Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project (HTRIP)

On 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

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.

“The most important thing we need to do about the world’s environmental problems,” says Diamond, “is trying to forget about there being any most important thing we need to do. Instead, there are dozen things and we’ve got to get them all right.”

EDEN WRECKED

The Haiti/Dominican Republic border; Completely deforested on the Haitian side; "Charcoal cartel" beginning to make inroads on the Dominican side

Where did all the forests go? The stats are as numbing as the satellite photos are stark:

• 1492: Columbus stops by. 75% of what would become Haiti covered in trees

• 1664: The French West India Company formed. Millions of trees chopped & harvested to create massive plantations. African slaves by the tens of thousands are imported to provide labor.

• 1825: French agree to recognize Haiti’s freedom, won in 1804, in exchange for 150 million francs (later reduced to 90 million). This puts the country in deep debt from which it never recovers. Much of the country’s timber wealth (mahogony) ships out for a song.

• 1940: An estimated 30% of country still forested

• 1970: Only 10% forested. People depend on charcoal made from wood for cooking. By contrast, government subsidizes gas stoves in the Dominican Republic

• 2010: Less than 1% forested. “Charcoal cartels” start chopping down trees across the Dominican border. Eroded land silts up lake, floods key road to Port-au-Prince. $40 million need to build alternate road.

LOW TECH / LOW COST: SOLUTIONS IN PROBLEMS

In a twist of dust-to-dust poetry, some of the answers to Haiti’s most intractable problems can be found in the one thing that Haiti has in abundance: waste.

About 10 years ago, MIT D-Lab founder Amy Smith, took a group of students to Haiti, where they were inspired by a local entrepreneur who had developed a way to make charcoal briquettes from scrap paper.  Smith’s team improved the process, using agricultural waste as feedstock. In 2006, she presented the results at the TED conference.

The upsides are stunning: No trees cut. A better product. Makes money for the producers. And since charcoal generates less smoke than wood, fewer cases of cooking fire smoke-induced acute respiratory illness, the leading cause of death for those under 5 years old in developing countries.

The process continues to be improved. Here is a step-by-step DIY field demo by Smith:

SHIT HAPPENS – THAT’S GOOD NEWS

SOIL, a small American non-profit operating in Haiti, has a plan for turning one of the country’s foulest, most intractable public health issues into a plus: transforming smelly poop into fragrant fertile compost. “Instead of potting soil, potty soil.”

Composting toilets themselves are nothing new, but developing a sustainable community-supported model for their use is – and  key to the group’s over-arching mission to reduce poverty via “liberation ecology.” With the likes of Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer and The Land Institute’s Wes Jackson on their all-star advisory board, they have a better shot than most at getting the plan to work.

In March, 2009, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof took a tour with SOIL staffers Sasha Kramer and Sarah Brownell:

SOIL’s approach parallels MacArthur genius Will Allen’s vermiculture-based urban farms. The flagship 3-acre Growing Power farm, located just a few blocks from Milwaukee’s largest public housing project, is a stunning example of ecosystem-thinking applied to intensive agriculture. And it all begins with worms chowing down on municipal waste, turning garbage into fertile black gold. Allen also weaves in aquaponics – a freshwater closed loop fish-operation (perch, tilapia). Plants are nourished by fish-poo water, which filters down back to the fish. Could such a system work in Haiti? It certainly seems worth investigating.

HIGH TECH HELP

Tree-planting, briquettes, compost toilets and urban farming don’t require a lot of complicated moving parts or all that much money. Their simplicity is an essential part of why they might make a real difference. But high tech tools can help make these good ideas even more effective.

• Mapping: Tools to track and predict deforestation, including illegal logging, and to help identify good sites for reforestation projects.

• Communications: Connecting charcoal briquette producers with ag waste sources and with customers; Web-based how-to guides on how to make charcoal briquettes, tree-care tips, etc.

• Fundraising: M-giving and other philanthropy tools, e.g., develop a game where players grow a cyber-forest – download proceeds to support a real forest.

RELATED READING / VIEWING:

“After the earthquake: Haiti’s deforestation needs attention” by Moises Velasquez-Manoff (Christian Science Monitor)

“Agroforestry and sustainable resource conservation in Haiti: A Case Study” by Nathan McClintock

U.S. Senate Bill 1183: Haiti Reforestation Act of 2009 introduced by Senator Dick Durbin

“Haiti and the Dominican Republic: One Island, Two Worlds” by Jared Diamond (excerpt from “Collapse”)

“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond (book)

“Jared Diamond on why societies collapse” (TED talk – video)

The Charcoal Project (website)

Growing Power (website)

“The Farm Next Door: Urban Agriculture, Biomimicry, Aquaponics, Why Worms are Priceless & How Will Allen Aims to Fix the World” by J.A. Ginsburg (Trackerblog)

“Google Earth boosts deforestation monitoring capabilities” by Rhett A. Butler (Mongabay.com)

A special TrackerNews page with news, info and resources relevant to Haitian relief and reconstruction; A prototype “sketch” for a personal aggregation tool; Hi-tech meets What-tech?; Haiti’s legacy

At TrackerNews, we tell stories by collecting and connecting links. Unlike most aggregators  that are driven by by dateline or popularity, we are interested in context, mixing news stories and research papers, conference videos and book sites, archived articles and blog posts from the field. Typically, between 4 and 6 story groups about health (human / animal / eco), humanitarian work and technology are on the site at any given time, setting the stage for the alchemy of cross-disciplinary insight. Eventually, everything ends up in a searchable database. Day by day, link by link, a broadly defined beat becomes a richer archive, a deeper resource.

Very occasionally, major breaking news stories  – a hurricane, disease outbreak, political unrest, climate conference – have taken over the entire site. But the Haitian earthquake stands apart with its mix of staggering devastation, technological hope, massive global response, cascading threats (disease, looting, hurricanes), ecological horror (the fertile skin of  the land has literally been stripped bare from deforestation) and the glimmering potential to right more than three centuries of unspeakable wrongs rooted in the slave trade.

For two weeks, dozens upon dozens of Haiti-related links have coursed through the TrackerNews columns. More have been tweeted via @TrackerNews. Now we have created a special permanent TrackerNews: Haiti resources page.

As is the TrackerNews style, it includes a mix of links to news stories, organization websites, web tools, wiki’s, apps, books, reports, magazines and blogs. It is a work in progress and covers the following categories (to start -more can be added as needed):

• Aid/Funding
• Disaster Tech / Mapping / Mobile
• Earthquakes
• Food & Agriculture
• General News (MSM)
• Haiti
• Heath: Human / Animal
• Human Rights
• Humanitarian Design
• Light / Power
• Money / Microfinance
• Reforestation / Charcoal
• Shelter / Infrastructure
• United Nations
• Water / Sanitation

The drop down box beneath the “red bar” is the easiest way to navigate around the page.

As encompassing as the approach may be, this is not intended as a be-all, end-all list. Wherever possible, we link to sources that have more detailing listings on a particular subject (e.g., Charity Navigator, UNHCR’s List of NGO partners, the ICT4Peace list of mapping sites, etc.).

On the other hand, there are links you likely won’t find elsewhere, or find easily. For example, last March, the Canadian Foundation for the Americas published a special all Haiti edition of its magazine, Focal Point, which included link to economist Paul Collier’s report to the U.N. on Haiti’s development prospects (see “Rebuilding” subcategory under “Haiti”).

