Sustainability is Dead.

forget sustainable. Time to REGENERATE.

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Improved cookstove design

Because so much time is spent in the cook-house, stove designs are a leverage point we can focus on improving to create multiple benefits:

Better air quality means better health

Faster cook times

Less fuel required

More time to spend on other activities

By controlling only two factors - airflow and thermal mass - we can improve stove design to optimize heat efficiency and transfer. 

How a Rocket Stove works:

A rocket stove achieves efficient combustion of the fuel at a high temperature by ensuring a good air draft into the fire, controlled use of fuel, complete combustion of volatiles, and efficient use of the resultant heat.

As the fuel burns within the combustion chamber, convection draws new air into the combustion chamber from below, ensuring that any smoke from smoldering wood near the fire is also drawn into the fire and up the chimney. The chimney can be insulated to maximize the temperature and improve combustion; according to studies this will increase efficiency by up to two percent more.

For cooking purposes, the design keeps the cooking vessel in contact with the fire over the largest possible surface area. A pot skirt can be used to create a narrow channel that forces hot air and gas to flow along the bottom and sides of the cooking vessel.

Optional baffles guide hot air and flame up the sides of the pot. For space heating purposes, the heat is transferred to a heat store which can, in some cases, be part of the structure of the house itself. The exhaust gasses then pass out of the building via the chimney.

The design of the rocket stove allows it to operate on about half as much fuel as a traditional open fire and can use smaller diameter wood. If the stove is insulated and raised from the floor, the danger of children burning themselves is reduced. Some more recently designed rocket stoves are self-feeding, using gravity to add fuel to the fire as required.

 - Wikipedia, 09/04/12 -

  Existing stoves observed in all 3 communities look like this:

Photos: Typical cookstove in Vanuatu, built on the ground with little or no insulation or airflow control, resulting in a smokey fire (indicating an incomplete & inefficient burn); Soot on the ceiling of cookhouse indicates how much particulate matter is released into the air with an inefficient burn

Our favorite Village Crazyman had already come up with improvements to his stove design:

Photo: Sawi's improved stove design.

A class brainstorm was conducted to explore ways we could improve Sawi's design:

Photo: Class brainstorm on improved stove design.

Not surprisingly, Sawi had created another improved stove design:

Photo:  Although this design focused primarily on improving the thermal mass, it still halved the typical cooking time for a suckling pig to just an hour; it was left to the class to further improve the design by harnessing airflow.

Here are some other variations on rocket stove from our friends at Permies.com:

A_whole_lot_of_rocket_cook_stoves_(wood_burning_stoves_forum_at_permies).pdf Download this file

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Traditional Food Culture in Vanuatu

Sawi treated us to a Sunday feast of traditional foods called laplap, which are wrapped in banana leaves and cooked in the traditional umu earthen oven (similar to the Maori hangi or Hawaiian imu):

Photo: The women prepare laplap dishes for our feast.

Photo: Chicken slaughtered yesterday.

Photo: Grated yam & coconut milk, tastes like a fluffy kulolo.

Photo: Fresh fish in coconut milk.

Photo: Nalalas, pig tripe & coconut milk.

I think we ate enough in one sitting to last us two days!

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Shifting Food Cultures

Modern cultural pressures are acting upon even remote communities, shifting values away from traditional values of natural resource stewardship and living from the land.  Imported goods are replacing traditional foods & materials, creating new challenges ranging from how to properly dispose of plastics, scrap metals and batteries. 

Photo: Inorganic waste is buried at Dixson's Reef on Malekula Island.

Dixson's Reef community currently separates & buries their inorganic waste, while on Araki & Ifira Islands piles of leaf litter & other organic matter mixed with plastic & other inorganic wastes are regularly burnt. 

The diversity of island cultures throughout Vanuatu is perhaps most apparent in the diversity of languages spoken here, where even neighboring villages will often have their own distinct dialect.  Languages hold information & nuances that are very specific to people & place - even down to neighboring valleys.  On Araki Island, only 4 speakers of their native language remain.

Imported & processed foods which are cheaply & abundantly available (especially white rice & packaged noodles), present a seductive option to cook & prepare because there is much less time & physical effort expended to purchase from the store & cook a meal with these items - especially compared to the time & physical effort required to grow, harvest, clean, prepare and cook traditional root crops & vegetables.

Photo: White rice is even featured on the signature Flying Fox dish at the L'Houstalet, a high-end French restaurant in Port Villa.

On Ifira Island, this has led to a shift of focus towards away from crop cultivation and towards income generation as the primary means to feed oneself.

This shift away from traditional food culture is already contributing to an increase in Non-Communicable Diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure, and is particularly tricky to address since it requires an understanding of the opposite tensions between traditional & modern culture in order to effectively re-frame simple daily choices (such as choosing to eat white rice) in such a way to affect better decision making at a household level. 

