Greening the Desert (and updates) by Geoff Lawton

   Its not true that nature can't heal herself, just that she can't with us messing things up.
     If we disappeared she could but as we would rather not disappear, then we must, as geoff Lawton says, be the weeds that heal the land.

     AAAgain i want to say on this subject, we could send out scientists like paul stamets and others from arizona university, to see what exactly geoff lawton did near the dead sea. Its always good bringing the scientists on board, it helps getting backing from everyone, we can't wait untill everyone goes hippy. Anyway its hard to see that happening. rose macaskie.

  You had better write another bit if i top this off, no one will ever write another word here. rose.

Why do you think nobody will write another word?

Didn't Geoff do a good enough job explaining what he did?

    I was really interested in what geoff lawton said it is incredible to try to green a bit of land near the dead sea and manage to do it, i have not traveled much but i was down by the dead sea when i was young, it is like a moon lanscape. Him being able to use permaculture techniqus for such a situation really speaks for permaculture technics. It should have been impossible.
    I suppose he could say much more, i think he has a video you can order and buy, i have to get buying things on the internet together.
      In his other video though, about swales, the one that has a video diagram of how they work  but isnot just the one with only that diagram of swales but the other one that also him making a swale in a mans garden, when he explains about the trick of level and making the water stay in the swale and just overflow the lip at the end, i got a bit confused an dremain unsure about how many centimetres from what, he was talking about. I am just great on centimetres and numbers  . agri rose macaskie

  I have been thinking about it and as well as being an account of how he greened the dead sea it is a really good description of permaculture practices. agri rose macaskie.

  Paul Wheaton, you asked why i might put an end to the whole discussion.
     i think that i have been picking up information for at least ten years and a bit before that and i am so full of details i want to communicate that it could be a bit overwhelming for others. I always thought that if you want people to talk you had better not bowl them over with what you have to say, on the other hand if you learn a lot and don't hand it on, then what were you doing building up information for yourself.
       I was never the first in the class at school and could always handle others knowing so many more details than me, that i dont know why i don't realise that most people can handle it. I know that others are usually really good at one thing or another that I am not very good at so if i beat them at one thing they will beat me at another so what does it matter if i beat them at something.
     Gosh five years since the indonesian tsunami. I have the television on in the background.
    Then lots of details if iI put them in aren't so lively and fun as other bits of the forums with smaller bits of information and more rapport, lively interchange, i enjoy the lively bits best. I would have thought people would look at the forum and say, "last writer rose" that will be a bit of a bore and look for another forum that is more fun. i should keep things shorter, in the long run i suppose you can get it all out in little bits. agri rose macaskie.
     

I just watched his full food forest video (say that 10 times fast) What an amazing bit of work...It's really great to see real time images of the things I've been reading about and seeing pictures/diagrams of. The climate he showcases isn't anything like mine but as he says, the principles work around the world. Now all I need is a backhoe and seeds.

It's amusing to me what Lawton is doing here.   He's playing with an area that doesn't really need to be terraformed(a whole rant unto itself), and he's trying to use a Fukuokian idea to validate it.  I guess he didn't read the whole book though, cause the other side of Fukuoka's "hard worker" theory is, that when allowed to do their job, weeds will use up their advantage and die out as other species begin their "hard work".  Not exactly what he was aiming at I think.

shamanan monkey is everything Lawton does amusing? I  hav ebeen correctign this so maybe it will begin to make more sense.
       Isn't there a middle place you need to find to weigh anything up.
      If you take an extreme point of veiw you can say he is doing something uneccessary compared to fukoaka? Doesnt it seem that the world has been brought to such a point with unhealthy farm tecniques that it is necessary to point out that soil does not retain much water if it has no organic matter in it.
    Chemical fertilisers have meant that people haven't needed to use manure or compost and soil has been depleted of all organic matter and oragnic matter absorbs and retains more water than most soils do without it and soils with organic matter in them are capable of absorbing and retaining more nutrients than other soils, so reducing the run off of nutrients so organic matter is important to retain water and nutrients on the land.
   Soil with more organic material in it also betters the texture of the soil for roots, it is easier for roots to go through soil with more organica matter in it clay can be so heavy as to be almost impenetrable. Soils with more organic matter in them also may hold more oxygen too and roots die if they cant breath. Organic matter warms the earth as it rots, so bettering the temperature of the soil, so plants need it but now that we can get our nitrogen without using organic matter we dont often use it. Chemical nitrogen has greatly reduced our use of organic matter on the land.
  chemical nitrogen also reduces our use of organic matter because if we do use organic matter the organic matter will give  our soil some nitrogen so chemical businesses will see their profits drop as people will need less chemical nitrogen and so the chemical companies do what they can to convince us that using organic matter is an unecessary, hippy, venture, so that is the second way chemical notrogen reduces the use of organic matter, the chemical multinationals make that there is bad press given to the use of organic materialb and convince a lot of people to stop using it.
   In the old days the only way to put nitrates in the soil was adding vegetable matter, digested by animals or straight, but with chemical fertilises manure was no longer needed to give nitrogen to the soil  so soils stopped getting any organic matter.