There is also a link to another report detailing lessons learned from three decades of humanitarian response to earthquake disasters. (This one was gleaned from a tweet by TED conference director Chris Anderson – sources are everywhere!)

There are several links about urban agriculture – a perennial TrackerNews favorite – including a couple of stories on nearby Cuba’s success (see “Urban Agriculture” subcategory under “Food / Ag”)

From solar cell phones to microwind technology, from crisis-mapping to eco-toilets, TrackerNews: Haiti covers the gamut. You may not find exactly what you are looking for, but chances are good there will be a link to another site that will get you closer.

Frankly, however, the site isn’t nearly good enough. It is limited by inevitable editor bias and filter and by language. That’s why we are working to develop a tool that would allow anyone to curate, aggregate and share groups of links set within a graphically intuitively and flexible template. Imagine creating as many categories and sub-categories as needed, and arranging them however made the most sense to you.

Or imagine if categories prepared in advance of a disaster by experts in various areas of humanitarian response. A special TrackerNews page could be put together within a matter of hours, crowdsourced and customized – which is just a taste of what we hope to be able to provide in the future.

In the meantime, we hope you find the Haiti page useful, and that in some small way it helps Haiti.

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HI-TECH MEETS WHAT-TECH?

Within hours on the 7.0 earthquake on January 12, space satellite cameras began snapping the ultimate in aerial views, while videos of the enormous dust cloud floating above a crumbled Port-au-Prince began posting to YouTube and CNN’s Anderson Cooper dashed off to the airport.

Within days, text message philanthropy had bloomed into a national obsession and an Israeli team managed set up a best-in-class field hospital, complete with electronic medical records, telemedicine hook-ups and a neonatal unit, while everyone else sat waiting for supplies. Google set up a “Person Finder” service in English, Kreyol, French and Spanish.

Within a week, Ushahidi, a “crisis mapping” website born of a corrupt Kenyan election, and Reuters’ newly-minted Emergency Information Service  (EIS) had launched a sort of “911″ text service for Haitians to type for help by cell phone (#4636). “Crisis Camps” began sprouting up all over the country, attracting candy-fueled, sleep-starved coding crusaders by the hundreds.

Translations into Haitian Kreyol? Crowdsource! Injured, trapped and waiting for rescue? There’s an app for that! A global fund-raiser? Call George Clooney and MTV, write a song and sell albums (lots of them) via the iTunes store!

And yet, for all the bountiful, brilliant and sometimes bizarre can-do technical triumphs, the grim reality of Haiti’s disastrous condition before this latest catastrophe means there will be no quick fixes.

Case in point: food delivery. The never-was-very-good infrastructure of Port-au-Prince is so shredded, the World Food Program had to nix air food drops in the city for fear that wind generated by helicopters would further weaken quake-cracked buildings. Roads are wrecked and hundreds of thousands of people are on the move. What do you do?

Or consider shelter. While aftershocks continue to jangle masonry and nerves, an estimated one million newly homeless sleep outdoors beneath makeshift tents. Aid groups say tens of thousands of real tents are needed. But with hurricane season only a few months away, tents are a short-term solution at best.

The reconstruction effort is expected to cost billions of dollars and take at least 10 years – but that’s only if there are no more major earthquakes or killer storms. Even if Haiti is spared, there will be other disasters elsewhere that will demand the world’s attention.

Perhaps the legacy of the Haitian tragedy will be that the world didn’t leave it stranded, that life for Haiti’s people actually improved and that some of the tech developed and lessons learned from this nightmare were able to help others in the future.

In the meantime, here is a list compiled by the Foundation Center’s blog, Philantopic, of who’s doing what where. They could all use some support.

On biomimicry and the answers right in front of us; Photosynthesis & personal power; Urban farming, tropical agroforestry and (eco)system modeling; A carbon negative idea with fertile perks; Population balance

Waiting for diplomats to resolve the global climate crisis may take so long, it won’t matter. So what do we do in the meantime?

At TrackerNews, we have highlighted all kinds of promising green energy ideas, from micro-wind and solar textiles to vast arrays of concentrated solar collectors and giant “sea snakes” harvesting wave energy.

We love them all and their heartening range of ingenuity and resourcefulness. But none of them – or even all of them taken together – can do much to move the global thermostat in the near term, especially without the political will and the investment that results to grow them to scale.

We began to wonder whether there were any ideas that could make a difference, that could actually help stabilize our feverish planet within a matter of years instead of decades. We found five – an encouraging start. Notably, all take their design cues from nature and offer multi-faceted benefits. Nature, notes Janine Benyus of the Biomimicry Institute, relies on technologies that have been field tested for millions of years, the ultimate in iterative design. It works. Every time.

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1) TAKING A LEAF FROM NATURE

MIT chemistry professor Daniel Nocera says he can solve the world’s energy needs with a little bit water – and while he’s at it, make a dent in the water crisis. Although the most theoretical of the four ideas, Nocera’s breakthrough could lead to a quick and decisive global conversion to a hydrogen-based economy.

He began by calculating global energy needs past and future (best case and business-as-usual scenarios), comparing them with the most optimistic projections for energy generated from non-carbon sources (wind, solar, nuclear) and noting the physical limitations that prevent significant improvement in battery storage.  Disturbingly, even if we all did everything possible to minimize per capita energy consumption and the number of “capitas” was kept in check by educating poor women – the fastest way, according to Nocera, to reduce the birth rate, the future looks pretty gloomy.

In the hopes of rosying things up, he studied how plants make energy by splitting water molecules. For years researchers had focused on finding catalysts that could survive the process. Nocera noticed that nature didn’t bother, instead using catalysts that simply reassembled themselves. The system was “self-healing.” Then he came up with a way to do the same thing.

Within  “8.1254 years, ” Nocera envisions homes outfitted with solar panels tied into  inexpensive water-splitting systems (no pricey precious metals such as platinum required – common pvc pipe will do). The resulting hydrogen will be stored on site to take care of the home’s energy needs and recharge electric cars.  Each building will become its own power station, with no grid  – and no coal-powered central power stations – required. As a bonus, the catalyst is hardy enough to handle dirty water, so the system  can be set up almost anywhere. And if you reverse the process, reuniting hydrogen with oxygen, presto, clean water.

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2) AN (ECO)SYSTEMS APPROACH TO URBAN AGRICULTURE

Growing Power, agriculturist and MacArthur fellow Will Allen’s flagship farm in Milwaukee, has become the “go to” lab for urban agriculture. Even in sub-zero, snow-packed dead of winter Wisconsin, the suite of greenhouses spread over 3 acres a few blocks from the city’s largest public housing project produces harvest after bountiful harvest. It is literally a green oasis in the middle of a food desert.

As in nature, there is no waste, only recycling. And the more complex the system, the more robust and stable it becomes. Worms – millions of red wrigglers – convert mountains of municipal waste into castings of remarkable fertility. Fish poo feeds plants that filter water for the fish in closed loop aquaponics set-ups. Rainwater is captured and stored. Compost berms insulate and heat greenhouses. Over 150 crops – vegetables, fruit, poultry and fish – dovetail in dense exuberance, collectively generating from $5 to $30 per square foot, which is super-star status by traditional farm metrics.

