How Permaculture Can Restore Ecosystems & Communities

Maddy Harland tells the story of the Shona African community who healed their damaged ecosystems. They restored their springs, rebuilt their soil, regenerated their agriculture and alleviated poverty and malnutrition. Permaculture farming has proven effective all over the planet.

In the rural Shona African community in Zimbabwe, five villages of 7,000 people have joined together to form the Chikukwa Project, named after their local chief. Twenty years ago their land was deforested, barren, and nothing would grow there in the summer months. When the rains came, they washed down the slopes taking the soil with them. The springs had dried up and the people were poor, hungry, and suffering from malnutrition.

The Shona decided to do something about it and sought advice from permaculture pioneer, John Wilson. Slowly, a field at a time, they built water retaining landscapes: terracing the slopes and digging swales to hold the water in the soil. They added composted manure to these terrace beds to build soil and grow food. They stopped grazing animals and foraging for firewood in the gullies where the springs rose and planted native trees there to hold the moisture in the soil. They also stopped untethered grazing of goats on the hillsides, allowing trees to regenerate, and they started driving their cattle to agreed grazing areas. They learnt new skills: specifically permaculture training, conflict resolution, women’s empowerment, primary education and HIV management.

Within three years, the springs began to reactivate. They saw that the yields from the plots with swales were bigger than the plots without them. Twenty years later, where there was once eroded soil and over-grazed slopes, there are now reforested gullies with flowing water, terraces full of vegetables, grains and fruit, and high ridges lined with trees for firewood. In the villages, there are home gardens, pens for hens and goats, water tanks to catch rainfall runoff, and a culture of cooperation that values people skills as much as horticultural techniques. The landscape is verdant and biodiverse, and the gardens and farms produce crops for the families and for market, bringing an economic yield back into the region. All this in one generation.

Read more here.

Ecocide or Murder of Mother Earth

Earth's ecosystems are collapsing and dying as all life and the biosphere are murdered for industrial economic growth

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

For decades, probably several centuries, our obsession with economic growth, but more so even in the last decades, has led to a wholesale destruction of habitats and the ecosystems of our Planet in general.

The latest stupid idea is so-called sustainable economic growth and the talk is full of it, at times. However, the words “sustainable” and “growth” just do not compute together in a world with finite non-renewable resources.

We need to come to understand that economic growth is not sustainable and in order to be sustainable we have to develop a new model and system. If we do not we are going to kill ourselves and the Planet, and that in that order.

The capitalist system, and we must include here also state capitalism, which was referred to as communism/socialism, that was prevalent in the countries of the Com-Bloc, those once upon a time behind the so-called Iron Curtain. That was not true communism or socialism but state regulated capitalism. In both instances the system was geared towards ever increasing growth, to the detriment of Mother Earth.

“When the Earth is ravaged and the animals are dying, a new tribe of people shall come unto the Earth from many colors, creeds and classes, and who by their actions and deeds shall make the Earth green again. They shall be known as the Warriors of the Rainbow.” Hopi Prophesy

Our organized religions, especially the three Abrahamic Faiths, are detrimental to the Planet as they teach, basically, or, let's better say are misinterpreted to teach, that man is the lord over all creation and over the Earth and some even teach that all lithe non-renewable resources and not, actually, non-renewable but that G-d will replenish them at infinitum and that, therefore, we do not have to stop using oil and such. Much like Jesus turning water to wine at the wedding at a wedding G-d will create more oil, gas, and other resources. The sad thing that those people actually firmly believe this and cannot and will not be convinced of the opposite.

The truth is, obviously, an entirely different one and one that is not so rosy as painted by those of those religions and especially those of certain brands of the Christian one.

The Bible does not say that G-d gave us everything to abuse; it says that it was given to us to use. And use here means use for our needs and not for our greed.

Neither, say the proponents of this belief, is the Earth experiencing any climate change. It is made up by those that want to control everyone and that there has always been freak weather throughout the thousands of years the Earth has been in existence. Yes, they do not believe either that the Earth is millions of years old, despite the fossil evidence and all the rest. Some even believe – and teach children (in school) – that man and dinosaurs walked the Earth together, despite evidence to the contrary.

