(I’d love to see an organized effort to heal Massachusetts, to wrestle land-use policy from real estate developers, to start letting nature step in to solve climate with techniques like this, holistic land management, etc. as we create robust local and regional food systems. That can be our contribution to healing the world. – promoted by eli_beckerman)
It was probably around thirty years ago that I went to a basement apartment near Harvard Square for a presentation by two people visiting from Auroville, a religious community and ecovillage near Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, India. The man and woman talked about their work planting trees and reforesting the area. They showed slides, focusing on a method they derived by trial and error to provide water for their saplings by molding bunds, small catchment basins just downslope from the tree to gather rainwater so that it could soak down into the roots. They talked about following erosion gullies upslope to where they began and using stones and pebbles to stop the erosion at the source. They said that after more than a decade of work, the weather had noticeably changed in the region and the seasonal rains had returned.
How did we get into this mess?
A little bit at a time and because everybody does it.
We get out of it just
that same way.
4/23/01 John Berry, in conversation
I think about this as I plant my garden. I remember John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed; Jean Giono’s story of Elzéard Bouffier, “The Man Who Planted Trees;” John Todd’s vision to restore the devastated mountains of Appalachia. I think about ecological design instead of geoengineering, the small seeds planted and tended over time with modesty and patience rather than the heroic technology of global scale for immediate results and long-term unintended consequences.
One of my favorite videos is this short piece on Greening the Desert, a permaculture installation in Jordan near the Dead Sea. It reaffirms my faith in the idea that “You Can Fix All the World’s Problems in a Garden.”
Greening the Desert Follow-Up, Six Years After the Funding Ran Out
“The Man Who Planted Trees” is Jean Giono’s allegorical story of a shepherd who plants a forest. It is beautifully written and, unfortunately, fiction. You can read it in English
and en Français or watch the Academy Award winning animation.
John Todd’s Ecological Design for Appalachia won the first Buckminster Fuller Design Challenge. He proposes using biological waste treatment to clean up coal slurry and tree planting and biomass production to restore the landscape and provide jobs.
One Man Creates a Forest in India shows that what Giono imagined can happen in reality. Abdul Karim is a living Elzéard Bouffier
Auroville is still planting trees and you can help build their Sadhana Forest.
There is also the Green Belt Movement in Africa founded by Wangari Maathai.
Trees for the Future promotes tree planting all around the world.
Arbor Day varies from state to state but usually happens in April.
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Loving your stuff, Gmoke–an inspiration to me as I go about getting knee deep in the soil for the first time.
But the trouble with this:
“How did we get into this mess?
A little bit at a time and because everybody does it.
We get out of it just
that same way.”
…is that while we’ve had centuries over which to get into the environmental mess we’re in, one small step for a man at a time, a lotta the science seems to suggest that we have, umm, weeks in which to start getting out, and a few short years in which to succeed. Requiring some very large leaps on the part of mankind.
Hence my own “yes and no” vote. You can’t make political progress without demonstrating, on the ground level, that what you want can be accomplished. In whatever small ways. Your cloches, for example; my promise to feed sixty people including a local bishop, a 100% local, organic feast in two months (god help me, especially sourcing the pasta!). If what we do all day simply mirrors the culture at large, we fail, no matter what ideology we promote (driving cars, sitting at computer screens, eating shit–and who among us is exempt?).
But at the same time, our individual efforts aren’t going to accomplish enough without the political will to create and fund in the infrastructures needed to propagate what you’re doing on a grand scale–or at the very LEAST, to stop promoting and funding the complete opposite!
It’s going to take two fists to whoop the system.