In a warming world pests migrate and flourish in previously inpenetrable habitats and latitudes.

Of course there are obvious problems with Frank’s position here – like what happens when your subsistence gets washed away by some other unpredicted AGW shitstorm.

As ever, Permaculture looks straight into the heart of things.

Further Reading:

• The Gospel of Consumption

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….

Enjoy, or not, the KAB Man series from KABman.org, but whatever you do, stay tuned for the more serious side of recycling afterwards….

Episode I – Hiring a Superhero

Episode II – First Day on the Job

Episode III – KAB Man Gets a Sidekick

If you’ve spent half your lunch break chuckling over the above, now it’s time to get a little serious for the other half. No need to stop chewing though.

Recycling is a great thing. We need to do it, and we need to learn how to do it as efficiently as possible. It should become as natural to us as brushing our teeth. But, I want to make a point here about where our litter comes from in the first place.

Please take the time to watch the following video, where you’ll see KAB Man’s new sidekick, Iron Eyes Cody again (seen in Episode III above), but, more importantly, learn some interesting facts about the original Keep America Beautiful campaign – that, rather than an effort in genuine corporate social responsibility, it was in fact a campaign launched to stop the spread of laws that threatened the profits and ‘efficiency’ of industry. The campaign was a bid to shift focus away from the source of the litter (the corporations who capitalise on built-in obsolescence, and encourage rampant over-consumption), and to instead transfer the blame to the individual doing their ‘patriotic duty’ – the consumer. Specifically, the KAB campaign was "was created in response to Vermont’s 1953 attempt to outlaw disposable containers" (wikipedia). The bottling industries wanted to externalise costs by avoiding laws that forced them to deal with returned glass (I still remember taking glass bottles back to the store as a child to retrieve a few cents back). Instead of depost/return/recycling systems, they wanted to shift to disposable plastic bottles – leaving the onus of cleanup on the individual and on munipical (taxpayer financed…) recycling. The cost of the greenwash campaign was far less than their own glass recycling costs – and so disposable plastic bottles were born into the world.

Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage Duration: 19mins

KAB Man – a superhero, or a victim of corporate green-washing?

Not wanting to belittle the comedic efforts of the Keep America Beautiful people, I’d much rather see a campaign encouraging people to buy less by encouraging home gardens and cottage industries. The concept of ignoring the never-ending waves of fashion, look, and design, considering needs over wants, or developing systems of self-sufficiency, are never broached unfortunately. Also not mentioned is that recycling processes themselves consume vast amounts of energy on their own. The separate collections, the inability to recycle vast amounts of ‘recycleable’ material, etc. are hidden from the consumer eye.

Please take a moment to consider the definition of the following word:

Consume
verb transitive to use up; to devour; to waste or spend; to destroy by wasting, fire, evaporation, etc; to exhaust.

The concept of consumption always had a bad connotation up until about a century ago. So much so, in fact, that they assigned this name to a terribly deadly disease – Tuberculosis. This has all changed. Today, a good consumer is a model citizen of capitalist society. Our politicians are positively infatuated with the words “growth economy”. A healthy economy, we are told, is dependent on growth – and we cannot have growth without continual, ever increasing, consumption.

If the sink was overflowing, I could start a “Keep the Bathroom Beautiful” campaign, soliciting all of you to help with the cleanup. We’d all get busy with mops, right? We dare not regulate the flow of water by turning the tap off, you see – as keeping the water flowing is critical to progress.

The reality is that an economy that can only exist through a constant plundering of finite resources is to the earth what cancer is to the human body. Its success is made complete through the death of the host.

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.

The UK Gov’t backtracks on cast iron commitments to environmental performance standards to make space for more dirty coal.

I can’t help thinking it’s a sweetener to bring the big energy companies on board for the stalled nuclear programme. Investors won’t commit unless the taxpayer guarantees their profits and underwrites the decommissioning costs.

Public debt for private profit, without so much as a mention of consumer restraint – all sounds depressingly familiar.

Today I’m writing to address an ‘article’ from Paula Fitzgerald from Agrifood Awareness Australia Limited. A colleague recently forwarded me her attempted rebuff to my article “10 reasons to go organic beyond being trendy”. Ms. Fitzgerald’s response to my article was titled “Serious about sustainability or terrified of not being trendy” (PDF). Take a look. I can understand where the author is coming from, as it would appear her role is to protect the interests of the organisation and its founding members – CropLife Australia, Grains Research and Development Corporation and the National Farmers’ Federation, as well as the sugar industry which supports their activities and the red meat industry who it partners with.

