The El Manzano community hold their finished hand pumps

Over the course of my short visit here the power has gone out, for one reason or another, multiple times, and when it happens the taps totally refuse to surrender their precious charge. I thus find myself almost compulsively filling my stainless steel water bottle at every opportunity.

Our dependency on electricity is great enough without exacerbating the problem manyfold by having that vulnerability daisy-chain on to such a basic human need as water.

As mentioned, the massive earthquake a couple of months back helped villagers to register and acknowledge their vulnerability. The two hand pumps in the village were a critical element in their being able to avoid the chaos found in the towns and cities at the time. Ten days without power would otherwise have meant ten days without water.

A few days ago the El Manzano community rallied to increase their water security.

Jose demonstrates while the village looks on

Jose (below centre), who works for a local NGO that helps train poor farmers how to improve their situation with inexpensive, low tech solutions, came to El Manzano to get the village set up with manual water pumps. Rather than just bringing pre-assembled pumps along and handing them over, Jose brought the components only, and got the village involved, and working together, in their creation. The villagers took ownership of this element of their transition, and in the course of doing so are now intimately familiar with how the pumps work, so are now well prepared to create more if needed and to repair any that may break in the future.

The villagers get busy creating their own from scratch

There’s more to such gatherings than just reducing resiliency for individual families, of course. Such hands-on meetings create opportunity for the community to unite behind a common need and goal. Days like this are active and fun and serve to build relationships and strengthen friendships.

Even the children got involved

The resulting hand pumps are six metres in length – more than enough for the very high water table they have here, yet deep enough to help filter water that’s seeped down from above.

Is your community looking at ways to build resiliency for the energy-challenged times ahead? Why not give it some thought…. Aside from the practicalities, it can be a fun way for families – old and young – to get together to do something practical and rewarding.

Rather than fearing the future, we have opportunity to take it by the horns and steer it in a positive direction – one that gives us a localised interdependence that has a measure of hope of seeing us through difficult times.

Or, the other option is to just sit and trust the government to take care of us….

Continue on to Part VII: The House Building Gets Underway

Click here to open a 390kb PDF of details.

For more information please contact calgarypermaculture (at) gmail.com

Permaculture Calgary website: www.permaculturecalgary.org

Post-civil war security in Sri Lanka
All photographs © Craig Mackintosh

Standing, jostling in a small space with 15,000 people of mixed ethnicity and religion, just after a deadly civil war had been quashed by Sri Lanka’s government forces, could make a person feel a tad jittery – particularly when the event that attracted the aforesaid 15,000 people was in respect to Lord Kathirgaman, a six-headed Hindu god of war.

But here I was.

Kataragama Festival, Sri Lanka

It was a steamy August evening in 2009, and the last day of the annual two-week Kataragama Festival in deep south Sri Lanka. Many devotees arrive here after grueling pilgrimages on foot, often barefoot, from all over the country. They share a belief in the god’s power to grant wishes, with a few even expressing penance in extreme ways – like walking on coals or hanging their bodies from hooks. Over the course of the festival, upwards of half a million people come here.

Buddhist Kiri Vehera Temple, Kataragama

Hindu devotee

Although celebrating a Hindu deity, the festival has attracted special recognition from almost everyone. Buddhists and Hindus, Sinhalese and Tamils – they all come. Even minority Catholics make a showing. Yet, the atmosphere was clearly one of peaceful, joyous harmony; not tension. There was a small, supervisory military presence – to be expected since not even three months had elapsed since the Tamil Tigers conceded defeat – but even they looked unperturbed.

The throngs of people emanated a palpable feeling of relief that the civil war had ended. The common people seemed keen to put aside the ugliness of politics and get on with the challenges and joys of living.

Sarvodaya Aids Tamil Refugees

Sarvodaya’s belief in non-violence, and their resulting non-partisan efforts, have made them one of the few groups the Sri Lankan government allowed into the hot zones in the north of Sri Lanka to assist with humanitarian aid.

