Land of the Long White Cloud

Should we strive for more equality in our societies?

2011-01-09T19:50:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,
The first image has nothing to do with the topic of this blog, unless the phenomenon of a guy making chutney connects with equality. We had a glut of zucchini, so several of us made a large amount of excellent chutney a few days ago. These are fellow Atamai villagers, Craig and Lynda. Took us all day.

OK, back to work. I read this book because other things I was reading referred to it. I thought it was very good; it has me thinking seriously about the issue. A young Green party friend says that all the politicians are reading it.

See what you think yourself.

Book Review of Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, New York, Berlin, London: Bloomsbury Press, 2010

The merits of societies more equal in income and wealth have been discussed for centuries. In the late 19th century, Edward Bellamy published two novels in the US – Looking Backward and its sequel, Equality. The plot of both involves a young man, Julian West, who goes to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000 to find that the US has undergone an economic revolution. All persons, male and female, are now economic equals. The two novels are an extended elaboration on the implications of this change and moral arguments for economic equality. Looking Backward became the third best-seller in the US at the time and gave rise to ‘Bellamy Clubs’, to several attempts at communities founded on these principles, and to a spate of books written in response to Bellamy’s ideas.

In the real world, inequality within countries has increased, at least over the 50 years for which we have adequate data . The increase is attributed substantially to increased wealth of the uppermost 20% of each country’s population. Does this matter, in that, in almost every country, per capita income has increased over this period?

Wilkinson and Pickett, UK public health scholars, bring a great deal of evidence to support their assertion that income inequality is a crucial variable in a great range of dimensions of human well-being. Their data apply only to high income countries, those on the plateau of the curve of happiness or life expectancy plotted against income, where more income does not mean more happiness or years of life. In those countries, it seems, more equality does mean more happiness. More equality correlates with more child well-being, more trust in other people, higher status of women, more of the national income spent on foreign aid, less mental illness, less drug use, greater life expectancy, lower infant mortality, fewer obese adults and overweight children, higher maths and literacy scores, fewer teenage pregnancies, fewer homicides, less bullying in children, fewer people in prison and more social mobility. These trends are derived from data of the 20 richest countries and also data on inequality levels for all US states. What is enormously interesting is that people at all income levels, not just the poor, do worse in unequal societies. And at any given income level, a person will be better off in a more equal society. Interestingly, the relationship does not apply for inequalities in small local areas.

What is it about living in an unequal society, both at a country level and a US state level that could contribute to such a wide range of physical and social ills? Social relationships, as measured by social cohesion, trust, involvement in community life, are better in more equal societies, and are known to be important correlates of health and well-being. Conversely, social hierarchies appear to be bad for health and well-being. People experience social evaluative situations, where they see themselves being compared with others in some way, as particularly highly stressful. Assigned social status, or in more rigid societies, caste, is a cognitive organiser of social evaluation. Income and its visible markers of house, car, clothes and possessions are prominent markers of social status. People lower on the hierarchy are stressed by their position relative to others, and strive to attain markers of higher status.

Herve Kampf, in the forthrightly titled How the Rich are Destroying the Earth cites research showing that the greater the gap between where a person regards themselves as situated on a social scale and the reference group for their aspirations, the more hours they will be prepared to work. People in more unequal societies work many more hours per year.

It is this behaviour, ‘conspicuous consumption’, that is a major driver of carbon emissions, other pollution and habitat reduction. So inequality, say the authors, is a significant contributor to climate change and the many other survival -threatening aspects of the degradation of Nature.

What is to be done? Wilkinson and Pickett argue strongly for the adoption of means towards a more equal society. They point out that a more equal distribution of income can be achieved at the point of salary received or taxes paid. There can be both ceilings and floors on allowable salaries. There can be agreed ratios in corporations between highest and lowest earners. A few corporations have already adopted such a measure. Their most favoured measure is the conversion of hierarchical corporations into workers’ cooperatives, where decision-making power, responsibility and salaries are shared equally. Interestingly, this happened inadvertently during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. The rich fled the region, and workers took over the factories and corporations – successfully, it seems. Equality was a strong value in these organisations. Mondragon, the world's largest workers' cooperative, in the Spanish Basque region, has recently made an agreement with United Steel Workers to set up cooperative structures in Canada and the US. This is an extremely interesting development. Mondragon's salasry ratio is never more than 5:1. (This compares with 400: 1 in some corporations.)

The findings put together so masterfully by Wilkinson and Pickett have major public health significance generally. In New Zealand, the Green Party has explicit measures to achieve a more equal society in this highly unequal one. There are implications for our village. There are wealth differences in the beginning population of the village. The social structures of the village equalise this, but beyond this settlement’s enthusiastic beginnings, will that prevail? Or will wealth and income differences create a social hierarchy with its very many attendant ills? We must try to avoid this.

Markus Jantti and Susanna Sandstrom. Trends in Income Inequality: A critical study of the evidence in WIID2. 2005. http://www.rrojasdatabank.info/widerconf/JanttyStr.pdf Accessed 2010 Jan7.
Herve Kampf. How the Rich are Destroying the Earth. Vermont, USA: Chelsea Green Publishing company, 2007.
Ted Trainer. Inspiration for Local Economies Today: The Success of the Spanish Collectives. Pacific Ecologist 19, Winter/Spirng 2010, pp43-47.

Biochar book review

2011-01-09T18:52:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,

The first photo is a pile of biochar. Also in view are our new solar panels and barrels of cow manure collected by Jack and Jeff for compost. (This stuff us as gold around here. I considered an armed guard but it seems inconsistent with the hope of building trust in our village!)

Below is a book review. There's reason to be modestly hopeful about the potential of the use of biochar in farming and gardening to have a useful impact on sequestering carbon.

This is particularly interesting to me, as we use it here regularly when we plant anything, even little seedlings. Atamai has a biochar-based soil amendment. The formula was put together some years ago by village founder Jurgen Heissner and colleagues. It includes rock dust, effective micro-organisms and much more. We are in general very pleased with its effects, but very much need to do systematic trials.

Update on us:

Healthy, active, enjoying the addition of our youngest son, Jeff to the family. The guys are outdoors a fair bit. Right now, Jack is mowing grass with a crawler and Jeff is assisting the masons who are laying blocks in our new house.

The new house is progressing, but some months off moving-in time.

Atamai Village: There has been a surge of new interest in the village, with two couples having committed themselves over last weekend and a third looking likely. They are from Australia, the US and New Zealand. All of them share our worried projections for the future of the mainstream economy, and see strong reasons to aim for self-reliance in basic needs.

Transition Town Motueka: A low level of activity specifically organised under this aegis, but considerable activity on the things that matter. Riverside continues to run workshops on relevant skills. this weekend's is on how to build yourself a solar shower. The Motueka Community Garden is developing. I continue with my radio show. The upcoming session will be an interview with a fascinating man who keeps a team of Clydesdales, has the remnants of a bullock team, and has a full range of horse-drawn agricultural implements. He sees these as of historic and tourist interest. I see them as valuable potential assets for the future. Lester Rowntree, the man with the horses and bullocks, has been ploughing the community garden with them, a very picturesque sight.

The review has been written for Peace Magazine, published in Canada, which I recommend to you.

The Biochar Solution by Albert Bates.
Gabriola Island, BC Canada: New Society Publishers, 2010.
We are in big trouble, as readers of this magazine know, from our violent
relationship with the Earth. We risk runaway climate change, and even the aware
among us shrink from imagining what that would be like for our children
and grandkids.
Biochar to the rescue? Of course not. Sorry. We know perfectly well there is no
one solution, nothing that will absolve us from the strenuous task of working out
how to live with less and then no fossil fuel. That is and will remain our first
duty to the Earth and our offspring. I get irritated by writing that includes the
word 'offset', as if we can keep polluting the atmosphere as long as we offset our
sins by planting more trees or some such activity.
But biochar may play a modest but significant role in bringing carbon back down
to safe enough levels for human civilization to continue. Albert Bates's book does a
splendid job of telling us how this could be done, and giving a global coverage of
who is doing what in this arena. Bates has impressive credentials for exploring
alternatives to our current suicidal patterns. He shared the 1980 Right Livelihood
Award for work to preserve the cultures of indigenous people and is co-founder of the
Global Ecovillage Network, which he represents at the UN climate change talks. He is
a practical man who has made and used biochar himself. And he is a good story-
teller.
His book is full of fascinating stories - of the discovery of Amazonian biochar,
and of the many people who have followed up on this, in one way or another. The book
is fun to read. In addition, Bates does a good job of explaining the science behind
charcoal, the nature of soil, climate change and so on.
Here's the plot. About 10,000 years ago, agriculture began in the Fertile
Crescent. The technology of ploughing and irrigating the soil were steadily refined.
These were wrong turns for humanity. The ploughing depleted the soil web of life and the
irrigation salinated the soil. Over time, the Crescent became a desert, and the
civilizations that once flourished there disappeared. This story has repeated itself
on most but not all continents. Australia's Murray River basin tragedy is the latest
episode. In two places agriculture took a different turn. In China, extensive
composting returned to the soil what was taken out, even to the extent of routinely
taking the humanure from cities back to the fields. Forty centuries later, the soil
continued to be fertile (1). In Amazonian South America, a pattern of composting
incorporating charred biomass developed. Bates believes it was sytematic, done to a
recipe. The soil remains highly fertile, much more so than the surrounding rain
forest soil, to this day, and even 'grows', apparently drawing nutrients in to the
soil life from the surrounding area. When rediscovered last century, it came to be
known as 'terra preta' , black earth. . Bates cites recent archaeological evidence of the remarkable
population density of pre-Columbian Amazon civilization, supported by this soil. When it fell
suddenly after Spanish contact, their agricultural methods and the adapted cultivars they had used
perished too, along with the formula for terra preta
Other early agricultural and pastoral practices began to increase atmospheric
carbon dioxide long before the fossil fuel age. Flooded rice paddies produced
methane, as did increasing flocks of domesticated animals. Burning forest areas to
clear land produced carbon dioxide and decreased the carbon dioxide 'sink' capacity
of the disappearing forest. By 1000CE, most of England's trees were cut down. By taking off crop after
crop and dispersing the biomass, soil carbon decreased by 30-50% in most places, thus increasing carbon in atmosphere and ocean. In our reasonable focus on the role of fossil fuel in climate change, we tend to ignore the contribution of land use and change in land use, such as deforestation, in sending carbon into the atmosphere. It is substantial, perhaps responsible for a third of the excess greenhouse gases.
After 6000 years of ploughing we are relearning how to grow food while maintaining the health of the soil, including its crucial carbon content. We need to change our patterns of land use and agriculture urgently in ways that sequester carbon in stab le form. It can be expected to remain sequestered in this form for centuries or millennia, and this is a vital parameter in the dynamics of the carbon cycle. In fact, the potential of massive programmes of soil and biomass carbon sequestration could make a difference to atmospheric carbon in the next two decades – a time scale much faster than the probability of effective action from technologies now being invested with questionable hope, such as new fuels and carbon capture at source.
So-called carbon farming involves no tillage of the soil, organic growing methods, using crop residue as mulch (thus returning its carbon and other nutrients to the soil), using cover crops between the food or fibre crops, rotational grazing of pasture animals, turning from annual crops to perennial polycultures, employing the great range of Permaculture strategies, agroforestry, leaving wild plant strips, keyline water management and subsoil ploughing. And incorporating biochar mixtures in recreated terra preta-type soil amendments. These methods also have the potential to eliminate the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers – an important source of the potent greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.
The programme needs to involve massive global tree-planting, stopping deforestation, carbon farming and biochar sequestration. Bates suggests that carbon farming could sequester 1 Gigatonne of carbon a year in both labile (short-term) and stable (long-term) carbon. Biochar use could sequester another Gigatonne a year in stable carbon. . Reforestation on a massive scale could sequester 4.5 Gigatonnes a year. There are about 800 Gigatonnes of carbon in the atmosphere, so we could slowly reverse the current disastrous accumulation of carbon.
Bates tells us how biochar is made and why it works so well. There is a fascinating chapter on stoves, especially low-cost stoves to replace the smoky cooking methods responsible for a fair slice of low-income country mortality and morbidity. Some of these inventions also produce biochar which can increase garden fertility for the owners.
Bates doesn’t deal with the limits to biochar sequestration in soils with high carbon levels, or with the issue of loss of nutrients other than carbon in forming charcoal rather than letting biomass rot back into the Earth.
This book sent me into action – joining the International Biochar Initiative, and going to inspect our ‘terra preta’-enhanced tree plantings which experts say are doing remarkably well. I like to think of the biochar around their roots, keeping carbon out of the atmosphere for centuries.
Joanna Santa Barbara is working to develop Atamai, a New Zealand ecovillage trying to respond to peak oil and climate change issues. She and her colleagues use a biochar mix in all their plantings.