Their disclaimer:

Agrifood Awareness Australia Limited gives no warranty and makes no representation that the information contained in this document is suitable for any purpose or is free from error. Agrifood Awareness Australia Limited accepts no responsibility for any person acting or relying upon the information contained in this document, and disclaims all liability. August 2010. – Agrifood Awareness (PDF)

It would be a shame if more farmers were given poor information that led them to “voting with their feet” and going GM when the real rewards for them and their family’s future could be in regenerative agriculture. My advice to the aforementioned partners, supporters and funders: find or form an organisation that produces credible information that is suitable for at least some purpose. My advice to farmers: stop and think before going GM. It’s so important that information about the way we grow food is as accurate as possible and not clouded by vested interests, as we’re playing with lives here.

The truth hurts

To my surprise the author has accused me of unscrupulously disregarding science, data and evidence. But as anyone with a PDC would know, permaculturalists start with the best evidence available to them and go from there.

Evidence

There is overwhelming evidence that conventional mono-cultural agriculture is a damaging process and that GMOs are one of the most frightening things we’ve ever unleashed on ourselves, and they are not a solution or even a short-term fix. There is so much evidence against GMOs that I couldn’t possibly list the lot but here are a few good reasons not to touch the stuff with a continent-long pole.

1) Economics and the Environment – We’re running out of topsoil.

Overgrazed, mismanaged, degraded land in Jordan
Photo © Craig Mackintosh

You’d be forgiven for thinking the picture above is of the subsoils of rural Australia. It’s actually what I saw while studying in Jordan, where the effects of long-term human settlement and destructive land management practices can be easily seen.

It’s a commonly held belief that nothing grows here without huge inputs of dwindling resources such as fuel, polytents, chemicals and fertilisers. In fact this is rapidly becoming a belief about degraded land across the globe. From that perspective you could easily make GM look attractive with the flawed argument that it’s a more sustainable solution. However when you look closer, it’s more of the same stuff that got us here in the first place. GM is a continuation of a system that disregards natural processes – favouring instead unsustainable practices that continue soil damage and only make the repair work harder in the long run.

How did we get to a point where nothing grows without help from artificial inputs? The story of soil will give you the full scoop, but basically soil is a habitat for the micro-biology that holds minerals and nutrients. The practice of regular ploughing kills that life which eventually leads to pest and fungi problems. Then by poisoning anything that tries to hold that soil together, any life that was left ends up eroding away along with chemical residues and the farmer’s income, heading out to sea where dead zones rivalling the impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill are created.

All this and yet Geoff Lawton’s greening the desert project proves you can re-green the desert sustainably and restore fertile soil without reliance on anything toxic. Subsequent to this project, one of the local schools has taken up farming the Permaculture way with amazing results and national attention.

2) Yield

It would seem that GM crops aren’t even delivering what they promise causing "The largest wave of farmer suicides [in India] and an ecological nightmare… Dr. Mae-Wan Ho exposes the “fudged” data and false claims of ‘successes’ that have perpetrated the humanitarian disaster.”

But here is the gem in scientifically-controlled yield data and evidence – the longest-running scientifically controlled comparison of organic vs. conventional crop production systems shows yields of conventional corn only beat organic corn for the first four years. This was followed by a long 8 year phase of yield parity before organic won with a slightly higher yield for the following 12 seasons. The study also revealed that the organic corn was more resilient to extreme weather events including drought.

3) Health & Safety

Are GMOs safe for consumption? This well-referenced article reveals a growing number of doctors are prescribing GMO free diets because of links to “infertility, immune dysregulation, accelerated aging, dysregulation of genes associated with cholesterol synthesis, [faulty] insulin regulation, cell signaling, and protein formation, and changes in the liver, kidney, spleen and gastrointestinal system.”

The article also says:

When sheep grazed on Bt cotton plants after harvest, thousands died. Post mortems showed severe irritation and black patches in their intestines and livers. Investigators said preliminary evidence “strongly suggests that the sheep mortality was due to a toxin. . . . most probably Bt-toxin.” In a small feeding study, 100% of sheep fed Bt cotton died within 30 days, while those grazing on natural cotton plants in the adjoining field had no symptoms.

