EcoExplorers Madagascar 2010 from Shannon Kohlitz on Vimeo.

Here we are past July’s time for fleece, hat and socks, wouldn’t you believe! Manintsy – cold (25/16 °C day/night or less) was the semiarid southwest Madagascar in winter; winter in the dry southwest where ‘it never rains’. Well, never say ‘never’ and/or be prepared for rain in the no rain season and for beautiful double rainbows arching gently over the glowing morning skies….

Since our last update in February, ho avy has been on a ‘high season rainbow ride’ – exciting in a way, admittedly speedy and bumpy some of the time – more like a downhill slalom race against time, where falling over exposed tree roots is unavoidable. Retrospectively, it’s been a valuable growing time: our trees are growing and we are growing with them.

We especially enjoyed the rainbow of colors left behind the pens, pencils and brushes of Eco-Explorers – talented undergraduate students of the University of Michigan’s School of Art and Design. These young students overflowing with creativity came to Madagascar expecting no rain. Although they got some, they seemed to greatly enjoy this mad ride, and so did we on ho avy & Madagascar Eco-Explorers’ tour and project service work in Ranobe.

A double rainbow morning

Some truly beautiful pieces of art were born on this three week long trip from mid May to June, exploring Madagascar and spending five days doing projects with ho avy in Ranobe. The students painted two interpretation panels: one for the native tree nursery and another one for the reforestation research center. Several oxen carts (and finally also oxen horns) were colorfully painted. Without doubt, the favorite motif is Star Wars. With pride this cart has been riding to the next village and the city of Toliara! Bar relief sculpturing on adobe walls on the reforestation center has adaptively used the wet walls leaving our planned spiny forest mural for another occasion in the future. A treadle pump for easier and playful water access has been built during the days of the group visit and another one completed in even shorter time by one volunteering student staying beyond the expedition.

Bar relief

Deep impressions have anchored in minds and hearts of these young people exploring Madagascar on their first step out of their secure homelands into the unknown. Madagascar is quite an experience.

Wildlife theme on centre

The 19-person art student group was the largest we’ve hosted in Ranobe since last December, adding significantly to the 4 Czech, 2 American, 1 French, 4 Israeli, and 2 Spanish visitors already spending several weeks with us – sharing their skills and expertise to advance various aspects of our program, from forest habitat description, GIS to business development. They have been a refreshing change for ho avy as well as our hosting community.

The most recent partner of ho avy was a team of four engineering masters students from the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan (www.hazomanga.org), who came to Madagascar with the group of the art students. The engineers give sustainable energy assessments and make conservation management recommendations. They collected solar data, built housing for ho avy’s solar system, designed and built a solar dryer, water filter and evaluated the feasibility of biofuels. The students interviewed the Ranobe community on wood, charcoal and water use issues. Mapping of land use, deforestation and forest recovery, set a good ground for a long-term monitoring research. Being a well organized, dynamic and enthusiastic team with women in majority, they creatively filled their free time with experimental baking in our solar box oven. Banana bread, chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin cookies, among others, turned out being delicious field yummies. Nicely done!

Clair, Brennen and Olivia taking solar data

Patty and Brennen constructing solar dryer

Ho avy’s daily interactions with the villagers since October 2009, with international visitors and cultural and language exchange, have been raising environmental awareness and building capacity. Needless to say, information starvation and curiosity is apparent among villages of all age groups. Ho avy has been collaborating with the GTZ and Sokapila organizations on implementing the Kit Mad’ere, a tool introducing environmental education to schools and community. A workshop was held in early April for teachers from the schools in Ranobe and Ambolimalailaka. In March, ho avy organized a workshop to improve farming methods: introducing the system of rice intensification (SRI). The workshop has been well attended and the method is now practiced on several FIMPAHARA fields.

Olivia with Tsiforse and Malai mapping deforestation

Improved and alternative technologies brought by ho avy seem to get adopted: the fuel efficient stove was in full operation, the biogas digester has been producing methane for the ladies to cook with for several months now. The output of the biogas digester is an excellent fertilizer and FIMPAHARA used it for their crop fields. Ho avy’s well, installed in December last year got a manual pump and has been in non-stop use by the villagers. Results of interviews show, the pump is greatly appreciated for easing everyday chores. The solar box oven has not had a break and delicious variations of bread, cakes, muffins, or roasted peanuts for snacks indicate a growing appreciation of solar energy as a passive cooking option.

Housing for solar panels designed by the MSc students

Speaking of solar – ho avy’s solar system is now located on the second floor of ho avy’s research center. Ho avy spiny forest research center will generate knowledge about how to conserve biodiversity through research, sustainable development and forest restoration. The center has been under construction over the last months – largely natural building, designed by Anthony, who has worked closely on it with the FIMPAHARA men. The building progress has been exciting, considering the tool limitations, e.g. a non-functional drill, so much of the building was done creatively – by hand and off the grid, with local wood, rock, roofing material, bamboo and adobe mix. The building is not far from being completed; we plan for an inauguration by the end of this year. The center’s surroundings are developing into a demonstration site of integrated sustainability, home gardening, multi-crop plots, agroforestry and more.

Agroforestry has been our focus activity since March. We raised fruit trees along with native trees in three tree nurseries on an area of 184 m2. Nearly 10 000 native trees and 5500 fruit and multi-purpose trees have been nurtured. FIMPAHARA collected 75 species of native and 5 non-native species for medicines, non-invasive fast wood propagation and oil-rich seeds. Up to June 2010 over 800 native and 750 fruit trees have been planted on 1.35 ha of FIMAHARA land: on edges of forest, in agroforestry polyculture plots and in live fences/hedges. Jointly with FIMPAHARA, we planted diverse fruit trees on ca 3 ha of crop fields. These efforts, i.e. planting indigenous and fruit species on disturbed forest edges and reforesting in belts, aim to assist ecological forest recovery. We want to create ‘ecotones’ (transitional habitats) favoring wildlife colonization and assisting seed dispersal. Planted trees have been monitored for survival and growth.

Just hanging out in the village

The local community has been enthusiastic to participate and support these agroforestry trials. The planted species included native fruit trees ofen harvested from the forest, locally planted bananas, papaya, mango, guava, lemons and tamarinds and tested varieties of species that are on the market, but not grown in Ranobe, such as litchi, clementine and orange, cashew, annona, passion fruit, pomegranate, avocado, loquat, date and coconut palms.

The community helps build the reforestation center

Ho avy’s involvement on site for the last quarters of a year has been an invaluable experience which allowed observing and figuring seasonality in terms of food growing. One has to skin-experience it, especially when coming from completely different climate. By living through the ‘cold’ parts of the year – we got it right now with April/May potato planting time. Besides potatoes, 1 ha of garden has onion and garlic, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, red beets and radishes, carrot and parsley, basil, lettuce, spinach, swiss chard, a variety of beans, peanuts, sesame, flex, several kinds of squash and melons. A few sunflowers have made our gardening efforts more cheerful. Malagasy people like rice, but they also like flowers and so do we. This is indeed a very exciting step forward to community-scale gardening, greater diversity of food production and important dietary supplements, that have been largely lacking.

Watering the nursery

For filling these gaps, we need to continue our mission; we let the exciting energy of the upcoming spring enter: rising temperatures, new beautiful flowers and fresh leaves or magnificent courtships of birds, bring inspiration to the next phase of ho avy’s efforts in Ranobe. We have a few exciting goals and future prospects and will mobilize our efforts to reach them before this year’s end, moving step by step towards a sustainable future. Stay tuned if you’d like to hear more in few months….