     Is there not a need just to insist on the need for organic matter and mulch for the soil, so that soils don't need to be irrigated or only need a bit of irrigation and it does not matter if you make your garden in the desert or in a place which does not need restoring, you need to say manure and organic matter work because we are spoiling soils everywhere.       
       Dont people say that you have to have chemical fertilisers everywhere or you could not feed the worlds population? Is not it necessary to say to all, "look we can produce food the natural way". People think they have to poison things to be sure that there is enough food to go around. This is one of the arguements the chemical multinationals use to reduce interest in things like permaculuture and to make sure that we buy their fertilisers.

 
       If we spend our time insisting on being permaculturaly puritanical about sharing things and i have known in Spian one very big group of people who talk about sharing and then back up the status quo outrageously, so you cant always trust the real direction of such peopleb mighten we lose that part of Bbill mollisons message taht allows us to save the earth though it does not swave ourselves.
      I liked the priminister Harold Wilson putting a super tax on the rich but i dont approve of were the soviet union went. If you argue about the grades of saintlyness a permaculturalist should have, then the power of permaculture to bring relief to the poorest farmers may be reduced because of bickering about how much we are willing to share.
      Also global warming has already caused so many disasters floods and tornadoes, that  the part of agriculture that deals with global warming is so important that nothing else should come in its way. So many more people are going to be hunngry or lose their homes and have to emigrate if global warming is not stopped. The only problem with Obamas green progam is that he was not making solar panels free, so as to stop expenses in disasters. One solar panel factory went broke is not a problem.
  `Poor farmers many of whom know lots of things about plants and animals but sometimes dont look after soils well, the same goes for rich farmers for different reasons. Sosme poor farmers look after soils very well in their vegetable gardens but not in their pasture land, and these could be enormousely helped by permaculture, the purely agricultural side of it and no bickering about saintly behavior should get in the way of that.  
   If we leave land bare, as in leaving it fallow, between wheat crops a practice habituall in millions of acres of the world or bare because of over pasturising pastures, then that should increase global warming and that can be stopped by getting farmers to grow cover crops so as to  have more organic matter for the soil. If farmers grow cover crops or green manures and stop over grazing then there will always be plants on the soil to sink carbon.  
    A good plant covering would  protect the earth, that is very good thermal mass, doing  what thermal masses do in contact with a source of heat like the sun, store heat and we want plants that reflect sunlight from their shiny leaves covering the ground, not bare earth that stores energy in direct contact with the sun. If we are to reduce global warming we should cloth the earth to stop it heating. With pèrmaculture  we can reduce global warming.
  For me the places that are being eaten up by the desert are so importamt that other things like purity in communism pale beside it. People are loosing their livelyhood and having to emigrate and to find worlk in other places and leave their family behind and live lonely in foriegn cities till they can get their families to follow them because of desertification.Though if we forget the principles of coumunism then we shall go back to the horrible societies of before, in which there were  few fat cats and everyone else lived in hovels.  
      
Stopping desertification and helping people in really difficult situation is the most important parrt of permaculture goals. agri rose macaskie,

Wow Rose.  I couldn't even understand what you wrote at first.  That's an issue.

If I peiced out your writing correctly then I would have to say you didn't even read what I wrote properly.

I didn't saying anything about Geoff Lawton's other projects, just this one.

I didn't say Fukuoka was better than Lawton, I said he is using one of Fukuoka's principals to validate his perspective.

