Subject: RE: [Permaculture] African deserts

From: John Schinnerer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 11:34:20 -0700

Aloha,

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Scott Pittman [SMTP:[email-masked]]
>I've just returned from a month in Africa where deserts are being created
>systematically and shovel technology is just not an option if one wants to
>begin the process of pushing the desert back.  

By whom, and how, are these deserts being systematically created?  I haven't
heard about this yet...?  This isn't the Egyptian plan to create a second
"Nile river valley," is it?

John Schinnerer

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From: Scott Pittman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Jul 1999 17:02:16 -0700 (PDT)

>"Nile river valley," is it?
"On the southern edge of the Sahara an area the size of Somalia has become
desert over the past 50 years.  The same fate now threatens more than
one-third of the African continent.  The main cause of desertification is
not drought but mis-management of land, including overgrazing and felling of
trees and brushwood for fuel." Source: "The conservation and Rehabilation of
African Lands" FAO 1990

FYI Somalia is 650,000 square kilometers.  An additional 50,000 to 70,000
km2 is being added to the African desertification list annually.  "More than
35% of the land north of the equator is affected by either erotion or
salinity.  Zimbabwe alone could be losing 1.6 million tonnes of nitrogen and
240,000 tonnes of phosphorus each year through erotion." FAO ARC/90/4

Just because you havn't heard about it doesn't mean it isn't happening.

How would you restore 650,000 square kilometers of sand dunes?  And what is
you argument against thousands of miles of swales to collect rainfall that
may fall on this land.  This isn't new commercial technology the Nabateans
were doing the same thing in the Sinai desert before Moses.  If the Jews had
of maintained these water collecting structures the Sinai would still be in
bloom.

Though I sympathize with Luddism in some contexts this isn't one of them.

Scott

Scott Pittman

Permaculture Institute, USA
PO Box 3702, Pojoaque, NM 87501  US
phone 505.455.0270

*********
Ingenio Patet Campus

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 1999 03:23:32 EDT

Scott Pittman wrote:
<<"On the southern edge of the Sahara an area the size of Somalia has become

Though I sympathize with Luddism in some contexts this isn't one of them.>>

To expand this conversation I would encourage everyone to investigate the 
work of the Savory Center for Holistic Management based in Albuquerque, New 
Mexico USA. 
<A HREF="http://www.holisticmanagement.org/">Center for Holistic Manage...</A>

A couple years ago the Center made a video of a lecture that Allan Savory 
gave at the University of New Mexico where he very convincingly demonstrates 
the beneficial role grazing animals can have restoring desertifying lands, 
when managed correctly. He does a great comparison between the situation in 
Africa, (loss of soils, loss of plant cover, etc, etc, as Scott points out in 
the quotes above), and Texas. Almost everyone blames the situation in Africa 
on things like overgrazing, overcutting of trees, tragedy of the commons, 
etc. He uses Texas as the conter-example because it's a similar environment 
and it's an opposite in almost every regard: very few animals, lots of trees 
(mesquite is blamed for drought), private land ownership, etc.  

Allan then goes on to say that the flaw is in people's decision making, in 
how we think about the world and what we're doing in it, and how we choose to 
act. Part of the model that's been developed has a very clear (and sametimes 
fuzzy! since it is holism) process for helping make decisions that are sound 
ecologically, as in they help regenerate natural systems, sound socially, as 
in they empower local communities to develop rich relationships with the 
natural world and other human communities, and economically viable, as in 
they create a yield or surplus for reinvestment. 

Part of his work that I really like is the insistence that all tools can be 
in the toolbox ('dozer swaling, and planned grazing of cattle, for example) 
but we need a may to move ourselves forward towards the future we envision. 

What is it that the people in these areas want? What kind of quality of life  
do they envision for them selves? What do they need to do and produce in 
order to move towards that kind of life? What does their landscape need to 
look like far, far into the future in order to sustain what they  need to do 
to support their quality of life? When these questions have been answered to 
some degree, then we can start talking about what tools will help get them 
there. 

With regards,
Christopher Peck
Santa Fe, New Mexico USA

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From: Toby Hemenway <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 1999 07:08:28 -0700

John Schinnerer wrote:

> A couple of decades or so of small-scale exploration and experimentation
> in systems that
>spent hundreds and even thousands of years evolving the complexity that we
>observe them to have seems woefully inadequate preparation for
>industrial-scale intervention into those systems.

