Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Restoring Depleted Lands

Unexpected earth lessons from a New Zealand trip through suburbia.

Suburban scapes. Once again I am taking a long bus ride through a strange landscape and wondering why. Opposite, a serene giant of a Samoan man with traditionally tattooed arms, an airport worker’s shirt, and the deeply compassionate, inward-focused expression of a beautiful ancient god, sits motionless throughout. It is the South Pacific.

I am traveling up the Hutt Valley in Wellington New Zealand to a camp on climate change. From across the harbor before I started out I could see that the long broad valley was shrouded in cloud and a blustery cold wind blows. The light is bright, colors harsh. People are a mix of Maori, Pakeha (European origin), Asians and Pacific Islanders.

I alight and from memory of the google directions start walking through low, small wooden houses. They are shabby, seemingly temporary. Each perches on a small plot of gardenless lawn dotted with cars, fences graphited. Twenty minutes later it is clear that the directions were wrong. Nobody is around to ask.

Climate change camp. Suddenly I am enveloped in the darkness of a patch of dense native forest. There are some sizeable trees. Damp earth smell of New Zealand “bush” permeates. Emerging I walk along a high river-flood embankment, and sight an encampment of about 50 small and a few larger tents including a North American teepee.

I sit outside a tent containing 20 or so people dressed in woolen hats, parkas, tattooed, ring-nosed, listening intently to a slowly developing discussion in the local nasal twang on restoring New Zealand’s severely depleted landscape. It is fascinating.
* * * * *
I learned early about depletion. As a child I spent my weekends with the other children climbing the steep hillsides above our village, grassy slopes ridged and cropped close by sheep. Having avoided annoyed farmers, their dogs, and dangerous bulls, we got lost, fell in bogs, and mist descended down the few wire fences. There were thunder storms, rain squalls in gale-force winds, rainbows, and fantastic views of farmed, often sun-bleached, hills and valleys arrayed in serried ranks to ocean on both sides.

Once we rested in a high area dotted with strange mounds covered with wiry dry growth. I parted the covering on one mound and to my astonishment discovered a huge, slowly decaying stump of tree underneath. For a second the whole landscape was covered in towering forest filled with melodious native birds—then back to mountains scrubbed clean and bare by the settlers in this once densely forested land of new opportunity. Wow! What have we done?
* * * * *
This talk described it. We have removed the trees, channeled the rivers, washed away the soil, drained the swamps, poisoned the aquifers, destroyed the fertility. And, in a hundred years or so, just all over the globe.

A way to restoration? Two rangy, bare-foot young speakers were describing an agriculture different from sheep, dairy, and cattle farming. It yields, they said, 7 times the tons of food per hectare of land, protects soil, retains water even with low rainfall, and builds fertility. It is all about allowing water to work for us.

We start by growing 3 foot high weeds on the tops of hills to add nutrients to the descending water, and by not draining the cleansing, nutrient-rich swamps. When rivers are not channeled by concrete and boulders and the banks are shaded by plant growth, 90% of the water permeates the mossy soil on either side keeping the landscape moist for food plants. Loss of soil and water out to sea in huge damaging floods is greatly reduced.

Soil, nutrients and moisture are retained by growing fruit-bearing trees. These are under-layered with berry bushes and interspersed with open patches of vegetables. Placing barriers of organic debris like logs of punga (tree ferns) on hill slopes rapidly builds soil and retains water to create paddy fields growing water vegetables, rice and fish. Chickens and ducks live naturally in such terrain without damaging it.

The mosaic of varying water paths, soil, sun, wind, steepness, etc within a landscape is carefully studied to choose appropriately different plants and management. The method has various names—terraquaculture, natural farming, and others — and its modern emergence involves a New Zealand developer of permaculture, Haikai Tane. He has studied examples of traditional terraquaculture in China, India, and South East Asia.

This new way is old. Yes, it is an ancient Asian-Pacific farming method used over several millennia. It is intensive in labor and highly productive. In some places in Asia, individuals do not own continuous land but pieces located in different kinds of terrains, each producing different foods. The mayor gets the land at the bottom of the mountain so he feels the effect of his regulation of everyone else’s use above. So Dion told us.

Vigilance needed. After a young woman kindly suggests that I not use my camera, I briefly join a meeting in another tent on my rights should I be stopped or arrested by police for taking action on climate change.

Local evidence of depletion and restoration. In heavy rain and with poncho flying, I am shown the role of planted willow trees on the riverbank. Soil re-establishes by itself, then nitrogen-fixing weeds, and eventually native plants as birds bring seeds. The difference in retention of water and fertility was marked between the bulldozed, boulder-lined and lawn-topped embankments and the tree-clad, mossy outcrops starting to project naturally into the riverbed.

