Flinders Ranges in the Spotlight – Autumn Seasonal Events in the National Park
Biodiversity, Community Projects, Consumerism, Society — by Anthea Hudson March 17, 2012
Twice a year, over the school holidays in the Australian states of South Australia and Victoria, the Flinders Ranges comes alive, with a series of activities aimed to provide an insight into this majestic, yet environmentally sensitive area.
Comments (3)Peru Bans GMOs
Biodiversity, GMOs, Health & Disease, News, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Water Contaminaton & Loss — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor March 13, 2012
Back in 2009, Wikileaks released some diplomatic cables from the U.S. which revealed a list of priority countries for ‘GMO outreach’. Peru was amongst those on the hit list.
Well, now it seems Peru has opted out….
Comments (2)Getting Kids into Gardening, Part I: Creating a Butterfly Garden
Biodiversity, Insects, Society, Urban Projects — by Anthea Hudson March 6, 2012
Involving our children in hands-on explorations of the natural world is essential if we are to create a generation who are able to undertake the vital tasks of re-establishing a resilient life on this planet. What better place to start nurturing this than in our gardens!
Comments (5)Mythologists of the Glen
Biodiversity, Deforestation, Livestock, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Village Development — by George Monbiot March 5, 2012
A report on deer in the Scottish Highlands is a sycophantic paean to Balmorality and landed power.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
A remnant of the ancient Caledonian Forest, Scotland
I’ve read too many daft reports in the course of this job, but I don’t remember any as self-defeating as this. This morning the Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association launches its study on the economic importance of red deer to Scotland’s rural economy*. It succeeds in demonstrating the opposite of what it sets out to prove.
Comments (2)Stabilizing the Climate with “Permanent Agriculture”
Animal Forage, Biodiversity, Biofuels, Deforestation, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, Land, Medicinal Plants, Plant Systems, Regional Water Cycle, Rehabilitation, Soil Conservation, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Trees, Village Development, Water Contaminaton & Loss, Water Harvesting — by Eric Toensmeier March 1, 2012
Trees are one of our most powerful tools to pull carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in the soil for long-term storage. This is why reforestation and protecting intact forests are such important parts of plans to address climate change. Conventional climate change science tells us that the planet’s capacity for reforestation is limited, however, by the need to preserve land for agriculture.
But movements like agroforestry and permaculture show us that farming and trees are not mutually exclusive. From tree crops to contour strips of nitrogen fixing trees between bands of annual crops, there is a wealth of techniques that can give us the best of both worlds. These techniques, should a global effort get behind their implementation on a large scale, could have a major impact on climate change. They would also have numerous other benefits to the planet and its people.
A century ago, writer-farmers like J. Russell Smith coined the term “permanent agriculture” to describe food forestry and other farming practices that combated a key issue of their day — erosion and degradation of farmland. From Smith and his compatriots we in permaculture have taken the name of our movement, though our movement has grown to encompass much more than food forestry. Today these visionary ideas are more essential than ever, to address an environmental crisis on a scale Smith and his contemporaries could not have imagined.
Comments (4)Regenerating Rusinga (Kenya)
Aid Projects, Biodiversity, Community Projects, Deforestation, Developments, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, Land, Population, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Trees, Village Development, Water Contaminaton & Loss — by Elin Lindhagen February 28, 2012
FMNR workshop, Feb 2012, Kenya
Rusinga Island is situated in Lake Victoria in the Western parts of Kenya. It is known for its prehistoric findings of primate fossils dating from 17 million years ago and for being the birthplace of the famously assassinated Kenyan politician, Tom Mboya, whose scholarship fund enabled Barack Obama’s father to study abroad. Not too many years ago it was still known to be a beautiful forested island, rich in unique bird species and with access to great fishing. Today the island is considered a vulnerable ecosystem with marginal agricultural land, leading one author to call it ‘one of the driest and most environmentally marginal agricultural zones in the region’(1).