Photo galleries:

• Forest, wildlife and research
• Eco-Explorer’s art student trip
• MSc. students
• Ho avy and community interactions
• Technical alternatives
• Center construction
• Nursery, agroecology, agroforesty & gardening

During my two week immersion into permaculture design, Bill Mollison was asked by a student, "How do we go about teaching permaculture to our children?” to which Bill replied something along the lines of, “I don’t believe we should be teaching Permaculture to children. They already have enough on their plates in terms of responsibilities and such, so we shouldn’t overburden them with yet another subject.”

True enough, if you take permaculture as the full 72-hour course that we adults tend towards. But I approach the idea that teaching children permaculture is vitally important to the sustainability of life itself and needs to be taught to youths so that by the time they are adults, permaculture is no longer a subject, but a way of life that is as natural as breathing.

But how would we go about uploading The Permaculture Designers Manual into the minds of our youths without overburdening their grey matter? Exactly the same way that farmers (1) are learning Permaculture – a bit at a time, with small bite sized chunks of drip fed information, with an emphasis on tacit learning. My son’s school has done their part in this by going for the low hanging fruit, the easy beginners’ steps of sustainability;

• Rainwater tanks all over the place, so many of them I lost count and the larger ones are connected to the subsurface irrigation system on the sports field. No swales though…
• Vegetable gardens for the children to learn about where food actually comes from and how to grow it. Other schools have taken this step even further with a Kitchen Garden Program
• Teaching about biodiversity; what it means, why it’s important, and how can we go about achieving it in our area? The NSW Government has provided fantastic teaching resources for this subject. They are covering subjects such as; the web of life, habitats and homes, ecosystems, vertebrates, invertebrates, food chains and webs and vertical layers of habitats.

Now these simple elements are not Permaculture as such, but they are a fantastic place to start and they will sow the seed within their generation for them to make the necessary changes for a sustainable planet.

I should probably point out that that my son is not at high school. He is only 7 and has already begun walking the path to sustainability. If he and his class mates can do it, then there is hope for us all.

Notes:

1. You would simply be amazed how well farmers are warming to elements of Permaculture. More on that next time.

Further Reading/Watching:

• Solving All the Problems of the World – in a Garden
• Scary school nightmares and de-schooling society

Resources:

• Eat Your Garden – Organic Gardening for Home and Schools
• Seed to Seed – Food Gardens in Schools

Preamble: Described as ‘the champagne of tea’, Sri Lankan tea is consumed the world over. Second only to Kenya in exports, Sri Lanka’s tea industry accounts for a full 15% of the nation’s GDP, generating about $700 million per year. Yet very little of this money is seen by the people actually producing it…. Tea plantation workers are trapped in low paid manual labour positions and live in miserable housing conditions, while people around the globe slurp on the fruit of their misery. Sarvodaya has its work cut out to try to assist, but they’re giving it a good try.

Sri Lankan tea plantation worker
All photographs © copyright Craig Mackintosh

Winding up into the south-central highlands of Sri Lanka was refreshing – taking us from temperatures pushing 40′C to a pleasant 24-ish. In contrast to the more arid south and north of the country, this hilly terrain, which hosts dozens of Sri Lanka’s world famous tea plantations, attracts significantly more precipitation and cooler temperatures.

Tea has been grown in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon, as named by the British colonialists) for more than 130 years. In the 1860s, after a rust fungus decimated the coffee plantations that previously majored there, tea quickly took over as the crop of choice. Although produced in several lowland regions in the south of the country as well, it’s the leaves from the tea estates of these higher altitudes that are particularly sought after for their exceptional quality in taste and colour.

Tea plantations in the central highlands of Sri Lanka

While the scenery was exceptional and the climate pleasant, anyone with half a heart who might head off the beaten tourist path in this district would find much injustice to dampen the mood….

We pass through a small town as we climb up into the mountains

A village rests on a hill above a giant waterfall
in the high watershed of Sri Lanka’s central highlands

Life sucks for the average tea plantation worker

Unlike other Sarvodaya endeavours – where entire villages reassess what’s really important in life and then work together to implement positive change on land under their control – Sarvodaya faces a much greater challenge here, with the people they’re trying to assist being low paid peasant tenants on state owned, industry controlled estates.

Across Sri Lanka women are often discriminated against, but on the tea plantations this tendency is even more pronounced. Tea plucking is assigned to women and girls, only, with the girls starting as young as twelve years old. They, along with their males, are accommodated in barracks of one or two room ‘line houses’ (which I was not allowed to view or photograph) with extremely basic amenities – normally without running water, electricity, sanitation facilities and often even without windows. Six to eleven family members may live together in a single room. Privacy and sexual harassment is thus also a significant problem, resulting in a higher than normal suicide rates amongst the women.

Pluckers are paid by the quantity they harvest, earning about 200 rupees per day (US$1.75) from working 7:30am to 5-5:30pm. In the peak season they will work these hours seven days per week for up to three months, slowing to 3-4 days per week in the off-season. In the dim light or darkness before and after work the women must also cater to the needs of their families – looking for firewood with which to cook their meals, etc. This burden is offset a little by having even younger girls attend to domestic duties during the daylight hours.

Men fare slightly better – they’ll earn about the same amount for working less hours, weeding, logging and planting from 7:30am to 1:30pm, and can earn a little more again from other tasks after that. Men are responsible for collecting not only their own wage, but also that of their wives and daughters….

At the end of their working life workers are paid a small, lump sum pension payment – after which they’re at the mercy of their extended family.

Article continues after photos.

Women queuing at 5pm to register their day’s work at the estate office…

…both young…

…and old…

…before being trucked to a different part of the estate
– to work a little more before the day closes.

Mostly illiterate and unskilled, workers have little hope of escaping to a more equitable or meaningful life. All the estates pay the same rate, so trying to transfer to one of the other (roughly 500) plantations in the country is pointless. The industry retains its labour force, not through incentives or reward, but by paying them so inadequately that they just cannot leave.

As most have little to no land or time available to cultivate much in the way of their own food, they’re fully dependent on this wholly unjust money system.

‘Fair Trade’

The particular estate I visited had the apparent dual advantage of being ‘fair trade’ in addition to Sarvodaya’s involvement. When questioning the women on the benefits brought by the estate’s fair trade status, however, my disgust with many fair trade claims was further cemented. After much contemplation, the women said the fair trade organisation had provided school bags for their children, and a couple of very small buildings for religious services. Wahoo! Convinced they must have done more, I pressed different individuals during the course of my visit, asking in different ways in the hope of prying more information out. I signally failed to discover anything more that ‘fair trade’ had done to improve their lot. The one thing they did confirm was that they were not paid more than workers on other estates.

That should give you that nice warm, fuzzy feeling the next time you pay a premium to pick up fair trade Sri Lankan tea at your local market, hey?

When escorted into the estate’s leaf processing factory I was told I must put my camera away. When querying the reason, I was informed that the last person to take pictures there, a year prior I believe, returned to her homeland, Germany, and the pictures went into a German newspaper report that didn’t make the ‘fair trade’ organisation happy at all…. The result of the article was not an improvement of worker conditions, but a ban on further photographs in the building.