The image here is full of practical symbolism. A Singhalese (the majority)
volunteers his time to Sarvodaya to truck supplies of water to Tamil
IDP (Internally Displaced Person) camps in the north, in a truck
donated by German federal aid

As expressed about their involvement with Tsunami relief, wide-spreading community networks sharing common ideals are better situated to help when tragedy strikes than centralised government ever can. In this case it’s even more relevant when the political opinions of government heads might cloud an atmosphere of kindness with a desire to punish, rather than help.

Post Civil War Development

Just like with the Tsunami, Sarvodaya doesn’t want to only help through box-shifting initial aid, and then just drop it. They desire to keep working with communities to help them permanently shift to a sustainable, bottom-up democratic platform. An understanding of what is ’sustainable’, however, can be relative, depending on your view.

I want to note at this juncture, that I am not wholeheartedly and blindly holding Sarvodaya up as a perfect model of community and national development. But rather, as civilisation begins to unravel, I’m frantically looking for frameworks we can build on and improve. There are many elements of the Sarvodaya movement that I believe we need to examine – particularly as it’s the largest participatory democracy movement on the planet – but it is not perfect.

Sarvodaya Partnership with Microsoft and HSBC

In my first post on Sarvodaya I wrote the following question:

Did Sarvodaya hold the secrets to this systemic change? Or, being devil’s advocate here, did Sarvodaya threaten us with more of the same – taking impoverished but low carbon millions, helping them onto their feet, just to see them reach out for the very lifestyles from which we’re now trying to retreat?

A recent announcement from Sarvodaya – that they’re going to work in partnership with Microsoft and HSBC bank "to help educate the youth of the North and East and provide them with Information Technology skills", is a case in point. The announcement includes expressing the desire to ‘grow the economy’, which is, as we know, an impossibility if we’re seeking to reduce energy consumption, climate change, ocean acidification, etc.

The information technology training they are talking about would of course be done with the best of intentions. It may even help a few achieve a more ‘comfortable’ life. It would also provide inexpensive labour for the industrial machine…. What it won’t do is teach people how to build on the remnants of sustainable living they still retain. It won’t teach them how to develop localised cottage industries that supply food, clothing and housing in sustainable ways. It will encourage young people with new IT skills to leave their villages for higher incomes, and continue the trend to move people off the land – incentivising industrial agriculture to move in and fill the void. IT will encourage the beginnings of a process that leads to more specialisation and centralisation – and a greater dependency on supply lines outside of one’s control.

In the two-thirds world countries I’ve been in, one aspect that is striking, but expected, is a higher degree of naivety about world issues and current events. This is true particularly in regards to Peak Oil and its implications. Adverts reach these people far easier than the world energy and other peak-everything topics that are now commonplace in the west. Because of this, it’s not difficult for good intentions to get derailed along the way.

I take heart in one realisation, however. The energy and other issues we face will bring significant changes over the next few years. I don’t see there being time for these people to ‘develop‘ too far before they find themselves having to take stock of more realistic priorities, and fall back on community support and low carbon survival. Obviously the window of time we have now would be better spent in appropriate preparation, rather than chasing the mirage of a western lifestyle. In this sense misguided development attempts are an unfortunate, even dangerous, distraction. Here’s hoping Sarvodaya’s wide spreading network of ‘awakened’ villagers can urge their representatives (what we in the west, unfortunately, label our ‘leadership’) to avoid hopping into bed with just anyone that comes along bearing gifts (Sarvodaya people – please read this article). After all, that’s where the strength of a community shows itself, in their ability to shape their own future, and not just sit and watch, as we do in the west, as our governments lead us down the proverbial garden path.

Continue to read Part VI in this series….

Recently, The Panya Permaculture Project here in Thailand collaborated with Pun-Pun (an organic farm, seed-saving operation, and sustainable living and learning centre) to launch The Living Seeds Festival; an annual festival to celebrate biodiversity, sustainable living and community in northern Thailand.

The Festival included local organic food, organic seed exchange, massage and natural healing, and demonstrations such as natural building, earthen ovens, organic gardening techniques, appropriate technology and more…. The main aim of the Festival was to raise awareness on our present food crisis. The loss of food varieties (both in the markets and our diets), damage to land and soil (caused by conventional farming techniques), and the fragility of food security were just some of the many issues presented.