While one would like to believe that this belief only exists among a few sad characters the unfortunate fact is that it seems to be gaining momentum, especially in the Christian right (and not very right they are) in the USA and other countries.

The facts are that we are running out of resources of the non-renewable kind, and that we cannot maintain a growth-based economy. It was a bad idea for starters but is an even worse one now, and even calling for sustainable economic growth is something that just does not work. Instead we need to develop a resource-based economy and one that is not dedicated to growth.

We must do that, and we must do that now, in order to halt the damage to the Earth and in the hope that we can reverse and repair the damage already caused.

© 2013

Putting a price tag on ecosystem services

By Michael Smith (Veshengro)

A recent article in the New York Times about the work Stanford University biology professor Gretchen Daily is doing in Africa and Costa Rica highlights the importance of ecosystem services, or putting a value on ecosystems. Daily co-founded the Natural Capital Project (NCP) in November 2006, which, as Daily told the New York Times, works to “quantify in biophysical and dollar terms the value of conserving the forest and its wildlife.”

and he also explained as to why we should put a price tag on ecosystem services.

NCP is a joint venture between Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). NCP developed software tools for Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVest) which allows “decision makers” to put a value on natural capital, as its website states. InVest includes coastal and marine ecosystem services.

NCP has several projects in North America: the Sierra Nevada region in California, the Hawaiian Islands, and the West Coast of Vancouver Island in Canada’s British Columbia. NCP’s other projects are located in China’s Upper Yangtze River Basin, Coastal Belize, Sumatra (Indonesia), Northern Andes and Southern Central America (NASCA), and Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains.

The Sierra Nevada Region project caught my attention because I have roots in the area. NCP’s website gives some interesting facts about the region, which helps someone understand both the importance of NCP having a demonstration project there, and the importance of ecosystem services:

* The Sierra Nevada Mountains are a 650 kilometer region that includes Yosemite Valley, Lake Tahoe and Mt. Whitney

* The Sierra Nevada produces approximately $2.2 billion worth of commodities and services a year (water resources, timber, ranching, mining, recreation and tourism), with water comprising 60 percent of the total value, or over $1.32 billion

* The region’s watersheds (rivers, lakes and streams) supply 65 percent of California’s urban and rural water supply, and almost all of the water for western Nevada

* NCP calls the region “California’s principal watershed” that supports the 5th largest economy in the world (California)

* By 2040, almost 20 percent of the region’s private forests and rangelands could be affected by development

* Climate change could also be a threat as the snowpack could be reduced which would mean California and Nevada would have less of a water supply

* The human population in the region has tripled since 1970

NCP’s project in the Sierra Nevadas, its California Demonstration Site, compiles relevant data by mapping and modeling ecosystem service production and human dimensions in the region. The point of the demonstration site is to give decision-makers the tools to “identify and properly value ecosystem services and assess the costs and benefits of their protection.”

From Dow to the World Bank: putting a value on ecosystems is all the rage

Putting a value on ecosystems is not something that only NCP does. There are companies who seek to quantify ecosystems. For example, Dow Chemical, the company that brings us pesticides, announced its partnership in January with TNC to put a value on ecosystems.

Last October, the World Bank launched its Global Partnership for Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services Valuation and Wealth Accounting. The partnership builds on the UNEP project The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), and will include both developed and developing countries, international organizations like the UNEP and NGOs.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBSCD) released its Guide to Corporate Ecosystem Valuation (CEV) in April. The Guide provides a framework for companies to improve “corporate decision-making through valuing ecosystem services,” according to the WBCSD.

In his book “Wild Law” South African environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan also suggest that we must put a tag on ecosystem services and why, and he has done so since the first edition of that book in the late 1990s.

Only when we finally realize that Nature's services and resources are NOT free for the taking will we, as a whole, come to value the services provides to us by the ecosystems per se.

It is also not only resources that Nature provides; it is much, much more.

Mankind, as a whole, especially man from the developed world, treats Nature and the services of the ecosystems as goods and services which can simply be taken without needing to consider the consequences. Does it not all regenerate? No, not like that. It is not something free and for the taking and something that can be exploited.

We must rethink our relationship with the natural world and understand that we are but a part of it and not apart of it.

© 2011