Sarvodaya, the people’s movement, more effective

When asked about Sarvodaya’s involvement, however, they were far more enthusiastic. One middle aged and heavily calloused women clearly stated "Sarvodaya has much more value to us than fair trade".

One of the first tangible benefits Sarvodaya has brought was to provide (with international donors financing it and the estate workers and Sarvodaya volunteers providing the labour), clean drinking water – through a gravity fed system that filters the water and pipes it directly to tanks on top of the line houses. As you might imagine, carrying water great distances in your ‘free’ time, when working such long shifts, would be a major chore. This single low-tech design implementation is, on its own, of immense value to the tenant families.

In addition Sarvodaya has, just like in other Sarvodaya villages, encouraged and helped the women to form committees to address specific needs, and has encouraged the estate managers to open estate management up to input from the same. Of the estates Sarvodaya are involved in, up to fifty percent of the labourers are now members of committees which directly influence estate management. Wage increases don’t enter into the discussion at this point, but other aspects that directly effect their quality of life do – including developing greater respect for women by all.

Sarvodaya is working to improve the estates’ health situations – currently farm accidents and other medical issues can be traumatic and deadly due to delays and lack of medical support and resources – and is also providing micro financing for some to begin small cottage industries. On this particular estate, some of the families that had lived there for generations had tiny portions of garden space, which Sarvodaya was assisting them with to develop a little food security as well.

It seems clear that a grass roots, participatory democracy people’s movement will always be more effective than top down, industry- and self-interest controlled, consumer-pandering financial mechanisms. The self-interest foundation of capitalism ensures funds trickle, or flood, to the people with power, not the people who need it or have earned it.

A peaceful revolution?

When I first arrived at the estate I was welcomed like a king. Warm smiles and enthusiastic hand shaking ensued before I was prominently seated in a small room with more than 15 other women and just a few men – one a rather apprehensive looking fair trade representative. A wooden bowl was produced, a finger dipped into it, and a Tilaka painted onto my forehead. Then a floral necklace, reminiscent of the Hawaiian Lei, but made of plastic, was placed over my head and around my neck. To complete the welcome they all sang a song in unison. I worked hard to project appreciation and not reveal my inner embarrassment for such a show of attention.

Talking with them all, I felt so out of touch with the realities of their life, and yet as a westerner accustomed to some degree of (at least perceived) independence, I felt a deep frustration for the way these people are forced to live. Short of suicide, they truly have little chance to escape their onerous existence.

After speaking a while and hearing their situation and their views, with my frustration deepening, I couldn’t help but broach the topic of ’systemic management change’ and/or land redistribution. Could they envision a more equitable profit-share scenario, where workers co-owned the estate and benefitted from its development?

"No, we can’t see our instigating a revolution", one said, as they all broke into a smile.

"What then, do you see for the future?"

"We put our hopes in our children" another shared, with others nodding in agreement.

They told me that Sarvodaya is helping support the education of their children, giving hope that these will go on to achieve more, become politically and legally active, and potentially overturn the system they were born into. Sarvodaya’s leadership training has seen not a few underprivileged young people go on to become teachers, lawyers and even judges. This, combined with the Sarvodaya philosophy of ‘progress/welfare for all’, has the potential, they believe, to stimulate positive pressure on their situation.

In Part II of this series I shared the meaning of the words ‘Sarvodaya Shramadana’, the name of the people’s movement I’ve been documenting. It is, essentially, "the awakening and uplift/progress/welfare of all". In the context of the modern day feudalism and effective slavery occurring at these tea estates, the words might well also be transliterated into, simply, ‘a peaceful revolution’?

Stay tuned for Part X….

But, not stopping on the negative, Rhamis goes on to show some of the exciting movements within Detroit that these circumstances are giving life to. Out of necessity, people are working to increase their resiliency and quality of life – turning the problem of Detroit into a solution. Rhamis joins the dots between our socio-economic problems and the environmental catastrophes taking place, and begins to look through the lens of permaculture to see how we can turn things around by imitating natural systems to create low- to no-impact societies that don’t operate on the boom-and-bust model that present day Detroit is arguably the most striking example of.

Duration: 82 minutes

Part way through the talk Rhamis presents the following Urban Roots film trailer. I’ll put it below for convenience. To jump back to where the trailer below (higher quality) ends in the video above, click on 31:40 on progress bar above.

Some people think the permaculture flower is a remnant of the hippie’s flower power movement, or that it has something to do with New Age – just another consumerism idea to be sold to the confused and rich people of the middle classes. Oh no, the ‘flower power’ of the permaculture flower has real power. It has the power to reunite humanity with the complex systems of nature, so they can live in symbiosis, enriching each other. Nothing else possesses this power.

The petals’ colours are given by the pattern languages they cover. These adapt to place and culture, giving the flower a local color. The seven petals together support all aspects of life. It is not just a flower of beauty, or with a pleasant smell. No, this flower can provide you with everything you need, for all aspects of life. Nothing else I know can do that.

In the core you find what are most valuable, the basic ethics and the guiding principles. The core is like the heart of the flower; every permaculture design has its origin here. The evolutionary spiral path is the sign of the permaculture flower – it’s visionary, integrated into its genes. It starts with ethics and design principles, and it starts with you at a local level. The path is then moving outward connecting all the fields of the society into integrated patterns and pattern languages, making the world a living whole. And this spiral is eternal, like evolution is.

Even though I’m not a permaculture designer I’ve put some consideration into these guiding principles. Before I learned about permaculture these thoughts were hidden from me, but when I see the world from a permaculture perspective it looks different. Very different. But keep in mind these are just some loose thoughts from me, a deeper understanding are to be found at David Holmgren’s home page.

Observe and Interact

Good design starts with observation and interaction with place and history. Here we see the difference between permaculture projects and other projects – the time and energy spent to observe and understand the patterns of time and place, before implementing any new design. This is why I set up a list of criteria that should be met before you invest your time or money in a project. For example, an aid project:

1. The project is using time and energy in observing the patterns of place, nature, culture, community and history. This is done in cooperation with the native people they are intended to help.
2. The project is paying a lot of respect to the patterns of place, nature, culture, community and history, being very careful not to disturb any of these patterns, and that any new systems of design will enrich and strengthen the existing patterns.
3. The project leader should be skilled / experienced in decoding and implementing patterns.

Design from Patterns to Details

In a pattern language you start with the whole and put in the details as you go, if not the whole cannot evolve.

Every pattern has to be unfolded; a living process is by nature morphogenetic, using generative codes. A flower is made this way and nature works this way to avoid trillions of errors – errors that unavoidably occur if you try to force a design upon nature or a community.

If an embryo were shaped by fabrication, and not generated, the number of mistakes would be unbelievably large.

The human embryo is created by 50 doubling of cells. Starting with a single cell (the fertilized egg), after 50 doublings, the embryo has 250 cells. During this doubling process that occurs 50 times, each cell has the opportunity to adapt itself, and to remove possible mistakes by position, adaption, pushing and pulling. The total number of opportunities for correction, then, in the growing embryo, is (1+2+2²+2³+….2⁵⁰) = 2⁵¹. Reversing the argument, we may express this by saying that the assembly of embryo cells, if not given a chance for adaption and instead made by design and fabrication, would typically have 2⁵¹ mistakes – a truly enormous number, roughly 10¹⁵, or a thousand trillion mistakes. That is what would happen if an embryo were designed and built, not generated. If an embryo were built from a blueprint of a design, not generated by an adaptive process, there would inevitably be one thousand trillion mistakes. Because of its history as a generated structure, there are virtually none. – The Process of Creating Life, by Christopher Alexander, page 187-188

And the fundamental answer is, that there is a fundamental law about the creation of complexity, which is visible and obvious to everyone – yet this law is, to all intents and purposes, ignored in 99% of the daily fabrication process of society. The law states simply this: ALL the well-ordered complex systems we know in the world, all those anyway that we review as highly successful, are GENERATED structures, not fabricated structures.” – The Process of Creating Life, by Christopher Alexander, page 180

Always keep this in mind; a living structure cannot be fabricated, it has to be generated!