Rapid population growth in the 1980s led to intensified pressure on natural resources such as trees and fish. At the same time, other communities started coming into Rusinga’s fishing waters to exploit the fish resources. Fish stocks started declining and the fishermen of Rusinga were forced to start looking for other ways of making an income. Many turned to agriculture but the Luo’s on Rusinga were traditionally fishermen, not farmers. Trees were cut down to make houses for a growing population, firewood to feed an increasing number of hungry stomachs and charcoal to make an income. Within a generation, what was once a richly forested island had become bare — suffering increasing droughts, soil erosion and crop failures due to the loss of trees.
Comments (1)There’s No Tomorrow (Video)
Biodiversity, Biofuels, Consumerism, Deforestation, Economics, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, Nuclear, Society, peak oil — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor
This video is hands down the best I’ve seen yet at covering all the bases of our present converging dilemmas in one quick (35 minute) hit. Over the years I’ve presented all of the issues covered in this video — hitting them from various angles and in different ways to try to drive the point home — but it’s excruciatingly difficult to cover each element sufficiently whilst giving the casual or intermittant reader a full overview simultaneously. The excellent use of imagery has enabled the creators of this little video to touch on each subject whilst joining up all those dots into the fuller picture.
I’d encourage you to watch, and share widely. When sharing, you might want to do it by way of linking to this blog post, as I’ll put below a smattering of articles on these topics which some may look to for more details after watching:
Comments (22)The Big Green Question
Biodiversity, Biofuels, Consumerism, Deforestation, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, Society — by George Monbiot February 15, 2012
Is environmentalism compatible with social justice?
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
It is the stick with which the greens are beaten daily: if we spend money on protecting the environment, the poor will starve, or freeze to death, or will go without shoes and education. Most of those making this argument do so disingenuously: they support the conservative or libertarian politics that keep the poor in their place and ensure that the 1% harvest the lion’s share of the world’s resources.
Comments (0)Anonymous Took Down Monsanto Website
Biodiversity, GMOs, Health & Disease, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Water Contaminaton & Loss — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor January 25, 2012
It’s not as good as seeing all of Monsanto’s plants and chemicals getting taken ‘offline’, but at least I can get a little mischevious pleasure from learning that Monsanto has been on the hit-list of the Anonymous team. The following video apparently shows how Monsanto was taken offline (Note that I’m a bit slow on the uptake on this one — as the video is from the middle of last year — but since I’m in an anti-GMO mood today, I thought I’d run it anyway):
Anonymous DDOS attack on Monsanto.com
Here’s an Anonymous message to Monsanto, with transcript below:
Comments (4)The Plow That Broke the Plains
Biodiversity, Food Shortages, Regional Water Cycle, Society, Soil Erosion & Contamination — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor December 5, 2011
I love history. As they say, if you don’t learn from it, you’re destined to repeat it. The video below, circa 1937, is a fascinating look at how men forsook the crucial observational stage when making the best laid plans of mice and men and in doing so took an enormous swathe of stable prairie, steppe and grassland environments and literally turned them into dust.
As the narrative comments:
Settler, plow at your peril!
This version is without the epilogue.
A version with the epilogue is here, but in lower quality.
Permaculture Pygmies
Aid Projects, Biodiversity, Community Projects, Deforestation, Food Shortages, Village Development — by Xavier Fux November 10, 2011
by Xavier Fux
Deep in the jungle of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pygmy communities had lived for generations as hunter-gatherers. When the Kahuzi Biega National Park was created in 1970 by the Congolese government, the Pygmies and other local communities were expulsed from the forest, their ancestral land, without receiving any compensation or any land to settle in. They were left without a home. Over time, they were allowed to live on private property at the edge of the park, near other local communities but without any right of ownership over the land. This situation created a huge life obstacle for Pygmy communities, because land is the basic means of subsistence in the area. Currently, they rarely have access to the forest that constituted a vital area for their culture and traditions, and where they could collect food, health, means and shelter.