1. FH King. Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea and Japan.Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2004. (First published in 1911.)

Transmitting knowledge

2010-11-28T16:39:00.000-08:00

Dear Family and Friends,
I recently read the book shown in the photo.
My friend, Metta, has been working towards it almost as long as I've known her. As I've said in my review, below, it made me think a good deal about the importance of cross-national, cross-cultural transmission of knowledge.

The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy by Metta Spencer.
Lanham, USA: Lexington Books, 2010.
Joanna Santa Barbara
In 1982 I was in Moscow with Metta Spencer, the author of a remarkable book on the transmission of ideas, in this case, ideas about peace. We and several other Canadian peace activists were on our way to participate in an international peace conference in Vienna. Metta had a telephone number of a dissident peace organisation in Moscow. We found our way to a small apartment and met with members of the Trustbuilders Group. This group aimed to counter Cold War mentality on both sides of the Iron Curtain by fostering people-to-people relationships and joint projects. The members were being persecuted, for example by being fired from their jobs, because they stood as independent thinkers outside the government system. Metta established relationships with the people in this group that have lasted to this day, and began pursuing a 28 year-long trail led by her curiosity about the impact of western peace researchers and activists on the tortuous development of Russian peace and democracy.
The Trustbuilders exemplified what Metta called ‘barking dogs’, those who spoke up outside the system, the critics. These people suffered, often seriously, from their courageous expressions. Her typology of actors includes ‘termites’, those within the system who were quietly critical and actively searching for new ideas. When Mikhail Gorbachev, a termite who had assimilated the most important concepts peace research had to offer, assumed power, history took several dramatic turns. The typology is completed with ‘sheep’, the large majority of citizens who accepted life as it was, and largely accepted the framing of reality presented by the state.
We learn how the ideas of the great 20th century peace researchers, such as Anatol Rapaport, Johan Galtung and Dietrich Fischer reached the inner circle of Soviet policy-makers around Gorbachev, and how, much earlier, President Kennedy, influenced by Charles Osgood’s ideas on Graduated Reciprocation of Tension Reduction (GRIT) made several unilateral disarmament moves. Each was immediately reciprocated by Khrushchev in a series abruptly ended by Kennedy’s murder. GRIT, the ideas of common security, non-offensive defence, reasonable sufficiency in weaponry (rather than ruinous arms races), confidence-building measures, non-intervention in other states, the necessity for nuclear abolition were assimilated by Gorbachev and became part of his ‘New Political thinking’. Lithuania, after becoming an independent state, even adopted the idea from peace research of civilian-based defence.
While peace theory took root, a highly creative process of citizen diplomacy occurred through the 1980s. Brilliant solo players such a Norman Cousins, Jeremy Stone, Bernard Lown and Ernst van Eeghen played their parts, backed by organisations such as the Dartmouth Conferences, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Pugwash, and Parliamentarians for Global Action.
These processes seeded new ideas in receptive Soviet minds, worked out implementation processes together and formed relationships of trust. Many readers of this review will have played some role in this chapter of history. Metta reviews the outcome to the present – the transformation of Eastern Europe without violence, the end of proxy wars, avoidance of nuclear war and progress in nuclear disarmament. She examines the sad question of why Russians are willing to tolerate authoritarian government, reversing the moves towards democracy that Gorbachev began. She focuses on the low levels of social trust in Russia, between people and between citizens and their government. It is worth considering what community-building processes might remedy this.
Metta has an engaging style of writing, very like a personal conversation. The book is deeply interesting for its theoretical content, and fascinating for the cameos of extraordinary people who appear in the pages. Metta has created a website with photos of these people, and the full texts of the hundreds of interviews that provided the substance of this work. (http://russianpeaceanddemocracy.com )
I found myself pondering after I finished reading. When the cross-national transmission of ideas can yield such important results, what are the responsibilities of intellectuals and activists? Are these processes relevant to the other daunting task many of us face – how to end the destruction of Nature through human economic activity and population growth, most acutely in climate change and biodiversity loss? It is extraordinary to consider that, whereas in the historic episode Metta documents, it was the impact of ideas on Soviet minds that was the focus, now it is US and Chinese minds, as well as those in our own societies that might be thought crucial. Might cross-fertilising conversations with two-way learning get us over the present terrifying stalemate?

Working together

2010-10-21T19:26:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends and Family and other readers of this blog,
We recently had a rather marvellous day working on building a huge compost heap and preparing stuff to stimulate micro-organism growth in the soil.

I discovered through last week's communal garden building for the Motueka Community Garden, and this week's Biodynamic Day at Atamai (more explanation
later) how much pleasure I can get out of a community working effort.
I have for decades enjoyed the pleasures of working with others towards important goals in peace, and latterly ecological issues. Sharing intellectual capacity, creative ideas, working hard together, sharing laughs has for a very long time been one of the good things in my life. But, amazingly, there's even more of a 'high' for me in joint physical work towards a shared goal. Two weeks ago it was the creation of a community garden for the township of Motueka, a large project that will require more work. I personally won't benefit from this, but people who want to grow things but have little or no land on which to do it will benefit. It was a great feeling to be on a wheelbarrow or wield a shovel alongside others, strangers getting to know each other while we worked alongside each other, and seeing the garden grow while we worked.

This last weekend, Atamai was the host for the regional biodynamic group. This group, followers of Rudolf Steiner's ideas about agriculture, meets once a month on someone's property to see what they're doing and work together according to biodynamic principles. I have an ambivalent intellectual relationship with these ideas, some of which seem quite mystical to me.
However, I'm challenged by data that suggest that biodynamic horticulture really is more productive, stores more carbon in the soil, and so on. And I'm entirely unambivalent about the people involved, who comprise many of my good friends. So the group, ranging between a dozen and 30 at various times of the day, consisted of about half Atamai people and half outsider biodynamicists who came to put in a day's work. Adrienne, a committed biodynamic gardener (and nurse) works most days at Atamai taking care of the orchards, and was the host for this day. (Her orchard work is sweat equity towards the acquisition of a lot at Atamai. She has done a lovely job on the orchards, which are looking beautiful.) Adrienne began working towards this day months ago. The cow manure, necessary for both compost building and biodynamic preparations (something like fertility stimulants) had to undergo special processes before it was ready for use. She had worked for months removing gorse from gullies in the orchards, and had made big cylindrical piles of rotting gorse for use on the compost pile. She had cut large bags of nettles grown (deliberately) on her own property. As she passed through Picton a month ago on her way back from a retreat for anthroposophical nurses (this is Steiner's philsophy on health), she had bought a load of seaweed, and it came in a large winebarrel.

The biodynamic way of making hot compost involves using hay or grass with the dew still on it. Adrienne started on the land by torchlight on Saturday morning, about 5.30am. When I got up at 6.30, I could hear her mowing over on the hillsides. The time for gathering for raking the grass was 7am. I got there at ten past, and there were already four people (outsiders) raking. We raked for a few hours and Adrienne, seemingly out of nowhere, began cooking buckwheat pancakes, which were eaten with damson jelly of her own making. I provided the tea in big thermoses. Coffee was made over a clever device in which a double metal cylinder holding water between its two walls is placed over a little fire. The inner cylinder acts as a chimney for the fire which draws well and heats the water. We sat around eating this feast for a while, then got back on the rakes, wheelbarrows, forks and shovels. By that time we were also forking gorse and shovelling manure in layers on to the compost pile. This pile began with a 9 1/2 x 3 metre base. There were a few layers of nettles, which to my astonishment, people handled with their bare hands, while I went to look for gloves. 'Doesn't it hurt?' I asked. 'Only a bit,'
was the answer. At various stages layers of seaweed (very smelly), ground dolomite, and rock dust were added. Every layer got a sprinkle with the hose. The manure, after its long treatment, wasn't at all smelly. Adrienne compared the process to baking a cake. After about 4 hours of work, the pile was two metres high. You couldn't see people working on the other side.

Adrienne climbed on top, used a crowbar to make eight deep holes through the layers, and dropped little clods of special biodynamic preparations down each hole.
Everyone cheered and rejoiced and then went home.

