american permaculturist featured on the news of alrazeera

 This is a smll topic but i find it so exciting that i am putting it in as a new topic, and i dont know where ant bit it might relate to might be . If you can sort it out as you see fit it will be good with me. It seems to me something that is only interesting for a short time.

 Do you remember a contributer who said he, i suppose it was a he, was going to look for spaces in his town and grow things in them well..... i got bored of the frivolity of The Situation Room CNN giving a lot of time to a divorce case, divorce is very important and traumatic but this is a news program, not a psycology of the family program, well its important but it should not get so much time, so i turned over to Aljazeeras news channel, i don't know why i don't always whatch it, it has a much higher level of nearly always seriouseness, and they were talking about an american permaculturist called Harry Ryan making community gardens in Flint Michigan.

  Harry Ryan is living in a town that has a lot of empty houses and  gardens because it is a place were General Motors gave a lot of people jobs and general morors is not employing people anymore, and there he was growing turnips, just as i am who started growing vegetables rather late in the year and for the first time and so the easy one has come up for me. Mr Ryan has a more ambitiouse project than mine, to feed the town, opening comunity gardens in abandoned housing lots and the bit of news said,that maybe this is a good direction for the town to go in, they can offer people houses with plenty of land around so they can be self sustaining, that of the empty houses which are being knocked down, they can offer them a place they can be were they can be self sufficient.  

    I thought of the contributer here who said he was going to go round the town and look for places he could turn to use as market gardens and thought, "look it works" and "how i hope this man on television is the contributer to this forum beign who said he woudl do this, being brought close to the action, writtign on the same forum as somepone who is making it in permaculture  is fun." I have stopped trying to remember the contributers names i must start again.  I thought his was a  bold project and and honerable, noble, i like the bold working, coming out all right, as long as it is not a murder or something. So i sat right down to write about it and got distracted into writting two other things first while trying to find the right place to write it . He'll probably be back on the news later tonight as it was on the ordinary knews not a special documentary. He has been back on which has allowed me to give him a full name and the town a full name to and get the right vocabulary, community garden rigth. He didnot say he was a permaculturist but everything he was doing made it seem likely that he was.  Rose macaskie.

Rose , Have you found out any more about Mr. Ryan?

There is a pretty strong movement to use gardening to rehabilitate the Detroit area. Some of it is real and driven by people who actually garden, but some is related to big investors who have dreams of thousands of acres of hydroponic greenhouse and biotech.  I don't know anything about Harry Ryan and how he fits in ... I've read 2 or 3 articles, but it seems far away and abstract to me so the details didn't stick.

  I did not find out more about him. Sometimes alzazeeras and one of its studios is in washington, has good documentaries on Norhth America, on the less fortunate americans. This must be good for america it would make other countiries less jealouse of them. Aljazeeras is good a programs on the less fortunate in lots of places anyway, such as  the poor indian workers in the Arabian Gulf. People from india who are invited to work in  rich arab states and then find they owe their new employees their plane tickets to get there and that they aren't going to get a decent wage in their new jobs and so wont be able to pay back the price of the tickets. Debt to the companies they work for enslaves them. Also they are so badly paid they have to live in barracks and sleep in  in shared dormitories, their jobs don't allow athem to get themselves a place and family and the things that people normallly want. . I say this to show that aljazeerases programs don't only expose poverty in north america they expose it in other countries too.
  THey were interesting on the tunnels into gaza they had a documentary on them similar to cnn's documentary on the same but the Aljazeeras one said that the tunnels were annoying to the palestinian authorities as well as to the israelis because the arms smuggled through them made such a problem for those policing palestine, naturally. I had  not thought of it but of course that would be so.

  Mr Ryan did not look like a big buisness man type adventurer in the world of agricvulture he looked thin and energetic and full of ideas not a fat cat full of ideas, more the sort of person who sees a lot of neighbors out of work and wants to get something going that might help them and as he lives in a town  were a lot of houses are being left ownerless and so a place with a a lot of disused gardens, no one is likely to mind if someone digs them up  dig up and plant turnips on  had that option for helping them.
  The truth is I thought imediately of the man on these forums who said he was going to look around his town and and see if he could not get something in the food growing  way  around his town ausing bits of land no one was using  a proposal that seemed very adventurouse to me but when i saw this documentary on detroit area with all the empty houses and gardens, and gardens where the houses had been bulldozered  i understood how you could find space for permaculture without annoying anyone.
          May be you could get the tape off Aljazeeras, all their journalists seem really nice liberal and intelligent.
        I got excited and wrote about it here because  I just felt sure it was the contributer here who alzazeeras had found and hoped if i wrote about it he would own up to it being him which seemed quite exciting iI love everything to fall into place and connect. .agri rose macaskie.

Here are some links to other stories about Harry - he looks like he is practical and legit, not one of the theoretical dreamers that seem to be looking at Detroit's ruin as an opportunity to get rich. Doesn't seem to specifically mention permaculture, but if he is using gardening to help that community, good on him. 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106492824

http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2009/11/flint_resident_harry_ryan_and.html

  Tñhats great youv'e found him movign story what. a good example not only self sufficiente but looking after youngsters and others. its better than the document on aljazeeras. rose

being from Michigan i found this fairly interesting..our governor has a program to tear down a lot of the houses that have been vacant and have been falling down..as people have been using them for crack and meth labs..

so if they do tear down a bunch of these houses this year..i've heard thousands..that should leave a lot of unused property where the meth labs were..and in the inner city..so this fellow should have a LOT more opportunity to be putting in more community gardens..

it is very unlikely  the land will be put back into building use for a while..as there is no real reason to build as no one is around to buy..so if the property is cleared and left fallow what a wonderful oppportunity for people like this to garden the cities surrounding the detroit metroplex..

i for one applaud his effort and hope that this opens more opportunities to like minded people in the area..my sisterin law lives just south of there but i'm way way way Northwest

  brenda you'll have to get your sister in law moving or moving others. it seems to me a coolish thing to do.  Free, usefull and a little bit adventurouse because you will be doing somthing you have not quite been given permision for maybe people can get permisision to do it, wasn't there someone on these forums plotting free land in his county for possible use for permaculture type projects. Vegetables are so expensive that growing your own would be a big help with a low income, plus people beign able to make sure the nvegetables  aren't full of chemical rubbish. May be some people can make money with organic certified food stuffs. rose macaskie

she is quite a way south of Detroit, but she has just moved to a new home on a small acerage and she has always had vegetable gardens with small fruits on her property. this is her first summer in her new home and she has big plans for putting in gardens..there are peach trees on the property but they appear diseased (she says) so she is removing them.