Unfortunately this stuff may only scratch the surface. With very few human trials, the apparent ban on real scientific discussion and questionable methods in studies, it may be years before we find out the full effects. In fact it would appear that even Monsanto are still working out the effects.

Worse still, Bayer has admitted it can’t control the spread of GMOs and when asked how a trial rice strain that hadn’t been through any kind of food safety test could make it to the dinner table in over 30 countries world-wide, they blamed God! Was that based on a scientific study of God’s interaction with rice? I wonder.

First discovered in January of that year, tests of neighbouring farmers lead to the discovery that this rice had already been unknowingly cultivated across several U.S. states, and worse, it was then found on dinner tables and on fields in more than thirty countries worldwide… This contamination caused an almost overnight collapse of the U.S. rice export market in 2006, bankrupting farmers. – Bayer Admits it is Unable to Control Spread of GMOs

So there’s just a glimpse of the evidence, data and science supporting the move to organic food and bio-diverse farming systems.

I won’t even begin on public health, deforestation, pollution, biodiversity, peak oil & climate change except to say that the people pushing GM products as a solution to our agricultural mess are the same people that have been involved in causing the mess. While GM crops offer little real benefit to the farmer, consumer and the environment, the companies that make them have billions of rea$on$ to push them.

4) Is GM organic?

No. That’s the truthful and indisputable answer. But then spin is a wonderful thing isn’t it? With carefully placed words and figures you can cloud the issue by implying ‘no’ means ‘yes’ even when it still means ‘no’.

Back to the Agrifoods article, the author states the Law Society Journal defines organics as “The use of renewable resources, conservation of energy, soil and water, recognition of livestock welfare needs, and environmental maintenance and enhancement”.

She then states that under that definition “one could claim that GM crops meet the organic definition.” But then rather than substantiating that claim, she jumps to the uptake of GM canola by Australian farmers saying that “says it all”. Maybe I’m missing the point or I looked at the above evidence wrongly but the only thing it indicates to me is that there are a lot of farmers out there that have been let down by the trappings of conventional farming methods and are desperate to keep their properties running. The bad news for them is GM is proving itself to be less than a short-term fix which will only cause pain and suffering for them and the rest of humanity down the track.

Farmers are now being backed into a corner with a barrage of marketing propaganda. Websites, articles and key-note speakers are telling them that the only way we can feed a burgeoning population, the only way we can eradicate poverty and the only way we can stay in business and turn a profit is by turning to a patented system that’s designed to use the same company’s pesticide combination. This is a system that is designed for profit, not the good of humanity.

What if we could actually feed ourselves using nature?

Despite all the clutter of questionable data and misleading science, let’s never forget nature provides all our needs. As Craig Mackintosh wrote:

People have been safely ‘engineering’ plants for millennia, without the need to bypass plants’ natural defenses and bombard their cells with genes from entirely unrelated species. GM crops have failed to deliver on their promises, and are an expensive distraction from the faster, localised natural plant breeding techniques that can quickly optimise plants for specific locales.

Whichever way you look at it, permaculture principles, organics, bio-dynamics and regenerative agriculture are solutions-based approaches to the economic, health and environmental challenges of modern food production. No Spin.

Finally a personal note to farmers: I don’t want chemically grown and/or genetically modified goods mixed in with my food and I will happily pay a premium for clean foods if you grow it, even under a voluntary organics standard. But it’s not just me. I’m only one of a rapidly growing number of people that vote with their dollar while continuing to apply pressure for a compulsory organics standard, better labelling and ultimately the banning of GMOs, and the re-localisation of food. Why not hop onboard early and reap the financial benefits?

I promised last week that I would tell you about the cows here at Zaytuna and I’m going to do just that. I’d like for the vegetarians out there (who will find most of this menu unpalatable) to still be interested in reading about these cows because it’s not just about the beef that ended up on our plates….

Zaytuna cow
Photo © Craig Mackintosh

Cow’s Breakfast Salad

Billy the bull Photo © Craig Mackintosh

I spent some time watching the cows this morning. They’re playful these cows. Tame. I stroke their hides and smile at how beautiful they are. And as I have a chat with Jordan, the good lad who wakes up each morning to milk them, I keep smiling at all that he has to tell me about the fresh salad he prepares for them in exchange for their lovely milk.