The Pygmies had never farmed before. They were hunters and gatherers and depended on natural resources in the forest for subsistence. Birds and guinea pigs constituted their intake of protein, and they gathered fruits, nuts and collected honey from bee traps they set up in trees.
Comments (12)Maarten Stapper: “Biological Agriculture – a Third Way?” (IPC10 Presentation – Video)
Animal Forage, Biodiversity, Commercial Farm Projects, Compost, Conferences, Courses/Workshops, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Fungi, GMOs, Health & Disease, Plant Systems, Presentations/Demonstrations, Rehabilitation, Seeds, Soil Biology, Soil Composition, Soil Conservation, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Structure, Trees, Water Contaminaton & Loss — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor October 25, 2011
If you didn’t catch it already, be sure to check out the previous post with Dr. Maarten Stapper’s first IPC10 convergence presentation. And, after several attempts, I finally managed to get his second presentation uploaded — you can click play above to watch this as well. With decades of experience in the farming industry, Dr. Stapper has a great deal to share, and a lot of insight to go with it.
Comments (1)Tony Rinaudo: “Against the odds: Reversing desertification in arid and semi arid lands” (IPC Presentation – Video)
Aid Projects, Animal Forage, Biodiversity, Community Projects, Conferences, Deforestation, Food Forests, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, Health & Disease, Land, Medicinal Plants, Nurseries & Propogation, Plant Systems, Presentations/Demonstrations, Regional Water Cycle, Rehabilitation, Seeds, Trees — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor October 3, 2011
Tony Rinaudo’s IPC10 conference presentation was one of the highlights of the event for three good reasons — 1) because of the scale of impact his Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) work has achieved (more than 30,000 km² of re-greened, regenerated land to date); 2) the utter simplicity — and thus doability — of this work (it requires no financial investment or out-of-reach technologies, only a little educational guidance and community collaboration), and 3) the speed at which this regeneration can occur and lives can improve.
We’ve brought people’s attention to FMNR before…
… and now I have the great pleasure of being able to share Tony’s IPC10 conference talk in high definition video (at top). Note: If you want to see the slides in higher quality, you can download Tony’s presentation (9mb Powerpoint) and click through it in a different window as Tony talks if you like.
Readers can also download:
Comments (3)Roberto Perez Rivero: “Permaculture’s Use of Water in Time of Climate Change – the Cuban Experience” (IPC Presentation – Video)
Biodiversity, Community Projects, Conferences, Conservation, Consumerism, Deforestation, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, Irrigation, Presentations/Demonstrations, Regional Water Cycle, Rehabilitation, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Water Contaminaton & Loss, Water Harvesting, peak oil — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor September 28, 2011
Roberto Perez Rivero gives his presentation at the IPC10, Amman, Jordan
Photographs © Craig Mackintosh
Roberto Perez Rivero gave an excellent presentation at the Tenth International Permaculture Conference (IPC10). Watch it below. As the projector wasn’t the best, you may also want to make use of the links below to download the slideshow from this talk so you can click through those in a different window as Roberto speaks:
Comments (2)Arrested Development
Biodiversity — by George Monbiot September 27, 2011
The wild boar cull should be halted, and we should stop confusing conservation with gardening.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
Is the United Kingdom the most zoophobic nation in Europe? Do we, in other words, have an unusually intense fear of wild animals?
We’ve certainly been less successful than other nations at protecting large mammals. Norway and Finland, for example, have lost none of their large, post-glacial land mammal species. But, until recently, our native species numbered just two: roe deer and red deer. As David Hetherington of the Cairngorms Wildcat Project pointed out at a meeting in London Zoo last year, the UK is “the largest country in Europe and almost the whole world” which no longer possesses any of its big carnivores. Other countries as densely populated and industrialised as ours have managed to hang on to theirs.
Comments (0)