The point is, though, that we've already intervened in these systems on a
massive scale. Obviously, untouched ecosystems (if there are any outside of
Antarctica) should be left alone. But most desertification and land
degradation was caused by "human-scale, grassroots" uses such as the wood
collecting and grazing that Scott has cited. The industrial damage to, say,
the Amazon is small compared to what humans did prior to the industrial
age, like the clearing and fencing of all of America, the cutting of North
Africa's forests for Roman ships, the desertification of once-green Greece,
and on and on.
   I agree that we don't fully understand exactly how ecosystems function.
But we're not trying to restore degraded ecosystems to their original
pristine state (whatever that is: pre-European America? or pre-native
American-burning America? or pre ice-age America? How would you choose?) we
just want something other than a desert, we just want to jump-start
succession again by restoring a little rainfall and biomass accumulation.
Nature will do the rest. There's a lot of data out there on how to begin:
many large-scale projects done by thousands of restoration ecologists,
grassland restoration of hundreds of square miles by conscientious
ranchers, and we can also evaluate several thousand years of indigenous
land use, such as the regular burning of every major river valley in North
America for most of the last 5000 years. We know a lot about what works,
and we sure know what doesn't. Besides, *we* evolved in these systems, too:
we know quite a bit about them if we just listen. And we couldn't do much
worse than the desert that's already there.
  A bunch of people with shovels can do a lot of good, but they aren't
going to heal 650,000 square km of Somalian desert, not in the real,
political world. I see no reason why we shouldn't work at every scale, from
me with my shovel in my yard to a squadron of D-9 cats swaling a big
demonstration site in Somalia.

Toby

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From: John Schinnerer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 14:52:44 -0700

Aloha,

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]

>some degree, then we can start talking about what tools will help get them 

Thanks, Christopher, you have illuminated my concerns to a great extent.
The way it's been presented thus far, swaling a million acres of foreign
desert (or whatever industrial-scale project) sounds like any other foreign
aid project where someone knows what's good for someone somewhere else but
isn't from there, doesn't live there and maybe hasn't really asked them.  

So in this situation in Africa, who are the stakeholders in this designing?
Have they been asked any of the above and related questions, and listened to
long and hard?  What do they want?  How much help do they need, and how
much/what kind would be detrimental?  (Like George Bush's big food drop into
Somalia, which fed some starving people for a little while *and* put a bunch
of Somali farmers out of business for a long while).

Scott writes:
>The main cause of desertification is
>trees and brushwood for fuel."

So who's mis-managing, and why?  Who's overgrazing and cutting trees and
gathering fuel beyond what the bioregions can support at present, and more
importantly *why*?  To me, good ecological designing requires considering
more than just methods, techniques and technologies to catch more water and
grow more biomass.  I don't doubt that bulldozer permaculture can effect
significant vegetative and ultimately climactic changes, but if the current
mis-managers will still be in charge of management and maintenance, if the
various human organizational/cultural/infrastructure/population/etc. factors
are left out of the designing, the design is likely to be insufficient.
Maybe this is all being done in this case; if so I'd love to hear all the
details as it would be a great example to document.  Thus far I don't hear
of it being done.

John Schinnerer

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From: Toby Hemenway <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1999 07:56:47 -0700

John Schinnerer raised a couple of excellent points:
>So who's mis-managing, and why?
and
>if the current

   From what I've seen in the less-developed world, mis-management comes in
two forms: One is the original problem, which is local people putting too
much pressure on the land by living a traditional lifestyle that is
unsuited to high population levels (not that any lifestyle avoids this,
especially ours). The second problem is the response to this: NGOs and
governments implementing "solutions" without including the local people and
culture. If you swale and plant trees, people will just cut the trees down
for fuel. So if you want to help people (people who've asked for help, it
goes without saying) to harvest water and build biomass, there needs to be
a coordinated effort that suits the culture. I like what the folks at
Aprovecho are doing: they go into Latin American and African villages,
bringing "rocket stoves" made of tin cans that consume a tiny fraction of
the wood of usual cooking fires and don't make smoke (lung disease is a
huge cause of early death there). The people think the stoves are great,
they can make them themselves from local materials, and they build these
very pretty adobe structures around them that are nicer than what Aprovecho
brought. The new technology gets accepted and implicated into the culture,
and far fewer trees get cut down. That way, the "current mis-managers"
(i.e. the local people) themselves decide to change their land use
practices. Some of these villages are simultaneously re-learning organic
farming techniques better suited to the polycultures they've always grown.
This is one of the few examples I know of where outsiders have been
effective at actually helping rather than hurting. The Red Cross has been
sponsoring some of this work, but the implementation is very local.
   Thanks for raising the points about taking multiple factors into
account; just as technology can operate at many scales (shovels to dozers),
so must all other aspects of a design, especially the cultural ones.

Toby

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From: [email-masked] (Jeff Owens)
Date: Fri, 09 Jul 1999 10:17:47 -0700

>>So who's mis-managing, and why?

