Permaculture - from forest to farm | Clea Chandmal
https://youtu.be/KI3haUOkP-I?si=v_z8xCOKzwLO-May
IMO this is one of the most succint and clear explanations of why permaculture is so important - because it tries to mimic nature, which has had (m|b)illions more years to evolve and create much more intelligent and efficient growth, energy conversion, creation and destruction processes than we stupid and arrogant humans have had in the few tens of thousands of years (at most) that we have been doing agriculture, or should I say, monoculture or even better, stupidiculture.
It seems like this idea relies on a long term low wage workforce willing to live on subsistence agriculture.
I think that is already the population. What the attempt seems to be is to create a green belt that prevents further desertification of semi-arable land that they are already subsistence farming on, because if the desert keeps moving, these people will cease to exist.
Captialistically/economically, there is questions as to whether these people should continue to subsistence farm, but if they want to, and it can help keep the desert at bay, then I say more power to them.
But if you don't have enough food it all fails. History has taught us that in every corner.
But yes, it is ambitious project and there indeed are lot of questions on both short-term feasibility and long-term outlook. As is natural for a project of this kind, the financial aspect is especially messy.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/07/africa-g...
Note how the video points out how it is causing more people to have reasons to stay in villages that's otherwise get depleted of young people. If that continues, it will have a significant long term benefit for the growth of Senegals economy.
Now the ground is hard dirt and water runs off. The half moons capture water and makes it possible to grow a tree.
Roots will loosen the soil, and combined with biomass from the bushes in the trenches you can imagine there’s a path towards changing the composition to something more arable in the traditional sense.
To me it sounds like the editable crops are a carrot to keep the locals working toward a much longer term goal.
It's a labour intensive, make work program that accepts the reality that there's going to be 100s of millions to billions of Africans who will be stuck in subsistence agriculture for the rest of their lives. You can incrementally improve new workforce over time as society develops, but people who get left behind generally get left behind. Ultimately, their labour is cheap, and need something to do. Maybe you can replace 1000 workers with a piece of specialized heavy machinery that's cheaper, but then you'll have 999 idle hands.
>> there is a LOT of manual human labor
Also it should be combined with the other Great Green Wall projects, the most successful being "just plant trees" to shade the crops and keep the area cool and humid.
"Just plant trees" without doing anything to ensure the trees can survive is not meaningful in all conditions. What they're doing here is effectively "just planting trees" in a way that ensures the area stays moist enough for the trees to survive, and leveraging the same space to grow crops.
edit: looking closer, it looks like this might be in one of the few countries that might actually do better. Though that also helps as people who are doing better have time to invest in this. time will tell.
There are some who are content with low wages and a simple life of living off the land. Shouldn't technology make this even easier, buy making low cost education available to their kids and making more affordable healthcare possible?
What was shown in the video looks like a "mickey mouse" operation, akin to a local tree planting effort to combat climate change. For this to make any difference you can't have people digging "half-moons" at a rate of 1 person/1 half-moon/1 day - that does not scale in any meaningful way. You need to do this kind of project at an industrial scale, with large amounts of heavy machinery and thousands of skilled professional workers - especially since they are discussing creating a "Green Wall" across thousands of kilometers at a width of hundreds of kilometers.
I read William Langewiesche's travelogue where he crossed the Sahara overland after being a pilot who flew over for a few years. He said that the locals are rather fatalistic about living in such a massive and unforgiving place (people frequently die there); they say that when god decides it's your time, then it's your time. Langewiesche added that if you don't believe in god, then you can replace that with "The Sahara" and it still works quite well.
I cannot imagine that there is much humans can do to hold back the desert. I'm quite sure that the only thing that would matter, a rapid drawdown of carbon emissions, is not possible at this point. I know it sucks, sorry.
It'll get harder to maintain that pace as heat increases too. There'll be fewer and fewer hours that people can work outside. Rising temperatures will bring more heat-related illnesses and injuries. Considering the amount of ground they want to cover bringing in machinery to speed things up does sound like a good idea.
I think it was the dune series, that I read a number of years back that touched on this idea a bit in the second or third book? It was not something I ever really thought about before that. It's cool to see a real life example of it.
