WEDESDAY, JAN 11, 2023: NOTE TO FILE
Module 1-5
A short 8-week course in ecological design, module 1, lesson 5
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: SUSTAINABILITY, FROM THE WIRES, LANGUAGE GAMES
Abstract: As I have sustainability concerns and concerns for posterity's and the biosphere's future, I will start a course in Ecological Design tomorrow, which is one of four 'dimensions' of the offering. Subnotes to file will likely follow.
COOS BAY (A-P) — The 5th lesson. [My comments are in brackets.]
The Transition Town Network
In 2005, an energy-descent plan drawn up by students for permaculture teacher Rob Hopkins led to the first Transition Town in Totnes, England. The movement is now global.
You can watch a documentary that shows, among many interesting initiatives, a bit of this movement story, named “Demain” (tomorrow) here.
3.3. Greening the Desert
Geoff Lawton’s permaculture project in Jordan has regenerated 5 hectares of semi-arid land badly degraded through over-grazing. It receives only 2 or 3 light rainfalls a year and the fine-grained silt is salty; wells in the area are too saline for irrigation. Using water-retention-landscape techniques to capture rainfall and run-off from the road in tanks with fish to purify and fertilise the water for drip-node irrigation, they planted trees in heavily mulched, moist trenches: olive, fig, guava, date palm, pomegranate, grape, citrus, carob, mulberry, cactus and a wide range of vegetables. Barley and alfalfa were planted as legumes and forages for farm animals (chickens, pigeons, turkey, geese, ducks, rabbits, sheep, and a dairy cow) that also provide fertilisation. Watch this short (8mins) video celebrating 10 years of the project in 2018. [That grey water is processed on site, together with humanure, rabbit and chicken manure, food, apart from what is grown on the 12 acres, would be an imported source of nutrients/fertilizer from outside. The water source is not mentioned, but the annual rainfall is 100 mm (4 in.) and the 5 hectars are obviously irrigated, including misters, and the demonstration project is not scalable, i.e. is dependent on water, nutrient, and energy (including human labor) inputs and is not remotely sustainable.]
We can see from this video that not only has this permaculture, whole-systems approach regenerated land desertified by inappropriate agricultural practices, but it is also a whole-systems approach on a broader level including food sovereignty, education for adults and children, community building, alleviation of poverty and empowerment for woman. It contributes to achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals and can be implemented anyhwere in the world. [The show project site (Greening the Desert Permaculture Ecolodge Project) is 14 km north of the Dead Sea, and so can be implemented in Death Valley too, but only on a small scale with vast amounts of per hectare inputs that could not be scaled up to cover Death Valley, the area around the Dead Sea, or anywhere else. Building a greenhouse in Antartica on top of a hog manure digester that generated methane to keep the greenhouse warm when burned to increase the CO2 inside to aid photosynethis with the manure produced by an ajacent hog farm fed by food not grown in Antartica would be possible, but a distraction as it would not scale up or solve any problems facing humanity.]
Module 1, lesson 6
