her calf standing in the bed of a pickup truck. It's not unusual to see towering piles of bamboo, crates of chickens, or even live goats slung across the back of bikes or motorcycles.

A few weeks ago, I watched with amazement as a man wove through traffic on a motorcycle carrying over a hundred eggs. They were packed into square plastic trays with divots for each egg, stacked two wide and at least eight layers high. This seemingly precarious cargo was strapped meticulously to the rack on the back of the motorcycle so that the load was perfectly cantilevered off each side. 

In short, if something needs to be moved here, it's moved with the minimum energy expenditure needed. I never fail to be amazed by the "can-do" outlook on transportation.

But let's return to the egg story for a minute. Those eggs were almost certainly traveling to a local market (soko) or small family-owned shop (duka) where they will be purchased (unpackaged) by local residents. Most of these people will be on a first-name basis with the seller. Most of these people won't have access to personal transportation, and will be riding home in community buses (daladalas) operated by local entrepreneurs. They'll return with staple foods like avocados, papayas, bananas, mangoes, greens, tomatoes, onions, cornmeal, rice, lentils, beans, peanuts, whole spices, and free-range meats that have all been grown or raised within a 1-2 hour travel radius. That's about how far a farmer or livestock owner can practically travel to sell their wares multiple times a week without personal transportation.

And this isn't something unique to the region where I'm living. For all but a few traditional foods that are predominantly produced in specific areas of the country (like dried sardines from Lake Victoria, oranges from the Tanga Region, or cashews from Mtwara), the foodsheds here are generally small and the transportation is communal. 

It's kind of funny to think that in the United States, farm-to-table restaurants charge a premium for foods grown nearby. There are entire festivals dedicated to celebrating local agriculture, and effectively, to shifting social norms towards making "eating local" and "knowing your farmer" a trendy thing. 

Fortune 500 companies pay consulting firms millions in contract dollars every year to establish complex software and reporting systems to track the carbon footprint and environmental impacts of their supply chain. They measure and analyze everything from vehicle miles driven to factory emissions to waste water release and come up with lengthy strategic plans to reduce these. 

Cities make public buses free or offer discounted light-rail passes to incentivize people to stop commuting down crowded highways in near-empty vehicles. There are behavior change campaigns dedicated to discouraging people from running to the store for a gallon of milk in a half-ton pick-up truck or 4x4 SUV, and raising awareness of the environmental impacts of making energy-use decisions that are entirely out of proportion to the task at hand.

In short, it seems like in the Global North (a.k.a. Minority World) we've overshot the mark. We created counter-productive or downright dysfunctional systems, and now we're having to try to figure out how to make a major course correction. It's proving extremely difficult and costly to retrench, to scale back, to alter deeply-embedded systems and ways of thinking that have a lot of inertia behind them. Entire cities have been built around wasteful energy and water use, inefficient land use, and energy-intensive food systems, and generations of people have been raised in these contrived environments. 

So it's understandably hard to convince many Americans that eating local or using communal transit is worth the extra effort and inconvenience. To persuade consumers to avoid single-use packaging. To incentivize Fortune 500 companies to care about their environmental and social impacts because of the global consequences if they don't. We're having to reengineer not only infrastructure but social norms to fit a different reality. We're doing this in the desperate hope of reaching some kind of stable state that could be sustained into the future. 

Here in Tanzania, I see so much opportunity to avoid these painful and costly course-adjustments. Many things are already being done in a more sustainable and equitable way. Roadsides, neighborhoods, and farm edges bursting with native plant species. Low food miles. Wholesome diets rich with fresh ingredients. Social networks that effectively facilitate food-sharing. Energy-efficient transportation options for goods and people. 

All of this gives me a lot of hope. Hope that Tanzania and other African countries will find a straighter path to sustainability and human wellbeing. And hope that they'll channel the kind of out-of-the-box ingenuity and determination that can balance dozens of eggs on a motorcycle into finding solutions that inspire the rest of the world to see possibility instead of obstacles.

To join me on this journey, you can follow along with new posts in the Field Notes blog on this website or LinkedIn. I am in Tanzania on a Critical Language Scholarship for Summer 2026. My research is currently supported by the Center for Human-Carnivore Coexistence, a P.E.O. Scholar Award, and a Center for Collaborative Conservation Fellowship. I am actively fundraising for the next phase of my research, and welcome referrals to funders who are interested in supporting work on global challenges including human-wildlife conflict, poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation, and the impacts of a changing climate on all of these issues.

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