He harvests some arrowroot, comfrey, bamboo leaves, acacia leaves, protein rich leaucaena and pigeon pea leaves, lupin cover crop in the winter and cowpea cover crop in the summer, the occasional helping of mugwort for worming. He takes all this good salady stuff and he chops it up, throws it into a bucket and prepares the dressing. Ha! These cows have got it made. For the dressing he takes a touch of copper sulphate and stirs it into some hot water. Don’t worry, Jordan won’t harm the cows- he adds a tablespoon of animal dolomite to the mix to neutralize poisoning effects of copper sulphate, then a tablespoon of sulphur to acidify the alkaline effect of the animal dolomite. Some dried kelp seaweed, some full compliment rock dust, a big spoon of molasses for sweetness plus a good half cup splash of organic apple cider vinegar. Bring it all together with some Lucerne (alfalfa) and pollard and you’ve got yourself one mineral rich dressing.

Jordan mixes it through the bucket of the chopped greens and I watch the cows eagerly follow him all the way to the milking station. They know a good feed when they taste one and they get this every day. You should see how healthy they are. Good looking animals full of energy and life.

And as I watch the milk squirt out, I can’t help but smile some more, thinking how all that energy and life is being transferred into the milk. This isn’t just good animal husbandry. This is intelligent design. Especially when you realize that the minerals Jordan gives the cows aren’t just in their milk. They get into the soil too, through the cow’s waste, also as a main compost and worm farm ingredient. Soil we grow our food in. Food that we dispel into the compost toilet…. The whole thing going round and round in a beautifully managed pattern.

Zaytuna calf
Photo © Craig Mackintosh

It makes sense and makes for some seriously tasty and nutrient rich milk in a raw form that can’t be beat. And away to the diet police out there who say milk is no good for you. Why, without milk we wouldn’t have cream or cheese or frozen yoghurt (flavoured with rose water and sprinkled with candied pistachios) and we wouldn’t have butter and all the good things that butter makes possible like croissants and scones and pasta flora and butter on warm toast and smiles all round. Food is too important to be restricted by fear or prejudice my friends. Let me eat in peace, with joy in my heart and hopefully some good folk to share the meal with.

Troop’s Breakfast

Goat milk porridge folded through with pan fried apple slices and sunflower kernels. Coffee and tea.

Photo © Marcelo Severo

The troops don’t dig the goat milk much so I slip it into their porridge and they don’t seem to notice or mind. (You can disguise liver into a beef pie if you chop it small enough and cook it long enough in a rich sauce. Slivers of poached tongue disappear amongst the other toppings on a pizza, the tongue poaching liquid goes into the Bolognese sauce, burnt biscuits into the muesli slice, left-over pancake batter into the sourdough bread…)

I gave them goat milk with their coffee and tea once and they used half as much as they do with cow milk. Nothing wrong with goat milk I reckon, but there was the odd comment and complaint. Goat milk tastes funny. I don’t like it.… When it’s in the porridge though, everyone likes goat milk only they don’t know it. And I don’t tell them otherwise, removing the chance of any discussion upon the subject.

You see, it’s my job to not let anything from the farm go to waste in the kitchen and to try to keep everybody here well fed and as happy as they can manage to be with the food I give them. I do my best and when I get that odd complaint I suffer the old cook’s customary desire to whack a chopping board across the complainer’s head. I’m too busy feeding all the people to discuss the issue of any one individual’s dietary dilemmas. And I keep my eye on the milk supply line like a hawk. I know what’s going on with the milk and I’ll make sure you get some, that’s all you need to know. In this world, just be happy there’s any milk at all.

Morning Tea

Pancakes with banana, honey and walnut cream.

Ever since the cows changed pastures there sure has been more cream sitting on top of the milk. We’re eating what they’re eating and today what we get to eat from the pasture via the cows comes in the form of lovely silky thick cream. I skim it off and beat it stiff. Drizzle in some honey and crushed walnuts. Fold it all through with smashed up bananas and a sprinkle of cinnamon and brown sugar. Yum, especially dolloped upon pancakes cooked on the wood stove. No complaints from the troops.

Lunch

Caramelized eel. Thai-like beef salad. Steamed rice. Lemongrass tea.