At 4pm people reconvened for the next phase, coming to a higher terrace on the orchard for the process of making and spreading biodynamic preparations. This was the more mystical side of biodynamics, but the quietly sceptical also joined in. You can see me stirring the mixture (first clockwise, making a vortex, then reversing) and Jack sprinkling the mixture on to the soil.

Finally we had a wonderful picnic on the still sunny terrace, with the many little kids rolling themselves down the grassy slopes and laughing.

This was the first large occasion of communal work at Atamai, although our tree planting last year involved 8-10 people at some stages. We plan in the future to build an implement shed, and a picnic shelter in this way. There are many other possible projects.

Warmest wishes,
Joanna

Atamai Village Update

2010-10-08T15:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,
I'm eager to give you an update on us and on the village. We're well and quite busy - Jack with tree-planting on the land around and sloping down from our house. In the previous two autumns there have been large-scale plantings of mainly natives for wind-break and slope protection. In the last month and continuing there has been planting of fruit and nut trees on the sunny terraces - cherry, plum, pear, nashi (a Japanese pear), peach, almond, hazelnut. Apples yet to come when we can get the varieties we want.
I'm largely occupied with the people side of the village - helping where it's needed, organising the communal meals and the village council meetings. A big day coming up is next Saturday when the regional biodynamic growers' group will meet here for a compost -making day and also to make biodynamic preparations. (Adrienne, who cares for the orchards, is strongly oriented to biodynamic growing.)

As you can see, the house is progressing. It takes an inordinate amount of our time too. Millions of mini-decisions.

Jurgen has just written a whole village update, which I'll now include. It gives you a good overview of where we are in village development.
This image is part of the garden Jurgen is developing adjacent to his house site. The house doesn't yet exist, but will be Japanese in character.

Hi everyone
Looking for the last update sent to everyone I realise that 10 months have gone by without a word from us to the friends of Atamai far and wide. Not surprisingly it is not due to all being quiet in the village but rather an unintended by-product of intense activity. Including everything that has happened and is going on would see you read for hours, so here is just a selection of some of the more important developments:
The land
Over the last months a good number of property changes, boundary adjustments, title issues and acquisitions have happened. A block of adjacent land of about 10 ha has been added to the village as well as another one of the existing houses on the ridge top. The house, a 400 sm high quality residence including a large independent flat, is being retrofitted with solar panels, an additional room and some landscaping changes and will be available for sale as part of the village at the end of the summer.
Food security, which was mentioned already in our mailout last summer as an upcoming crisis point is now emerging rapidly as an issue of serious concern around the world. Food prices are expected to rise by up to 30% in short order and food shortages in many countries are expected to continue to make headlines again. Last week a UN conference on the issue was called.
In the tradition of transition towns Atamai continues to work on practical preparations for local food security. The Mediterranean garden is in very good shape this spring, a private and established leasehold garden plot has been added to the village production pallet for a number of years and row crops are being put in for the first time for bulk staple foods.
The community orchard has been extended significantly over the winter planting season and is being lovingly cared for by Adrienne, who is now on the crew full time.
The nursery had an additional well water source added which we don’t expect to ever run dry.
Over summer we will put up the new green house to have more scope for shoulder season production (see nursery remarks below).
More maintenance and food production equipment has been purchased for the village including a small tractor with mower and front loader.
Village Development Process
We were fortunate to have two very talented landscape designers from London, Paul and Anise work for us over winter developing a Permaculture landscape design methodology which can now be used for the planning of all the new private sections. It makes the creation of effective permaculture systems a much easier, structured and satisfying process. It also saves a lot of effort and provides a means of integrating landscapes on private titles into the bigger Atamai permaculture picture.
The Sustainable Villages development team achieved a significant milestone and filed the application for the second residential stage of Atamai Village last month. This second stage comprises the balance of the larger sections scattered around the denser village core. The denser village core is the third stage which completes the village. The third stage is now planned for consent filing mid next year.
Stage two consists of 24 new residential sections, 7 of which are ‘sold’ or spoken for at this stage. The plan for the sections has been posted on the web site.
Building projects & Sections
Jack and Joanna’s house will have the ‘roof shout’ party for the first Atamai Eco House on the 29th of October. The roof is on, structural timber walls are up, windows are going in and it is making progress in leaps and bounds due to the diligent work of Greg Law and his ‘ORCA Development’ crew. Greg is looking forward to build as many of the homes and buildings at Atamai as possible.
One of the next buildings to be put up will be a stone clad implement shed on the commons.
Village community
Quite a few changes have happened and there is now a number of households living on the Atamai land. Craig and Tracey and their little son William have moved onto the site (renting), as have Wulf and his son Christian into their house and Greg and Isabel and their 4 children Noah, Sophia, Fin & Nathan (renting as well). Craig and Tracey will be starting to build as soon as possible on Lot 4. Greg and Isabel are waiting for their section (Lot 9, stage II) to become available. So all in all there are currently 6 households already on site with Adrienne and Lynda keen to join as soon as possible. Plans for Adrienne’s house on Lot 5, stage I, are also close to complete.
Sadly Geoff and Leonora have decided to stay in Nelson at this stage and have put Lot 0, which they purchased last year back into the pool of available properties. Their lot 0, stage I is one of the two only elevated properties currently available with brilliant views.
Rob and Lisa have decided to be part of Atamai and intend to purchase Lot 8 Stage I, as has Lynda.
With more people on site the social aspects of the community are coming along nicely and a number of events, pot lucks and working bees are planned for those interested to join in.
One of the more hazardous aspects of the emerging village live is that one has to watch now for increasing numbers of little knights with wooden swords on wooden cycles ambushing residents and practicing their chivalry skills on unaware passersby.
A good number of visitors have announced themselves for summer this year to check out the site or stay for a little while to see if they like the village project. We really look forward to welcome you all.
Business Opportunities
The brick/block making operation has now been fully set up and three varieties of bricks are in production. The first batches of about 8000 bricks have been made and most of them will be used in Jack & Joanna’s house and for landscaping. Atamai recently acquired a large production green house and a nursery utility building at an auction and they have been moved onto the village grounds and should be completely installed over summer. Lynda and Joni Bridge will be operating the nursery initially until either an enthusiastic owner operator comes on board or a cooperative forms itself.
A business plan for a third enterprise, the production and sale of the Terra Preta soil conditioner has been completed and is also awaiting an owner operator.
So if you are interested in taking up either of these three ready to go businesses as a livelihood, let us know.
Rob Malloch has converted the Hangar at TeMara into a well equipped engineering workshop as a base for his village business and has spent a number of months now bringing all of the machinery and vehicle fleet up to scratch. His next project will be to complete development of the Lister engine powered generators.
Organisational Changes
After more than two years of planning, preparation and legal work the villages governing body which will also hold all the commons asset has now been formed and is duly incorporated as a society. It is officially called ‘Atamai Village Council Inc’. The trust, which is the ‘developer’ of Atamai, has been renamed ‘Atamai Trust’ so we could keep the more appropriate ‘Council’ name for the actual village body.
The next step in the formation process is to split the trust into the charitable part which will undertake the educational work in the future and a private trust which will complete the village implementation and then dissolve.
Earthworks
The earthworks for Jack & Joanna’s section were completed last summer. The sections 9 & 10 started in late autumn but have been stop and go all winter and spring due to persistently unfavourable rainfall patterns and amounts. Some progress has been made in spite of it and the drainage systems and silt retention measures have coped well with the abundant rain. The ground is now drying out now a we look forward to have the sections completed before the end of the year.
Web Site
As part of a major advertising initiative to sell the remaining sections of stage I and II the web site will get another major overhaul in the next weeks. Information on the sections, layout, pricing, updates on developments, progress with the permaculture land use planning and implementation will all be posted as a resource.
Expect another email update when it’s ready!
kind regards
Jurgen Heissner, Executive Board Member

Back to my comments now: this is a complex and difficult project, and I feel good about how far we have come. The people side of the village is coming together. The nicest aspect of this is the delightful kids involved. Conflicts, of course, have already arisen,as expected. Is someone experienced enough to keep a cow on their land? Does adding biochar conflict with organic gardening principles? I'm confident that we are dealing with these in a constructive way, although we will have to attend closely to the process of living in this way, partly communally, as distinct from the way we have all been socialised.

You can learn more details about Atamai on our website www.atamai.co.nz

Warmest wishes to all,
Joanna

Can soil carbon sequestration contribute to mitigating climate change?

2010-10-05T01:23:00.000-07:00

The images here are intended to illustrate two aspects of soil carbon (or organic matter) - firstly the production of good food (on my kitchen bench), secondly the need to reforest and to implement careful management of soil to enhance its organic matter (a slope at our new place). Increasing soil and biomass carbon will decrease atmospheric carbon, thus having a significant impact on global heating.

Dear Friends,
I continue to fret about Climate Change. In January, after the shocking failure of the Copenhagen talks, several of us got together to share our distress and work out what to do next. One person suggested we push for the personal carbon quota. In this system, everyone has an equal share of the total allowable annual carbon emissions. You have a strong incentive to live with less than your budgetted amount, and then you can trade the extra with someone who wants to exceed their budget. The total allowable amount diminishes with time.

Jack wanted to explore the role of global elites - the ultra-wealthy, the media controllers and so on, in blocking action on climate change. Since then he has been conversing with folk in the International forum on Globalization about a possible project on that topic.

I wanted to explore the idea of carbon sequestration through agriculture and forestry - by biological means. It seemed to me that the focus had been on fossil fuel carbon emissions and alternative energy. Several points began to become evident to me, alongside one that is well-known - carbon losses through deforestation.
*Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture are a significant proportion of the total - 13.5% globally, about 50% of emissions in New Zealand. The global figure rises to 51% if land use and land use change are included in the calculation. That's emissions from deforestation. The emissions comprise nitrous oxide, largely from the enormous and rising use of nitrate fertilisers; methane from the guts of ruminant animals; carbon dioxide from deforestation to clear more land, soil management practices, fertiliser manufacture and fossil fuel use in agricultural machinery. Many readers of this blog will know that nitrous oxide and methane are many times more potent in reflecting solar heat back to earth than carbon dioxide is.
* There are quite well-known ways to cut agricultural greenhouse emissions, and many of them, eg no-till agriculture. . Furthermore, there are multiple ways to build soil carbon. That is, not only cutting emissions, but pulling down CO2 from the atmosphere into the soil. Some of those ways are designed to keep stable carbon in the soil for centuries. Composting would be the best known of this cluster of strategies. Biochar burial in soil is another.