Among the climate benefits:

• No petrochemical fertilizers required

• Much shorter “farm to fork” distribution chains, so a significantly reduced carbon footprint

• Growing plants that sequester carbon

Additionally, water is recycled wherever possible, so less is required overall. In regions facing climate change-related droughts (retreating glaciers, shifting rain patterns), this is a significant advantage.

With over half the world’s population now living in cities, urban farming has become a world-wide phenomenon. From small rooftop plots that also help curb the “urban heat island effect” (localized warming caused by the mix of heat absorbing asphalt and auto-exhaust-fueled particulate pollution), to sophisticated integrated greenhouse operations, urban farms offer the benefits of a distributed system: local, modular, adaptable, scalable. Since food is fresher when it reaches the consumer, it is also more nutritious.

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3) TROPICAL AGROFORESTRY

Willie Smits, a Dutch-born forestry scientist working in Indonesia, is, to a certain extent, doing the same thing as Will Allen, only on a rainforest scale.

For the last 30 years, he has focused much of his work in Borneo, which now has the dubious distinction of being the world’s 3rd highest emitter of greenhouse gases, right behind China and the United States. This is due almost entirely to the wholesale destruction of  its rainforests to make way for palm oil plantations. Deforestation has also dealt at crushing blow to the island’s biodiversity, turning great swaths of land into superficially green monoculture bio-deserts. The loss of coastal forests has also led to inland droughts. Trees that transpired massive amounts of water vapor into the air are gone, so oceans winds blow dry and hot.

The scourge of palm oil plantations is now spreading to Africa, where there are plans for a one million hectare (~ 3,800 square mile) operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Smits’ solution? Trade in the oil palm for the polyculture-loving, biodiversity-friendly, marginal land-suited, local economy-boosting, altogether superior sugar palm. He has developed a method to process the notoriously fast-fermenting sap (a.k.a. “juice”) before it begins go alcoholic. The juice, which can be turned either into sugar or ethanol, is only one of series of forest-based products, ranging from food to furniture. The scheme, however, can only succeed with local support to assure a vested interest in protecting the land. It is as much about preserving the stability of human cultures and local economies as it is restoring forests to thriving productivity.

So far, Smith has tested his ideas at two sites, one in Borneo and the other in nearby North Sulawesi. Over the last decade, millions of trees have been planted, thousands of jobs created, local micro-climates stabilized, hillsides stabilized, river health improved, wildlife populations restored and tons upon tons of carbon sequestered. The system is scalable, replicable and could just save the “lungs of the planet.”

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4) GOING (CARBON) NEGATIVE: MAYA-MIMICKING SOIL

If someone were to tell you that there was a way to sequester carbon while improving soil fertility, would you bite?

Biochar, charcoal produced in a low oxygen burn, was first used by Amazonians at least 1,500 years ago as a soil amendment (called terra preta or black earth). Its porous structure attracts microbial colonization, which  attracts other soil life forms, which improves the recycling of nutrients. Little did the Amazonians realize, but biochar is also very good at sequestering atmospheric carbon and nitrous oxide (which molecule for molecule, packs roughly 300 times the greenhouse gas punch).

Tim Flannery (“The Weathermakers“) thinks biochar may be “the single most important initiative for humanity’s environmental future,” while James Lovelock (“The Revenge of Gaia“) suspects it may be our only chance.

It is not, however, without controversy, with some wondering how burning biomass could possibly help the environment. Proponents point out that it also improves soil moisture retention, so crops don’t require as much water – a big plus from regions hit with climate-driven drought – while reducing the need for petrochemical fertilizers.

If entrepreneurs such as Jason Aramburu are right, not only could biochar dramatically improve crop yields in developing world, its production could generate enough energy to power a village. Scaled up globally, it could bring us back from the brink of climate catastrophe. “If we can get two billion tons of CO2, two gigatons out, in year,” says Araburu, “we could roll back emissions to pre-1982 levels in just 10 years.”

Araburu uses plant waste to make biochar – the same material MIT’s Amy Smith and her D-Lab students use to create a clean burning charcoal alternative to cheap cooking oil (ironically, palm oil). Did they reach essentially the same answer for two completely different problems? Very possibly. In which case this virtuous circle just gets better and better.

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5) POPULATION BALANCE

When a population of anything – bacteria, bugs or bunnies – grows beyond its supplies of food, water or shelter, or pollutes its environment to the point it becomes poisonous, there will be die-offs. The species may survive. Or not. This is Nature’s ultimate feedback loop and there is no negotiation.

In 1900, the global human population was 1.65 billion. In 2000, it was just over 6 billion. In another 40 years, the U.N. estimates it will be over 9 billion. And if something isn’t done fast to slow or reverse climate change, at least 250 million of them are expected to be “climate refugees.”  These will be people whose island homes or coastal cities have been submerged by rising seas. Fresh water supplies will have been fatally fouled. Others will have fled drought-scarred lands left dry and desolate by the retreat of glaciers. Still others will find their homelands flooded by ever more frequent and fierce typhoons, hurricanes and tornadoes.

As a species, we are running out of everything: food, water, shelter, clean air and especially time. But we can buy at least a little time if population growth can slowed.

Daniel Nocera is right: Investing in the education of poor women (along with providing ready access to contraceptives) is a critical part of addressing the energy crisis and, by extension, climate change. Women who attend school have fewer children because they are in a better position to make decisions about their families and their futures. According to WHO, there are 51 million unplanned children born in the developing world each year. That’s 1/6 of the population of the United States. Each year.

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NATURE BATS LAST

Each one of five ideas offers the extra bonus of multiple bottom lines: Save the climate and provide energy / clean water / food / jobs / habitat restoration / education. We can either learn from nature and biomimic our way to a more promising future, or defy it and suffer.

The really good news: We don’t have to wait for politicians. We can start to make a difference right now.

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RELATED READING / LISTENING / VIEWING

• “Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action” (TED talk – video)

• Biomimicry: Nature as Model, Measure and Mentor (Benyus’ website)

• “Chemistry and Personalized Solar Power” (NPR “Science Friday” interview with Daniel Nocera- audio)

• “The Farm Next Door: Urban Agriculture, Biomimicry, Aquaponics, Why Worms are Priceless & How Will Allen Aims to Fix the World” (TrackerBlog post)

• Tapergy: Willie Smits’ business to commercialize the sugar palm and related rainforest products (website)

• “Google Earth Hero: BOS, Borneo rain forest – Willie Smits” (video)

• “The Carbon NEGATIVE Option: Why Tim Flannery & James Lovelock Love Biochar” (TrackerBlog post)

• re:char – Jason Aramburu’s biochar business (website)

• “The Way Forward: Researching the Environment and Migration Nexus” (report by the Institute for Environment and Human Security, United Nations University – pdf)

The last-minute, cobbled-together, non-binding, specifics-lite COP15 “accord” managed to unify almost everyone in disappointment, though perhaps not in surprise. Many, including climatologist James Hansen and economist Jeffrey Sachs, have for months called the drawn-out politically-driven process “broken.” When there was no time to waste, time was wasted. The representative from the fast-sinking island of Tuvalu noted forlornly that the fate of the world was “being decided by some senators in the U.S. Congress.”

Really? Just a handful of senators? A few people out of a few dozen determining the future of six billion? If true, then as a species perhaps we deserve ourselves – though our fellow travelers on this blue dot planet certainly deserve better.