Caramelized eel and Tai beef salad with rice
Photo © Marcelo Severo

A complaint drifted into the kitchen of not enough meat. I did the calculations and figured that we’d have to kill a chicken a day or use a kilo of beef or some other kind of meat to satisfy this request by (in their defense) only a few members of the group. It’s manageable I believe, but I’m not sure if it’s necessary. I figure most people around the world get by on a high carb diet with a little protein and some vegetable matter thrown in to help make more interesting and nutritious their humble serve of rice or cassava or polenta or tortilla or noodle or couscous or piece of bread….

Good enough for them. Good enough for me. Good enough for you if you’re eating from my kitchen. I’m fair though. Children and nurturing mothers first. And I take care of the workers who work and work and work. They’ve earned their crust.

But today there’s lots of meat for everyone. A surplus of three eels presented itself to the kitchen via a couple of the intern’s fishing efforts. Good on them for sharing their bounty with everyone and good on the Vietnamese for showing me the way to cook the eel.

Eel, raw and cooking
Photo © Marcelo Severo

Kill your eel with a good whack to the brain. Open up the guts and scoop all that stuff out. Grab a cleaver and chop your eel into chunky steaks… skin, bones and all. It’s all good stuff. Next, throw a handful or two of sugar into a pan with a little water and put it on the stove. Let it caramelize golden and lovely, not burnt and bitter. It’s a tightrope and you have to pay attention to the pan. When it gets to the golden lovely point, you pour in a good helping of soy sauce and let it all reduce a bit. (While it’s doing that, you can throw in some combination of garlic, chili, lemongrass, ginger, galangal, fish sauce, kaffir lime leaf, oniony things… all the usual suspects in Southeast Asian cuisine.) Add your chopped up eel to the pot (including the head, which is delicious) and let it all simmer for a good while. You want all that eel fattiness to melt into the sauce and for the sweet sauce to reduce down to a syrup that melts into the eel. A very satisfying way to eat eel. Thankyou Vietnam. Thank you eel.

To cook the beef for the salad, I stole a bit of the caramelized soy reduction out of the eel pan, added more fish sauce, more garlic, more chili, more galangal.… Massage this stuff into your beef then place into a baking pan, cover and shove the whole thing into the wood oven for a slow braise. When it’s done, you slice the beef up nice and thin and toss it along with the pan juices and some pickled strips of turnip and carrot and cabbage, roasted onion wedges, toasted coconut, fried peanuts, lemon segments, lots of coriander and mint. Only a vegetarian could complain and to them I say – do the same thing but swap the beef with some stir-fried tofu or shitake mushrooms or even some smashed up adzuki beans. Everybody happy? Let’s move on to dinner.…

Pizza Dinner

Photo © Marcelo Severo

Everybody loves pizza right? So why not use the opportunity to sneak in the somewhat less popular culinary item of poached tongue? Slice it thin and scatter it amongst the other toppings of leftover pumpkin wedges, sautéed calvo nero and onion, marinated olives.… Just watch the happy pizza eaters shovel it in, even the ones who think they don’t eat tongue.

I don’t know what anyone could have against tongue anyway. I love the stuff and made sure to keep some for my breakfast in the morning. Before I went to bed though, I marinated my slices of poached tongue in a bath of (50/50) olive oil and lemon juice. You can heat your marinade up with some sliced garlic, chopped chili, some lightly toasted coriander seeds, a bay leaf or two.… The next morning, you take a boiled egg and chop it up with some green olives and parsley. Put it all together on top of some toast and the only regret you’ll have is using too much of the precious tongue on the pizzas….

Tongue on toast
Photo © Marcelo Severo

by Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

A Ladakhi woman and her barley
Photo copyright © Craig Mackintosh

Around midnight on Wednesday, August 11th, a group of commodity analysts will gather at a meeting site in the massive South Building of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Washington, D.C. Once they are assembled, the door will be locked. Cell phones will be collected. Phone and Internet lines will be disconnected. Short of a medical emergency, no one will be permitted to leave before 8:30 am.

The USDA produces an estimate of world grain production, consumption, and trade by the 12th of each month. The gathered analysts will consult reports from a worldwide network of agricultural attachés, satellite images of crop vegetation, and the latest weather reports. The widely respected World Agricultural Outlook Board’s report, though little known to the public, is of incalculable value to commodity traders, agribusinesses, and farmers—some of whom stand to gain or lose fortunes on the data it contains.