* Better still, all of the practices referred to above shift agriculture from being an unsustainable practice, exhausting the soil over time, to a perhaps perpetually sustainable activity.

* Better yet, some of these practices bear the promise of greater food productivity. Not all of them.

So we should surely talk more about this issue.

I registered for a conference on New Zealand Soil Carbon. With the help of my friend and mentor, soil scientist Don Graves, I put myself through a little crash course on learning about soil. I cycled to Don's one day to pick up a primer in the nature of soil. I had to come back with the car to collect the ten volumes of essential reading Don had for me. What a revelation! It's another world down there! And to think I've been walking around on top of it all, largely oblivious to the teaming life in ultra-complex systems beneath my feet.

The conference was an interesting experience. The participants were mainly farmers, fertiliser makers and soil scientists. Highlights in my quest to answer the question that heads this blog were:

* the presentation by Australian climate activist (and much else) Tim Flannery. Here are his major points:
o Half of avoided emissions to deal with climate change need to come from the biological systems of agriculture and forestry.
o Emissions need to start coming down by 2015; this requires rapid action. (Agriculture doesn’t even enter the NZ ETS until 2015.)
o Carbon can be sequestered in soil in three ways – holistic stock management; enhanced humus production and retention (by a variety of methods comprising biological farming); and charcoal sequestration in soil.
o NZ’s effort in research in this area, $5million per annum, is ‘pathetic’. Much more is needed.
o It’s good that NZ at least has an ETS (compared with Australia) but it needs major revisions to incentivise individual farmers to sequester soil carbon. (I noted that many farmers present were anxious and negative towards the ETS, concerned that they wouldn’t be rewarded for their carbon achievements.)

The other highlight was a ‘break-out session’ hosted by me on the potential of Soil Carbon sequestration to contribute to Climate Change mitigation. These were the major points:
1. There’s loads of potential for increasing soil C in NZ; in fact, it will be dangerous if we don’t do so and fail to retain C in some soils.
2. Biological farming is the way to do it. Get C deep and stable by means of plant choices.
3. We need to be able to measure it.
4. You can make changes that have to do with increasing soil carbon very quickly eg in a year. This contrasts dramatically with the lead time needed for other CC mitigation strategies, eg alternative energy solutions.
5. We need to incentivise the costly transition to biological (different from subsidising production). But note – Carbon and Energy footprint reducing measures are often intrinsically money-saving.
However, on a panel of six speakers later asked about the potential of biochar, several were sceptical because of cost-benefit issues and the carbon costs of transport of feedstock and making the biochar compared with carbon savings in sequestration. One was enthusiastic.

Where do I go from here on this? As soon as I complete another major task I'd like to address this one. It feels very urgent. I'm not sure what the next step is. Probably to get a few minds together. If any reader of this blog wants to go further on this issue, please let me know.

Also, I can send my full notes on this conference to anyone who wishes to see them.

Warmest wishes,
Joanna

Eating locally, Atamai progress.

2010-05-23T16:10:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

Transition Town news.
On Saturday we held an Eating Locally event, to both celebrate our local foods and to explore ways of further localising our food consumption. I'll go into a bit of detail, becuase we were happy with how the event played out, and think this may be helpful to others considering something similar.

We held the event at Riverside, which has a large kitchen, all that you need for a potluck meal for lots of people, and facilities for music performance. We put some trouble but little money into advertising - posters in shop windows, library display with appropriate books, fliers, radio, newspaper and online ads (all free). People were invited to bring a potluck meal made with local ingredients, together with its recipe to share.

On the day we prepared a beautiful display of local produce, as you can see above. In the picture is Tanja, a remarkable young woman, who did a huge array of things, usually two or three at a time, always with little Leenas (seen here) strapped to her back, and with her 4 and 7 year-old girls nearby, the 7 year-old being a real help in any way she could. Also in the picture is Richard, the Good Bread Man, who baked a batch of sourdough rye especially for the event. The aroma of the baking bread greeted the guests on the day.

We began with an intro of why we should eat locally. We can think of many reasons, as you will see below. Then the 7 year-old sang a food-blessing in Maori and we enjoyed some very creative ad delicious food. Our friends, Dawn and Emery, played mellow jazz and folk on the piano as background.

Then we reorganised the tables to use a World Cafe procedure. Some of you will have experienced this applied to other topics. It was my first experience and I recommend it. It's fast -moving, gets people thinking about the issues, and good ideas emerge. In this case we considered firstly what we ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner, how far it travelled to get to us. Then we thought about how we could make that meal local, and finally we thought about the 'gaps' - food from far away that we can either think about growing nearby, or substituting something else, or doing without.

There was then a competition for the best menu using local foods, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Prizes were donated by local producers. Finally a brilliant group of local musicians, the Northern Lights, entertained us.

We had about 40 people there, some very original food (yakon, radish seed pods, chocolate chestnut pie, achachas stuffed with feijoa and goat cheese), good ideas and great music.

Atamai Ecovillage news
The village has been working at its formal structure, with the help of lawyers. To have Commons land doesn't fit well with normal legal structures, so it has taken a lot of work to shape the necessary entities. There will be an Atamai Land Trust whose task is to develop the land into individual lots and the shared Commons. The Trust uses a company, Sustainable Villages Ltd to carry out the development. The lots are sold to individuals who also buy a share of the Commons, and agree to certain covenants. The Commons will be owned and governed by the Atamai Village Council Inc., comprising all villagers who have bought into the Commons. All the normal developers' profits will go to the Commons.

Jurgen and Kyoko, and our builder, Greg Law and his wife, Isabel, have just bought one of the existing large ridgetop houses and will share it, for as long as it takes to be able to build their own homes on lots they've selected, This means that we'll soon have five little kids as neighbours, ranging, I think, from 3 to about 9.

Jo and Jack
We've both been involved in the evolution of the village, and I've spent time on the Eating Locally event and also on my radio programme. I've been writing bits and pieces for the Reconciliation book, some of which readers of this blog have seen. One you haven't seen is on reconciliation in East Timor, which is, I think, a case study in what happens when one party is immensely more powerful than the other. Basically, the big power gets away with murder, multiplied many times over.

We've spent a little time on the house, which now has its concrete foundation. Jack has spent a lot of time with a team of six, planting 2000 trees, bushes, grasses to stop the terrace slopes from washing down.

The village baby, William, turned one yesterday, so we had a birthday party for this happy little chap.

REcommended film: Mao's last Dancer. Wonderful ballet in this.

Now, here are 15 points about eating locally:
Why do we want to eat locally?• It’s nutritious. And delicious. More nutrients in fresh food.
• It reduces carbon emissions, and helps mitigate CC.
• It helps prepare us for coming fuel scarcity, when the faraway food might not get to us at all.
• It gets us growing and considering what’s in the soil, or puts us in contact with the grower,, to inquire about pesticides , herbicides etc.
• It’s cheaper.
• Strengthens the local economy.
• Helps our kids understand where food comes from
How do we do this?
• It means we eat seasonally, and learn to preserve summer’s abundance for the winter.
• It may mean we’re prepared to do without some things eg bananas.
• It means we read labels when we shop, and try to buy Top of the South whenever we can.
• Some of us grow as much as we can in our own gardens. No food miles or km, just metres.
• Some of us further strengthen the local economy by trading for our food in TALENTS.
• What we don’t grow, we get mainly from the following places (showing the map): Motueka Sunday Market; Riverside Friday Market; Arcadia Organics; Toad Hall; Victoria Gardens.
• We keep our eyes open for roadside stalls and buy from them when possible. (Asparagus, lemons, nashi, kiwi fruit, blueberries – lots of wonderful things, usually just picked.)
• Some of us get our milk direct from a farm to avoid the long distances milk travels, at high energy input. We make our own yoghurt and cheese and butter.

OK, that's it for now, dear folks.
Much love,
Joanna

Reconciliation , large and small-scale.

2010-04-17T02:41:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,
An Autumn update.
Ourselves
We have gained confidence as trampers in doing short overnight stays in some of the wonderful huts on tracks in this country. Above is a photo of the track to Wainui Hut, and of us keeping cosy in this old hut as night fell. The thrid os of us with friend, Katerina, outside the Bushline Hut, a much newer constuction. It's enormously refreshing to be immersed in forest and mountain beauty.
Our house is slowly proceeding. We have the root cellar dug into the side of a hill, the foundations of the shed for the solar panels, the cistern for the composting toilet, the slab for the shed, and now, the foundations of the house already done. The shed is up.
A team has begun work pressing the bricks, none too soon.

The huge amounts of time required for the house have detracted from other things we want to do. I'm eager to spend more time finishing the book on Reconciliation, and on revving up work on Transition initiatives. I have begun again, after a break, the Transition Towns radio show, with interviews of a woman promoting local eating and a climate scientist turned educator. David Lowe was an atmospheric chemist and lead author of IPCC reports. He felt that continuing to publish papers was not going to save the situation; perhaps getting into schools and talking to people might, so that's what he's doing. Admirable guy. I've done one on care of the local aquifer, and another on local democracy. Next week I've lined up someone on The Natural Step principles, and a fascinating sheep farmer who has replaced his pasture with lucerne to adapt to climate change, and is sequestering lots of carbon at the same time in the deep roots o the lucerne, thus helping to mitigate climate change.

I've been pulled back a little into the arena of developing knowledge of soil carbon and biochar, but I'd prefer to defer this until the book is finished.

I recently made one of my periodic trips to Wellington to do a session on Peace through Health with medical students, and then to meet with colleagues in International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. With the modest steps Obama has taken and the Nonproliferation Treaty Review on now, this was a good time for us to meet. It's not entirely easy to think what New Zealand can contribute to pushing things forward to nuclear weapons abolition, but it has provided a dramatic example in the past of how to move out of the nuclear weapons orbit. Regarding what small non-nuclear countries can do, I was inspired by reading today of how it was the Irish UN representative at the time, Frank Aiken, who skilfully and persistently raised and steadily pushed the idea of a nonproliferation treaty forward. It took ten years from when he first raised it to the accomplishment of the treaty.

A small nice thing happened today. In my last blog I included an essay I wrote on Maori-Pakeha reconciliation. I wanted to have one or more Maori review it, and had found this difficult to accomplish. When a Maori man we know had been working on chopping our felled trees into firewood for the local marae, Jack had asked him about this. He said he'd ask an elder. I assumed he had forgotten about this when nothing happened. Today I met him in the supermarket. One definitely notices Matua; he's big, very dark, and has a wreath of leaves tatooed around his face. 'Hey', he said. "I got Uncle Tahi to say he'd read your essay, and he'll meet with you about it.'