A recent report on climate modeling suggested that African
Desert expansion is due to many external factors and local
activity is a very small part of the problem.  Mostly it is
due to climate change and a global view might be most useful.
If this is true then one thing we can do is improve our local
ecology and change our agricultural systems/industrial
activities.

I don't think this suggests we should ignore immediate problems
in Africa, just that our local activities may be more connected
to Africa than we expect.  The problem could be "us".

 ----------
Jeff Owens ([email-masked])  Zone 7, http://www.teleport.com/~kowens
 Underground house, solar energy, reduced consumption, no TV

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1999 16:25:43 EDT

In a message dated 7/9/99 10:25:47 AM, you wrote:

I don't think this suggests we should ignore immediate problems
in Africa, just that our local activities may be more connected
to Africa than we expect.  The problem could be "us".>>

I would challenge the findings of these kinds of reports. Allan Savory, in 
the video I mentioned earlier, takes on this point of blaming world 
desertification on climate change. He gives the example of southern africa 
where there were many dutch towns with names like Springbockfontain, etc. 
Basically the name of an animal and the word fountain. There were springs all 
over the landscape, huge native grasses, and tons of game too. In 200 or so 
years now there's almost no grass, very little game, and no springs: 
desertification. And there's clear rainfall data; it rains just as little and 
just as sporadically as 200 years ago. 

In that publication of the Soil Conservation Service from 50 years ago called 
something like "Soil and Civilization over 7000 Years," (I assume someone 
will give the correct source and name of the author here since I can't seem 
to remember it) the author travels to the middle east and looks at land 
degradation that has happened on a massive scale. In one event in Jordan he's 
talking with a herder who is telling about when he was a kid he would stand 
on the ridge that they are sitting on and he couldn't see the animals below 
because of the grass. Now it's all barren. The author asks why and the herder 
says that it just doesn't rain the way it used to. But when he checks the 
rainfall data, which this place has for a considerable history, the rainfall 
hasn't changed one bit. 

What's important is the effectiveness of rainfall. I saw this with painful 
clarity in my last 12 years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Most of the rain that 
fell was simply unavailable to plants, either because it ran off, was 
evaporated or for various other reasons. So plants are living on 3-4 inches 
of rainfall a year at best, not 12 in an average year. 

So, the core of my challenge is that climate change may be a factor (and may 
be even more of a factor in the future) but if the top inch of soil is unable 
to absorb moisture, it doesn't matter how nicely it rains, it's ineffective. 

Just my $.02 worth,
Christopher Peck
Santa Fe, New Mexico USA

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From: Toby Hemenway <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1999 17:28:47 -0700

A further thought: As in so many differences of opinion, I think the
contrasting positions taken by Scott and myself on one side, and John S.
(and maybe Eric and Christopher) on the other come from different starting
assumptions. We're not advocating roaring in with bulldozers, IMF-like, to
ram a million acres of swales down somebody's throat. In any design, at an
early phase you must ask, as Christopher says:

>do they envision for them selves?

and recognize that, as John says,

>if the various human organizational/cultural/infrastructure/population/etc.
>factors are left out of the designing, the design is likely to be
>insufficient.

This is the site assessment phase as taught in the PDC: know your client
and site. Scott (I believe) and I assume that you've already done this,
have the backing of the client, and now you're at the implementation phase,
asking whether digging stick or dozer is a more effective and appropriate
technology. We wouldn't, a priori, rule out either method. But if you
haven't done a good site assessment and if you don't know your client, any
design, large or small, will fail. I think we don't really disagree, we're
just starting at different places.  I believe that the technical solutions
to desertification, and very elegant yet large-scale ones, exist. Whether
the appropriate cultural or political milieu for implementation exists is
another question altogether, and that's one I don't know the answer to. But
you guys have framed the questions very articulately, and in a way that
would be a contribution to any design course. These issues are at the heart
of permaculture every bit as much as the techniques (and why no designer
wants to work without seeing the site and client), and we ignore them at
our own peril.

Toby

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From: georg <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Jul 1999 16:43:07 +0200

>I believe that the technical solutions
>another question altogether, and that's one I don't know the answer to.

kimseed's revegetation programs are a rgeat example for this -
unfortunately their pretty lousy website
<http://www.iinet.net.au/~kimseed2/menu00.htm> doesnt show this, but i have
seen pictures in their seedcatalog of reveg jobs they have been doing in oz
and saudiarabia - they just run up and down the desert with
pitcher-seeders, and on next rain off it goes - squaremiles and squaremiles
of arid land fodder crops...

australia and arabia - both have very feudal landownder structures... might
tell us where such schemes are most easily implemented.

*

georg

********
follow your heart -
it is the only way to heaven on earth.. .  .
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