And where did I mention the chemical fertilizers that make up 80% of your [ comments ]?  Oh yes, I see, I didn't mention them AT ALL.

[ stuff deleted ]  ask Geoff why he isn't out there teaching the locals to do what he believes can be done?  I'm seeing him toot his own horn, not feed the people.

[ edited to comply with "be nice" - pw ]

  Sharing thing sounds beatifull but we have the example of communism to say it can be a disaster in practice.
  If you always share what you have you can't save and better things so you institute perpetual inefficiency when you institute sharing. You cant save to buy that barn you need and that would save more food for more people if you are always sharing everythign you have got, sharign  tends to destroy that bit of wisdom shown by the pharoe who built barns to house the extra from the good years, to feed people with in the bad years.
          The idea of sharing  is so beatifull it makes us lose our heads.
        I read a criticsim of the play king Lear that said that Cordelia did the sensible thing when he asked her to flatter him so as to get her inheritance and she refused to but the critic said that later on in the play when he was alone and sad and asked her to be kind, i can't remember exactly how it went, then she did not keep her head and did what he wanted and what he wanted was not a particulary good idea and they ended up having their heads chopped off as a consequence, so when you ask people to be kind it may make them foolish.
      This happens with sharing it can be econommically disasterouse, so can letting some people take much too much, or giving them a completely free hand. It is too hard to say no to what sounds like a morally beautifull idea. We lose our heads when we get extremly idealistic. agri rose macaskie.

  On sharing things, a typical example of its dangers is of churches who start asking even the poor to share. The economies in very religiouse countries can go really badly, they ask everyone to be so unmaterialistic that thigns get reallly inefficient.

  There was an example of the legnth the religiouse will go asking people to  share in Larry kings suday bit on haiti. There was a preist in haiti asking Haitans to share, just at this time when in all likely hood his coffers were being filled by all the worried peole in the world an dthe taihitans probably had a lot of calls on there money from other sources relatives who ahd left their houses for example.  . It was a gr<tuitiouse show of power over his congragation and might not they well b eable themselves to decide on th ebest way to use their moeny in such a crisis . THe preist are a small number of people if you want to have things go well you need many heads and heads need money to help or at least it really helps. He should have left them a lone in a moment like that, a nasty peice of work.
  Preists are famouse ffor beggaring the poor. Then they can give them soups from the soup kitchen and really have them in their power. Here they are called stupds soups.agri rose macaskie.

I think i wrote the last two for the forum the third ethic not for this forum. rose .

shamanmonkey wrote:
He's playing with an area that doesn't really need to be terraformed

If nothing else the terraforming creates a warmer microclimate and wider surface area than not having it there. So maybe he didn't need to make a berm but it helped him create a significantly greater yield potential

paul wheaton wrote:
It takes a minute to get to it, but in the middle of this video is geoof lawton making some good points.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdeACFj06Fw

Excellent video. I have watched this before. Weeds are the healers of land. Nature does not like to be uncovered.

I think his idea that we are the weeds is excellent. We can effect progressive and accelerated succession to bring restoration to very damaged land... just as he did in Jordan... the most degraded land he had ever seen.... and also with the least rainfall.... only 6 inches a year that comes once or twice. We are talking land that was heavily salted.... and well water that is only slightly less heavily salted.

Solution? Nitrogen fixing trees at 5:1 to other trees... any organic matter they could find in the area... that was usually burned! ..... Water harvesting techniques.... and drip irrigation to minimise evaporation... Fast-tracked a desert eco-system by rapidly increasing succession of species that would do best.

Result? In 4 months he had figs fruiting. All seen at length in his "Greening the Desert" video. SO SUPERB!!!

shamanmonkey wrote:
It's amusing to me what Lawton is doing here.   He's playing with an area that doesn't really need to be terraformed(a whole rant unto itself), and he's trying to use a Fukuokian idea to validate it.  I guess he didn't read the whole book though, cause the other side of Fukuoka's "hard worker" theory is, that when allowed to do their job, weeds will use up their advantage and die out as other species begin their "hard work".  Not exactly what he was aiming at I think.

?? Did you watch the video?

No Fukuoka here. I have read Fukuoka.

Permaculture at its best. All the methods used. And quick succession of desert species of trees.....  and including some other orchard species to provide food.... to effect healing.