Being very close to Pun-Pun (as neighbours and friends) Panya’s role was very supportive. We covered the shaded grounds within Chiang Mai University in bamboo sculptures. These included ‘tensegrity structures’ (a mesmeric combination of tension and integrity, which creates a self-standing, three-dimensional, and often times awesome geometric structure; Google it for some fascinating imagery), giant tripods, woven orbs and nests.

The land was a wonderment of shapes and figures, and the bamboo awarded the area a gorgeous sense of nature; in its complexity as well as its simplicity.

We decided on bamboo for several reasons: there is a bamboo grove between Pun-Pun and Panya; the harvesting of bamboo is relatively quick and the plant regenerates rapidly; bamboo is durable and flexible; bamboo is extremely cooperative; and a relatively new member to Panya – Will Eastlake- has extensive experience with bamboo installations and constructions from various festival projects in Australia.

The Festival was a hit. Throughout the afternoon, people and more people wandered amongst the myriad booths, from seed saving to making adobe bricks. Seeing so many interested in food security and personal independence was truly inspirational. The proverbial ball has definitely begun to roll in Thailand.

And, I expect next year’s Living Seeds Festival to be an even bigger success.

For those who can make it, we are also having a two week natural building workshop, starting January 6, 2010.

In the United States, there has been a surge of interest in eating fresh local foods, corresponding with mounting concerns about the climate effects of consuming food from distant places and about the obesity and other health problems associated with junk food diets. This is reflected in the rise in urban gardening, school gardening, and farmers’ markets.

With the fast-growing local foods movement, diets are becoming more locally shaped and more seasonal. In a typical supermarket in an industrial country today it is often difficult to tell what season it is because the store tries to make everything available on a year-round basis. As oil prices rise, this will become less common. In essence, a reduction in the use of oil to transport food over long distances—whether by plane, truck, or ship—will also localize the food economy.

This trend toward localization is reflected in the recent rise in the number of farms in the United States, which may be the reversal of a century-long trend of farm consolidation. Between the agricultural census of 2002 and that of 2007, the number of farms in the United States increased by 4 percent to roughly 2.2 million. The new farms were mostly small, many of them operated by women, whose numbers in farming jumped from 238,000 in 2002 to 306,000 in 2007, a rise of nearly 30 percent.

Many of the new farms cater to local markets. Some produce fresh fruits and vegetables exclusively for farmers’ markets or for their own roadside stands. Others produce specialized products, such as the goat farms that produce milk, cheese, and meat or the farms that grow flowers or wood for fireplaces. Others specialize in organic food. The number of organic farms in the United States jumped from 12,000 in 2002 to 18,200 in 2007, increasing by half in five years.

Gardening was given a big boost in the spring of 2009 when U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama worked with children from a local school to dig up a piece of lawn by the White House to start a vegetable garden. There was a precedent. Eleanor Roosevelt planted a White House victory garden during World War II. Her initiative encouraged millions of victory gardens that eventually grew 40 percent of the nation’s fresh produce.

Although it was much easier to expand home gardening during World War II, when the United States was largely a rural society, there is still a huge gardening potential—given that the grass lawns surrounding U.S. residences collectively cover some 18 million acres. Converting even a small share of this to fresh vegetables and fruit trees could make an important contribution to improving nutrition.

Many cities and small towns in the United States and England are creating community gardens that can be used by those who would otherwise not have access to land for gardening. Providing space for community gardens is seen by many local governments as an essential service, like providing playgrounds for children or tennis courts and other sport facilities.

Many market outlets are opening up for local produce. Perhaps the best known of these are the farmers’ markets where local farmers bring their produce for sale. In the United States, the number of these markets increased from 1,755 in 1994 to more than 4,700 in mid-2009, nearly tripling over 15 years. Farmers’ markets reestablish personal ties between producers and consumers that do not exist in the impersonal confines of the supermarket. Many farmers’ markets also now take food stamps, giving low-income consumers access to fresh produce that they might not otherwise be able to afford. With so many trends now boosting interest in these markets, their numbers may grow even faster in the future.