Photo: Without innovation, traditional culture stagnates & dies.  Without respect for traditional culture, traditional culture stagnates & dies.  Culture can flourish when the balance between tradition and innovation is maintained.

A facilitated class discussion was held in an attempt to re-connect traditional foods with traditional culture, so that simple acts of growing & eating foods appropriate to place & culture can regain their significance.

What is culture?

How has your landscape impacted your culture?  Your diet?     [Explore cultural foods, mythologies, ceremonies, processing & preservation techniques, and so on]

How has your culture impacted your landscape?     [Explore cultivation techniques & philosophy, village design, relationship w/ land, and so on]

How does modern culture impact your landscape?  Your diet?     [Share stories]

Why save seeds?  Why grow cultural foods?

  Photo: 'Seedsaving = No Thank you Monsanto', on Oahu, Hawaii (photo credit: Michael Broady Jr.).

Back home in Hawaii and Australia, this conversation begins by exploring the modern food system & agricultural practices (and its impacts upon planet & people), and narrows down to the simple practices of seed saving, water harvesting & stewardship, and gardening. 

As a part of this exploration, we can re-frame the political significance of these simple & peaceful acts - while understanding that in the modern consumerist society, harvesting our own water, saving our own seeds, and growing our own food are in many ways among the most radical & revolutionary acts we can do.

As one student in Hawaii (whose #1 agricultural export commodity is GMO seed) said:  

''It's like gently, but firmly saying 'F&^k You to the multinational corporations who seek to control our food and water supply."   - Student in Hawaii -

  Here in Vanuatu, the situation in many ways is perhaps not quite so dire (subsistence farming is still widely practiced, and local food production still very much valued), though the conditions are ripening for such cancerous attitudes to fester. 

The government building on the main street of Villa boasts a large electronic notice board which flashes monthly reports of agriculture commodity exports by tonnage and dollar amount - not a bad thing in and of itself, though perhaps indicative of a broader shifting of focus away from agriculture as 'subsistence farming' and towards 'export commodity production'.

Photo: Breakfast meal served for us on Araki Island, featuring fried doughballs, imported crackers, local cooked sweet banana, and local eggs fried w/ Nalalas (Polyscias fruticosa).  We were treated later with something we dubbed 'Yambu', a delicious pudding of grated yam & coconut milk stuffed into a bamboo node and cooked in the earthen oven.

How much sense does it make to grow enough food to export & sell, to make enough money, to be able to afford your own food, which has been processed, imported & sold back to you?  A pound of harvested, fermented, & dried cacao beans sells for 200-250VT /kg(1); a couple of chocolate bars imported from Australia will cost you 200VT.

We find ourselves in a 'mitigation' situation on the ground here, where the

In order to build locally resilient communities, we must instead focus first upon growing enough to feed ourselves, then our community, and then look for opportunities to trade your surplus to in exchange for items outside of our bioregion.

  "In Cuba, agriculture means growing food for our people to eat."  - Roberto Perez, Permaculture Activist featured in 'The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil' documentary -

  See the full gallery on Posterous

Photo: Learning about lactobaccilic ferment by making kimchee.

  _________________________________________

(1) http://www.nuipacific.org/home/vanuatu-development

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Plant guilds in Vanuatu

"There is an enormous difference in the way we make a design in permaculture and the way an agriculturist would make it.  Really what we are up to is trying to let things function in a natural way."

  - Bill Mollison, Wilton, NH (USA) PDC 1981 -

  Companion planting, or planting two or more plants who help each other, with each other, is one tool we can use to increase the resilience of our cropping systems. 

For example, planting dill and alliums (onion family) between mounds of potatoes can help attract beneficial insects to the umbrelliferous flowers of the dill, while the allium roots exude antibacterial & antifungal compounds which can protect potato tubers from fungal infection, and give us total yield of three crops from the same space.

Photo: Fruit & nut trees occupy the understory of this coconut plantation on Malekula Island, while swamp taro & cattle occupy the ground level.

In permaculture design we refer to this as 'guilding'.  We can use it to mimic the diversity found in natural systems and assemble our planting guilds by selecting plants occupying different niches; for example, selecting deep rooted plants to row next to shallow rooted plants, or identifying understory trees which can be planted under our canopy.

We can take this a step further by designing for maximum functional diversity; in other words, seeking to connect elements in our system so that the needs (or 'inputs') of one element are met by the products or behaviors ('outputs') of another element in our system. 

Photo: Needs / Products / Functions = Functional Analysis.

By using the 'Functional Analysis' tool to map the needs, products & characteristics of our species palette, we can begin to make these connections to create gropings of plants which are mutually beneficial when grown together.  For example, we can grow vines up a taller crop, select an edible ground cover to ramble in an understory, and intercrop nitrogen-fixing species to provide for our soil fertility needs.