Integrate Rather than Segregate

The core of the pattern practice is to integrate rather than segregate. This means to use and value diversity, all in a meaningful relationship with each other. A completely integrated pattern language produces no waste, especially by not wasting human capital, which is the largest waste problem in our western societies. Our so called “modern societies” produce almost nothing but waste, and the more waste, the more “modern” according to most political and economical theory. Even recycling, which for the most part means downcycling, is mainly a waste of time and energy. See also.

A modern city like Brasilia is based on the completely opposite – segregate rather than integrate – which is the core of modernism. And this is a tragedy, because this is the opposite of an integrated life, and to live an integrated life is the meaning of life.

The world’s leading anti modernist, Christopher Alexander, has dedicated his life to creating an integrated world, which means a world that consists of a deep wholeness. Just take a look at pattern 9 in A Pattern Language.

Conflict

The artificial separation of houses and work creates intolerable rifts in people’s inner lives.

Resolution

Use zoning laws, neighborhood planning, tax incentives, and any other means available to scatter workplaces throughout the city. Prohibit large concentrations of work, without family life around them. Prohibit large concentrations of family life, without workplaces around them.

There is nothing I despise more than these monocultures of houses so common today; I hate them even more than lawns. To make the situation even worse are houses ordered in rows, like a plantation of houses, every house separated from one another, while in nature most things are ordered in clusters or guilds. Urban and rural design should have been based on house clusters.

Conflict

People will not feel comfortable in their houses unless a group of houses forms a cluster, with the public land between them jointly owned by all the householders.

Resolution

Arrange houses to form very rough but identifiable clusters of 8 to 12 households around some common land and paths. Arrange the clusters so that anyone can walk through them, without feeling like a trespasser.

Why can’t people understand that monocultures make life monotone?!?

The opposite of this madness is the ecovillage, but because of individualism (which today is identical with consumerism) and sectorialism (most visible in bureaucracy), people find it almost impossible to create something so nice today.

Still, my dream is someday to live in an ecovillage by Lake Mjøsa.

Use Small and Slow Solutions

Using small and slow solutions is maybe the most neglected principle today. There is a lot of talk about renewable energy and green technology, but almost nothing about using small and slow solutions, which could have been the most important solution. I recently learned that the amount of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas consumed every year within the European Union equals 12000 times the annual hydro power production of Norway. Where in the world is the EU going to get 12000 Norway’s worth of renewable energy to replace this? Maybe we have to reintroduce the slave trade, because this abuse of fossil fuels equals roughly 1000 energy slaves for each one of us.

Our large and fast solutions are enormously resource hungry, and not just for energy. For example, the amount of macadam necessary for the EU infrastructure equals 10 – 15 tons for every person every year. With an average life span at ca 75 years this means 750 – 1125 tons per person. Try to crush 1000 tons of granite by using a sledge hammer, and you might get an idea about how dependent we are upon fossil fuels to sustain our lifestyle.

Quite a lot of this is taken from the Norwegian mountains. When they find a proper mountain close to the Sea they produce the macadam this way:

First they drill a vertical hole down to sea level, where they make a cave inside the mountain for the crushing mill. Then they start crushing the mountain from above in a large circle around the hole, into which they pour the bigger stones going to the crushing mill. The macadam is transported from here to a ship – one ship every week. The hollowing of the mountain is placed in such a way that it’s not visible from the sea, so not disturbing the mountain’s profile and the tourists view from a cruise ship.

I came to think that our “modern societies” are like these mountains, just an illusion.

Much of this macadam is mixed with asphalt, and this way the people of Europe drive on the top of the Norwegian mountains every day, not even giving it a thought.

But macadam is also used as a bed for pipelines all over the continent, for transporting water and sewage in huge systems. Here where I live they catch the water from ca 200 meters below the surface of Lake Mjøsa, from where they pump it to people living up to 400 meters above the lake. For some of these remote dwellings there is no pipeline for the sewer, so they pump it into trucks driving it down to the sewage cleaning plants from where the water is finally pumped back to Lake Mjøsa.

You maybe call this a sick pattern, but it’s not a pattern at all, because a pattern is something which is in a meaningful connection with something else.

Part of the solution is pattern 178, a compost toilet. This small and slow solution uses no energy at all, still producing both compost and negawatts. Small and slow solutions produce a lot of negawatts – saving megawatts – the easiest way to “produce” new energy. In some countries 30-40% of the energy consumed by society is invested into the delivery of potable water and the removal of sewage. Pumping fluids is extremely energy intensive.

In addition about half of the 15 million tons of phosphorus exploited each year ends up in the oceans. Much of this flushed down the toilet. The world’s known phosphorus reserves can only supply us for another 30 – 80 years.

Our “modern societies” are almost completely running off large and fast solutions. Small and slow is mostly laughed at, as if they were romantic little dreams with no connection to reality.

Small and slow solutions give people control back over their own lives, and in this way giving them back their dignity. Large and fast solutions are left in the hands of specialised ‘experts’ only, destroying the dignity and responsibility of ordinary people.

I cannot think about anything more packed with small and slow solutions than an earthship. It’s a completely integrated system, ready to meet the collapse of our large and fast solutions – a collapse that is getting closer every day.

The symbol of this principle is a snail, known for its slow speed and small house. More than ever it is time for going to the snail to become wise.

Use Edges and Value the Marginal

Here I’ll just say a little about the last part of this principle – to value the marginal. The word marginal has many meanings. I’ll concentrate on the meaning “not of central importance” for the beauty of the area. This according to pattern 104, site repair:

Conflict

Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best.

Resolution

On no account place buildings in the places which are most beautiful. In fact, do the opposite. Consider the site and its buildings as a single living eco-system. Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, conformable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are least pleasant now.

I hardly think anything has destroyed the beauty of our world more than the violence against this pattern. It’s horrible to see how the rich and privileged people have put their holiday residences and mansions at the most beautiful spots along the Oslo Fjord. And this way they destroy both the beauty of the fjord and the access for ordinary people to these places.

We, the permaculture people, are designated to heal our world. This is why we should pay a special attention to this pattern.

But still I’m just a permaculturist by heart, not by diploma, so please forgive me my limited understanding. I have just started my walk at the evolutionary spiral path of permaculture. How I wish I had been given this path by birth. And please, share the permaculture flower, so that the world can recover. Let us create a new kind of world, a world sustained by real flower power.

There are two very unique and exciting opportunities to learn Permaculture Design and obtain your certification in Kenya this coming December of 2010 or in March of 2011. Students from around the world are invited to join local Kenyan students and International permaculture teacher and designer, Warren Brush, of Quail Springs Learning Oasis and Permaculture Farm and other teachers from the local culture for this learning journey of a lifetime.