Atamai, the village
There is a developing sense of a village community. The young couple, Craig and Tracey Ambrose, have helped with this in establishing Friday night pizza and beer meals. They make the dough, and we all bring toppings and/or dessert, and beer, of course. Tracey and Kyoko are also establishing an organic foods co-op. Now I buy milk in bulk, straight from the farm (not our farm). I just made butter from the cream.

Three of the neighbours are mounting a coordinated campaign to harrass and discredit Atamai. They have tried unsuccessfully to oust Jurgen from his temporary housing on his land; they have complained unsuccessfully to the council that we are mining our land to make the bricks, one has posed as an interested investor to the local building society to try to find out about financial arrangements. Another gave a false name in order to try to extract information from the project lawyer. They're afraid, unnecessarily I think, that their peaceful rural way of life will be upset. We proposed mediation, but they rejected the offer.

Transition Town Motueka
The TALENTS currency is growing in use. We are planning a big session on Eating Locally. The car-pooling scheme is going well.

In turning back to the topic of reconciliation, I wondered how the concepts might apply to our relationship with the Earth, and wrote this exploratory essay. Don't feel obliged to read it. I daily hope that we can find some way to move toward reconciliation with our unhappy neighbours. With time, I'm sure we will.

Warmest wishes to all,
Joanna

Reconciliation with the Earth
Is it not stretching the concept of reconciliation too far to consider such an interaction with a system without consciousness – the Earth? We cautiously propose that it is not for the following reason: the biosphere and those parts of the soil, rocks and oceans on which the biosphere depends (sometimes summarised by the mythically-derived term ‘Gaia’) is an extraordinarily complex system of systems. It appears to have an emergent long-term self-regulating property with the goal of maximizing life. The human population of the Earth, a conscious component part of the biosphere, has grown in numbers and technological capacity to the point of affecting the huge, complex self-regulating Earth system. The result of this interference is changing the conditions of life on Earth, contributing to the sixth major episode of extinction of biodiversity and to deteriorating conditions for human life.
. Life on planet earth is an improbable event; the biogeochemical evolution of our planet is, as far as we know, unique in our solar system, and likely beyond. If there is anything that is indeed sacred, it is the unique conditions and interplay between the inert matter of our special planet and the living systems that arose from this inert matter. We humans are, of course, part of that web of life. We are also the only species that have caused not only local disruption of these complex systems, but also planetary disruptions that now threaten the complexity of the unique phenomena we so take for granted – living systems. This is harm on a grand scale. And where there is harm, there is a need for reconciliation. Understanding the nature of the harm, who is harmed, and how they are harmed, influences how reconciliation might be approached.
The nature of this harm has largely been an unconscious phenomenon for humans, recently and currently becoming increasingly conscious. The processes of acknowledgment of harm, guilt, remorse, determination not to continue or repeat the harmful behaviour, repair of the damage and recovery and maintenance of a peaceful relationship are all highly relevant to this situation. So, according to James Lovelock, is the concept of revenge, though he does not assume consciousness in the process. Lovelock and many others foresee the possibility that a warming Earth, due both to increased heat from the sun and to human generation of greenhouse gases, will become seriously inhospitable for humans. The possibility of human extinction, in the short rather than long term, presents itself. This would be revenge indeed.
Let us see where the application of concepts of reconciliation in this situation gets us.
What harm has been (and is likely to be) done?
We will need to consider harm to humans and harm to other species. Where we considered harm to relationships in other case studies, here we need to consider harm to complex systems of relationships between multiple species and their sustaining substrate – in other words, ecosystems. For once let us consider other species before we consider humans.
• Harm to other species. We are accustomed to thinking of the basic needs of humans, and how these translate into human rights. Let us consider that other species also manifest most of the same basic needs in their behavior. They need security from death or injury and will seek to maximize this by evolutionary adaptation or by dramatic measures in the face of immediate threats if they are a mobile species. They need well-being and will employ the same long-term and short-term measures to ensuring this. They need freedom and will usually attempt to get it when it is denied them. The very many social species, from ants, sardines and crows to wolves and humans need to be able to congregate with their group, group inclusion. In humans, we think of this as a need for identity; this is the concept advanced consciousness associates with group inclusion, a very basic need. In humans, particularly over the last century, we have formulated the idea of rights to fulfilment of these basic needs. There is no consensus on whether, from our perspective, other species have rights. It is very clear that they have basic needs.
The magnitude of the harm done is already very severe, and includes death, not only to large numbers of individual organisms, but to entire species. Humans have encroached on the habitat of other species through agriculture, massive urbanization, roads, dams and mining . They have appropriated 25 to 40% of the net products of photosynthesis, the process on which the entire food chain (and our own food supply) depends . As one of millions of species, this is an extraordinarily large share of the biosphere’s production to commandeer. Hunting, fishing, pollution of soil, water and air, contribution to global warming and ocean acidification have added to these effects to lead to a massive extinction phenomenon , , comparable in magnitude to the five other extinction spasms in the history of the biosphere. This loss is likely to include animals to whose existence we are sentimentally attached such as koalas, polar bears, whales, gorillas, and also forms of life with which we have no familiarity, such as beetles, moths and micro-organisms, some of which may be crucial to their ecosystems. This harm is irreversible. Once the last koala or elephant has died, they can never again enjoy life, nor make their contribution to the life around them. We can never again enjoy such creatures accompanying our time on Earth. Their genetic code has gone forever.
• Harm to ecosystems and the biosphere as an integrated system of systems. Damage to ecosystems involves harm to the multiple species interdependent in the system. Examples of such large-scale harm are rainforest destruction, dead zones in oceans due to damaging effluent from large rivers, the loss of freshwater life in rivers and lakes and the global loss of soil swept by erosion into the ocean. Some damage is reversible, such as recovery of rivers and lakes when toxic effluent is stopped. This cannot happen if species have become extinct, or if damage has engaged positive feedback loops and worsens exponentially. In addition, as ecosystems attempt to adapt to climate change, the resilience provided by rich diversity will have been diminished. Human knowledge of the intricate interconnexions of ecosystems and the whole biosphere is scanty, and we interfere at our peril. For example, insufficient appreciation of the functions of coastal mangrove ecosystems as flood protection and as ocean fish nurseries has led to widespread destruction and loss of these ecosystems, increasing vulnerability to flooding of coastal areas (such as New Orleans) and to diminution of fish populations .
• Harm to humans
Since humans are part of the biosphere, and utterly dependent on it for survival and well-being, the harm we have done and continue to do to the biosphere is harm we do to each other. But this harm is not equally distributed. There is broad agreement that it is the poorest segment of local human populations and of the global population that have suffered and will suffer disproportionately from ecological damage of all kinds .
(i) Forced human movement. In Bangladesh, several hundred thousands of people have already had to move because of rising sea levels due to climate change. They largely move to the slums of Dhaka . The number of such internal migrants, forced to move because of sea-level rise, climate-induced famine or water shortage is estimated to be in the tens of millions by mid-century . Forced migration is costly to those affected, often meaning loss of capital goods and means of livelihood, loss of supportive community structure and culture. It is likely to be costly to those resident in the areas of new settlement too. The first populations to suffer climate change effects alongside the Bangladeshis are the small Pacific Island states, and the Inuit of the Arctic. It is projected that over the next century, sea level rise will affect many of the world’s largest cities which are close to sea-level . It is easy to project conflict arising out of these population movements into already heavily occupied areas, and the possibility of violent conflict.
(ii) Health effects of multiple forms of ecological damage . A hotter climate will diminish productivity; humans work less efficiently at higher temperatures. This will particularly affect agricultural and factory productivity. The former is especially worrying in the light of declining global grain stocks. Infectious diseases may become more troublesome as changing climate alters the distribution of vectors, and populations with low immunity are affected. The frequency of natural disasters of flooding, drought, hurricanes has increased due to climate change, causing immense suffering to affected areas.
(iii) The economic well-being of large populations deteriorates under conditions of desertification, deforestation, soil depletion, water pollution and diversion.
(iv) Harm to the beauty of the Earth. There is something in us that thrives on the beauty of wild places – an untrammelled river, the deep forest, an unspoiled beach. We seek it out. In the 21st century we have to seek harder and harder, as Earth’s beauty becomes obliterated by ever-enlarging cities, by roads, factories and agriculture. For many people, this beauty, once the common treasure of all humans, has become entirely inaccessible.
(v) Harm to future generations of humans. We who are alive now will leave the Earth in much worse condition than we found it. We are drawing down on Earth’s ‘natural capital’ instead of living on the interest. William Catton points out that when a population of any species overshoots the carrying capacity of its environment, what follows is collapse of the population . We are depleting the resources available to the next generation. We leave serious problems, created by human activity, to those as yet unborn to solve. If they can.
(vi) Finally, possibly curtailing the span of humans on Earth. The Earth is heating anyway, apart from human activity, and its hospitality for our species will not be perpetual. All species have a limited span in the history of the Earth. By altering the temperature and the climate severely, we may have hastened the time when the Earth can no longer support our species .
Revenge
If the reader will allow a little stretching of the concept, usually reserved for conscious pay-back after a perceived insult, there is something worth understanding here. Revenge in primate society, including humans, is a crude and flawed self-regulating justice system. Another self-regulating system, the human body, deals with invasion by a species causing harm to its functioning, such as parasites, bacteria or viruses, by changing the internal environment of the system through immune response to exterminate the invading species. The analogy put forward here is that humans, having multiplied to a prodigious extent to occupy every zone on Earth, and appropriating an entirely disproportionate amount of Earth’s photosynthetic output , are, through their technology and numbers, doing severe damage to the biosphere. The unanticipated outcome of this damage is a change in the environment towards suboptimal conditions for survival of the species. The expectation is that large numbers of humans will die, that complex civilization will disappear, and that much smaller numbers of humans will live in less complex societies at lower levels of technology, and less capacity to harm the biosphere. This is conceived of as the ‘revenge’ of Gaia.
We might also consider the point of view of the human and conscious part of the biosphere in the future, perhaps in 2150, contemplating our own generations, particularly those responsible for much of the harm to the Earth. The spotlight falls on the affluent countries of high economic growth after the period of the industrial revolution. Will they feel anger and rejection towards us for leaving them such a damaged Earth? They will have no capacity to punish us for our ecological sins, though.
The alternative route is to speedily adapt the impact of human presence in the biosphere to a level which no longer involves damaging activities, no longer draws down on resources faster than they can be renewed and produces wastes beyond possible rates of natural processing, and which repays the ecological debt to be discussed below. In other words, the harm must cease, the conflict of incompatible goals resolved and reconciliation of the relationship engaged in.
Ending the harm
Ending the harm is an enormous task. The formula for the harm introduced by Paul Ehrlich and used by many others since is I= PAT . I is Impact on ecological integrity of the biosphere. P is Population size. A is level of Affluence or consumption of the population, T is Technology used in terms of ecological damage. (For example, electricity produced by a coal-fired power station will do more damage than electricity from a wind farm.) Ending the harm then involves tackling all factors in the equation. We would need to stop blowing up mountains to extract more coal, burning which then deforms the atmosphere, which results in overheating the Earth and damaging many species. This we might consider as direct violence to the Earth. We would need to curb or halt economic growth, which demands more and more throughput of materials and energy in a never-ending and logically impossible sequence on a finite Earth. This is structural violence deeply embedded in the structure of our economies. But most strikingly, we would need to tackle the cultural violence of our convictions about every one of the factors in the IPAT formula – belief in our imperative to populate the Earth with many offspring, belief in our right to affluence and waste and assessment of technology by its capacity to generate profit or enhance convenience, no matter what the externalized cost to the Earth and the global commons, which all of us share.
Resolving the conflict
The observed goal of the biosphere is to maximize life. The complex goals of humans counter this goal, sometimes severely and perhaps terminally. Working out a ‘transcending’ solution to this conflict is theoretically possible. It would mean living at levels of population, affluence and technology congruent with Earth’s carrying capacity. It would mean transmitting from generation to generation the values, skills and knowledge to sustain these limits while improving on life within these limits. Humans would enhance the beauty, integrity and resilience of the biosphere instead of destroying them.
Reconciling
In this case the processes of resolution and reconciliation merge, as follows.
Acknowledgement
There is a global furore about acknowledgment of human contribution to the destructive processes listed above, particularly to climate change. It is deeply embedded in dominant cultures that the Earth and its resources are for human exploitation, that ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’ are opposed, and ‘Man’ will conquer ‘Nature’, that Earth’s resources are endless, and it has endless capacity to deal with the effluents resulting from human activities. These embedded attitudes, together with the near-worship of ‘economic growth’ are, as suggested, a very close match to the idea of ‘cultural violence’ – the beliefs and attitudes that support violence in its many forms. Many indigenous cultures, on the other hand are imbued with a profound identification of humans with the natural world, a deep respect for species other than humans, an awareness of limits in use of resources and proscription of going beyond those limits. (It would, however, be a mistake to see indigenous cultures as ideal in their relationship to Nature. Many extinctions of food species were caused by such societies.)
Yet, acknowledgement is proceeding. Recognition of the damage our species is causing is steadily advancing. It is entering school curricula and university programmes. Environmental Impact Assessments must be done before further interfering with Nature in many governance systems. Environmental laws are passed to minimize further damage. The Precautionary Principle implies a humble acknowledgement of the paucity of our knowledge of natural systems – that we shouldn’t interfere unless we are sure we can avoid all damage. Full acknowledgement requires full shared understanding of the damage humans have done, and we are quite a long way from that state. We resist understanding, and deny the evidence before our eyes, because we benefit short-term from drawing down on Earth’s natural capital. In addition, there is powerful organized resistance to this acknowledgement, some of it funded by coal and oil industries .
We are a long way from the condition of a general shared deep respect for the integrity, beauty and resilience of Nature and all its intricate parts, the kind of respect that would lead to extreme caution before any interference or depletion.
There are further complications in this acknowledgement. Rich countries, with their history of one to two centuries of industrial development powered by fossil fuels are responsible for most of the gases in the atmosphere causing the greenhouse effect. The most severe impacts of global warming will fall particularly on people and other species in poor countries, where droughts will limit what can grow, and floods will carry away stock, crops and wild species . Poor countries are demanding acknowledgement of this in climate negotiations, preparatory to making claims on rich countries. The acknowledgement is slow in coming.
Guilt and remorse
Many who become aware of how severely the Earth has been damaged feel guilt and remorse. Among them, some believe the damage is irreversible, or at least partly so. This perspective is deeply depressing. Remorse involves the intention not to repeat the harm, the wish to undo the damage. This emotion can energize activism to change the course of events.
Apology
This is irrelevant in relation to a system without consciousness, except in a symbolic sense to affirm the intention not to continue or repeat the harm. But perhaps such an apology to Gaia and all she nourishes, including our own descendants would be a good start. Such an aspiration involves enormous changes in human civilization. Governments are beginning to work at lowering carbon emissions, but show no signs of lowering them far enough and fast enough to avoid the agreed-upon dangerousness of having the global average temperature rise above 2 degrees Celsius. There is very little discussion of rights-respecting ways of lowering human population numbers, or changing economies to function within the biophysical limits of what the Earth can provide and absorb. Groups in civil society work away at some of these issues; governments do not mention them. We should consider apologizing to our children and grandchildren who will have to cope with what we have done.
Restoration of damage
The term ‘ecological debt’ is used in two senses. One is seen as a debt owed by the (over)developed countries to the underdeveloped countries. The former have damaged the biosphere disproportionately as they developed their economies on burning fossil fuel over the last century and more. The less developed countries continue to have large proportions of their populations living below sufficiency levels. They need help from the developed countries if they are to provide adequately for their people without damaging the biosphere even more seriously .
The other sense in which the term is used is the debt to future generations of humans (and other species) of damaging the Earth to the extent that it is depleted in its resources and the ecosystem services such as carbon absorption, flood protection, climate regulation on which human life depends. We have made life much harder for our offspring. As we are dealing here with the relation between humans and the biosphere or Gaia, we will deal with the second sense of ecological debt, not the first.
Can the damage be restored, the debt paid off? Obviously the first consideration is how to stop the damaging processes, as above. To restore the injured Earth, the highest priority is likely to be returning some of the carbon sent into the atmosphere back to biomass, soil or rock. (The acidified ocean cannot store more.) This can be partly done with changed agricultural and pastoral practices, particularly organic methods . Reforestation, increasing the proportion of land under permanent forest cover, stores carbon in tree biomass and assists with debt repayment .
Bringing Earth’s population below levels congruent with its carrying capacity for humans, curbing consumption to levels of sufficiency rather than excess, learning to run steady-state economies below Earth’s biophysical limits are all measures that will allow restoration of the biosphere, if a tipping point has not been passed.
Restoring a peaceful, cooperative relationship
It may be hundreds or thousands of years before Earth recovers from its present human-induced illness. Excess carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for periods in that order of magnitude. If recovery of a generous, bountiful relationship is possible, humans will need to change their behavior henceforth. They will need to curb their population numbers and their consumption, and their astounding technological capacity for heedless harm to Nature. All of human cleverness and wisdom will need to be dedicated to learning to live well without harming the biosphere. Reverence for all life forms will need to enter human cultures, together with knowledge of the intricate integration of the great biosphere of which we are a part. Humility before this unknowable system needs to be part of our values, transmitted from generation to generation. Perhaps we will succeed in making peace with the Earth.