Photo: A guild is a family of plants who work together. At the Department of Agriculture's demonstration plot on Efate, Piper nigrum (back pepper) grows up nitrogen-fixing 'Erythrina varigata' (Indian Coral Tree).

Students were tasked with designing their own localized guilds using these patterns, starting with grouping plant species they are already familiar with in the different niches they occupy, and then looking to re-assemble them by looking for functional relationships between the plants:

See the full gallery on Posterous

Photo: Amsen Wille from the Vanuatu Department of Agriculture presents his group's plant guild designs.

Photo: 1) Banana, cacao & Island cabbage (Abelmoschus manihot) grow in the understory of a coconut plantation, with Sweet potato (known locally as 'Kumala') as a ground cover.  Glyricidia provides fertility to the system, banana & Island cabbage provide a shorter term crop while cacao is maturing, and sweet potato lends productivity  at ground level while serving as a living mulch to protect topsoils.

2) 'Whitewood' (Endospermum medullosum), a locally prized timber crop, creates a closed canopy which few plants can tolerate.  Swamp taro (Alocasia macrorrhiza) can fill this niche and turn it into a productive space - this guild was expanded further as an alley crop between Glyricidia to provide fertility to the system.

3) Citrus is placed with nitrogen-fixing Pigeon pea (Cajanus cajun) as a nurse crop to protect & feed it in its early stages (and yield an edible crop), while pawpaw (papaya), Island Cabbage, and Chinese cabbage (known locally as 'Whitebone') give additional yields in space & time.

  Bill Mollison said, "If you do something right, it will do a lot more right itself," and we experienced this phenomenon with this practical exercise.

Students were asked first to group plants according to niche, and then to create guilds by looking for functional relationships between these plants - and in doing so they also managed to stack crops in space, stack yields in time, and increase diversity & fertility.

  "Our job is to put things in the right place and then let them rip."

  - Bill Mollison, Wilton, NH (USA) PDC 1981 -

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

No Dig Gardenbeds & The Village Crazyman

A social pattern that Rick Coleman has observed in his work overseas is that of the 'Village Crazyman':

Everywhere he has worked, Rick has encountered this person - typically slightly overweight (ie well-fed), and the only person in his village who is growing anything with any success - often with raging success, while everyone around has written him off as 'crazy'; simply because of the lack of social proof: 

If that guy was doing things so right, then why isn't everyone else doing it?

Africa, Peru, Mexico, Palestine, Mongolia; wherever he went, sooner or later he would eventually run into this person, and when he did… it would be time to ask lots of questions & take furious notes… and ironically enough, when Rick returns home to his productive permacultural bio-dome smack-bang in the middle of the declining pastures in Gippsland (considered prime dairy country in that neck of the woods), guess who the neighbors consider to be the crazyman?

Photo: Our new friend Sawi is Da Man!

When we first met Sawi during our tour of Ifira Island on Day 1 of this consultancy, it was clear that he was doing some very good things - but it wasn't until we had conducted our site visits to Araki Island & Dixson's Reef that it started to become clear that we had found our 'Crazyman'.

One consequence of the relative material affluence of this small community is a preference for buying cheap, processed & imported foods, and Sawi is one of the few residents of Ifira Island still growing his own food: trained chickens, free-range-non-foraging pigs, cyclone yams (not a typo), fruit & nut trees, hessian-crete walls (hessian bags dipped in concrete and used as a sort of plaster), thermal-efficient roasting oven, handmade fishtraps, compost heaps, nursery operations - he's got a lot going on.

Check out these no-dig garden beds, made from treestumps, compost, & leaf litter, growing 'cyclone yams' (wild yams which can store in the ground for many seasons and can act as a backup food supply in case of cyclones), at least 3 different varieties of Island Cabbage (Abelmoschus manihot, aka Edible Hibiscus), an unidentified shrubby edible, and interplanted with colorful varieties of Coleus to attract beneficial insects:

[[posterous-content:pid___0]]

Photo: No-dig Gardenbeds on Ifira Island in Vanuatu.

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Photo: Three different varieties of Island Cabbage (Abelmoschus manihot, aka Edible Hibiscus).

[[posterous-content:pid___2]]Photo: Mushrooms thriving on the decomposing log borders.

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Appropriate Design & Knowledge Transfer

Appropriate Design. Google 'Appropriate Design' and the first few results you get are a handful of Green Design Firms  Self-Sufficiently Sustaining their Sustainability through 'appropriate design'.

As a kid growing up, the word 'inappropriate' was often used to describe my behavior - so what exactly is appropriate design, and who or what exactly are we being 'appropriate' to or for?