Nyumbani Village

In December of 2010, we will be convening the first course at a village outside of Nairobi called Nyumbani Village. This village stands on one thousand acres of land donated by the Kitui District County Council. The site is within the poorest division in the Kitui District and has a high incidence of HIV and a high number of HIV orphans. When complete, the Village will accommodate approximately 1000 orphans and 100 grandparents living in 100 dwelling units each with a grandparent and 8 – 10 children.

The Village provides a family-like setting for orphaned children under the stewardship of elderly adults and seeks to ensure that the children receive love, sustenance, health-care, holistic education and culture transfer, aiming for their physical, psychosocial and spiritual development, and, at the same time, providing holistic care and support for the grandparents in their later years. Through group homes and community services, the Village seeks to harness the energy of youth and the maturity of elders to create new blended families that foster healing, hope and opportunity. The village also seeks to ensure that the residents in the surrounding communities reach a certain level of self-reliance through the Village sustainability program.

They are ripe and ready for permaculture education to take root in their development process. Local teacher, Joseph Ntunyoi, from the Maasai tribe, will be assisting Warren Brush in the teaching of this course along with an up and coming teacher Ayouba Kamara from Liberia as well as with other special guests.

Badilisha Village

The second course is in March of 2011 at a village development called Badilisha Ecovillage on Rusinga Island on Lake Victoria. Badilisha has been organized by local people to make valuable lasting contributions to the social, economic, emotional, mental, spiritual and physical health of the people and ecology of Rusinga Island in Kenya

The good people at Badilisha Ecovillage are well on their way in establishing a community from which Earth Care and environmental conservation is supported by conscious design and application. They are growing food using permaculture principles, they are working to establish a resource centre for local residents to learn about sustainability through various projects and programs and they are working to improve the economies of the island by developing ecotourism. Their work spans working with school programs, teaching and practicing non-violent communication, assisting people with HIV, and they run a family sponsorship program for the extremely disadvantaged people of their region. This course will be taught by Warren Brush and assisted by local teacher Evans Owuor Odula and international teachers Elin Lindhagen and Loren Luyendyk.

At each of these visionary sites, we will be offering an affordable full two-week permaculture design certification course that will blend both local students with international students in a unique cross-cultural learning environment. These courses will incorporate myriad hands-on learning opportunities with practical permaculture theory and storytelling that is delivered uniquely by Warren Brush and the local teachers.

To keep within our ethics, we are asking that the students who cross the oceans to get to this course also commit to offsetting their carbon emissions for their travel to get to Kenya through designing and applying what they learn in the course. For the local students, we are asking them to commit to taking what they learn in these courses to their communities through applied projects that better the lives and ecologies of their home regions.

May our work in Permaculture around the globe continue to bring healing to place and people as it provides abundance, resilience and stability to our strained world!