You understand he was referring to the most damaged land he had ever seen? I think he has been around some damaged land.....

Chelle

shamanmonkey wrote:
It's amusing to me what Lawton is doing here.   He's playing with an area that doesn't really need to be terraformed(a whole rant unto itself), and he's trying to use a Fukuokian idea to validate it.  I guess he didn't read the whole book though, cause the other side of Fukuoka's "hard worker" theory is, that when allowed to do their job, weeds will use up their advantage and die out as other species begin their "hard work".  Not exactly what he was aiming at I think.

I think that if we said "I'm doing this based on the work of fukuoka, mollison and ruth stout", then I suppose somebody could then require them to to ONLY do those things that all three say is good.  And then that system would suck.  Especially for a chunk of land that fukuoka, mollison and stout have never been to.

I think that lawton has drawn knowledge from hundreds, if not thousands of people and is taking this combined knowledge and doing what he thinks is best for that land.  And, in my horribly obnoxious opinion, he is doing such a good job, that I like to point at his work as an example of damn good permaculture in practice.

I have visited a lot of farms and on every one I would do something different.  I suspect that if I visited that farm, I would come up with a list of things I would want to do different.  And if I could visit with lawton, I would guess that I would be convinced to drop 2/3 of the things off of my list for damn good reasons, that I didn't know beforehand. 

  I was lookig at my agricultural specialist book again and a lot of the ideas of organic people and such are mentioned in farming books that aren¡t organic or arent only only organic or permaculturist, so the strang things is, why do the ideas that ruin soils take such a hold that the ideas that would help a traditional chemical use farmer fron the organics an dothers are not taken up.. Are the sellers of chemicals the only people the great majority of farmers really listen to. the really heavy use of chemical feritilizers and leavign soils get eroded  is whats called at school a craze. rose macaskie.

I think that the familiarity, popularity, and history/tradition of harmful agricultural practices is the main hurdle. Natural farming and permaculture are still on the fringe, and things on the fringe take awhile to gain acceptance in the mainstream.

It's hard for the average industrialized person to wrap their head around the methods of Fukuoka, Lawton and others when all they are used to seeing is massive monocultures along the highways.

I can't wait to start planting in view of the highway that runs along our farm...

Quick cash is usually expensive cash.
  i remember a conversation between two shop keepers in the north of spain about a shop that had come up for sale and one said it would cost money and the other said "you buy money." If you are a rich shop owner or farmer you can buy money if not don't if you can avoid it an dmost especially don't buy quick money it is likely to be even more expensive than normal money. rose macaskie.

I'm trying to write a summary of his "greening the desert" stuff. Does this seem accurate?

Geoff was brouught to a chunk of desert in Jordan.  No trees as far as the eye can see.  A bit of scrub.  Mostly sand and rocks.  Geoff installed permaculture and left.  The people who owned the land watered it for a couple of years and then sold the land and left.  The new owners did not water anything, and they eventually sold it to somebody else.  And these new owners didn't water anything either.  Geoff returns after being away for eight years and finds a jungle where he had planted permaculture.

hi,

i think you describe the greening the desert part 2 video.

his first (most famous one) describes how he set up the forest garden in the desert, the problems encountering and some facts comparing practices in the neigbourhood with hos own.

the second is cooming back after some years.

if I would make a summary (which im not) i wouldnt focus on the stuff about the ownership passing on, but on forest gardening and actually greening the desert.

shamanmonkey wrote:
Wow Rose.  I couldn't even understand what you wrote at first.  That's an issue.

If I peiced out your writing correctly then I would have to say you didn't even read what I wrote properly.

I didn't saying anything about Geoff Lawton's other projects, just this one.

I didn't say Fukuoka was better than Lawton, I said he is using one of Fukuoka's principals to validate his perspective.

And where did I mention the chemical fertilizers that make up 80% of your [ comments ]?  Oh yes, I see, I didn't mention them AT ALL.

[ stuff deleted ]  ask Geoff why he isn't out there teaching the locals to do what he believes can be done?  I'm seeing him toot his own horn, not feed the people.