In school gardens, children learn how food is produced, a skill often lacking in urban settings, and they may get their first taste of freshly picked peas or vine-ripened tomatoes. School gardens also provide fresh produce for school lunches. California, a leader in this area, has 6,000 school gardens.

Many schools and universities are now making a point of buying local food because it is fresher, tastier, and more nutritious and it fits into new campus greening programs. Some universities compost kitchen and cafeteria food waste and make the compost available to the farmers who supply them with fresh produce.

Supermarkets are increasingly contracting with local farmers during the season when locally grown produce is available. Upscale restaurants emphasize locally grown food on their menus. In some cases, year-round food markets are evolving that market just locally produced foods, including not only fruit and vegetables but also meat, milk, cheese, eggs, and other farm products.

Food from more distant locations boosts carbon emissions while losing flavor and nutrition. A survey of food consumed in Iowa showed conventional produce traveled on average 1,500 miles, not including food imported from other countries. In contrast, locally grown produce traveled on average 56 miles—a huge difference in fuel investment. And a study in Ontario, Canada, found that 58 imported foods traveled an average of 2,800 miles. Simply put, consumers are worried about food security in a long-distance food economy. This trend has led to a new term: locavore, complementing the better known terms herbivore, carnivore, and omnivore.

Concerns about the climate effects of consuming food transported from distant locations has also led Tesco, the leading U.K. supermarket chain, to label products with their carbon footprint—indicating the greenhouse gas contribution of food items from the farm to supermarket shelf. Sweden is a recent pioneer in labeling food with its carbon footprint along with nutritional facts.

As agriculture localizes, livestock production will likely start to shift away from mega-sized cattle, hog, and poultry feeding operations. The shift from factory farm production of milk, meat, and eggs by returning to mixed crop-livestock operations facilitates nutrient recycling as local farmers return livestock manure to the land. The combination of high prices of natural gas, which is used to make nitrogen fertilizer, and of phosphate, as reserves are depleted, suggests a much greater future emphasis on nutrient recycling—an area where small farmers producing for local markets have a distinct advantage over massive feeding operations.

In combination with moving down the food chain to eat fewer livestock products, reducing the food miles in our diets can dramatically reduce energy use in the food economy. And as world food insecurity mounts, more and more people will be looking to produce some of their own food in backyards, in front yards, on rooftops, in community gardens, and elsewhere, further contributing to the localization of agriculture.

Adapted from Chapter 9, “Feeding Eight Billion People Well,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/books/pb4

Evil is afoot! Conventional Agriculture has teamed up with Toxin-Spewing Factories to destroy the earth’s ecosystems! It looks like a job for…THE GREEN TEEN TEAM! (Try saying that three times fast.)

…No? Okay, but seriously, I took my PDC in Melbourne, Australia with Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawton in 2008 at the age of eleven. When my parents decided to take the course I didn’t quite know what to say. “You’re going to Australia? …and what, I’m staying at home in the U.S., alone with my {then nineteen-year-old} brother for two weeks? I can’t stay alone with him for two weeks, we’ll annoy each other to death!”

It ended up with me tagging along for the ride. The plan was to sit quietly while my parents took a ‘boring class about organic farming and sustainable building and stuff.’ “Whatever.” Needless to say, I brought plenty of reading material. On the first day, I sat down, took a book out of my backpack and started reading… then Bill went into one of his stories. I put my book down and listened for a while, then he went back into more technical things and I dug out my Nintendo DS. Then I ended up putting that away too and listening to the technical stuff as well. The second day I was still convinced that could sit there and read, this time I brought a notebook to doodle in. I drew a bird before class, and that was it. I found myself listening and taking notes. When the time came for teams to be made for the design exercise Geoff put me in a group too, and one devoid of either of my parents! On the second to last day, I presented my part of the design along with everyone else and on the last day I was happily surprised when I was called to receive a certificate.