  "Local relevance and local needs are often considered key to appropriateness. A technology or practice is considered "appropriate" if its costs and benefits are appropriate to the locality in which it is used. "  - Appropedia.org wiki -

  Local relevance. Traditional Cultures have co-evolved closely with the place a peoples have descended from, shaping both people and place.

For example, the extensive taro cultivation of Ancient Hawaiians evolved to as a response to the peoples' efforts first to survive, and then to thrive within the ecological limits of the islands; in turn, the terraced lo'i (taro paddies) and kauhale (family housing clusters) in the ahapua'a of Ancient Hawaii forever altered the wild tropical rainforests that Ancestral Hawaiians would have encountered upon their first arrival by voyaging canoe.

Similarly (though in a radically different part of the world), the nomadic herding culture of the Mongols evolved as their people's response to first survive, and then to thrive in the extreme conditions of their place. 

Animal herds are the peoples' primary energy storage (food supply) which can survive -40C winters; animal dungs provide fuel for fires, and provide fertility for the grasslands in the delicate balance that is life on the steppe.   Over the millennia, the Mongolian landscape has co-evolved with the movement of animals & people across its rambling, arid highland plains.

The notion that 'lands belong to people' is a symptom of disconnect between people and land in modern culture - all traditional cultures that are still intact today have a shared notion of 'belonging to their land' - in other words, a universal recognition that their ability to thrive as people is nested within the ability of the landscape around them to thrive:

We take care of the land, and the land takes care of us.

'Local relevance' takes us back to this idea of designing solutions which utilize locally available resources to solve the specific challenges presented by a locale's landscape, and the culture which has co-evolved within it; in other words, solutions which are appropriate to place and culture.

Knowledge Transfer. Gardening techniques & tricks that have been developed for a seasonal agriculture may not be appropriate for a culture that has developed a perennial agricultural system in response to its landscape.

At first glance in Vanuatu, it may appear that there are no garden beds (that we may recognize) within the village, a shift in our perception reveals a complex & diverse agroforestry system of edible & useful species planted within the village and extending into the surrounding lands.

The fastest-growing traditional crop here is likely sweet potato, which is ready for first harvest in around 3 months; compare that to the Mongolian growing season of 90 days.

So, when working in foreign lands & cultures, we must work to match our design solutions to place & people. 

Photo: Knowledge replicating out into community as one of our student's next door neighboor is now feeding her banana patches w/ organic matter instead of burning it.

For example, in the shallow topsoils of the tropics much of the nutrient is held in the biomass of the plants growing there.  The practice of burning any & all organic matter (in the interests of maintaining tidiness) breaks this cycle, turning valuable nutrients into char & smoke.

Once a foundational understanding of permaculture principles is established (in this case, the principle of 'cycling energy'), students can begin to relate these into locally appropriate action & practice.

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Island Water & Watersheds

Photo: High Island [photo credit: http://tropicalparadise.net].

Photo: Low Island (Ifira Island).

When we understand the importance of water and the watersheds which catch, store, filter & deliver our fresh water to us, we gain a deeper understanding of where we fit in to the ecology of a place.

Permaculture Publications managed to record, transcribe, and publish to the public domain a series of lectures from a PDC given by Bill Mollison in 1981 (New Hapshire, USA).  The treatise he gives on High Islands & Low Islands are excellent (and highly entertaining, if you can manage to read them in a lazy aussie drawl to fully capture the dry ironic undertone in his delivery).

There are both High & Low Islands on Vanuatu, so it is important to understand the way each is formed if we are to understand the differences in managing & protecting their watersheds.

Permaculture_on_Islands.pdf Download this file

Download: 'Permaculture on Islands', by Bill Mollison (1981)

For a detailed description of these differences, download the above Mollison transcript (well worth the read), for the cliff notes, see below:

High Islands:

    •    Air is funneled up the mountains of the windward side.     •    Clouds form as condensation occurs at upper levels.     •    Most rain is dropped on windward side.     •    Rain shadow is created on leeward side.     •    Upland forests seeds clouds with transpiration, which increases precipitation.     •    Over time, forests can descend from the upper slopes of the leeward side.     •    Clouds follow the forest into rain shadow.     •    Watersheds filter water through sedimentation, solarization, oxygenation & filtration.     •    Trees protect the watershed.

Low Islands:

    •    Bird droppings (phosphates) & sand (calcium) form basis of soil.     •    Pioneer plan species must break through 'platen' layer of phosphate + calcareous sands.     •    Once platen layer is penetrated by pioneers, groundwater table can form.     •    Organic matter from vegetation creates humus for succession species.     •    Groundwater table only 3-5 feet deep.     •    If groundwater is overdrawn, salt water can get in.     •    This groundwater is shallow & must be protected!     •    Surface water catchment strategies help protect groundwater.     •    Low islands must be protected w/ trees or wind & waves will quickly erode.     •    Trees protect the island & watershed.