Tom Friedman, never one to shy away from clever turn of phrase, has called on “Father Greed” to save us from the political inertia letting  Mother Nature run amok. He wants to see a sort of green tech “arms” race between the U.S. and China, the two largest emitters responsible together for spewing half the greenhouse gases mucking up the atmosphere. To the winner will go economic advantage, an innovation edge and millions of jobs.

To the loser – well, there are no losers. With the world’s two largest economies leading the way, Friedman is certain the rest of the world will follow. Developing countries will build low-carbon energy infrastructure from the get go and a variety of disasters will be scaled back, if not altogether averted:

• Global CO2 levels will steady at safe-ish levels

• There won’t be quite as many record-breaking snow-storms, floods, droughts and famines

• The advance of vector-borne diseases into temperate zones will slow (anything that involves a mosquito, gnat or tick)

• Glaciers will return to an appropriately glacial crawl, slowing their retreat, possibly advancing and assuring millions of people living down-slope of reasonably predictable seasonal water supplies

• Oceans won’t turn lethally acidic, so corals and the fish that depend upon them will survive

• Oceans won’t rise as fast or as high as worst-case predictions, which will spare islands and coastlines from worst-case devastation

• Fewer forests will be blistered by drought, so won’t be incinerated in super-hot, soil-scorching mega-fires

• Fewer species will go extinct

• Climate refugees will number in the tens of millions instead of the hundreds of millions by 2050

The good news will be less bad news, which doesn’t have either much political cache or headline appeal, which is why the cynically optimistic Friedman is banking on greed: “(T)he way you get big change is by getting the big players to do the right things for the wrong reasons. If you wait for everyone to do the right thing for the right reason, you’re going to be waiting a long, long time.”

Time? Who’s got time?

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RELATED READING / LISTENING / VIEWING

• “The Fate of My Country Rests in Your Hands” (GOOD blog post / video)

• “Jeffrey Sachs: ‘Copenhagen expectations unlikely to be fulfilled’” (EarthSky podcasts / audio)

• “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity” by James Hansen (book website)

The 360 Paper Bottle

Leave it to an 8 year-old. Specifically, the 8 year-old son of Jim Warner, managing director of design consultancy Brandimage, who took one look at a plastic bottle his dad had helped create and said, “Oh. You make trash.”

Once the sting of that nasty little unvarnished truth wore off, Warner set to work to make not just a better bottle, but a better approach to bottling altogether. And with the 360 Paper Bottle, he may have hit the eco-ball straight out of the cradle-to-cradle design park.

The bottle,  introduced as a spec project to generate some buzz for the firm in 2008,  generated an “extreme response,” says Warner. Hundreds of calls winnowed down a handful of companies and organizations (details intentionally sketchy at this point) who have partnered with Brandimage to bring the bottles to market, possibly as early as sometime in 2010.

Among the 360’s many virtues:

• Not actually made out of paper but pulp, which can be sourced from almost anything fibrous such as bamboo, sugar cane or banana leaves.

• Local production plants can source local materials, generating local jobs and commerce.

• A shorter distribution chain means less transport-generated CO2

• The bottles designed to be become their own multi-unit packaging: a six-pack literally sticks together.

• A radical re-think of the bottle top: paper & with handy hook

• Bottles can be shipped flat to be filled closer to their final destination, reducing shipping costs

• They are compost-friendly

SAVES BIRDS & OCEANS

Perhaps the biggest virtue of all is simply that they are not plastic. They do not require a special recycling facility for processing – they can be tossed in a compost pile. They do not release Bisphenol A (BPA) as a carcinogenic byproduct. They will not contribute to Great Pacific Garbage Patch or any of the other spirals of death swirling poison in the Earth’s oceans. They will not kill innocent albatross chicks by bloating their bellies with bottle caps, their parents having been fooled by the colorful faux food as they fished in once fertile waters.

So, Mr. Warner…What else does that insightful son of yours have to say?

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RELATED READING / VIEWING

SEAPLEX: Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (website)

Agalita Marine Research Foundation (website)

“Captain Charles Moore on the seas of plastic” (TED talk – video below)

“We’re Poisoned! – FDA is killing us *Plastics* Bisphenol A” – an interview with Dr. Frederick vom Saal, Edocrine Disruptors Group, University of Missouri (video below)

Midway Journey: (documentary project blog – Chris Jordan, Manuel Maqueda, Bill Weaver, Jan Vozenilek, Victoria Sloan Jordan)

At TrackerNews, our approach is a little different from most aggregators. While they focus either on the latest or most popular stories, we focus on context. Stories cycle through the site in groups to deliver  a more faceted experience: breaking news is paired with archived stories, research papers, blog posts, websites, book reviews, e-books – print, audio, video. Every link is researched, reviewed, summarized, curated. Stephen Baker, former BusinessWeek journalist and author of the The Numerati, summed up it best: “TrackerNews puts the human algorithm back in the equation.”

We are not opposed to automated news feeds. Indeed, we scour them all the time. But they tend to skew to the new and the popular. Likewise, search engines often have hidden skews, affecting the order in which links appear (sponsored links, deals with news organizations, SEO tricks, etc.). Thousands of links make come up in a Google search, but who ever goes beyond the second page? As Mies van der Rohe pithily noted, “Less is more.”

"TrackerNews" Screen Grab Slide Show

Over the last year, TrackerNews has covered everything from malaria, mapping and microfinance, to chemical spills, earthquakes, political protests, human trafficking, energy, lighting, mobile tech, logistics, floods, famines, urban farming, the bushmeat trade, rapid diagnostics, mental illness and global warming. Our searchable database, which also includes an extensive collections of resources, has swelled to 3,000+ links and is just beginning to get interesting. (see slide show)

THE POPTECH TRACKER: A BETA DEMO

Ironically, as our database grows day by day, becoming a richer and more useful resource, its very size may itself start to become an issue.

The PopTech ‘09 Tracker (“PopTracker”) is an experiment in managing a tremendous number of links that relate to a single overarching subject. Conference presenters, teachers, fellows, along with PopTech-sponsored programs,  have been sorted into categories, then listed alphabetically. Between 4 and 10 related links are attached to each person or program, including presentation videos (added as they become available).

Even in its bare-bones format, the PopTracker shows promise as an at-a-glance research tool. Ultimately, our goal is to create a tool that will not only give everyone the ability to curate and organize information themselves, but also to share content with others using graphically intuitive templates. This is just a first step.

It has, however, been a really fun one.

PopTech 2009 Tracker / "PopTracker"

With a conference as sprawling as PopTech, it  is impossible for anyone to take it all in, even someone attending every lecture (and a blur of parties…). Researching and selecting links has been an education, full of delightful surprises. The goal was not to be exhaustive, but to provide insight. The biggest challenge? Trying to figure out which category best captured someone’s work.

Where do you put a Willie Smits, for example? His agro-forestry schemes repair the environment, while providing both food and energy. Or what about Michael Wesch, whose YouTube research deftly weaves together pop culture, social networks and cultural anthropology?  Or Daniel Nocera, whose “biomimick a molecule” fuel cell design not only has the potential to provide an endless supply of clean cheap power,  but purify polluted water in the process?

These are people who live hyphenated lives, who think between the boxes. Solar textiles. MacBook-ified cello music. “Scent” dinners. Cyber-security-digital-book-translation. Urban agriculture.