Take a PDC in Kenya (PDF) or donate, either way will help to underwrite the course expenses so that local Kenyans can participate without cost….

~~~~

Warren Brush is a certified Permaculture designer and teacher as well as a mentor and storyteller. He has worked for over 20 years in inspiring people of all ages to discover, nurture and express their inherent gifts while living in a sustainable manner. He is co-founder of Quail Springs Learning Oasis & Permaculture Farm, Wilderness Youth Project, Mentoring for Peace, and Trees for Children. He works extensively in Permaculture education and sustainable systems design in North America and in Africa through his design firm, True Nature Design. He can be reached through email at w (at) quailsprings.org or by calling his office at 805-886-7239.

Tongue-in-cheek instructional video

Note: This is an update on PRI’s position and direction, and an opportunity for you to get paid to help!

The short version: We’re now paying you to write for us! Click here to get started.

The background/long version follows:

Over the last two years since I took over the running of this site, I’ve been pleased to see significant growth in traffic. I’m not so narrow-minded as to believe this is just due to my efforts or Geoff and Nadia Lawton’s or the rest of the PRI team, however. Aside from the tremendous support and input from the wider permaculture community, I also note that current events and the spread of information through the internet is threatening to actually wake the world up – and this ‘awakening’ is seeing an unprecedented growth in interest in sustainability, transition and the creation of resilient people systems. This interest certainly isn’t coming too soon, but better late than never.

For whatever reasons, though, this site is today regularly recognised as one of the, or even the, leading permaculture website worldwide. This has come about with a lot of help from readers like yourself, and permaculture project leaders and workers worldwide. This growth is helping increase permaculture exposure, and is helping our aim to drive permaculture into mainstream consciousness. (Examples: CNN, SBS, ABC, etc..)

But, whenever a site or entity grows, there are always questions about its purpose. I want to share the Permaculture Research Institute’s intentions as succinctly as possible here, and also solicit your support to help us in our goals – goals I believe many of you subscribe to. And no, I’m not asking for donations! (Although these are always appreciated!)

The Permaculture Research Institute (PRI) is an independently audited (annually) non-profit entity. But, it’s a non-profit with a difference. While a large part of our focus is on project aid work, where we seek to implement permaculture solutions in some of the most challenging places in the world, we don’t subscribe to the traditional strategies that NGOs often ‘utilise’. It was my personal prediction that many NGOs will, as our energy and economic woes intensify, lose their funding as charitably-minded people and businesses lose their liquidity and reprioritise expenditure. From some of the NGOs I’ve worked with and spoken to over the last couple of years, these predictions seem to be coming to pass. More and more people and businesses are finding they just don’t have excess funds to pass on to ‘feel good’ causes. In a peak oil world, this can translate to huge humanitarian disasters as dependent populations find supports removed.

In other words, if we only ran on donations, we’d be as finite an endeavour as industrial civilisation.

The PRI, instead, wants to see permaculture education and uptake spread – despite a failing/flailing economy. We thus seek to be as resilient financially as our on-the-ground systems are biologically. As such, our methods differ not only in the solutions proposed (we prefer to teach a man to fish, and how to manage fish stocks sustainably, rather than just dump piles of them at his feet) but also in the financial model that keeps our permaculture evangelism growing and working while we’re still, reluctantly, in the ‘money economy’ era of the society we find ourselves in and are trying to transition ourselves out of.

Another point of difference, while I’m discussing this, is that we regard the suburbs of Los Angeles or Brisbane just as ‘challenging’ as rural Ethiopia or Vietnam – in that people in ‘first world’ countries are acutely vulnerable in so many ways (economy, energy, centralised food systems, etc.), but just don’t see it, nor where they’re headed – and thus don’t see the desperate need to transition to a life based on real-time sunlight. In contrast, ‘two thirds’ world people are generally struggling on a day to day basis, so can be highly appreciative of tools that make their lives more productive, resilient and efficient – and they are often barely only a generation or so removed from a sustainable, low-impact lifestyle, so their skill-set is usually far more practical. As such permaculture ‘aid work’ is just as essential in London and Melbourne as it is in Lesotho and Mombai. Given what’s looming on the horizon, some might say even more so….

The Permaculture Master Plan

Anyway, the PRI seeks to develop and support the growth of successful, mutually beneficial, interdependent relationships (both between individuals and communities, and between these and the land at their feet), with these successful interdependencies occurring by largely self-reliant individuals cooperating with each other to meet human needs in holistically sound ways. The emphasis here is that we seek to build relationships that are mutually supportive/symbiotic, and not competitive. Just as in the plants and organisms around us and at our feet, we believe the success of the permaculture movement as a whole is entirely dependent on our leaving behind the selfish ambition that most of us in the west have been programmed with through our education, media and through our participation in the contemporary, competitive economic model almost universally applied today – and instead to find ways to interact harmoniously to support each other.

Furthermore, we seek for our projects to transition to localised resilience in food and other base human requirements (housing, clothing, etc.), but also to become financially self-sufficient. As we do not believe in contributing to globalisation, but, rather, to help transition away from it, we do not encourage projects to be self sufficient through sales of produce or goods, or at least not to make this their primary endeavour, but, rather, to sell knowledge, so the people around them can begin to grow and produce their own goods. The idea, expressed by our Permaculture Master Plan, is to educate the world in permaculture design principles and application – making each project site both an impressive demonstration site of what is possible and achievable by and for local people in their respective regions, as well as a professional education site sharing the ‘how’ of it. Following this demonstrate-and-educate recipe enables project leaders and their teams to concentrate on transitioning/building the community around them while course and consultation fees finance this evangelisation.

We don’t see any losers in this scenario. The ideal and ultimate goal is that these projects will self-replicate to the point where they will saturate the global landscape with mutually interdependent and resilient communities of knowledgeable permaculture practitioners – setting the stage for a softer landing on the peak-oil downslide. Although the income from course fees would gradually diminish over time, as more and more demonstration/education sites multiply – this income would become increasingly redundant/unnecessary as the growth of resilient permaculture sites and communities fills the void created by a crashing money economy.

Time is of the Essence

If you’re following the logic so far, you will recognise that time is of the essence. To have paying students finance the ballooning of permaculture demonstration/education sites worldwide, we need to get a large portion of this ‘evangelisation’ work done before the economic mayhem born of peak oil and climate change begins to hit us even harder than it already has. At the moment, increasingly, people are seeing the need to get permaculture-educated while they still have the finances to do so. Many can still afford to take flights to learn at locations where their hardish western currency can not only train themselves in modern permaculture design systems whilst gaining valuable indigenous knowledge but also subsidise the training of poverty-stricken locals. This will not always be the case. We’re working in a window of opportunity that will close in the ensuing years.

Making the Most of the Time Window We Have

As such, we feel that leveraging the impact of this website (www.permaculture.org.au) is paramount. I note many permaculture individuals endeavouring to develop their own readership in fragmented efforts that, often with the best of intentions, fail to achieve much. The reason they fail to achieve much is that it takes a lot of time and dedication to grow a website, and that growth is largely dependent on a consistent stream of quality content that keeps people returning to, and linking to, your site. People are too busy on the ground to maintain such sites, or dedicate staff to the task. A million small websites sharing intermittent posts is not nearly as efficient as a few larger sites with far higher traffic counts sharing regular engaging content. I like to think of the networking and leveraging of grass-roots permaculture labour and resources – to build mainstream momentum in all things permaculture – as represented by that largest of all biological organisms: mycelium. While various plants and rocks and microorganisms appear independent of each other, there is a common link – in soil biology – that connects them all. In like manner, the internet, perhaps one of the few real gifts the industrial revolution has given us, is enabling us to connect and share our energies in symbiotic and synergistic ways for the benefit of all. For us to reach mainstream consciousness, funneling our experiences and knowledge through reliable website ‘portals’ is, I can say categorically, far more efficient than expecting readers to browse a thousand sites to get the information they need.

How to Leverage Our Collective Energies to Spread Permaculture Fast

The lifeblood of my work, that of trying to drive permaculture thinking into mainstream consciousness, is found in sharing quality reports from around the world. My logic goes like this: when people in mainstream consumer society confront permaculture, if they believe it’s only practiced by a few sandal-wearing souls living on the fringes of society, they’ll conclude "nice idea, but it’s too little, too late", and they’ll write the concept off as being idealistic dreaming. But if, instead, they realise the reality – that this is a movement of many tens of thousands of people working, right now, in almost every country on every continent of this jewel of an earth we call home – then they’ll instead think to themselves – "hell, change is afoot, and I’m getting left behind – I want to get involved, and now!"

The work is happening, and it’s building momentum. But while the word ‘Permaculture’ is now finally in the Oxford English dictionary, it needs to be on the lips and in the hands of everyone if humanity-saving goodness is to reach that tipping point where it’ll take off and meet the enormous challenges we face today.