Since the PDC I have come to enjoy many seemingly simple pleasures such as needing only to walk 10 feet from my front door to pick fresh basil and 50 feet for chicken-fresh eggs (no, not farm-fresh, chicken-fresh) for an omelet, and I have become much more aware about everything we’re doing to harm the environment and everything we can do to help it.

Now, I’ve created a message board for kids and teens from around the world, eighteen years old and younger to network, talk to other young permies, and most of all discuss permaculture related topics: the Young Permaculturists’ Discussion Group. I know you’re out there, gardening, taking PDCs, and even just looking for something to do that’s meaningful and ‘green,’ so let’s come together to talk chooks, cows, beans, solar power or whatever!

I’ll be waiting for you at the YPDG,

Kelly

P.S. I would love to have someone more experienced, like a permaculture teacher, to help me moderate the message board. Anyone interested could email me at klpagliaro (at) gmail.com

The theme for IPC9 is "Plan Africa – Food & Empowerment".

There are a few volunteer positions for this event that need filling. If you’ll be free during this period and would like to help make the IPC9 a success for the people of Africa and the wider international community by getting constructively involved in this exciting work, please click here (PDF) to read about these interesting posts and to find out how to apply.

Expressions of interest to get involved can email us at sheltermaker (at) gmail.com

The festival will be followed by a series of weekend summer workshops in Leitrim on ‘Permaculture: Food and Shelter’ and ‘Low-Tech Living’, taught by Australian permaculturist Alanna Moore, Irish architect Peter Cowman and guests.

Yesterday the Southern California Permaculture Convergence got underway. The word ‘convergence’ is the operative word here, and, ironically, to me at least, has a double meaning. Over the last couple of weeks, being here at Quail Springs just reminds me of the convergence of issues we face as a race, just as we ‘converge’ to network, share instruction and ideas, and find new ways to work together to face those same issues.

Let me explain, using an example very close to where we are today.

Quail Springs is situated in a high valley in the New Cuyama region of southern California. You can get an idea of the landscape from the panorama below (click for a larger version – you’ll also see an arrow pointing to where Quail Springs is).

Click for full view

As you can see, these are arid, desert lands. But, as mentioned before, it wasn’t always like this. Before Spanish and European settlement, this area held a vast swath of forest, with the New Cuyama River gliding slowly through. Now it’s a bone dry landscape in need of reconstructive surgery.

The picture below shows the New Cuyama River today. Deforestation and modern agriculture has totally undermined the natural watershed – a previously perpetual and abundant system that sustained the Chumash Indians for thousands of years.

The New Cuyama River – Pacific Steelhead Trout used to swim up here.
The river hasn’t flowed year round since the 1930s

This week we drove from Quail Springs, and followed the river as it wound its way to the sea. With the exception of a few small puddles showing up in a couple of places, it was bone dry all the way to the coast.

So, with the natural hydrological cycles disrupted, and the lands now converted to a virtual desert landscape, how do the many farmers here irrigate their crops? They dig wells and pump from the underground aquifers of course.

Quail Springs’ closest neighbour is a perfect example of how it works. This is a monocrop carrot farm (see above). The soil is fed each Spring by hundreds of thousands of tons of composted sewerage sludge from surrounding cities like Las Vegas, Santa Barbara, Bakersfield, etc. After it’s transported and dumped, heavy earthmoving equipment spreads it over the fields. The carrots are sown, and then watered through the hot spring and summer months by pumping the fast-depleting aquifer using two diesel generators.

The pumping has become a literal race-to-the-bottom. Smaller farmers cannot afford the costs of drilling deeper and deeper wells, so get priced out of the race. Larger farmers, whilst benefiting from more water, are also outcompeting their neighbours in both gaining a market share and depleting the precious aquifer.

Meanwhile, the remaining farmers are continuing to kill their own lands, as, amongst other things, the water they’re pumping is high in salt content. The irrigation runoff at the bottom of this slight slope dries out and has the telltale white surface crystalisation as evidence, and the carrots themselves, despite the huge energy expenditure to feed and water them, are not looking good this year – the high salt intake affecting their ability to take up water and to photosynthesize. As we look down the rows, we note that the foliage is a mix of green and sickly yellow.