The PopTracker is itself a mash-up as well, riffing on the conference and going beyond it with links to research, books, music and  interviews. Yet while it provides a good way to get a sense of the whole, any cross-disciplinary links must still be made by readers. So…

A CHALLENGE

To the graphically gifted (and you know who you are Frog Design, Winterhouse, Nick Bilton, Nancy Duarte, Nicholas Felton, et al):

A data visualization showing connections and potential connections between the ‘09 PopTech’ers.

The prize:

A “Green Bar” link on TrackerNews & a permanent  ”Red Bar” link on the PopTracker!

It was a wonderful little bubble while it lasted. Getting up before dawn. Dressing in easy-to-peel layers for whatever the day might bring. Walking over to Boynton-McKay, a diner of rare perfection, where the wi-fi was as reliably good as the pancakes (a boon in connectivity-challenged Camden…) Ascending the stairs and more stairs of the town’s famous 19th century Opera House. A few minutes to mingle-navigate among tables of nibble-food before settling down for a morning of things worth thinking about.

But first, a little music. Logan Richardson’s soulful, playful, questioning sax riffs on “America the Beautiful” one day. Zoe Keating’s clear, deeply layered, architecturally precise, transcending cello pieces another. How lovely to start each day by not thinking. Just being. In the moment. Together. Brilliant.

And then it was off and running, from economics to education, urban decay to urban agriculture, environmental catastrophe to conservation hope, design theory to food design, cardboard robots to paper diagnostics, communications to comics, art to dance to music. To, to, to…

But as the last note of the Mark O’Connor-anchored jam session finale faded into festive applause and we trundled off in buses through the rainy dark to a cavernous transportation museum for one last party, the bubble had begun to weaken and thin. Faces, now familiar, circled by against an improbable backdrop of vintage automobiles, sci-fi bicycles and disconcertingly disembodied airplane parts.  A few final conversations and business cards. Some hugs and toasts. Promises to keep in touch, follow up, finish that thought. We stayed up until we couldn’t. By morning, the bubble was lost in the dazzling clarity of a New England fall day. One by one we left the the small town – Maine’s answer to Brigadoon – journeying back to the chaotic urgency of our daily lives. With each mile down the highway to Boston, and each minute in the sky back to Chicago, I could feel experiences recasting into memories, ready for sorting and analysis.

TAKE-AWAYS

Throughout the conference, Michelle Riggen-Ransom, Rachel Barenblat, and Ethan Zuckerman were absolutely brilliant live-blogging the talks and I recommend reading their posts, along with Kristen Taylor’s, on the PopTech blog to get a more detailed view of goings on.

Among the overarching themes: the serendipity of the amateur and the common sense of a cross-disciplinary approach. In short, the easiest way to see outside the box is to be outside the box.

Take, for example, the tale of the $12 computer (can be haggled down to $10). PopTech 2009 fellow Derek Lomas, who was working in India on”ethnographic design research on uses of mobile phones in urban and rural contexts,” found just such a miracle browsing a crowded electronics marketplace. It’s bare bones – hooks up to a television for a screen and runs on the 8-bit chip that powered 1980s-era Apple II computers and Nintendo game systems. So “vintage” is the tech, patents have run out, making it, for all intents and purpose, open source. Funded by a $180,000 MacArthur grant, Lomas and his collaborators the Playpower Foundation are developing software that combines educational aims with game-playing appeal. “It occurred to me that if this platform had just a few decent games, and one good typing game, it could be economically transformative,” notes Lomas, “because touch-typing can make a difference between earning a dollar a day or a dollar an hour.” Why invent an answer from scratch when you can assemble one cheaper? Innovation through shopping…

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Another theme: The most effective way to to trigger change is to provide a better alternative to the status quo.

For preventive medicine pioneer Dean Ornish, the shift from the “fear of dying to the joy of living is the key to the healthier future. For materials scientist Neri Oxman, it is moving from a Miesian reality where each building material has a specific function (steel for support, glass for light) to one inspired by Nature, where a single material yields a range of benefits (e.g., the structure of an egg shell evolved to provide strength as well as gas permeability). For clinical psychologist, Naif  Al-Mutawa, it is tackling Muslim stereotypes through the compelling comic book stories of Muslim superhero kids (“The 99″). Better is better.

MIT architect Sheila Kennedy, who has helped spearhead PopTech’s portable lighting project, points out the importance of opening up a space to new ways of thinking.  FLAP – Flexible Light & Power – is a Timbuk2 messenger bag outfitted with small solar array, battery and LED. A removable panel lined with reflective material amplifies the light from a tiny bulb cleverly tucked into a strap. AfriGadget’s Erik Hersman recently took some prototypes to Africa for field testing. But no matter whether a bag design turns out to be a viable answer or not, the thinking has shifted: Solar is not just for roofs and calculators any more. Now you can literally wear power on your sleeve.

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photo: Growing Power

Which segues into a third theme: Just add sunshine. Three ideas presented at the conference that are either dependent upon or inspired by photosynthesis have the potential to help significantly move the dial on climate change.

• Will Allen is a teacher and an inspiration for the potential of urban agriculture. His suite of Growing Power farms in Milwaukee and Chicago are designed as a series of nested ecosystems. Vermicomposting – turning garbage into wildly fertile worm castings – is the lynchpin. You start by creating soil so rich, it doesn’t require petro-based chemical additives.  From aquaponics set ups to raise fish by the thousands to a biodigester for converting food waste into energy, everything that can be harvested or recycled is. It is cleaner, healthier, oil-independent food system, with local “farm to fork” distribution networks designed to turn urban “food deserts” green.

• Willie Smits has plans for a similar polyculture fix, only rainforest-size. Trained in forestry, Smits career took a turn when he came across a sick orangutan in a Borneo market. Saving orangutans meant saving habitat, an increasingly difficult task when easy profits for palm oil led to wholesale conversion of ancient forests into modern superficially-efficient monocultures. Beyond the staggering loss of biodiversity, forest clearing fires, especially in peat-land forests, have led to “CO2 volcanoes,” spewing vast amounts of sequestered greenhouse gases skyward. Smits’ fix centers around the sugar palm, a short tree common in second-growth forest, which thrives only when grown as part of a polyculture and has a talent both for sequestering carbon (deep roots) and gushing a liquid that can be turned into sugar or ethanol. Smits has come up with a way to process the quick-to-ferment “juice” efficiently off-site. With the “juice” as the economic anchor, a suite of other forest products can also be sustainably harvested. Recently Smits set up a company, Tapergy, to implement his ideas. Notably, both Smits and Allen focus on jobs. Commodity monocultures destroy jobs and communities. Urban agriculture and tropical agroforestry create them.

• Chemist Daniel Nocera, by contrast, doesn’t want to raise plants but mimic them to generate vast amounts of energy. His epiphany: Plants routinely rebuild the mechanisms for splitting water in their leafy “fuel cells.” Scientists’ decades-long quest to find stable catalysts was not only futile but utterly misguided. Instead, his lab developed a resilient catalyst that could rebuild itself, making it possible to create both a better, cheaper fuel cell and process dirty water into drinkable water.

NEXT…

Perhaps the most exciting announcement at the conference was about a new fellows program for scientists, which takes us back to cross-disciplinary common sense. As the speaker list already demonstrates, science is an essential part of creating change for the greater good.