[ edited to comply with "be nice" - pw ]

I completely agree with you ShamanMonkey. In my view Lawton is a permaculture teacher out for high visibility
shallow depth venues with lots of glowing publicity and probably plenty of money instead of bringing permaculture to the people in a language they can understand and technology they can put to work in their everyday lives. I never have been much interested in Lawton, he does good work and has made a significant contribution to the spread of permaculture around the world but is not a real mover and shaker in the movement; nowhere near the class of Mollison, but then few are. Permaculture is an art, a science, a craft
and an improvisation, a creative energy engine.

ask Geoff why he isn't out there teaching the locals to do what he believes can be done?  I'm seeing him toot his own horn, not feed the people.

But where do you get this notion then?

when i was watching the greening the desert part II video i saw several locals (now maintaining their own gardens) who were his first students there. They were explaining how Geoff helped them finding out about local old traditions in farming (like the stone mounds in which they plant olive trees), and how permaculture made it possible for them to use minimal amounts of water compared to their neighbors.

i think actually his wife was a local...

he also connected up to the local agricultural school...

     The global warming is such that the large amounts of rain and floods that the scientists said would come have come. Imagine if Pakistan gets flooded every year and the floods are worse everyyear because this is climate change not freakish weather, and china gets worse floods every year, then we should be growign less food ecveryyear because of disasters, and we shall have more and more hurricane katrinas, that will be very bad for lots of people and it is always worse for the poor, things are going as it was said they wouuld they would, there is only reason to expect more hurricane katrinas not less. Then there is no time for, "is he a nice humble`person or not" type speculation.
      doing things to improve all this should include high visibility coverage include going out for high visibility as hard as we can, to get more and more people growing things, greenery absorbes carbon and we need to get carbon levels in the air down fast, so much so for the poor of this world that all other considerations are stupid at the moment. We want high visibility. You can't do anything without high visibility, why did reformers look for visibility because they need the people to back up their measures, and understanding that is a sort of  of humility it is the humility to know you catn go it alone you have to brign everyone else in. At the moment we have, "oh i dont like  you, you  need visibility, need to have  the love of the madding crowds.  One of the reason people are great who get visibility is they have to be brave enough to face being called attention seekers, they have to stick their necks out. This is a time when fiddling is, fiddling while rome burns.
     If you have studied history you know that the churches have always been usefull to the ruling classes, they ask men to be humble and that is what a rulers like nice manipulable wives or ¡a nice manipulable work force but the ruling class don't bring up their men to be blushing vioilets, now we need men not mice. rose macaskie.

rose macaskie wrote:
   
      It should be going out for high visibility coverage as hard as we can to get more and more people growing things, greenery absorbes carbon and we need to get carbon levels in the air down fast, so much so for the poor of this world that all other considerations are stupid at the moment.

I hope you'll post more about how you are reaching out to people to teach them how to grow things, Rose.  I'm impressed by people like Geoff Lawton teaching people in different countries, and people like the Dervaes family at Path to Freedom reaching out to their community and others. 

  H ludi tyler.This is a ltaer addition to this post i dont know how to reach out to people except through this forum. if i was not writing on it so hard i might be studying the Cardencing sisters to find out how to get to more people. Or tryign to understand how to use face book or twitter.   
  This next bit i sabout swawles i am not sure why i ws writing about swales maybe because some one questions Lawsons use of them.
      I have dug swales on part of my banks and my finding is that the earth were i have swales get wet to some depth were the swales are, while in other part of the garden the rain has only wet the surface, so swales work.
     Also I planted a cherry, i bought it as what they call here a bare root tree not in a pot and it never needed watering to keep it alive though i remembered to give it a bit ocasionally i never saw it start to wilt so i did not feel a need to take care of it.
     I imagined that that was because it had been sold with bare roots instead of in a pot but since reading about swales and berms it has ocurred to me that i planted the tree at the foot of the path that goes to the bottom of the slope starting at top right and ending at bottom left and so the rain water was likely to roll down the slope and end up at the foot of the tree so it was planted in a place that recieved more water than other places, indeed since the idea of swales made me more interested in the behavior of rain water, i went out to look in a storm and the water was rolling down the path, i am going to dig dips in the path  to hold the rain.
  That the tree in this spot should need nearly no water in the dry season means that one water harvesting principle is, good if you hold up water so it seeps into the earth that place that has recieved the water has resesrves that last during bad season. THat is one of the ideas that is involved in denting the desert pf boññ mollisons dry land videos. 
     Instead of water getting carried straight to the sea it is a good idea to get it held on your land in the wet season this also prevents flash flooding.make the water do as much work for you as possible before gettign to the rivers that take it to the sea.
     The ponds of indian water harvesting, that hold water for the village use and replace the use of wells in the wet season, are used to produce a crop in the dry season. The earth where the water has stood has absorbed enough water in winter to grow a quick crop in the dry season.
  These ponds that are not lined to make the ground under them totally imperviouse also serve to refill the water table and so create springs and the renewal of rivers that have run dry.
 
