Rebuilding Haiti: On Trees, Charcoal, Compost and Why Low Tech, Low Cost Answers Could Make the Biggest Difference (& How High-Tech Can Help)

Posted on February 10, 2010 by J.A. Ginsburg

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Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project (HTRIP)

On the link between environmental health & public health; Rebuilding Haiti from the soil microbes up; A humanitarian aid petri dish; Jared Diamond’s checklist for collapse & Haiti as vision what could be in store for the rest of us; Charcoal cartels, Amy Smith’s better answer & Nicholas Kristof’s compost toilet tour

 

Five years ago, in a move as practical as it was visionary, the Hôpital Albert Schweitzer (HAS) in Haiti began planting trees – lots of trees – in an effort to mend an ailing landscape.

Small farm plots on hilly terrain had been stripped bare of soil-stabilizing cover (2/3 of the the country is on land that slopes 20% or more). No soil means no food means malnutrition means disease, illness, death.

“Practically every medical problem in Haiti is poverty-related,” notes Dr. Vehnita Suresh, the hospital’s CEO. “The never-ending cycle of deforestation lead(s) to more ecological damage, more compromised farming, more poverty and more hunger. It goes on and on and on.”

Public health and environmental health are so tied together, you simply can’t have the former without the latter. “We can go on giving health-care forever,” says Dr. Suresh, “It would never really touch even the brim of the problem here.”

So they plant trees. The Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project (HTRIP) has begun to reverse centuries of devastation that literally skinned the country alive, leaving hillsides such as the ones surrounding the Artibonite Valley where the hospital is located barren and bleak.

Documentary on The Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project, the Hopital Albert Schweitzer's reforestation effort

In the aftermath of the earthquake, reforestation has taken a back seat to the urgency of treating the injured (you can donate directly to support the hospital’s work). But over the long term, any real “Hope for Haiti” means planting trees – literally rebuilding the country from its soil microbes up.

AVOIDING COLLAPSE: LAB HAITI

Haiti has been teetering at brink of breakdown for as long as anyone can remember, but it took the quake to focus  global attention, sparking an unprecedented outpouring of support and a largely spontaneous explosion of technical can-do innovation. From CrisisMappers and Crisis Commons hackers to the collaborative Haiti Rewired network, Twitter hashtag-enabled mash-ups and teams of volunteer architects, engineers, doctors,  veterinarians and other professionals, this has been an all-hands-on-deck emergency.

In a sense, Haiti has become a sort of petri dish for humanitarian action. The stakes couldn’t be higher. If, somehow, this “Exhibit A” for all that Jared Diamond says spells doom for a culture/country’s prospects is rescued from the abyss of complete collapse, the implications go far beyond Haiti.

Haiti, in all its deforested, polluted, cartel-corrupted, disease-riddled impoverishment, is a vision of our planet’s future if we continue to devour natural resources beyond replenishment, downplay the seriousness of climate change, spike efforts at family planning and ignore the integral importance of environmental health. As goes Haiti, so go we all. (more…)

Filed under: agriculture, charcoal, Diaster relief, earthquake, forests, Haiti, innovation, reforestation, soil health | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

PopTech: Day 1 – Reimagining and Beyond Imagining

Posted on October 23, 2009 by J.A. Ginsburg

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Blame it on the birds. And the elephants, lions, biochar, Indonesian agroforestry, dirt batteries, mechanical caterpillar waves, global maps, messenger bag-cum-lighting systems, a cyber-dance experience and one very lovely essay about migration. But not too far into the first day of PopTech, the conference’s “Reimagining America” theme disappeared. Which was fine. It seemed too limited for a confab about Big Thoughts, even here in a small, charming  American town (that could use a little reimagining itself – connectivity way, way too spotty). In any case, you can’t really reimagine, or even imagine, America without including the rest the world in the equation.

And nobody brought that point home with more heart-wrenching eloquence than Chris Jordan with his slide show of photographs of dead albatross on Midway Island, killed by a diet of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Photograph after photographs of birds, heads twisted by pain, guts split by a bounty of all too familiar bottle caps – perky shades of reds and blues favored by marketers – had the audience in shock and *this* audience in tears. This wasn’t an isolated occasional bird tragedy, but the picture of a extinction-in-progress. And because it took so darn long for anyone to discover the Garbage Patch, a ghostly-insidious man-made chemically-enhanced primordial soup the size of at least a couple of Texas’s (Texi?), it is far too late to do much about it – at least for the albatross (“Midway Journey” project blog – notes & videos).

Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Save the microbes! Save the plankton! Save the food chain!  Who knows? We might just save ourselves, too.

_____________________

The day was filled with jolts of Overwhelming Problems paired with Glimmers of Hope.

John Fetterman, the myth-come-to-life mayor of Braddock, PA, a bankrupt rust-belt town that had been all but written off. A strikingly tall bald figure, with dates tattooed on his massive arms to remember the victims of violent crimes (thankfully, no new tattoos in over a year), Fetterman’s unvarnished recitation of all that had gone wrong coupled with some very basic ideas of what can be done had the crowd on a can-do upswing. Renovate those $5,000 homes (average price – since the recession, they’ve lost value). Add artists. LOTS of artists. Plant urban gardens. Hold lots of family-friendly it-takes-a-village-to-make-a-village. Clear debris and make a park. Then came news of a major hospital closing, which will not only take jobs from the area, but leave the population – mostly poor and minority – in a health-care desert. It is hard to make money taking care of poor people. So much for the greater public good or, for that matter, public health.

I began to wonder whether some of the health solutions being tested in the developing world -  many driven by cell phone tech – wouldn’t be appropriate here, too? (e.g., PopTech Fellow Josh Nesbit’s FrontlineSMS: Medic & Hope Phones).

Indeed, one of the conference’s most intriguing themes to emerge so far is this concept of two-way innovation: developed to developing world and vice-versa. (Note to makers of One Laptop Per Child: I really really REALLY want one of those computer screens designed for use in full sun…)

_______________________

On the Glimmers of Hope front, the PopTech Fellows were batting it out of the park. From Jason Aramburu‘s efforts to commercialize biochar, a carbon negative solution that also improves soil fertility, to Eben Bayer’s nifty mushroom-mediated compostable alternative to landfill-choaking styrofoam, Aviva Presser Aiden and Hugo van Vurveen’s “dirt batteries” and Emily Pilloton’s no-nonsense determination to enlist an army of young designers to come up with Better Answers, there was a sense that it’s still not too late. We can, just maybe, turn this thing around and not go down the climate change tubes.

FLAP – Flexible Light and Power – a prototype of a portable lighting system stitched into a Timbuktu messenger bag – also caught the crowd’s imagination. Designed by MIT’s Sheila Kennedy, it’s a simple idea that could radically change the way we think about solar deployment, opening up the space to all kinds of new ideas. No longer would solar be consigned to rooftop panels or a strip on a pocket calculator. It can almost literally be woven into the fabric of our lives, turning us into portable “plants,” photosynthesizing as we go about our daily business. (More from Erik Hersman on field-testing the design in Africa.)

Indonesia-based Willie Smits also has big plans for photosynthesis, with a scheme that would not only reforest the world’s rain forests, but generate jobs and an array of crops, supply power to poor villages, restore biodiversity and wildlife habitat and dramatically reduce demand for foreign oil. Smits “Tapergy” plans is an integrated system that works with Nature to increase the productivity of land while capping CO2 “volcanos” that result when millions of acres of land, particularly peat-lands, are cleared from monoculture oil palm plantations. (read more about Smits work in “Trees for Trees” post – page down to section on “You Had Me at Organgutan” – includes videos)

There was much more to Day 1. But Day 2 is about to begin. So, connectivity willing, follow on twitter: #poptech / @trackernews.

Filed under: agriculture, charcoal, climate change, energy, eWaste, food, forests, innovation, lighting, mobile devices, rain forests, recycling, reforestation, solar, traffic, visualization, water | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Carbon NEGATIVE Option: Why Tim Flannery & James Lovelock Love Biochar

Posted on February 17, 2009 by J.A. Ginsburg

climatefriendlysoil“Sustainable” isn’t sustainable. It isn’t even achievable, according to several researchers presenting at the annual meeting of the  American Association for the Advancement of Science. Global carbon emissions have accelerated so dramatically over the last eight years, we are “now outside the entire envelope of possibilities” reviewed by the IPCC. Sure enough, sea levels are rising and rising faster than predicted. Meanwhile, biofuels, the great green hope of so many, have only made things worse, leading to a increase in slash & burn farming in the tropics. Indeed, we could find ourselves “effectively burning rain forests in our gas tanks,” noted one scientist.