Relating to aboriginal peoples

2010-02-09T22:17:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,
Greetings!
The image here is of Jeff and me at our local marae, or Maori centre. We were attending Matariki, the celebration of the New Year.

I'll give you a little of our news, and then get into the substance of this blog, which has to do with relating to aboriginal peoples. This is an essay I finished this afternoon (though it may undergo further revision.) Why should you look at it? Most readers of this blog probably live in one of my previous two homelands - Australia and Canada. Both of these, and my present homeland, together with the United States, have incompletely reconciled relationships with their aboriginal populations. (It's also the case that these were the only four countries who voted against adoption of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.) I'm a slow learner; it has taken me a long time to come to grips with this. Working on the issue of Reconcilliation , as I am currently, has created a context for this exploration.

So, first a little chat. Would you like a cup of tea?

Jack and I.
We're well. Jack has become a tramping addict, and we're now equipped to do overnight tramps.We have lovely sleeping bags, and backpacks so complicated you pretty much need a weekend workshop to learn to use one. The visit from Germany of our dear friends, Nicola and Ralph was a wonderful excuse to take time off and go tramping. Under the skilled mentorship of our friend Katerina, we went on our first overnight tramp. New Zealand has a system of government-maintained huts on major tracks, so you don't have to carry tents. Some even have gas stoves, although most don't. I had fun working out food that would be delicious after a long day's walking, and also very light to carry. After this wonderful few days, we celebrated Christmas together, and then went on a tent-camping trip on the Abel Tasman Track, reaching our starting point by water taxi.
Jack and I have since done another overnight on the Abel Tasman by ourselves, staying in a hut that was a farmhouse 100 years ago.
Working on designing the house still takes a lot of time. The earthworks are finished and it all looks rather like a moonscape.

Last month I went to Australia to help celebrate my mother's 90th birthday, which was done in three parties, all of which she greatly enjoyed. I was delighted to be present when my niece, Sky de Jersey, chaired the first meeting of a Transition Town in her part of Sydney. The group will set about creating vegetable gardens on footpath verges. In Sydney, I met up with our son Jeff, who is now in Paris, Ontario, to work on a film with friends.

OK, now for the essay.

Because I fear I might lose some of you before you get to the end of the essay, I'll say goodbye now, and how very much I appreciate the comments many of you make about the blog.

