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permaculture - Re: African Deserts

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>
  • To: permaculture digest <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: African Deserts
  • Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1999 07:56:47 -0700


John Schinnerer raised a couple of excellent points:
>So who's mis-managing, and why?
and
>if the current
>mis-managers will still be in charge of management and maintenance, if the
>various human organizational/cultural/infrastructure/population/etc. factors
>are left out of the designing, the design is likely to be insufficient.

From what I've seen in the less-developed world, mis-management comes in
two forms: One is the original problem, which is local people putting too
much pressure on the land by living a traditional lifestyle that is
unsuited to high population levels (not that any lifestyle avoids this,
especially ours). The second problem is the response to this: NGOs and
governments implementing "solutions" without including the local people and
culture. If you swale and plant trees, people will just cut the trees down
for fuel. So if you want to help people (people who've asked for help, it
goes without saying) to harvest water and build biomass, there needs to be
a coordinated effort that suits the culture. I like what the folks at
Aprovecho are doing: they go into Latin American and African villages,
bringing "rocket stoves" made of tin cans that consume a tiny fraction of
the wood of usual cooking fires and don't make smoke (lung disease is a
huge cause of early death there). The people think the stoves are great,
they can make them themselves from local materials, and they build these
very pretty adobe structures around them that are nicer than what Aprovecho
brought. The new technology gets accepted and implicated into the culture,
and far fewer trees get cut down. That way, the "current mis-managers"
(i.e. the local people) themselves decide to change their land use
practices. Some of these villages are simultaneously re-learning organic
farming techniques better suited to the polycultures they've always grown.
This is one of the few examples I know of where outsiders have been
effective at actually helping rather than hurting. The Red Cross has been
sponsoring some of this work, but the implementation is very local.
Thanks for raising the points about taking multiple factors into
account; just as technology can operate at many scales (shovels to dozers),
so must all other aspects of a design, especially the cultural ones.

Toby






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