The further promote and support collaborations, some suggestions:

1) Develop a session or a workshop focused on tech transfer, focusing on both the legal and marketing angles.

2) Add data visualizations to the program and on the website showing connections between speakers. With such a multi-disciplinary list, connections transcend program groupings.  For example, Smits could just as logically been grouped with Michael Pollan and Will Allen.

3) Open the PopTech Creative Reuse Workshop at 8 a.m., one hour before the conference. Put out coffee as bait for early risers. I completely missed the workshop. The daily speaker sessions tended to go long, so there wasn’t much time to scoot over afterward. During breaks, the tendency was to mingle, network and nosh on site. Restaurants chosen for lunches were all located in the opposite direction.

4) Develop an online book store search-able by title, author and subject.

Now to wait for the videos to post, just in time for the long winter cozy season…

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.

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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…)

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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.

Growing Power, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Healthier food, better access for poor, landfill relief, reduced carbon footprint, off-the-shelf set up, replicable, scalable, jobs bonanza, includes fish; Can a “small food” paradigm succeed where Big Food has failed?

The next agricultural revolution will not be patented. It will not depend on genetically modified seeds or petrochemical fertilizers. It will not poison or deplete aquifers. It will not erode topsoil that took millennia to form. Nor will distance between “farm and fork” be measured in thousands of gas-guzzling miles.

The next agricultural revolution won’t even take place on the farm – at least as we know it.

It will be potted and stacked, set up in hoop houses and warehouses, sprout from rooftops, vacant lots and lawns. Worms will be celebrated, bacteria will flourish and grubs nurtured. It will be drought and flood resistant and productive all year long.

The next agricultural revolution will be street-smart and urban, yet mimic nature far more closely than agro-giant operations sprawled over hundreds or even thousands of monotonous monoculture acres.

Best of all, the next agricultural revolution is well underway, just 5 blocks from Milwaukee’s largest public housing project, off a busy street, behind an unassuming farm-stand surrounded by sunflowers basking in the brilliant light of a mid-September afternoon. Welcome to Growing Power.

BIG FOOD GONE BAD

“The Big Food system hasn’t fed the world,” says Will Allen, urban farmer, MacArthur genius, share-cropper’s son, former basketball star, former corporate marketer, vermicompost evangelist and CEO of Growing Power. He is speaking to a group of environmental lawyers who have spent an hour digging a ditch after 2 hours touring Growing Power’s flagship 3-acre farm. They are flushed and sweaty and hang on every word. Here at last is a genuine answer that could just turn things around, no legal briefs required.

According to UN statistics, over a billion people do not have enough to eat, with tens of millions more added to the tally each year. Even in the  U.S., an estimated 1 in 6 children – more than 12 million – are “food insecure.” A global recession, a series of increasingly severe droughts and floods (at least some likely driven or amplified by climate change), and competition for land between food and fuel crops have sent those living near the edge straight over it. Every 6 seconds, a child somewhere in the world dies from hunger or related causes.

Micronutrient malnutrition affects an estimated 2 billion people. One third of children in the developing world are vitamin A deficient, putting them at risk for blindness. Anemia from iron deficiency during pregnancy is linked to over 100,000 maternal deaths.

In the developed world, malnutrition is often masked by obesity. A diet of high-calorie, high-fat, fast food laced with high fructose corn syrup  is not only a nutritional catastrophe, but also ups the odds for developing diabetes, heart disease and other assorted ills. Cheap food comes at a high cost that the poor, more than anyone else, have had to pay.

Fast food joints and liquor stores dot the neighborhood around Growing Power, but  the nearest full-service grocery is several miles away. For all practical purposes, the neighborhood is a healthy food desert. American cities are rife with them.

Allen’s mission is to fill the gap: to bring fresh, healthy, affordable food to the urban poor, to green food deserts with greens…and eggs, honey, chickens, turkeys, ducks and fish. Lots of fish.

SMALL FOOD, BIG DIFFERENCE

The Growing Power greenhouse - intensive all-season farming generates between $5 and $30 per square foot (photo: Growing Power)

Walk through the door of  the small shabby-neat one-room  store – where a video of Allen extolling the wonders of worms plays on an old television perched on some equally vintage coolers stocked with a few cartons of eggs and miscellaneous produce – into the Growing Power greenhouses and you enter a world that makes such sense, the relief is palpable. It fairly hums with purpose.

Bounty beyond imagining bursts from a substrate of plywood, 2 x 4s, waterproof liners, pumps (some solar powered), pvc pipe, fluorescent grow lights and tens of thousands of plastic pots and seed trays. There is an order to the chaos, a rhythm and logic to the intertwining series of elegantly balanced ecosystems that together support over 150 varieties of vegetables, edible plants, poultry, a few goats and tens of thousands of fish.

So intensively is space used, each square foot generates between $5 and $30. That translates per acre between roughly $218,000 and a little more than $1.3 million, which is astonishing. By contrast, corn currently sells for about $3 per bushel. If you figure 200 bushels per acre – a bumper crop – that ’s only $600. Comparing commodity grain crops to vegetables isn’t entirely fair: corn and wheat aren’t greenhouse-friendly. Still, this gives you some idea just how distorted and subsidy-addled the Big Food system has become. Factor in the cost of seed, fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, machinery, land and labor and what’s really being raised is a bumper crop of debt.

Allen’s harvest is also healthier because it is fresher, with fewer nutrients literally lost in transit. Tomatoes, produced year-round at Growing Power, sell when naturally ripe. Supermarket tomatoes, however, are often picked green, then exposed to ethylene gas to make them ripen in time for delivery, which usually involves a long-haul truck or an international flight.

In a rather poetic twist, fewer greenhouse gases are emitted from Allen’s greenhouse food because delivery is local.

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Will Allen atop compost bounty: waste + worms + coir + time = fertile soil = everything (photo: Growing Power)

Fertile soil is key to the whole operation, so Growing Power makes its own. As much as 100 thousand pounds of food waste is collected weekly for composting – millions of pounds diverted from landfills annually.

Coir, eco-friendly coconut husk alternative to peat moss, is added to the compost mix to improve texture. An army of ravenous red wriggler worms do the rest. Seven or eight species chow down for a few months, releasing nutrients and leaving little gift trails of mucous that help soil retain water. As a measure of Growing Power’s growth over the last 15 years, the “starter” 30 pounds of worms has ballooned to 5,000 pounds. Their “castings” – staggering to imagine – are another crop, fertilizer gold bagged and sold for $4 per pound. The worms themselves, though, are priceless. To get a bucketful, you have to sign up for a workshop on their care and feeding, or otherwise prove yourself a fit parent: “…(W)e won’t give them to just anybody.”

Alchemy: From garbage to $4 per pound via worms

Compost bins are everywhere. Outside, a massive compost windrow has been piled against a greenhouse wall to provide a bonus geothermal harvest: insulation and heat. Even in the dead of a Wisconsin winter, when zero degrees looks like a warming trend, it is equator hot inside the mound and the party never stops. Feasting on 20,000 to 30,000 pounds of brewery waste each week (this is Milwaukee after all), these worms are so delighted (drunk?) with their lot in life, no thought of escaping into the wild ever seems to enter their tiny happy heads.

Good times.