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Mapping a Site: Sectors & Zones

Mapping a site is a basic skill that is essential to permaculture design; it is the 'Point A' from which the design process starts.

Photo: Students map the homesite in the ground.

Students split up into teams and walked the teaching site (we are being hosted in the home of Talek, one of Ifira's best rugby players) to pace the boundaries, and gain a hands-on experience of drawing a site map to scale. 

After everyone had sketched rough maps in their notebooks, we gathered again as a group and consolidated the information gathered to create a 3-D map on the ground.

In this way participants could share & discuss the information each had gathered, and discover each other's different perceptions of the same site.  This interactive group process also serves to engage multiple learning styles and cross language barriers, creating opportunities for teams to start learning from each other instead of relying upon a translator to convey the entire lesson - not everyone can learn effectively in a lecture format in their own language (let alone having to sit through a translated 90-minute lecture).

Photo: Class discussion to map external energies acting upon the site.

Once the class had transferred the information gathered to create the larger-scale map on the ground, we could map the external energies which impacted the site - what we refer to as 'Sectors' in permaculture design.

As the group discussed prevailing winds, solar aspect, foot traffic, water flow across the site, and hurricane risk, it became apparent that it would just make sense to place certain elements  in certain places (for example bananas in the lee of a structure to give it protection from hurricane winds).

Photo: Student map.

Next we explored how use patterns will affect design decisions made for the site - what we refer to as 'Zones' in permaculture design.  Since the bathroom, kitchen & pigpen are all areas which are visited daily, we can take advantage of these energy flows to place what we need most often along these paths.

If we plant fruit trees along these flows, we can monitor them daily on our way to where we need to go anyways.  Or back at home in Hawaii, we may choose to site our herb garden outside the kitchen door (or even inside the kitchen if we are especially creative!).

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Making Connections: The Story of Design

The Functional Analysis is a tool which is used in permaculture design to map the needs, products and characteristics of resources we have available so that we can start to use them as elements within our system by seeking out functional relationships between each element.

Simply put, it is a tool we use to help answer the question: How can we use what we have to create what we need?

Students split into small teams and begin by listing the Needs (Inputs) / Characteristics / Products (Outputs/Functions) of an available resource - in this (somewhat infamous) example, a chicken:

Photo: Multifunctional-Permaculture-Superchicken.

Once the functional analysis for this resource is completed, another resource is selected and the functional analysis is conducted again.  This is repeated again and again, until students have a list of elements which can be connected to each other to create functional relationships.

By asking, 'How can the needs of one element in our system be met by the products/functions of another element within our system?', we can begin to tell the story of how these elements can work together to create a functioning system: the story of design.

In other words, we are creating the beginning of a fully functional permaculture design.

Photo: Students from Vanuatu 2012 PDC present a simple 'story of design' integrating Coconuts, Cattle, Pigs, a Dog, and Taro.

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Ethics (on Island Time)

Photo: 9am at the classroom... but where are the students?

Day 1 of the Vanuatu PDC started promptly on island time (2pm vs the scheduled 9am), and we had a beautiful class discussion and exchange of cultural ethics & values to kick things off.

Photo: English on the left, Bislama on the right.

English: Earth Care Hawaiian: Malama A'ina Bislama: Lukaotem Gud Kraon ('Look out 'em good ground') Local Example: The traditional practice of slash-n-burn agriculture (where a garden plot is cleared from the forest by a controlled burn) has evolved from a cultural practice of working with what the landscape has to offer.  Once food crops were grown & harvested, a family would move on to clear & farm another plot, leaving the old one to fallow so that the jungle could reclaim it and replenish the nutrients taken from the land to grow those crops.  Only after the land had a chance to regenerate itself would it be farmed again, a practice which makes sense given the low populations supported by the land.

Photo: Child on Dixson's Reef; wanting to create a better world for our children is fundamental human value which transcends all boundaries.

 English: People Care Hawaiian: Aloha Bislama: Lukaotem Gud Pipol ('Look out 'em good people') Local Example: The islands' communities are interdependent with each other, and rely upon people looking after each other - each producing its own specialty matched to its lands (good fishing, or special varieties of yam, taro, banana, kava, etc) and trading its surplus with neighboring communities.  In this way a diverse, resilient network of community has been created which can adapt dynamically and respond creatively to challenges; especially useful in a land of seasonal cyclones and volcanic activity.

Photo: Community bamboo woodlot outside of village at Dixson's Reef.

English: Resource Share Hawaiian: Kapu Bislama: Sherem Ol Samting / Tabu ('Share 'em all something / Taboo') Local Example: Sharing of resources also means stewarding of the resources entrusted to you; this is done most effectively by setting limits to consumption, population & growth.  Tabu is one system used to to limit consumption by forbidding the use of an overtaxed resource to allow it to recover (e.g a reef ecosystem or wild harvest area); the practice of requiring marrying daughters to move to the communities of their spouses was used traditionally as a way to limit population growth within island communities.