At 7:00 am on Thursday, shortly after the assembled team has completed its latest monthly estimate of this year’s world grain harvest, a handful of accredited agricultural reporters will be admitted and given access to the data so they can write their stories. At precisely 8:30 am the lockup will end, and phone and Internet lines will be reconnected.

All eyes will be on USDA’s new grain numbers. When the last report was released on July 9th, it showed that the previously estimated 2.2 billion ton world grain harvest had dropped by 18 million tons—a fall of nearly one percent. This month’s report will incorporate the effects of a continuing record heat wave and drought on the grain harvests of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, countries that account for one fourth of world wheat exports. The crop losses from the searing temperatures prompted Vladimir Putin’s early August announcement that Russia would ban grain exports at least through December, further raising concerns about the adequacy of this year’s global harvest.

During the two month span between June 9th and August 9th, the world price of wheat jumped by 66 percent. The USDA’s August estimate will show the world harvest shrinking further. But by how much? And how will it affect world grain prices?

Russia’s grain harvest, which was 94 million tons last year, could drop to 65 million tons or even less. West of the Ural Mountains, where most of its grain is grown, Russia is parched beyond belief. An estimated one fifth of its grainland is not worth harvesting. In addition, Ukraine’s harvest could be down 20 percent from last year. And Kazakhstan anticipates a harvest 34 percent below that of 2009. (See data at www.earthpolicy.org.)

This seven-week crop-withering heat wave is unprecedented for western Russia. July in Moscow was the hottest month in 130 years of recordkeeping. Wildfires are consuming hundreds of thousands of acres of forest, grassland, and ripe wheat fields that have been dried to a crisp in the relentless heat. By early August, hundreds of new fires were breaking out each day. The army was mobilized to assist local fire control units in trying to quell more than 550 fires raging across more than 430,000 acres.

The heat and drought that are shrinking the grain harvest are also reducing grass and hay growth. With less grass for grazing and less hay to carry Russia’s 21 million cattle through the long winter, farmers will have to feed more grain. In late July, Moscow released 3 million tons of grain from government stocks for use by livestock producers and millers. Supplementing hay with grain in cattle rations is costly, but the alternative is to reduce herd size by slaughtering livestock. This would, however, lead to higher milk and meat prices.

Russia and Ukraine together account for nearly half of world exports of barley, a widely used feedgrain in Europe and the Middle East. This year importers will have to look elsewhere. Russia itself could become a grain importer. Indeed, it is hoping to get exportable supplies from Kazakhstan and Belarus, fellow members of a new customs union.

The Russian ban on grain exports and possible restrictions on exports from Ukraine and Kazakhstan could cause panic in food-importing countries, leading to a run on exportable grain supplies. Beyond this year, there could be some drought spillover into next year if there is not enough soil moisture by late August to plant Russia’s new winter wheat crop.

Even as the grain export supply is shrinking, China—essentially self-sufficient in grain for several years—has in recent months turned quietly to Canada and Australia for over half a million tons of wheat from each and to the United States for a million tons of corn. A Chinese consulting firm projects China’s corn imports climbing to 15 million tons in 2015. China’s potential role as an importer could put additional pressure on exportable supplies of grain.

The bottom line indicator of food security is the amount of grain in the bin when the new harvest begins. When world carryover stocks of grain dropped to 62 days of consumption in 2006 and 64 days in 2007, it set the stage for the 2007-08 price run-up. World grain carryover stocks at the end of the current crop year have been estimated at 76 days of consumption, somewhat above the widely recommended 70-day minimum. But how much will carryover stocks drop in the new USDA crop estimate? No one knows how far grain prices will rise in the months ahead. What we do know, however, is that the prices of wheat, corn, and soybeans are actually somewhat higher in early August 2010 than they were in early August 2007, when the record-breaking 2007-08 run-up in grain prices began. Whether prices will reach the 2008 peak again remains to be seen.

Are this record heat wave and the associated crop shortfall the result of climate change? Not necessarily. No single heat wave, however extreme, can be attributed to global warming. What we can say is that heat and drought similar to that experienced in Russia are projected to occur more frequently as the earth’s temperature continues to rise in the decades ahead. This Russian heat wave lets us see just how brutal future climate change can be.