A lot of his stuff (including that desert video) can be found here:
(Hurricanes are believed to caused by dust blowing off the west coast of the Sahara)
also, this is geoengineering. the same kind the soviets used to do and the chinese do now. it would never be allowed to happen in a western country because someone with deep pockets for a lawsuit would find an endangered species of worm living in a dune or two
"Geoff Lawton videos."
You know, that Strine permaculture guy.
Watch at least 15 to 20 of them. Many are short.
Only then talk, people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Lawton
https://youtube.com/@DiscoverPermaculture?si=XVjdWpJk5ZIVTnL...
Same with wildlife preserves. One bad coup with corrupt politicians, one recession in the west - and its all gone, poached and ruins. Its worthless feel good photo OP, monetary potemkin zoos and forrests, providing the worst kind of hope, the one that has no chance to last in a storm.
What is their solution against nomads and there goat herds which are still a status symbol and in conflict with the farmers of the region? Poisonous plants? Guards? Landmines? How does it prevent building up resentment, when obviously a green landscape is more important to the foreigners, then the starving locals?
How does it solve the hard problem of exponential mankind vs civilizational allmende protection?
How do the plants survive in the climate change storms yet to come?
Nomads, landmines, buzzwords, you're just looking for edge cases where this fails, and that's not helpful. If it works for 80% of the land they look at, that's mre than good enough.
It depends on the institutional experience of each country. There's a reason this initiative is being done in Senegal instead of neighboring Mali.
WFP funding is fairly consistent and less whimsical ime. It's private donors like the Gates Foundation that tend to be flaky, as they only answer to the whims of the Gates family.
Programs like the WFP, WB, IMF, ADB, USAID, etc need to be auditable as significant amounts of public and private money are invested, leading to demands from multiple donors, compared to family foundations or smaller non-profits.
I plan on using this set of questions next time my girlfriend says we should do something I don't want to do.
> I abhor these projects...
Jeesh.
It has always been my understanding that modern farming is reliant on a large industrial outlay and global trade for things like fertiliser and pesticides. And that it also affects the soil in a way that is hard or impossible to reverse (extraction of certain nutrients that cannot be easily replenished naturally)
Traditional farming is not sustainable because they don't have pesticides and so once in a while your whole crop is destroyed and your whole village starves to death. Some traditional practices slowly destroy the soil over time.
Fertilizers like nitrogen (one of the largest fertilizer uses) are needed for the best yields, but modern farming creates enough as on farm to be sustainable without the addition at lower yield levels.
However when a crop leaves the field it takes away some things like sulfur, potassium, and that needs to be replaced for the next crop. I'm considering this a failure of modern transport to bring those back and not modern farming - but this should feel like a meaningless distinction.
When I say modern farming is sustainable I mean that modern farming is building up soil over the decades. While we need to replace anything actually removed with the crop, the soil is getting better year after year.
Of course as the village population grows you send the "young men" out to the edge and have them dig a few more half-moons at a rate of one/day. However they are building next to previous green areas which are already lowering the local temperature, and if sometimes it takes 2 days to build one - who cares, there is no hurry.
>Of course as the village population grows you send the "young men" out to the edge and have them dig a few more half-moons at a rate of one/day.
Uh huh - because that's what young men want to do, dig ditches for no wage or subsistence-level wage.
What's going to happen is those who can, will simply leave.
> because that's what young men want to do, dig ditches for no wage or subsistence-level wage.
It is an investment - see that bare desert over there, work off energy by digging it. Then when they "grow up" they discover that bare desert is their land to farm and their time was really a good investment in their future and gives them a good remainder of their life, and their kids a chance for an even better life.
Those who can will leave (unless they love farming), but today the majority don't have any better place to go. Stay in the village at the edge of the desert and dig in these green places means a better life than going to the city and trying to find a jobs (remember these people don't have skills in demand in the city either, other than their ability to dig ditches in the city, at least in the desert they can take ownership of the land they make better and have a farm.)
Ideally in 50 years Africa will improve conditions and industrial scale farming will take over, sending 98% of the people (there decedents) to a city where they work not as basic labor but as skilled labor (doctors, engineers...). However they are not in this position now and this looks like a step on the path to getting there.