Photo: The balance between tradition & innovation / culture & change must be maintained if healthy culture is to keep evolving.  Without one or the other, culture (tradition) will become extinct.

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Vanuatu 2012: 'Kaekae fo Laef' (Food For Life)

Photo: The view from the plane on the way to Malekula Island.

  “Food security has been defined as ...access by all people at all times to sufficient food for an active and healthy life.   - (Online), Dieticians Association of Australia, www.daa.asn.au (2006.) -

  Photo: The open market in Port Villa is filled with a diverse variety of local produce & goods

  Food Insecurity Food insecurity in Vanuatu is not primarily a case of inadequate volumes of food to feed people. 

[TGB: In fact, our site visits to two remote island communities (one accessible only by a 60-minute banana boat ride) revealed a richness in diversified perennial cropping systems and a deep knowledge of local plants & their uses.  We also discovered a fondness for consuming large amounts of cheap imported white rice.]

(Food insecurity in Vanuatu) is more related to what can be termed “hidden hunger”, or deficiencies of vital micronutrients in people’s diets. In rural areas, it is related to people eating unbalanced diets, and a building dependence on imported convenience foods (rice, noodles and tinned fish).

Photo: Typical household on Ifiri Island, a small island community located a short 10-minute boat ride from Port Villa.

In urban areas, it is related to people’s access to land, the ability to earn sufficient income to purchase food, and changes in people’s eating habits, shifting away from nutritionally rich traditional staples to imported, less nutritious food items.

In both rural and urban Vanuatu, there is physical evidence of some malnutrition amongst infants, pregnant and lactating women, low-income earners and the unemployed. Not all people are able to get access to enough food.

Findings from the 1983 National Nutrition Survey (no other recent work of this kind has taken place since) indicate that malnutrition is noticeable amongst children between 1 and 2 years of age in rural Vanuatu. In urban areas the problem is more prominent amongst low-income earners, who cannot earn sufficient income to meet the full food needs of their households.

  Increasing Soil Infertility Shifting cultivation is still widely practised in the rural areas of Vanuatu, where land is cleared, cultivated for a number of years, and left fallow while families move to a new piece of land to repeat the process.

Photo: Slash-and-burn garden plot ready for planting, Araki Island.

After each cultivation period, the soil is drained of almost all available nutrients. Therefore, a long fallow period is required to let the soil recover. It has been estimated that it can take as long as 15 to 20 years for land to recover fully in the tropics.

In the past, when population pressure was low this fallow period was feasible. However, in more recent years, the fallow period has been shortened to as short as two years or even less, particularly on the more populated islands.

Most rural families in Vanuatu are semi-subsistence farmers. These families are reporting differences between yields of crops harvested each time a piece of land is re-cultivated.

Photo: Slash-and-burn garden plot planted 3 months ago, Dixson's Reef.

Declining food crop yields are most likely directly related to declining soil fertility, which is an outcome of shorter fallow periods, which in turn are a consequence of land pressure that is linked to increased monoculture of cash crops and rapid population growth.

In the search for fertile soils for new gardens families are clearing forests a long way from their homes, often up to a full day walking distance.

This is creating pressures on women and children as they must travel long distances for the cultivation and harvest of food, which is contributing to preferences for nutritionally poor, imported non-perishable foods such as rice, noodles, etc (TGB: it is far easier to go to the local convenience store or bulk-buy processed foods from the supermarket than to walk a full day to-and-from your sustenance plot every day).

  Brief Description of the Proposed Project This project will improve food security through the introduction of innovative agriculture practices and training based on the permaculture approach that will allow intensive vegetable cultivation in gardens within the village, using organic methods that retain soil fertility year round.

The innovative gardening approaches will build on the gardening skills of rural families, and allow them to trial new ways of growing, processing and preserving their traditional crops. The project will work directly with families in two rural communities on Malekula and Santo Islands, and one poor urban settlement community in Port Vila.

Photo: At least 3 different varieties of Island Cabbage (Hibiscus manihot) grow as a planting guild in raised beds with Yams, Coleus, and an unidentified edible leafy green shrub (in front of logs). [Ifira Island]

Permaculture is based on creating closed ecosystems for growing food that are as natural as possible and meet all their own needs internally, such as supplying pest management, nutrients for all species, temperature control, soil building and maintenance, wind control, pollination, germination and pruning.

Key aspects of permaculture are intercropping for pest management and creation of microclimates that support the differing cultivation needs of the vegetables grown. A development opportunity that this project will be built upon is that some of the key practices of permaculture are already part of traditional Vanuatu gardening practice.