That intense heat waves shrink harvests is not surprising. The rule of thumb used by crop ecologists is that for each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum we can expect a reduction in grain yields of 10 percent. With global temperature projected to rise by up to 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) during this century, this effect on yields is an obvious matter of concern.

Each year the world demand for grain climbs. Each year the world’s farmers must feed 80 million more people. In addition, some 3 billion people are trying to move up the food chain and consume more grain-intensive livestock products. And this year some 120 million tons of the 415-million-ton U.S. grain harvest will go to ethanol distilleries to produce fuel for cars.

Surging annual growth in grain demand at a time when the earth is heating up, when climate events are becoming more extreme, and when water shortages are spreading makes it difficult for the world’s farmers to keep up. This situation underlines the urgency of cutting carbon emissions quickly—before climate change spins out of control.

Further Reading:

• The Looming Food Crisis and the 2030 Report
• The Food Crisis: “A Perfect Storm” – and How to Turn the Tide
• Orchestrating Famine – a Must-Read Backgrounder on the Food Crisis
• A Call to Large Scale Earth Healing and Lessons from the Loess Plateau (Video)

Some time ago the National Geographic did a piece on the connection between the introduction of caffeinated drinks into Europe and the Industrial Revolution.

It’s hardly a coincidence that coffee and tea caught on in Europe just as the first factories were ushering in the industrial revolution. The widespread use of caffeinated drinks—replacing the ubiquitous beer—facilitated the great transformation of human economic endeavor from the farm to the factory. Boiling water to make coffee or tea helped decrease the incidence of disease among workers in crowded cities. And the caffeine in their systems kept them from falling asleep over the machinery. In a sense, caffeine is the drug that made the modern world possible. And the more modern our world gets, the more we seem to need it. Without that useful jolt of coffee—or Diet Coke or Red Bull—to get us out of bed and back to work, the 24-hour society of the developed world couldn’t exist. – National Geographic

If this is so, then, of course, my incessantly wandering mind must put two and two together. If caffeine was an essential ingredient to bring about the Industrial Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution brought about widespread environmental destruction and climate change, then… that’s it… caffeine is bringing us to the brink of disaster!

Electricity, combined with caffeine, keeps us up late at night – when in pre-industrial times it would have been lights out hours ago. We’re no longer ‘burning the candle at both ends’, but rather the coal-fired power station that lights our homes and powers our televisions through the sunless hours.

And the next day – how does the day begin for most of us? Out of our beds we emerge like the walking dead from a B-grade zombie movie, until we reach for our kick-start-in-a-cup, and begin the cycle again.

Caffeine not only fueled the Industrial Revolution, but the Industrial Revolution and caffeine together saw the demise of the siesta – the mid-afternoon power-nap that was common in many parts of the world, including northern Europe.

And here’s another misunderstanding about siestas. It’s not really a Mediterranean invention – it’s just that those southern European countries have had the good sense to preserve the tradition.

Before the industrial revolution and fixed working hours, it would have been perfectly normal in northern Europe for people to take an afternoon sleep…. – BBC

We’ve written about factory farming several times on this site, and how our industry attempts at efficiency are back-firing in disease. Our industrial mindset takes a biological creature, like a chicken, and puts it into an industrial setting – trying to… er… squeeze out the maximum ‘widgets per chicken-hour’ (in this case, eggs) as possible. We treat the animal like a machine, and when it doesn’t operate as we want, we pump it with drugs until it does. It’s unnatural, and it’s unhealthy.

In a similar way, it’s interesting how we, also a biological creature, are applying this same template to ourselves – patterning ourselves after the machines we’ve created. Our economy is about widgets per man-hour, mathematics, and supposed efficiency. We’re bending our body’s biological clock to fit a schedule dictated by a mechanical clock on the wall, and we’re the only creatures on the planet to do so. Recent studies are proving that our bodies know best.

To reverse environmental degradation, won’t we need to slow down?

While you guys are rolling this around in your mind and thinking how to comment on this, I’m going to go and have forty winks, and come back at peak efficiency.

Zzzz……..

The Uk may have to import waste to burn as it builds more incinerators than we can use, whilst waste pickers in the majority world – the poorest of the poor – complain that their livelihoods as recyclers are being destroyed by incineration plans. Oh – and there’s a car that runs on shit.