FISH TALES

Systems thinking is, perhaps, Growing Power’s defining feature. This is biomimicry on a sweeping scale, with careful attention paid to the smallest details and profound delight taken from learning how to work within Nature’s symbiotic set-up.

If you shut your eyes, it is easy to imagine that the pervasive background burble is a stream in the woods and not water being pumped via pvc pipe from a 6-foot-deep, fish-filled trench called a raceway up onto shelves packed with plants several feet overhead. The plants – tomatoes,watercress, basil, among others – thrive on a diet of fish poop-enriched water, which they filter and drip back to the pond/raceway, fresh and clean.

Checking the fish crop at Growing Power

Aquaponics, a closed loop system for raising fish, herbs and vegetables, is so exquisitely balanced, water to top-off the tank only need be added occasionally.

Cold water lake perch and warm water tilapia swim among the greens at Growing Power. In the spirit of endless recycling, heat from the 85 degree tilapia water helps warm the greenhouses, while the fish nibble on plant waste. A moveable feast of floating papyrus – shades of the Fertile Delta – provide tilapia with a treat of tender roots in one of the above-ground set-ups.

Could soldier fly grubs help solve the global food crisis? Protein-rich feed for fish & poultry

Perch are omnivores, so also munch on home grown worms and commercial fish feed. One the dirtiest secrets of commercial aquaculture is the need to trawl wild waters for massive amounts of smaller fish to process into food for farmed fish, so Allen is experimenting with a more eco-friendly solution: raising protein-rich soldier fly grub. Cheap, prolific, and virtually without carbon footprint (no shipping), chickens like them, too.

The perch -  10,000 to a 10,000 gallon tank – not only grow 3 times as fast as their wild cousins in Lake Michigan a few miles east, but are also mercury-free.

TAKING ROOT & SCALING UP

Allen holds a shovel for the ceremonial photo-op, tosses some dirt into a wheelbarrow and darts off to get his own camera to document the lawyers as they set about their appointed volunteer task: Digging a trench 6 feet deep and 3 feet wide for a rain catchment system designed to harvest enough water to handle all the greenhouses’ needs.

The lawyers go at it with gusto, quickly discovering just how heavy dirt can be, gamely whittling their way down a foot or two. It’s not easy. But the real lesson they have learned this day is that it’s not that hard.

Will Allen’s agro-urban miracle, breathtaking in it depth and detail, can be easily replicated and scaled. The steps are straightforward and simple: Start with waste. Honor worms. Think in terms of systems. Study Nature. Then, as Candide eventually figured out, watch your garden grow.

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Imagine: You live in a third world slum, refugee camp or in an isolated village with marginal soil and an unpredictable water supply. A hoop house is set up, which takes about a day, perhaps with the help of an enterprising NGO. Vermicompost bins are built for food waste and a garbage collection program launched. An aquaponics system is set up, with fish below and plants above, powered by a solar pump using a car battery for electricity storage.

More waste, more soil. More soil, more plants. More plants, more fish. Water recycles, replenishes. Now repeat.

These are the real “Biosphere 2’s,” creating resilient little self-sufficient Edens exactly where they are needed most: right here on Biosphere 1.

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In the year since becoming a MacArthur fellow, Will Allen and Growing Power have been featured in everything from Oprah’s O magazine to the New York Times. His rousing call to arms for food justice was featured in the Sofia Joanes’ documentary, Fresh. He has become a popular speaker (appearing this October at both Bioneers by the Bay and  PopTech ‘09 ).

What began as project for local teens on the last tiny bit of farmland in Milwaukee in the mid-1990s has blossomed  into a network of small farms and a suite of regional training centers. A steady stream of Ph.D.’s and would-be Ph.D’s, mostly  from the University of Wisconsin, bring a scientific rigor to the operation, measuring, documenting and providing technical assistance for a seemingly endless series of projects.

Big Food may have failed the world. Small, smart, savvy food may just save it. The urban agriculture revolution is alive and well and coming to a city near you.

Let’s eat!

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sidebar: FARM CITY

Although Growing Power now has an enthusiastic national as well as an international following, nowhere has its example been more joyously embraced than in its home city, Milwaukee. Located halfway between Madison, a college town with a hippy past and an obsession for farmers’ markets, and Chicago, all skyline and swagger, Milwaukee mixes a do-able human scale with a some big city flash (read: easier and cheaper to park, a knock-out lakefront and did you see that stunning Calatrava-designed museum?!) In short, it is a very good place for ideas to grow quietly out of the limelight, but with plenty of help and expertise nearby.

As Growing Power ramped up its food business – it now provides thousands of low-income families access to affordable, healthy, fresh food and has built up a robust restaurant / school / grocery store clientele – it also grew as an educational resource. Long before the term “open source” became popular, sharing information was an integral part of the urban agriculture ideal. If Big Food is defined by patents and monopolies, small food counters with choice, education and collaboration. Know-how is a yet another “crop” at Growing Power, packaged in videos and workshops (see schedule / more).

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Erik Lindberg, a carpenter by trade (Community Building and Restoration), signed up for a workshop a couple of years ago. If it didn’t change his life, it certainly changed his roof. His modest one-story building, next to an auto garage and across the street from a Goodwill and a Popeye’s Chicken, now has a double life as a farm. To be precise, a rooftop CSA (community supported agriculture), that provides 7 families with a serial supply of cabbages and carrots, potatoes and pickles, tomatoes, squashes, basil and beans 40 weeks a year. That’s no mean feat in a place where winter feels like it lasts 6 months, even though it’s only 5. But that’s the magic of a hoop house and raised beds.

Gretchen Mead's entire front yard is filled with flowers & vegetables

Gretchen Mead, whose Victory Garden Initiative promotes planting veggies early, often and wherever possible, including front lawns (hers had a particularly tasty crop of ground cherries this year), is a big fan of Lindberg’s. Last spring she rounded used kiddie pools for him to recycle as giant planters – perfect for patty pan squash. If you plant them, they will grow..

The first commercial scale up of Will Allen's aquaponics system

But  the most improbable of Milwaukee’s new farms, Sweet Water Organics, is located in a 6-acre industrial complex, next door to a steel rolling plant, three miles from downtown. Earlier this year, when a Dutch flower-bulb importer tenant was forced to downsize due to the recession, landlord Steve Lindner, another Growing Power graduate, found himself with a spare 11,000 sf. In the time it takes to say, “from tulips to tilapia,” raceway trenches were being excavated for the first commercial scale up of Allen’s aquaponics system (aquaponics has been around for some time, but Allen, with help from University of Wisconsin – Sea Grant Institute, tweaked the design).

Soon worms were munching through small mountains of compost out back, while hundreds of pots filled with basil, watercress and sprouts were put in place under grow lights and tens of thousands of perch and tilapia fingerlings began swimming laps in their respective pools. Within 2 years, plans call for annual production of 100,000 fish, with revenue also coming in from herb sales, compost and worm casings.

Success is still a question mark and Lindner, along with his partners Josh Fraundorf and James Godsil – a Growing Power board member – are working closely with an array of University of Wisconsin aquaculture experts. Over $100,000 has been invested so far, but with perch going for as much as $7 per pound, tilapia for $4 and basil for $18, they’re hopeful.

A lot of people, including Will Allen, are watching closely. If Sweet Water works, it would be easy to replicate in other cities, redefining “industrial agriculture” while greening up the rust belt.