Currently the constraint is that the food gardens in Vanuatu are placed a long distance from the village, and the practice of slash/burn agriculture is depleting soil fertility to zero. Mono-cropping is another farming system practised primarily for cash crops such as coconut, cocoa, coffee and kava.

Photo: Coconut plantation on Malekula.

Permanent cash crops tie up land for long periods of time, resulting in shortages of suitable land for food crop production. Due to the value of the cash crops these are often located on the fertile soils closest to the village, another reason why food gardens are located so far away.

This project will use permaculture approaches to allow families to build on the integrated planting methods they are familiar with in order to cultivate complimentary food crops within their cash crops.

Rural families in Vanuatu also keep animals as sources of food or income, such as chickens, ducks, goats, pigs and some beef cattle. Usually this livestock ranges freely throughout the village, making establishing vegetable gardens impossible – especially if the villagers keep pigs.

Photo: Pigpens in Dixson's Reef Community.

A key aspect of the permaculture approach is the integration of livestock into the gardening system, as livestock both consume garden waste (fodder for goats or cows, or rotting vegetables for pigs), manage insect pests (chickens and ducks) and produce very fertile manure.

This project will work with the rural villagers so that they are able to integrate their livestock into their gardening practice, which will result in greater soil fertility and improved pest management. Sustainable vegetable production training will focus on seed saving, soil fertility, natural pest management, and water conservation for coastal communities with a long dry season.

Photo: Solar dryer in Araki Island.  These Beach Almonds are harvested by the local children and sold at market for 400VT /kg ($4USD).

Food processing and preservation techniques will also be introduced to the communities. Currently there is a high demand for this type of knowledge. This project will have a high potential for replication across Vanuatu.

In order to facilitate this the project will work with the Vanuatu Department of Agriculture and possibly a rural vocational training provider to develop curriculum materials based on the lessons learned and the approaches developed through the project activities.

These training materials will then be used to replicate the knowledge and skills so that agriculture extension workers can provide the knowledge to communities in other parts of Vanuatu, and young people at vocational training centres can obtain certificates in the permaculture approach.

 - Excerpts from ADRA Australia 'Kaikai fo Laef' ['Food for Life'] Concept Note written by Michelle Abel & Tileuybyek Ye, September 2011 -

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Vanuatu 2012

Not only does Vanuatu has the dubious honor of being home to the world's first community to be forced to move from their land because of rising sea levels (see 'Vanuatu village relocated due to rising sea level' on ABC Australia), this chain of 83 or so islands and islets also happens to sit on the edge of the Paficic Tectonic plate:

From this article published in Der Spiegel:

Klaus Töpfer, a German politician with Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Party (CDU) and the UNEP's executive director at the time, bleakly noted: "The melting and receding of sea ice and the rising of sea levels, storms surges and the like are the first manifestations of big changes underway which eventually will touch everyone on the planet."

A climate-change report to be published next year will present evidence that the world's oceans will rise between 0.5 and 1.2 meters (1.5 and four feet) by 2100, with global warming already increasing sea levels by 1.8 millimeters (0.07 inches) a year. However, that amount is not much when compared to the natural fluctuations at work here. Like most inhabitants of the South Pacific, those of Vanikoro must contend with sea-level fluctuations of some 20 centimeters (eight inches) caused by currents in the Pacific, such as the climate phenomenon called El Niño.

Earthquakes and tsunamis strike Vanikoro regularly, but people here are at the mercy of the forces of nature in a longer-term way, as well: On its slowly sinking course, the Australian Plate is dragging Vanikoro along into the depths.

That the UN had been premature in declaring the villagers on Tegua to be climate change refugees became clear when a large earthquake caused the island to shoot back out of the water in 2009. "The coconut plantation has been on dry land since then," Ballu [Valérie Ballu, 44, a geodesist from Paris] says.

However, she points out that, for the people there, it doesn't much matter which specific physical phenomena forced them to abandon their village. What frustrates Ballu is that a climate-change adaptation fund helped them resettle in a new village, but in a location hardly better than the original one. "It's at a lower elevation," Ballu says. "Spring tides or tsunamis can still reach it."

Which brings up an interesting point: no matter how one may quibble at the details, the fact of the matter is that changing weather patterns are impacting communities around the world, perhaps none moreso than the island nation of Vanuatu.

Although the archipelago "luxuriates in a tropical maritime climate with characteristic uniform temperature, high humidity and variable rainfall"(1), its island communities must deal with intensifying tropical storms, shifting rainfall distribution patterns, and alternating drought & floods as the El Nino and La Nina cycles also intensify.

Photo: Vanuatu from the air (photo courtesy tourist-destinations.com)

Freshwater is becoming increasingly scarce and many upland watersheds are being deforested and degraded. Proper waste disposal and water and air pollution are also increasingly troublesome issues around urban areas and large villages.