Why is the water so salt laden? Well, it’s because the extraction rate from the aquifer is higher than the replenishment rate, and so pumping is driven deeper and deeper. Salt water has a higher density than fresh water and tends to sink. They are now pumping near the bottom of the aquifer.

For this particular farm they are pumping at about 600 feet below, and some of the farms in this region, on a different aquifer, are pumping at up to 1,200 feet deep.

A New Cuyama Vinyard…

A ‘resting’ carrot field. No cover crop, but just left to erode by wind and rain

The ironic thing about this particular farm (and many others in the area) is that it is ‘organic’. These are the carrots that show up at places like Whole Foods, etc. Although slipping through the technical loopholes of organic standards, and, even aside from concerns over the source material for the compost, the production methods for these foodstuffs are obviously not sustainable. The aquifer is dying, and so is the soil, and the fossil fuel dependency is well entrenched (some farms use planes and helicopters for spraying). Local water experts believe these farmers have just a few years left.

This leads me to the ‘other convergence’. The Southern California Permaculture Convergence, where we’re hearing more positive news and success stories from people who are implementing land, water, energy and waste management techniques according to permaculture principles that lead to sustainable abundance.

This 1st Annual Southern California Convergence is the brainchild of Wes Roe and
Margie Bushman (pictured above) of the Santa Barbara Permaculture Network.
We thank them for the determination and effort that has made this important
event possible.

Warren Brush, who heads the 13-strong Quail Springs team,
welcomes attendees to the convergence

Warren and his wife, Cyndi, are the very gracious hosts of the convergence, ably assisted by the great team of people I’ve had the privilege of getting to know a little over the last couple of weeks. Geoff, Nadia and I thank them all for their hospitality and their vision.

After an excellent and inspiring introduction by Warren, one of the world’s youngest PDC graduates lit the flame for the weekend – using local materials (wood, leather, etc.). Cody (currently 13 – but who graduated at aged 12) used a bow drill to light a candle that is to burn through the convergence, symbolising how the permaculture knowledge that has developed worldwide over the last few decades must be passed on and developed by new, young permaculturists (the emerging canopy, as Warren eloquently put it) who will have to go on to do much more than the present generation, and for whom these skills will be even more pertinent than ever (imagine this land in another few years…).

Brad Lancaster illustrates water runoff principles for urban environments

The main speakers for the Convergence are Geoff Lawton and Brad Lancaster (inset). Honored guest speakers are Larry Santoyo, Bill Roley, Ed Mendoza, Gabriel Howearth, and Art Ludwig.

Geoff Lawton’s talks and slideshows made people aware of some of the wide-ranging work going on internationally. On Friday night attendees were also treated to the final cut of our soon-to-be-released Food Forest DVD, which went down a treat. Brad Lancaster had a great presentation on water harvesting in urban environments – showing the win-win-win implementation of simple techniques that have, until recently, eluded modern city councils. These simple low-cost solutions stop flooding and erosion, save money and precious water, and also make homes and neighbourhoods more habitable and comfortable. The good news from Brad is that some localities are taking note.

An example of this is can be seen via the clip below, where a Los Angeles home was fitted with water harvesting systems as a demonstration site – before invites were sent to city officials and others to come and see the site get bombarded with a (manufactured) one in 1500 year rainwater event. Despite the deluge, the site soaked its water and no damage was done. The impressive demonstration resulted in a proposed multimillion dollar stormwater upgrade getting shelved, in favour of diverting funds towards sustainable water harvesting methods instead.

As I type, the sun has set on the day – groups of permies are talking in the relative cool of the evening, discussing ways to work more effectively together in the months and years ahead. Recent events worldwide – in political, social, ecological and energy arenas – are driving more and more people to pound on the permaculture door. Interest is coming in from all directions, and at the highest levels. We certainly have the solutions; the mission now is to coordinate and escalate our efforts to meet the demand.

Not a good time to rely on fossil fuel dependant food

At least New Cuyamians have a sense of humour…