  These ponds exist where they have built a wall as a stop dam to hold up rain water and stop it going down hill. if there are enough ponds they can stop flooding down stream  by taking up part of the water the water in a heavy rain event. agri rose macaskie.

shamanmonkey wrote:


[ stuff deleted ]  ask Geoff why he isn't out there teaching the locals to do what he believes can be done?  I'm seeing him toot his own horn, not feed the people.

[ edited to comply with "be nice" - pw ]

Geoff does teach local people, a lot.  He now also teaches world wide.  He also invites poor people to come to his place and learn with him for a  while and then sends them to thier home country to help people at home.  IMO, Geoff, Bill M, Sepp and Masanob deserve / deserved  Nobel Peace Prizes.

dirtfarmer wrote:
I completely agree with you ShamanMonkey. In my view Lawton is a permaculture teacher out for high visibility
shallow depth venues with lots of glowing publicity and probably plenty of money instead of bringing permaculture to the people in a language they can understand and technology they can put to work in their everyday lives. I never have been much interested in Lawton, he does good work and has made a significant contribution to the spread of permaculture around the world but is not a real mover and shaker in the movement; nowhere near the class of Mollison, but then few are. Permaculture is an art, a science, a craft
and an improvisation, a creative energy engine.

I thought that to, until I read that he is taking people who can't afford his classes from all over the world, to his place and teaching them for free & then sending them back home as teachers to help their local community.

Paul and Jocelyn watched Geoff Lawton's "Permaculture Soil" video, and did a review: http://www.richsoil.com/permaculture/category/podcast/

Hey folks,

I have worked closely with Geoff for short, intense periods of time, and he's been out to my project in Saudi Arabia a couple times.  See http://permaculture.org.au/2011/01/14/permaculture-at-the-al-baydha-project-in-saudi-arabia-neal-spackman-video-1/ for proof.

  The trick to his greening the desert project was that the site was near a road, and he managed to put in some earthworks that captured a great deal of runoff from the road so that he could, in essence, increase the amount of water directed to his site.  It is the same thing I am doing with my project in Saudi Arabia, but instead of a road, I have mountains. 

Some would think that this diminishes how great it was to turn that piece of desert into a food forest, but in reality, it just means taking what he had and making the best of it, which is all that anyone can do.  He had a road and figured out how to use it to his advantage, and had the design tools and knowledge to use it to its greatest potential.   

rose macaskie wrote:
     The global warming is such that the large amounts of rain and floods that the scientists said would come have come. Imagine if Pakistan gets flooded every year and the floods are worse every year ...

That reminds me of an excellent video on water harvesting I just saw. It was in the area that is typical of dry parts of Pakistan and India (I think on Indian side, but many of the methods were built by the Moghuls 500 years ago). Anyway, they turned the flooding into a resource, not just a problem.

http://blog.ted.com/2009/12/03/the_ancient_ing/

Whether it is called permaculture or not, these techniques are the type of long term investments we need.

In this video Geoff explains he wants to train more teachers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQiT9iEFRSk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQiT9iEFRSk

A couple of inspiring characters! 

The Rough Couple of Rough Types video cracked me up the first time I saw it!

"Id hate to recommend him, he could be a bastard"

Paul, Caleb, and Krista review the movie "Water Harvesting" by Geoff in this podcast: http://www.richsoil.com/permaculture/330-podcast-045-water-harvesting-ponds-alternative-energy/

At the international permaculture conference:



He talks about how important this computer stuff is.  I'm sure he mean "permies.com" 

Permaculture is the practice of austrian economics...

we are very special here... we have thumbs.. we can put designs together to diversify nature in ways nature intends if we take upon the practice... nature has been waiting for people like us for a long time.