Those tens of thousands of people are working hard, accomplishing great things, but they’re often too busy to look up and around to view where they fit in the big picture – the big mycelium fungal net, as it were. I would like to say to those people that by writing articles and sharing your work, frustrations, challenges, successes, observations and inspiration, your effort to report, as an ‘element’ in your system, does in itself serve several ‘functions’.

1. You inspire others to imitate/emulate your example.
2. You educate people in the ‘how’ of it.
3. You make your work known. People can’t help and support you if they don’t know you or your work exists. Such assistance can come by way of encouragement, gifting practical knowledge/information that is relevant to you, and actual physical involvement and financial support.
4. You enable us (PRI) to better understand your situation, and tailor support to assist, assuming you are seeking such assistance.

As many of you will know, I regularly undertake to do such reports myself, and have done so in places as far afield as Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Chile, Jordan, the West Bank, Slovakia (and), Australia, (and, and, etc.). But, while I will continue to seek to profile successful examples of permaculture around the world, we want to hear your views, your experiences, your challenges, your successes and gain knowledge and inspiration from your particular observations. You don’t have to understand the science of web promotion – that’s my job. You don’t have to understand how to deal with websites, image optimisation and editing – that’s also my job. I get tired of hearing my own voice, as I’m sure do our readers. We want to hear yours! I want to see the permaculturists out there, from novice to guru expert (we don’t believe in gurus – but rather, real people doing real doable things), sharing their knowledge for the benefit of all.

Get paid to spread knowledge and inspiration

And guess what – we’ll even pay you to do it! Recognising people are very busy, and that in today’s world time is food, we will pay to hear your stories on a per-post basis. Click here to learn more.

We of course still welcome volunteer posts. Again, we’re a non-profit, so the more money we save the more we can inject into starting and assisting projects worldwide. In the last year, for example, we have donated approximately $100,000 to projects worldwide, either by way of direct donations or through teaching or consultation time. Over the next year we anticipate this figure will increase again. And we’ve assisted further through my time – utilising this high-traffic website to bring course adverts for diverse locations worldwide to the attention of our readers. We’ve seen sites where they were struggling to find students, but after an advert here the courses filled up. This is what it’s all about! This is funneling information and resources to spread permaculture as fast as we can!

This website and our forums (which we’ve recently upgraded by the way) have been a gift from PRI to the permaculture community. We’re very glad to see them getting utilised. I still see many people, however, not quite understanding our ’services’. Many almost appear to think we’re some kind of independently wealthy (or even publicly funded?) entity with a duty to spread research knowledge and long term analysis of various aspects of permaculture systems, and share it freely, not understanding that within our current capitalist framework such important but time-consuming work is impossible to do, simply because it’s price prohibitive. We remain financially independent, yes, but only due to the hard work of people within the team – and that work is based on classroom and field education. We’d love to initiate research-and-document projects, and create unending ‘how-to’ videos and articles, but doing so takes time and money. As such, we encourage all permaculturists to undertake these tasks as they are able, and to share them to the largest audience possible. We’ll help subsidise this work, by paying per-post as an encouragement/incentive to take the time out to do so.

So, in the busyness of life, I hope you will see that, as I’ve often said to PDC students, reporting on your work and observations is just as important as the physical design work itself. Make your voice heard. Share your knowledge and we’ll ensure it gets maximum exposure.

I look forward to receiving and sharing your articles!

P.S. Until today we’ve had excellent results from our arrangement with people interested to advertise their courses on our site. In exchange for a separate non-promotional article (i.e. something inspirational or educational or both), we’ve put their course adverts up at no charge. This arrangement will continue.

by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom

It took me a while to recognise what I was seeing. It was an ordinary campsite in Pembrokeshire: a square field with tents around the perimeter. But it had a curious effect on the children staying there. Young people who had seldom experienced daylight slowly emerged from their tents and were drawn towards the centre of the field. Bats and balls left on the grass mysteriously appeared in their hands. Children with no prior interest in sport started playing football, cricket and rounders. Little kids ran around with older ones. As children of all classes played together, their parents started talking to each other. It hit me with some force: we had reinvented the village green.

Source: Wikipedia

We are, to a surprising extent, what the built environment makes us. Academic papers show that many of the problems we blame on individual behaviour are caused in part by the places in which we live. People are more likely to help their neighbours in quiet areas, for example, than in noisy ones(1). A long series of studies across several countries, beginning in San Francisco in 1969, shows unequivocally that communities become weaker as the volume of traffic on their streets increases(2,3).

Other papers show that people’s use of shared spaces is strongly influenced by the presence of trees: the more trees there are, the more time people spend there and the larger the groups in which they gather(4,5). A further study shows that, partly as a result, vegetation in common spaces strengthens the neighbourhood’s social ties(6). In greener places, people know more of their neighbours, are more likely to help each other and have stronger feelings of belonging. Social isolation is strongly associated with an absence of green spaces(7).

One fascinating paper shows that crime rates are also strongly affected by vegetation. In housing projects in Chicago with equal levels of poverty, taking account of factors such as the size of the buildings and the vacancy rate, there’s a clear association between the absence of greenery and both property crime and violent crime(8).

Another set of studies demonstrates a relationship between urban planning and body mass index. Where settlements are dense (and therefore able to support public transport) and close to shops, work places and recreation places, people are more likely to walk and cycle and less likely to be fat(9). One paper shows that women living in mixed places (where houses and amenities are close together) have a risk of coronary heart disease 20% lower than women living in areas which contain only houses(10). Suburban sprawl is partly to blame for obesity.

Build loose suburbs carved up by busy roads and without green spaces and you help to create a population of fat, lonely people plagued by criminals. Build dense, leafy settlements with mixed uses, protected from traffic, and you help to create safe, fit and friendly communities.

In Sunday’s Observer the doctor Steve Field blamed public health problems squarely and solely on sufferers and their parents(11). It’s true that we must take as much responsibility as we can for our health. But Field, like most conservatives, ignores the social and political context, condemning people for problems they cannot tackle alone. He lambasts us for eating junk food, for example, while saying nothing about manufacturers who ensure that it’s as addictive as the regulations allow(12). He suggests that we should encourage children to get outside and play games. Of course we should, but if there is no safe place nearby in which they can do so we’re wasting our breath.

Here’s one picture of what a fit, safe and functional community might look like. There’s nothing either radical or new about it: similar developments have been built for centuries (and most have now been monopolised by the rich). Houses or apartment blocks are built densely around a square of shared green space. It is big enough for playing ball games, but without fixed goal posts, allowing both children and adults to define the space for themselves. It could contain trees; perhaps some rocks or logs to climb on. There might be a corner of uncut meadow, or flowerbeds or fruit bushes: the space will work best when it is designed and managed by the people who live there.

Most importantly, the houses face inwards, and no cars are allowed inside the square: the roads serve only the backs of the buildings. The square is overlooked by everyone, which means that children can run in and out of their houses unsupervised, create their own tribes and learn their own rules, without fear of traffic accidents or molesters. They have a place in which to run wild without collecting ASBOs.

There’s a council estate a bit like this across the road from my house. Whenever I pass through it on a dry day in the holidays, I see dozens of children playing there. On the other estates here you seldom see children out of doors, for the obvious reason that there is nowhere to play. Proximity is everything: if a park is far away, most families won’t go there(13). Walking across a city with a small child is no one’s idea of entertainment.

Those who need such spaces most are the socially excluded. Because of poverty, unemployment and poorer health, they leave their neighbourhoods less often than the affluent(14). But they tend to have the least access to green spaces. A study of Greater Manchester, for example, shows that wealthy parts of the city have tree cover of around ten per cent, the poor neighbourhoods just two per cent(15). Housing built around village greens need be no more expensive and no less dense: just better planned and better regulated.

Instead, whenever I visit a new estate, I see only lost opportunities: houses that turn their backs on each other; spaces that should be dedicated to playing reserved instead for parking; loneliness and exclusion built into the plan. We have allowed property developers and weak planning to define who we are and what we shall become. As the government launches a new scheme for ensuring that more houses are built(16), we must demand that it recognises a truth all these studies point to: that there is such a thing as society.

Further Reading:

• The Tragedy of Suburbia
• Parking Lots to Parks: Designing Livable Cities
• Reclaiming the Streets

References:

1. This was first documented by S Cohen and A Lezak, 1977. Noise and inattentiveness to social cues. Environment and Behavior, 9, 559-572.
2. D Appleyard, 1969. The Environmental Quality of City Streets: The Residents’ Viewpoint. Journal of the American Planning Association, 35, pp. 84-101.
3. Subsequent work on this issue is summarised and reviewed here: Joshua Hart, April 2008. Driven to Excess: impacts of motor vehicle traffic on residential quality of life in Bristol, UK.
4. RL Coley, FE Kuo and WC Sullivan, 1997. Where does community grow? The social context created by nature in urban public housing. Environment and Behavior, 29, 468-492.