Over the last 50 years, a million farm jobs have been lost from consolidation and mechanization, Allen estimates, noting that the next generation of farmers likely won’t come from farms. Only 2% of the U.S. population still lives on farms and 40% of farmers are now in their mid-50s, staring at retirement. “I believe we can grow thousands of jobs creating this new food system,” he says.

So:

• Healthier food
• Accessible to everyone, poor and rich alike
• Reduced carbon footprint and reliance on petrochemicals
• Smarter waste recycling and water use
• Flexible and adaptable enough to work anywhere
• Better able to survive, recover and rebuild after a catastrophic weather event
• Comparatively inexpensive to set up; no patented seeds required
• Job creation

In a world stressed to its resource limits in so many ways, where merely managing to maintain status quo can feel like progress, Allen and the other urban farmers are pioneering a new promising path. By following Nature’s lead maybe, just maybe, we can get ourselves back to the garden.

First, though, we have to plant it.

(photo: Growing Power)

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MORE READING / VIEWING

Will Allen, MacArthur Fellow:

Growing Power blog & Will Allen’s post, “A Good Food Manifesto”

Video Tour of Growing Power: Vermicomposting:

Video Tour of Growing Power: Greenhouse Growing

Video Tour of Growing Power: Aquaponics

Aquaponics video, University of Wisconsin – Sea Grant Institute:

“Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear,” Vanity Fair article by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

Seed Savers Exchange: non-profit organization of gardeners dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds

“Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food—Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences: Report to Congress,” USDA – Economic Research Service

“Investing in the Future: A United Call to Action on Vitamin and Mineral Deficiencies,” UNICEF report

The Biomimicry Institute, founded by Janine Benyus

“AskNature: The Biomimicry Design Portal,” Brain Pickings article by Kirstin Butler

“Fresh”: clips from Sofia Jones’ documentary – Russ Kremer, Will Allen, Joel Salatin, Michael Pollan

“Fresh” trailer:

“Food, Inc” movie website

“Food, Inc” trailer (Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser)

Colbert Report interview with Eric Schlosser, co-producer of “Food, Inc” and author of “Fast Food Nation”

Author Michael Pollan’s website: (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “In Defense of Food”)

Urban Agriculture magazine (produced by the RUAF Foundation – Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security)

Urban Farm magazine

Oxfam report summary: "Even the Himalayas Have Stopped Smiling"

If no other statistic about climate change gives you pause, this one should: 1/4 of the world’s population – an estimated 1.4 billion people – rely on water from rivers that source in the Himalayas. As glaciers retreat, snow packs shrink and spring thaws occur earlier and earlier, the precious gift of a well-timed water supply is disappearing before our eyes. Instead, flooding torrents race down mountain streams too early in the spring for crops to use, followed by months of drought when the flows of once reliably mighty rivers slow to a trickle. If that weren’t misery enough, alpine lakes swollen from glacial melt threaten to break their banks, unleashing “Nepali tsunamis” officially called “GLOFs” (Glacial Lake Outburst Floods) that threaten to drown villages and fields and scour away topsoil.

Women, who do most of the water-fetching and firewood-gathering, are forced to walk further and further for essentials each day. Crop failures mean hunger and malnutrition.

Temperatures, like a seasoned sherpa hiking up Mount Everest, climb fast at higher elevations – as much as 8 times faster in the Himalayas than elsewhere on the planet over the last three decades. With warmer weather comes a raft of vector-borne diseases for which these cold-adapted communities have no defense.

Weak, sick, hungry, thirsty. So much for Shangri-La.

WHERE THE RIVERS NO LONGER RUN THROUGH IT

Downstream, as Newsweek’s Sharon Begley notes, “A special place in climate hell is being reserved for India and China.” Already, 20% of China has turned to desert. And the water table beneath India’s irrigation-dependent “breadbasket” has been so depleted, NASA satellites have been able to detect a change in earth’s gravitational field over the region.

It isn’t just the breadth of the water disaster that is so confounding, but the fact that it is accelerating. As worthy as the efforts by organizations and projects such as charity: water and Ripple Effect may be, it is hard to believe they can possibly make a dent when need is growing both exponentially and quickly. There is a great big climate change hole-in-the-bucket.

So fast is the change, “glacial pace” has had to be redefined. The Extreme Ice Survey, headed by photojournalist James Balog, set up dozens of time-lapse cameras to document glacial retreat in the northern hemisphere (95% of the glaciers outside of Antarctic are shrinking, with flow speeds doubling over the last 20 years). But even they were gobsmacked when a 1.8 cubic mile chunk – the size of 3,000 U.S. Capital buildings – calved off a glacier in Greenland in 75 minutes.

from TED Global:

PROSPERITY SHIPS OUT

Indeed, only the Russians seem to see a silver lining in the global meltdown: For the first time in at least 5,000 years, a Northeast passage has opened up, making it possible for ships traveling from Asia to Europe to bypass the Suez Canal – at least during the summer months. The Beluga Group, which sent two ships as a test this summer, boasts that not only does the route knock 10 days off the journey at a cost savings of nearly $300,000, but that using less fuel means lower CO2 emissions. The lucrative “Arctic Rush” is on and, golly, it’s green, too!

Trade and development are routinely cited by politicians as reasons not to take a more aggressive stance on curbing emissions. Fear of being perceived as standing in the way of progress and its twin, prosperity, has blinded them to stark and utterly inconvenient truth: If the world continues to heat up, there won’t be as much to trade (failing crops, chronically depressed economies) or as many people who can afford to buy. That may begin to change as big institutional investors, feeling increasingly insecure about climate-driven threats to their investments, start to make their financial clout felt. The medical establishment has also come on board, framing the climate change as the biggest public health threat ever.

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Climate change is a braid of the subtle and the profound. Warming air feeds winds that shift sea temperature cycles that change weather patterns. A monsoon misses its cue, or fails altogether. Landscapes parch, becoming fire fodder.

These tragic consequences are often “tipped” and amplified by land use changes that directly affect local climates. Expanding cities are expanding “heat islands,” while deforestation is a multi-category disaster. Lose the trees and you pretty much lose the game. It’s not just their talent for sequestering carbon. Their roots help funnel water to aquifers, while the transpiration – the evaporation of water from leaves – cools the air and provides moisture for rain clouds. Sea breezes blowing over a coastal forest can inland can push moisture inland, so clear-cut the forest and you could trigger a drought hundreds of miles away.

In both Mexico and Kenya, logging, legal and otherwise, have increased vulnerability to droughts, which are becoming more frequent and devastating. Hippos now bask in roadside puddles in Kenya, while water trucks are routinely hijacked in Mexico City. Dead livestock spells the end of a way of life for African nomads, while stunted crops bring debt to Mexican farmers and higher food prices to everyone else.

We know better. Or, more accurately, we have the collective knowledge to do better. The question is whether we have the collective will.

If not…

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MORE READING/VIEWING

“Copenhagen Climate Summit Heat: from business to condoms” by Peter Casier – The Road to the Horizon round-up of issues & article links

“Study of 16 developing countries shows climate change could deepen poverty”: (press release overview / abstract & author links)

“Managing the health effects of climate change”: Lancet / University College London report on public health implications of climate change (free registration required)

The Not Stupid Campaign : from the creators of film, “The Age of Stupid”

“China’s Growing Sands” by Sean Gallagher: slide show produced for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (HT Peter Casier)