Very warmest wishes,
Joanna

Maori-Pakeha Reconciliation

Introduction
There are many situations throughout the world where two or more peoples living alongside each other and interacting with each other have a history of having harmed each other. Usually there is a power difference and one side has hurt the other disproportionately. Post-colonial relations are one category of such situations. Seen in North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Africa, the Basque areas of Spain and France, the relationship may have involved superiority in military technology and manpower, with domination of indigenous people and their culture backed by violence of various kinds.
Background
Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand. It is thought that they came to the islands of New Zealand, also called Aotearoa (Land of the Long White Cloud) from Polynesia in about the 13th century Common Era. Beginning in the early 19th century settlers, mainly from the British Isles at first, began arriving. Later other Europeans immigrated to New Zealand, from Germany and Scandinavia, and later still, from the Pacific Islands. Initially, Maori mostly welcomed the newcomers, seeing benefits in new technologies and plant varieties. They agreed to land sales, envisaging a cooperative relationship with, at that point, small numbers of new settlers, known as ‘pakeha’.
But things were changing rapidly in ways they could not foresee. The British were interested in protecting their access to the timber, flax, seal and whale resources of New Zealand. They were aware of growing French interest in the country, and of a private company forming with the purpose of taking boatloads of settlers there. They wanted to secure their sovereignty there and, it should be said, there were those in the Colonial Office in London, who were genuinely interested in protecting the indigenous people from abuse by Europeans. (These same people were involved in the anti-slave trade movement at the time.) These several motivations led to the presentation to certain Maori leaders of a document devised by James Busby, the appointed British Resident, called the Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand. In signing it in 1835, the Maori aristocracy affirmed their sovereignty over the territory of New Zealand. A further step was the forging of what came to be called the Treaty of Waitangi (after the place at which it was discussed and signed) in 1840.
The Maori version of this treaty, which was discussed by several score tribal leaders at Waitangi, and eventually signed by hundreds of Maori leaders, gives the right to govern the land to Britain, (likely assuming this applied to the two thousand sometimes rather lawless Europeans). Maori retain the right to govern their own communities, lands, forests, fisheries and ‘treasures’. Land sales, it was agreed, should be strictly voluntary, and only to the Crown. The English version was somewhat different. In it, sovereignty is ceded wto the British Crown, in exchange for protection. The signing of this ambiguous treaty opened the country to a massive influx of Europeans and an incessant hunger for land. Maori were overwhelmed, and lost control of land transfers.
Only a few years after the signing of the treaty, Maori armed resistance to what were regarded as inadmissible land deals had begun. Maori were initially successful in these encounters. They also used nonviolent land occupations to resist land transfers. The imperial response was to call for troops from Australia, until, in the 1860s, the Governor of New Zealand had 20,000 troops at his disposal, including settler volunteers. This was at a time when total Maori population of both islands was fewer than 56,000 people. Imperial force eventually prevailed. The government imposed crippling punitive land confiscations on the Maori in the most turbulent areas, depriving them of means of living.
Resistance to one of these confiscations was the scene of the most famous of Maori nonviolent actions. Prophets Te Whiti and Tohu regularly preached nonviolence in the village of Parihaka , on the west of the North Island. In 1881 they sent out teams of women to pull up survey pegs at night and teams of men in the day to plough and fence the land soon to be taken over. Again and again these teams were arrested, and more were sent to replace them. Eventually the government sent a force of 1600 men to enter the village. They were met by hordes of singing, skipping children who offered them food. Nonetheless, the village was destroyed, the leaders arrested and imprisoned without trial , the people dispersed and the land taken over.
Throughout the 19th century, population numbers of Maori steeply declined, from about 100,000 at the time of first contact to about 45,000 at the end of the century. This disastrous decline had many causes. Two major causes were not deliberate aspects of the quite explicit settler intention to dominate and assimilate Maori and their resources. Maori had poor immune resistance to European diseases, and died in large numbers of measles, influenza, whooping cough and tuberculosis. Maori fertility was affected by syphilis and gonorrhoea.
Maori culture included intense intertribal competitiveness. Once it became possible to acquire European firearms, there was an arms race between tribes, and the so-called Musket Wars in the 1820s and 1830s caused a loss of a large proportion of the population.
Maori considered that the promises of the Treaty of Waitangi were broken many times over. The Treaty was, in fact ignored by government institutions for the following century. In 1877, Chief Justice, Sir James Prendergast, ruled that ‘the whole treaty was worthless – a simple nullity [which] pretended to be an agreement between two nations, but [in reality] was between a civilised nation and a group of savages…’ Land continued to be transferred from Maori control in huge amounts.
In addition, land transfers often included promises to Maori to reserve land for them, to build hospitals, churches and schools. Many of these promises were not kept.
In the second half of the 19th century, Maori life expectancy was affected additionally by malnutrition, as the remaining land was insufficient for their sustenance, and their initial successful adoption of European agriculture and horticulture was economically overwhelmed by larger farms.
Who and what was hurt?• Having a population decline in numbers to less than half over a century translates into all living members of a population having to deal with sickness and death and the pain of childlessness, and into watching villages depopulate. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was expected that Maori were a dying people and that the end was near.
• The remaining population suffered hunger and malnutrition, unemployment, lower state benefits or none, substandard housing.
• Maori cultural and spiritual traditions declined for many reasons – voluntary adoption of the dominant culture, assertive missionary activity, deliberate suppression of Maori language in schools, suppression by law of aspects of Maori culture, urbanisation of Maori in the 20th century, and demoralisation.
• Weakening of community functioning meant the loss of community support, a vital social and spiritual resource for Maori.
• Deprivation of their resource base of land, forests and fisheries meant most Maori suffered poverty.
• While Maori health has improved through the 20th century, there is still a life expectancy differential of 11 years compared with the Pakeha population. The loss of 11 years of life is a very significant deprivation .
• Loss of trust and goodwill for the Pakeha portion of the population after repeated infractions of the solemn promise between the peoples in the Waitangi Treaty and many other promises.
• Currently many Maori perceive that they must resign themselves to persistent racism in the Pakeha population, and know that this impedes their life chances. Some continue to feel angry over all that has happened to them and their ancestors.
• It is possible to consider that this racism, derived from 19th century colonialist encounters, also harms those who hold such attitudes, although few would feel aware of this harm, and its effects are far less painful than those suffered by the object of racism.
Who hurt whom?
Parties particularly responsible for the many injuries to Maori and their lifeways were settler companies, land developers, the government, the military, missionaries. Maori killed settlers, soldiers and a few missionaries in the course of the several wars. In the 21st century, harm continues to be done by Pakeha ignorant of the necessity of redressing historical injuries. Such people see compensatory actions to Maori as unwarranted favours to a special group. This strand of sentiment is strong enough to create anti-Maori backlash at times, and the potential to be cynically used by political opportunists.
Process of healing
The Maori population did not die. There was a resurgence in population numbers, in language and in culture. There were improvements in physical health and a surge in fertility. Maori representation in Parliament steadily increased. A Maori party formed, and is part of a ruling coalition at the time of writing. There was a renewed focus on the promises of the Treaty of Waitangi, and it came to be seen as the founding document of the nation, to be incorporated into relevant legislation. The Waitangi Tribunal came into existence for the purpose of settling and redressing wrongs in failures to observe the terms of the treaty. Numbers of Pakeha learned to speak Maori; many attended workshops on the Treaty to deepen their understanding of the injuries of history that required reconciliation. School curricula changed to incorporate learning that would help all New Zealanders understand the history of the relationship between Maori and Pakeha.
How did all this come about?
Firstly, Maori never submitted to the injustices perpetrated on them. There was no historical period in which they paused in their attempt to protest their grievances, especially the removal of almost all of their lands. Before the Land Wars of the 1860s, a powerful Maori grouping had proposed parallel parliaments, shared sovereignty and cessation of land sales. In 1894 there was a Maori attempt to introduce a Maori Rights Bill into Parliament. Maori communities set up committees to abolish the Native Land Court which facilitated land transfers away from Maori. They used their disproportionately small parliamentary representation to struggle for successive improvements in Maori rights and lives throughout the early decades of the 20th century. Many of these efforts failed at the time, but created momentum for the next attempt.
The role of parliamentary action in this long struggle highlights the importance of democratic functioning in adjusting the relationships between peoples. But only after the introduction of a proportional representation system of parliamentary elections in 1996, did Maori begin to have numbers of parliamentary representatives proportional to their population. Their influence accordingly increased.
The courts too have played a role in recovery of a just relationship. For example, a successful legal challenge led to the requirement that the government spend significant amounts of money on promotion of the Maori language.
In addition, civil society organisations, such as the Maori Women’s Welfare League , the New Zealand Maori Council and urban protest groups, played a crucial role. Highly effective Maori leadership was an important element, including remarkable women leaders. The ability to adapt the means of protest, using mass media to convey the message, was a significant factor.
In the 1970s these protests became more insistent. In 1975 there was a great Land March from the northern tip of the land to Wellington, the seat of Parliament. This politicised Maori with a unity of purpose in the struggle against colonisation. There were several notable land occupations resulting in removal of occupiers by police and army. These nonviolent actions made clear the degree of unrest in the land. Equality of rights, restoration of land and language were the major themes of protest.
In 1975, the Waitangi Tribunal was set up by an Act of Parliament, in order to examine any future challenges to Treaty provisions. Among its helpful activities, the Tribunal recommended action to promote Maori as a living language, eventually to become an official language. After a decade of Maori agitation on Treaty issues, and motivated by a desire to retain the Maori vote, in 1985 the government made the scope of the tribunal retrospective. This initiated an avalanche of claims against the Crown. As each major settlement has been made, an apology has been issued by the Crown, in the person of the Prime Minister. When decisions have been appealed in courts, an evolving understanding has developed that the Treaty was ‘essential to the foundation of New Zealand’ and is ‘part of the fabric of New Zealand society’.
Efforts to regenerate Maori education began in the 1960s, but surged in the 80s with the established of language immersion from infancy. In the same period, Maori schools and universities began. Many refer to a Maori Renaissance.
Concepts of identity are changing. Some refer to ‘tangata whenua’, the people of the land (Maori) and ‘tangata tiriti’, the people of the Treaty (Pakeha). There is the idea of a bicultural society within a multicultural society. Historian Michael King questions the concept of a bicultural society, because of the actual and desirable interpenetration of each culture with the other.
These latter changes imply that the Pakeha population of New Zealand have changed over time too, from an unquestioned attitude of superiority supporting dispossession, towards greater understanding and respect for Maori. Needless to say, this shift is not universal. Backlashes flash from time to time, racism is still endemic at a lower level.
Why the change? The 20th century was one in which the value supports of colonialism and racism were repeatedly challenged and partly demolished. The idea of the universality of human rights became firmly established. New Zealanders displayed an astonishing degree of civil protest in response to a rugby tour of an apartheid South African rugby team in 1981. This turned the attention of some to the racism in their midst. If the Treaty had not existed, there would be moral imperatives for these changes, but the treaty had standing in law, and this helped immensely.
What is yet to be done?Maori do not think full redress for past wrongs has been made. The Waitangi Tribunal is still plodding through hundreds of claims and will be for some time ahead. Maori think that the promise of self-determination over their lands, forests and treasures has not been fulfilled. There are several Maori propositions for a dual system of power-sharing, in the belief that this will constitute a just relationship. In moving towards a just and generous relationship, it is important that New Zealanders learn from an early age the history of the relationship, the progress of reconciliation so far, national values of justice, cooperation, generosity and rejoicing in diversity, in order that they might carry it forward.
In such a large-scale, long-term reconciliation process, it can be seen that all the elements of reconciliation run in parallel over time. The demand that society and the offending group (in this case one and the same) hear the grievances is not yet fulfilled. The Waitangi Tribunal has a long list of cases which will take years to clear. This demand also requires that the injuries against Maori as a people be recorded and learnt as a common history of New Zealand for generations ahead. The acknowledgement of these grievances (in this case as in many others, the heart of the process) must proceed as the grievances unfold. Apologies are formally proffered as settlements are arrived at. In 1996, Queen Elizabeth II apologised to the large tribal group who had been subjected to invasion by imperial troops and punitive land confiscations in 1860. Reparations proceed as settlements are made. Some of these are monetary, some are land returns, some involve rights to resources, such as fisheries, and some involve reversion to Maori names of places. There are more to come.
Has there been forgiveness by Maori of Pakeha harm? Hard to say. The process of acknowledgement, apology and reparation is not yet complete, for one thing. Another issue is that for some Maori, the harm of endemic racism continues. Yet many Maori-Pakeha relationships appear free of the burden of the past.
The process of reconciliation received a major setback in 2004 when, despite massive protests by Maori and others, and a contrary recommendation by the Waitangi Tribunal, the government passed a law assuming sovereignty over the foreshore and seabed of New Zealand, traditional Maori resource areas. This Act has been successfully challenged in court and awaits revision or repeal. The government is said to be moving toward a form of co-management, an interesting shift towards a Maori worldview of non-ownership. This issue, one imagines, must signal to Maori the need for continuing vigilance over transfer of land and resources. Yet, unlike the depradations of the 19th and 20th centuries, this one was halted in three years after passage, and may lead to working with a blending of values about the resources of Nature.
Further comments
The harm to indigenous people in colonising relationships backed by power to kill and other kinds of violence is very severe, and continues for centuries after the active phase of colonisation. For example, the appalling numbers of sad and hopeless Canadian Inuit boys who have committed suicide in the last decades can be linked to the history of harm in colonisation. The cumulative suffering is enormous. There are current situations in which the colonisation is active and acute, for example, Israeli colonisation of Palestine and Chinese colonisation of Tibet. When the acute harm is ended we can expect the time of healing to be very prolonged, a task to be carried out for many generations ahead, as in the case history above. This case illustrates the typical situation in which it took nearly a century and a half to begin to have grievances acknowledged formally. An intergenerational task must be carried forward by education and value transmission.
It is foreseeable that the century ahead of us will be one in which the impact of population growth, peak oil and climate change on sea level and food production is likely to cause much movement of peoples. There are no new territories to occupy, so those who move will necessarily move in on the land and resources of others. In many of these cases, the immigrant people will probably be the less powerful, vulnerable to resistance by the indigenous to use of their possibly scarce resources. Sea level rise causing Bangladeshis to move inland is one of the most worrying future projections. It is also conceivable that armed invasions could occur, particularly where land has been purchased by one state for food production in another. For example, China and the Gulf States, among others, are engaged in systematic very large land purchases in every continent for food provision to their populations.
We would do well to try to minimise future suffering by planning now to act on both the causes and effects of these foreseeable human movements. Better to learn the lessons of the suffering incurred by population movement in the past and apply them to prevention than to address centuries of suffering with reconciliation in the future.
Sources for this section were:
Consedine T., Consedine J. Healing our History: the challenge of the Treaty of Waitangi. (2nd edition) Penguin, 2005.
King, Michael. The Penguin History of New Zealand. Penguin, 2003.
King, Michael. Being Pakeha Now: Reflections and Recollections of a White Native. (2nd edition) Penguin, 2004.
Website of Network Waitangi Otautahi: www.nwo.org.nz