"Purist" versus "realist" conflict. A passionate verbal fight breaks out. The purists (romantics says Dion) want to preserve our ~2,500 very slowly regenerating native plants (almost none of which produce human food) along with their associated culture and sacredness. The realists see that selection from the non-native 40,000 to 50,000 plants already introduced to New Zealand, could be helpful in establishing food-bearing fertility to feed our human population on land destroyed by deforestation and chemical farming. These viewpoints do not seem mutually exclusive to me.

Action! Now, we need real working demonstration farms and statistics so that the many can experience and learn the practicalities of growing food this way, and take it up.

Could terraquaculture be a possibility for reviving productivity of depleted land near you?

Friday, December 18, 2009

2010 Garden Project for Green Appalachia

 
Click on flier to make larger.

 If you would like to help organize this project by being on the committee, mentoring, or running workshops, please email appzenhouse@gmail.com.

Monday, December 14, 2009

At the End of the Earth

The climate. I am walking on earth, this island, this green and blue land of white, bright clouds in the Pacific Ocean. It is called New Zealand. The strong gusts of wind meet nothing between us and the Antarctic continent except a few thousand icebergs breaking off and melting into the too warm sea.

It is a raw place, bracing, and for the most part has its unique, ancient biological complexity devastated and a history of human exploitation. It breeds sturdy, perhaps dissatisfied, people.

Gentleness, intelligence, reverence, curiosity, stillness and openness, are they here? Are they here in me in these buffeting streams of air rendered visible by straining plants, and tui birds tossed wildly across the hill slopes? (Perhaps it is as exhilarating for them as for me?) This old house still slams and creaks in every blast.

Beneath the elemental boisterousness, settling deeper, loving what is, what do we need? How do I receive and offer life here in this turmoil?

Food and climate change. Yesterday I went to a talk on food and climate change. It turned out to be from a vegetarian society. The news delivered was very bad. The tipping point into destruction of the planetary biosphere is only two or three years away. Our only chance is to eliminate eating meat along with the associated industries. These industries produce methane, a worse offender than carbon dioxide and greater than 50% of the cause of climate change—more than transport, industry, and energy production combined. But unlike CO2, methane can be removed quickly from the atmosphere (if we stop producing it before the ice caps melt.) Our health would improve along with the planetary biosphere. So were we told.


The "violent weapon of the table fork" that Ghandi talks about, we have turned on our own body, our earth.

Eating is an elemental activity. It is deeply linked to survival, and emotionally and carnally conditioned far beyond the logic of staying alive and well. As any of us can attest who have tried to change: our tastes; what we believe nourishes us and our families; our use of food as comfort; what we know how to cook; religious views on eating; expression of wealth, culture, or education through food; and our response to eye and nose stimulation of salivation, these are matters not lightly susceptible. And that is before the interconnection of agro-business and government can be teased apart.

Civilizations appear to have gone extinct in the past from cutting down the last tree, or refusing to eat available foods associated with an “inferior culture.”*

If the facts presented are true, the task to save ourselves, let alone the planet, seems hopeless.

Prophets proclaim the justice of our demise arising from our sinful, wanton greed. (Does it help that some of us gain superiority by denying food as we all go down together?) Or is our greed innocent and ingenuous? Yet even without invoking the prophets of doom, indeed we are slow to see the inexorable relation of cause and effect, one bite after another. Wake up!

Despair sets in. How do we live our lives knowing that every mouthful brings exponential death and suffering in the short term? What is worth doing, when we are ending every thing we value so very soon?

Death. Now I am on familiar ground. “Death is certain” is the most basic of meditations. A given in my life now is that we can be free within our experiences of the circumstances of our lives, and free in our response to them. My vow is to manifest the oneness, wholeness, the interconnection of us all moment by moment in all that vividly arises now. This means in personal, political, planetary, and social realms whether we are living or dying.

Whether I personally die tonight or in five years from a bee sting allergy, global warming, a heart attack, a bus, being shot, nuclear war, infection from a tick bite, or a meteor from outer space, what is most valuable is being present with an open heart and mind to all I encounter and to express healing action (towards that which never was broken) as best I can.

Gratitude. I am grateful for this bite of food, for my life, for the innumerable gifts and sacrifices of many. I chew and swallow with attention, reverence, and knowledge, to the best of my ability. And with each breath, and with all my energy, I vow to give back the love and life I have received from you, by acting on behalf of all beings without discrimination. And by eating oryoki (just enough.)

Please, not separate from these turbulent winds of change, will you rest and drink this cup of tea with me?

* Easter Island and Greenland, as described by Jared Diamond in Collapse.