Additionally, the influence of consumer culture which western development has brought to the islands is shifting traditional cultural behavior patterns & values, sowing the seeds of disconnecting peoples from the land they have lived so closely with for millennia.

On the bright side, in 2006 the Happy Planet Index published by the New Economics Foundation and Friends of the Earth environmentalist group estimated Vanuatu to be the most ecologically efficient country in the world to achieve high well-being. 

Despite the challenges faced by these island communities, we take it as a good sign that the WELCOME sign on the airport wall reads: THE WORLD'S HAPPIEST COUNTRY.

(1) http://www.meteo.gov.vu/VanuatuClimate/tabid/196/Default.aspx

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Ifira Island

Photo: Arriving to Ifira Island.

The campfire smell of a firepit outside our window wafts through with each flurry of breeze, the bells of the gospel singing practice that has been belting out hymns next door for the last 90 minutes stll ringing in the air.

It's 9.30 at night, and the village of Ifiri Island is slowly winding down for the night.

Although it's supposedly the dry season, we descended from the clouds into a grey, humid & wet world - it has been raining off and on for the last couple weeks.

"Mother Nature is changing", says Noel, Project Manager for the Kaikai fo Laef project and our guide for this evening.

Tomorrow we meet Eddie, youngest member of the Chief's Council, who will guide us on a tour of this small island on foot (he tells us it will take only an hour or so to walk all the way around).

Meanwhile, a soft bed and pillow await aching travelbones...

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Chop-n-Drop Raised Gardenbeds

Here's a simple technique we discovered being used effectively on Oahu's North Shore, which is choked with tall-growing California grass in many areas...

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Image: California grass covered almost the entire property - you can see where it has been harvested for the gardenbeds in foreground.

...if you've ever had to clear a patch of this stuff to make way for growing edibles, you know what hard work it is to hack it back, and then dig up its tough root clump to ensure it does not just spring back even more vigourously.

You may have also noticed the soil life thriving in the root zones of these clumps, especially when compared to bare soil immediately adjacent - this 'weed' is performing a valuable function, building soil & creating a habitat for soil biology, and mining nutrients in its biomass... which makes it a potentially valuable resource.

Here's how the Chop-n-Drop Raised Bed technique works:

After cutting back an area of California grass

The compost heap is topped with a thick layer of mature compost & mulch, which can then be planted directly into:[[posterous-content:pid___5]]

4 months later, the raised beds will have shrunk by about 2/3 or so, and the plant roots can extend into all that goodness below (check out the size of this raddish!):

Simple, and highly effective.  Makes wonderful use of existing resources, and beautifully demonstrates the Permaculture Principle:

"The Problem is The Solution."

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Africa's Great Green Wall of Trees

  Africa is turning to desert. Studies show that as much as two thirds of the continent’s arable land could become desert by 2025 if current trends continue. But a bold initiative to plant a wall of trees 4,300 miles long across the African continent could keep back the sands of the Sahara, improve degraded lands, and help alleviate poverty. Living on Earth’s Bobby Bascomb reports from Senegal. 

Full story at Living on Earth's website: here.

This initiative is a great example of permacultural thinking can create Aid & Development Solutions that are appropriate, replicable, and create impacts that magnigy beyond the target group of beneficiaries for a given project.

‎

Highlights from the article:

"It’s more related to agriculture, rural development, food security and sustainable land management than planting trees."

‎"...following a devastating drought in the 1980s, farmers decided to allow the natural vegetation to grow and planted food crops around it. The result was a surplus of food and 12 million acres of trees, an area the size of Costa Rica. "

"In ten to 15 years this will be a forest. The trees will be big and this region will be completely transformed. We are already seeing animals come back that haven’t been here for years. Mostly deer and many species of wild bird, even jackal."

By working with what is already locally available, resources can be re-organized into design solutions that can be easily adopted, adapted, and evolved by communities.

Similarly, knowledge can be more easily transferred and new skills more readily developed if they are culturally appropriate.

[stonemaven-deactivated20181220]

Even if the garden only produces a cabbage in a flowerpot, you’ve succeeded in protesting, feeding yourself, cutting carbon emissions, and eating healthier.  Today I’m starting carrots in an 18” deep flowerpot.

[earthshinefairy]

on my 100 sqfoot balcony, Ive grown (from seed) strawberries, cucumber, cherry tomatoes, carrots, radishes, kale, 7 kinds of lettuce, edible flowers and every herb imaginable. Ive also got a 4.5 foot tall fig tree, and this winter I have sprouted an avocado, lemon and apple seeds that will get planted this spring :)

[thegreenbackpack-blog]

Sustainably sustaining sustainability?

Photo: says it all.  via http://xkcd.com/