TrackerNews has been full of  stories over the last few months painting the same grim picture:

  • The Sea of Japan absorbs only half has much CO2 as it used to. Scientists suspect warmer water temperatures have changed the pattern of vertical currents known as “ventilation.” The water on top has essentially become saturated with CO2.  If it turns out this is happening in other oceans, the ramifications are immense. Oceans absorb about a quarter of human-generated CO2
  • All this CO2 is making the oceans more acidic, which is destroying coral reefs, along with anything else unfortunate enough to rely on a calcium carbonate shell. That, in turn, is making it more difficult for stressed fisheries to recover, leading to higher food prices and hunger. The circle may be even more vicious. Researchers have just discovered that fish play a key role in marine carbon sequestration. Fish excrete vast quantities of calcium carbonate as a result of drinking seawater. Scientists speculate that climate-warmed seas would speed up fish metabolism leading to increased excretions. But fewer fish means a net decrease and less calcium carbonate in the water to neutralize acidity.
  • Canadian forests are now carbon emitters. A combination of drought, logging, beetles, milder winters (warm enough to allow beetles to survive) and fire have turned 1.2 million square miles-worth of carbon sink solution into part of the problem.

Clearly, if we are going to make any headway with this disaster, we are going to have to come up with goals considerably bolder than “carbon neutral.” Optimistically, we are thisclose to an irreversible tipping point. According to yet another depressing study, global warming could trigger massive marine “dead zones” persisting for thousands of years.

BIOCHAR, a.k.a. AGRICHAR, a.k.a., TERRA PRETA:  OLD TECH TO THE RESCUE

(more…)

Filed under: InSTEDD, TrackerNews, energy, climate change, agriculture, soil health, charcoal | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments »

Matchmaking: On Soil, Lost Ideas, Terra Preta, Carbon Sequestration and Amy B. Smith

Posted on December 2, 2008 by J.A. Ginsburg
"Our Good Earth," photographs by Jim Richardson

"Our Good Earth," photographs by Jim Richardson

A few days ago, I posted a suite of “green bar” links on TrackerNews about soil health and farming that included National Geographic piece – “Our Good Earth” -  by Charles Mann.

Mann starts out describing in great detail just  how stunningly bad things are: 7.5 million acres degraded worldwide from compaction, erosion and deforestation (according to the most comprehensive report of its kind, which is now 17 years old…). From America’s breadbasket in the Midwest where $400,000 satellite-guided tractors literally take the breath out the soil by squeezing out all the air, to wrong-headed one-size-fits-all Maoist farm policies turned the Loess Plateu, one of the most fertile places on the planet, into “arguably the worst soil erosion in the world,” it is a devastating picture of agricultural folly.

He travels to the African Sahel, where drought has turned lush savanna into desert badland. Then to the rainforests of South America where fields wrested by slash and burn go sterile in a few years as the meager stash of nutrients, which had been locked up in the trees, washes away in the thin soil. Add to this the over-use of nitrogen fertilizer (too much can turn soil acidic, with run-off causing marine “dead zones” ) and it’s bad to worse.

Just when you think there can’t possibly be any good news, Mann switches gears, describing a handful of  “lost” techniques for soil restoration: Cordons pierreux – lines of strategically placed fist-size stones  for erosion control. Zai holes – shallow pits seeded with manure to attract termites whose digestion of the manure releases nutrients, triggering a virtuous circle of soil health. And terra preta, a mysterious carbon-and-pottery-shard rich man-made soil that made the great pre-Columbian cultures of South America possible (also see Mann’s fascinating book, “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus”).

These were all simple, brilliant and, at one time, widely adopted practices, a.k.a. successful technologies. Beyond the compelling puzzle of how and why good ideas get forgotten, there is hope in their rediscovery.

I was particularly intrigued by terra preta, a soil which can retain its fertility for centuries, and attempts to create a terra preta nova.

(italics added):

“…Terra preta is found only where people lived, which means that it is an artificial, human-made soil, dating from before the arrival of Europeans. Neves and his colleagues have been trying to find out how the Amazon’s peoples made it, and why. The soil is rich in vital minerals such as phosphorus, calcium, zinc, and manganese, which are scarce in most tropical soils. But its most striking ingredient is charcoal—vast quantities of it, the source of terra preta’s color. Neves isn’t sure whether Indians had stirred the charcoal into the soil deliberately, if they had done it accidentally while disposing of household trash, or even if the terra preta created by charcoal initially had been used for farming. Ultimately, though, it became a resource that could sustain entire settlements; indeed, Neves said, a thousand years ago two Indian groups may have gone to war over control of this terra preta…

(more…)

Filed under: agriculture, charcoal, energy, soil health | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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