5. S DePooter, 1997. Nature and neighbors: Green spaces and social interactions in the inner city. Unpublished master thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Cited by FE Kuo et al (see below).
6. FE Kuo et al, 1998. Fertile Ground for Community: Inner-City
   Neighborhood Common Spaces. American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 26, No. 6.
7. ibid.
8. FE Kuo and WC Sullivan, May 2001. Environment and Crime in the Inner City: Does Vegetation Reduce Crime? Environment and Behavior vol. 33 no. 3 343-367
   doi: 10.1177/0013916501333002
9. Andrew Rundle et al, 2007. The Urban Built Environment and Obesity in New
   York City: A Multilevel Analysis. American Journal of Health Promotion, pp 326-334. This paper also summarises several similar studies.
10. Lee R Mobley et al, April 2006. Environment, Obesity, and Cardiovascular Disease Risk in Low-Income Women. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 30, Issue 4, Pages 327-332.e1. doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2005.12.001
11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/08/steve-field-patient-responsibility-health
12. See David A. Kessler, 2009. The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. Rodale Press.
13. AE Kazmierczak and P James, 2007 cite research which suggests that ” for most people the distance between 500m and 1km is the furthest they would walk to a park”. Role of Urban Green Spaces in Improving Social Inclusion.
14. A.E. Kazmierczak, P. James, ibid.
15. B Rudlin, and N Falk, 1999. Building the 21st century home, Architectural Press, Oxford, cited by A.E. Kazmierczak, P. James, ibid.
16. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10910048

Map of fires in Russia

As I type, half of Russia is on fire after its hottest summer on record, Pakistan is dealing with the biggest floods in living memory and Australia is still in the clutches of a decade long drought. The last decade, worldwide, was the hottest since records began, and 2010 may break the records of 1998 and 2005 to become the hottest year we’ve ever known. We could spend weeks just examining the extreme weather events going on on a country by country basis.

Today we are crossing thresholds in our destruction of nature that will make all our subsequent efforts at earth healing even harder than they ever should have been. We have removed eco-systems, and their services, to such an extent that dangerous feedback loops are in progress. Climate is fast becoming a runaway train – and we’re its passengers.

Consider the fires in Russia, for example – millions of rain-producing trees are going up in smoke, taking their carbon with it. Trees growing in the ground are a carbon sink. On fire, they’re a carbon source. The Pakistan floods kill trees and plants likewise. These will later dry out and much of it too will end up in the atmosphere. With less trees in place, flooding events will occur even more often, and the soils these plants held in place will be washed away. The arctic permafrost is melting, releasing the powerful heat trapping gas, methane, at unprecedented levels – promising even more temperature increases. Our oceans are acidifying, threatening to turn the world’s largest carbon sink into a carbon source. And so on….

The dominoes are falling. It’s like nature is shouting to us: "If you don’t appreciate the services of these systems, then I’ll remove them all entirely".

We are facing crises on an unprecedented scale. Atop the foundations of an energy crisis, a climate crisis and a soil, water and biodiversity crisis, rests that mother of all crises – a food crisis. Crops are going up in smoke or are being washed away in deluges, our precious soils with them, while world grain stores are at their lowest levels and production is in decline whilst demand is rising. Such a food crisis, in the context of today’s population levels, translates, in turn, to a social/political/economic crisis on a scale that will make the convulsions of WWII look like a walk in the park.

It’s getting ugly, yet many are still not even awake to the perfect storm that is upon us. And of the few who are, many are discussing light bulbs and hybrids, cap and trade and recycling. They’re discussing being a little ‘less bad’, not recognising the urgent need for us – all 6.8 billion of us (and counting, at a rate of 1 billion every twelve years…) – to immediately become a positive element within our biosphere. And we must move fast! (The proverb ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ really rings true when considering these feedback loops….)

There is a solution though! That being a widespread, collaborative effort to assist nature in restoring, at scale, the biological processes that have, until today, kept this world stable for millennia. The solutions are in design, and in the observation and replication of natural symbiotic systems. We don’t need just less cars, we need more biology – more photosynthesis and more life! We might not be able to have rainforests everywhere, but we can certainly have food forests everywhere! The video clips below share a glimmer of hope along these lines. It documents an incredible journey of restorative transition for a 35,000 square kilometre area in the Leoss Plateau in the north of China. It is a journey that begins with completely eroded, overgrazed land where floods were a constant nightmare, and ends in terraced green hills, flood and food stability and prosperity. And, it only took ten years.

Give it a watch, and, as you do, consider what kind of social/political/economic systems would be the most conducive to achieving similar results in other places worldwide. It’s an interesting mix of top-down ‘interference’ (both in terms of blanket regulations and financial investment) combined with land ‘privatisation’, and participatory involvement at all levels. It reinforces for me the need to build resilient, localised, holistically educated and politically engaged communities whose members don’t discard government, but who through greater involvement in the decision-making process (including choosing their representatives) effectively become government and self-determine to build a world based on land stewardship and voluntary simplicity. We cannot act as individuals alone, working in our own self-interest, and achieve the kind of results you’ll see in the video below. We need to work collaboratively, and sometimes sensible, holistically discussed decisions will need to be enforced on individuals who either can’t see the big picture, or who don’t care.

Further reading:

• The Development of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration
• The World’s Largest Water Harvesting Earthworks Project
• The Biology of Global Warming

Over the past couple of years, there has been quite a bit of attention paid to the purchase of massive amounts of agricultural land by rich countries and corporate entities in the developing world. Craig Mackintosh wrote about this on this site, as have many other very informative reports and press stories.

To summarize, there has been approximately US$100 Billion mobilized to purchase somewhere between 40 – 50 million hectares (roughly 100 – 125 million acres) of agricultural land worldwide.

Quoting a recent article published by The Financial Times on July 27, 2010, World Bank warns about the ‘farmland grab’ trend:

Investors in farmland are targeting countries with weak laws, buying arable land on the cheap and failing to deliver on promises of jobs and investments, according to the draft of a report by the World Bank.

“Investor interest is focused on countries with weak land governance,” the draft said. Although deals promised jobs and infrastructure, “investors failed to follow through on their investments plans, in some cases after inflicting serious damage on the local resource base”.

In addition, “the level of formal payments required was low”, making speculation a key motive for purchases. “Payments for land are often waived … and large investors often pay lower taxes than smallholders … or none at all.”

[A World Bank study entitled] ‘The Global Land Rush: Can it yield sustainable and equitable benefits?’ is the broadest study yet of the so-called “farmland grab”, in which countries invest in overseas land to boost their food security, or investors – who are mostly locals – buy arable land. The “farmland grab” trend gained notoriety after an attempt in 2008 by South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics to secure a large chunk of land in Madagascar for a very low price and vague promises of investment. The deal contributed to a coup d’état in the African country." – farmlandgrab.org

A couple of excellent examinations of this issue has been published by The Oakland Institute. They are:

• (Mis)Investment in Agriculture: The Role of the International Finance Corporation in the Global Land Grab
• The Great Land Grab: Rush for World’s Farmland Threatens Food Security for the Poor

This topic has also been featured by news outlets such as Al-Jazeera English’s Riz Khan Program "Land Grab or Investment":

Part I

Part II

What is, in essence, the primary driver behind these land deals is identified in a UK Telegraph article titled ‘Britain facing food crisis as world’s soil ‘vanishes in 60 years’, which was published on February 3, 2010. Quoting from the article, which followed the Carbon Farming conference that took place in Borenore, NSW Australia November 2009:

An estimated 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost annually with more than 80 per cent of the world’s farming land "moderately or severely eroded", the Carbon Farming conference heard.

A University of Sydney study, presented to the conference, found soil is being lost in China 57 times faster than it can be replaced through natural processes.

In Europe that figure is 17 times, in America 10 times while five times as much soil is being lost in Australia.

Soil is also a valuable store of carbon and can release the greenhouse gas if it is ploughed or dug up.

The conference heard world soil, including European and British soils, could vanish within about 60 years if drastic action was not taken.

This will lead to a global food crisis, chronic food shortages and higher prices, the conference heard.

Despite better than average farming practices, European soil might last for 100 years if no further damage occurs worldwide, scientists said.

In reality, however, increased land pressures aimed at compensating global production losses would likely mean it will run out faster, they added. – telegraph.co.uk

The issues connected to the Global Land Grab controversy are directly linked to those of the global Earth Repair/Ecosystem Restoration Work (ERW) agenda. ERW has yet to be seriously discussed as means by which the global ecological dilemma and degrading of natural capital can be effectively addressed.

The attempts made to purchase these vast amounts of arable land speaks to the manner in which investors treat natural capital like financial capital. The impression given is that the ecological problem is something that can be avoided by buying our collective way out of the situation. The rich and wealthy are mostly woefully ignorant of how to manage & use natural capital. This is where those acquainted with ERW techniques and strategies can provide an indispensable service.

I was invited to speak at a socially responsible/triple bottom line investors conference taking place in London November 2010. The event is being put on by TBLI (Triple Bottom Line Investment). I intend on addressing this very issue in my presentation entitled: "Economic Support for Global Earth Repair Work and Ecological Restoration – Making The Case".