Well, if you got this far, you are a devoted reader, indeed! My congratulations! Of course, I welcome comments on this, as on other material.

More warm wishes,
Joanna

Grans and Gramps against Greenhouse Gases

2009-12-09T22:40:00.000-08:00

Dear Family and Friends,
Warmest greetings to all.
If the image placed here gets through to you, it's of our new group - Grans and Gramps against Greenhouse Gases. We were singing in Nelson on a Climate Action Day early December. The Climate Change Minister invited us to sing to a gathering he held the night before he left for Copenhagen next day. So we made it pretty pointed.

News of us.
We've continued to spend rather more time than we wish on designing this new house. Our plans have been sent to the Council for approval. Meanwhile, large machines reshape the land at the housesite. A few days ago our much-appreciated engineer, Gil, rescued ten tree-ferns from being crushed and replanted them near the house-to-be - our first garden plantings. We must now organise the brickmaking.
Jack continues to complete the huge hillside mulching project on the windbreak; he was shovelling bark today.
Jack also continues to spend a lot of time on the management of the project.
We've enjoyed guests in the last few weeks, including Jeff and his partner, Katy. Jeff made a film of the Grans group. You can see it on Youtube on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voZjohITqAs
Jeff is now in Brisbane, Australia, and then will fly to Canada to make a film with his buddies.
Jack and I continue to find things we want to write about. Jack just had an article published in the new US journal, 'Solutions', edited by Bob Costanza. I worked with Peace through Health colleagues in Denmark, Norway and Canada on a paper on the role of health workers in relation to violent conflict. I've contributed in a minor way to articles written by a new group of physicians, Ora Taiao or Climate and Health. This is a tremendously dedicated and active group, working over e-mail on climate change issues.
I've learned new things in this period. I attended a workshop on scything, bought a scythe and its appurtenances and now use it. One friend who took the workshop with me says it's as fast as a weed-eater doing the same job. It's an aerobic workout, and very pleasant exercise. It's best done in the early morning when you can hear the birds singing along with the swish-swish of the scythe.
The fragrance of the air at this time of year is wonderful. This morning's meditation was scented by clover, lavender and mint.
Recently I attended part of a workshop on the 'invisible structures' in communities - the people side. We discussed types of communities on a spectrum of communal to individualised, legal aspects, consensus decision-making and conflict management. I need to go much further in this area of knowledge.

Village issues Jack and I have done some work on the covenants of Atamai Village - those provisions that will be mandatory on residents.
The village is slowly growing. Jurgen and his wife and toddler have moved on to the land in two little buildings as a temporary home. One of them was previously Jeff's little home when he was with us. The earthworks for the home of Tracey and Craig Ambrose and their baby has now been completed, and we held a potluck there to celebrate.
We have potlucks about every two weeks. Everyone seems to enjoy them a lot.
One of the very big houses on the top of the ridge changed hands recently. The new folk want to be part of the village. I understand they can buy into the Commons. They have five kids and are expecting the 6th. All home-schooled.

Here is Jurgen Heissner's New Year summary of Atamai progress:
Here is a little stock taking from the Atamai project:

The land

The last months have seen tremendous progress on the land. Kerry started working for us two months ago with a focus on the Atamai landscaping and maintenance and Adrienne has been busy with huge compost piles for the community garden. The orchard is looking very tidy now and the trees are thriving.

The goat herd has settled in nicely at TeMara and Cheryl is producing some great cheese from the milk. Growing has indeed been a challenge this year with the weather but production is picking up now. The irrigation system in the Mediterranean garden is now nearly complete which will help a lot with the watering later on in the year.

Food security is very high on our list of priorities and is receiving the bulk of current investment in terms of commons and effort on the land. Not that it will impact New Zealand a lot but the world-wide food supply situation is deteriorating rapidly and we are very conscious of our responsibilities there for the village and beyond. An excellent summary of the situation can be found here but be warned, it’s not a pretty picture nor a good outlook.

Building projects & Sections

The first temporary accommodation is now on the land and the areas around them are being enthusiastically landscaped. One of the cottages is themed along a ‘French Country Style’ and the proud owners of the 10 square meter abode are tossing about the names ‘Versailles Cottage’ or ‘Dragonfly Cottage’ (lot’s of ponds nearby). No votes are taken J, humour or romance will decide.

Village community

Seven of the twelve sections available at this stage have now sold and two more sales are likely to close within the next few weeks from the pool of four parties keenly interested. We are now looking at mid 2010 or spring for the next batch of 12 to 18 to become available. We welcome Graeme and Kath from Auckland to the village!

Business Opportunities

The brick making operation will be set up next. Initially the bricks required for Jack & Joanna’s and Kyoko and Jurgen’s house and subsequent projects and then as an independent business. Our next priority is to the get a more commercial setup for the nursery operation going. We are already purchasing a lot of plants now and this will steadily increase as sections will get landscaped and gardening ramped up.

Shifting and Contacting us

Our offices are now housed in the engineering workshop at TeMara. To contact us there use the usual email address or the temporary phone number 03 526 7002.

Atamai has now got an official RD address and mailbox:

Atamai Village Council
Mytton Heights
Pangatotara
RD 1 Motuka 7196

Those of you how are looking at shifting onto the site soon and haven’t had their property numbers issued by council you can use this address as a c/o address in the meantime.

Earthworks

The earthworks for the first section (Lot 4) have now been completed and title issue is in the final stages. Our engineer is very proud to have received a ‘no issues whatsoever’ verdict from the Tasman District Council engineer. High quality indeed. Earthworks on Jack’s section are in progress and should be complete by mid January by which time the next six lots will be started.

Transition Town Motueka. Momentum has slowed a bit. Partly this is because I'm devoting a lot of time to Climate Change issues, and no one else does the coordinating role. I continue with the radio show, and have recently interviewed people about Ora Taiao, eco-architecture, and new developments in the Transition Town idea. The Scything workshop was a considerable success. Three sessions were filled. We used the meadows at Te Mara, our food-producing property, for this. The teacher was Austrian, a former airline pilot, who greatly prefers to farm and teach scything.

Global work. Copenhagen has come and gone, leaving a trail of disappontment in its wake. Now we must consider what to do.
I would like to put time into shaping ideas about organic farming as a significant nay of reducing emissions and sequestering carbon. I understand that, at a certain scale, this could make a large difference. Switzerland's government subsidises organic conversion and they now have a considerable proportion of organic farms. There needs to be a research side of this too.
Even further, the ideas being put forward by WEs Jackson of the Land Institute and Wendell Berry (one of my lifetime favourite writers of fiction, nonfiction and poetry) on perennial polyculture, closely related to Permaculture ideas, seem very important. The focus is soil preservation for long-term sustainability of agriculture, as well as carbon sequestration.
Next weekend we hope to get some of the most energetic of the local activists together for a strategy meeting. Some of the options to be reviewed are:
* calling the politicians to account
* public education linking climate change, economic growth, the money system, modes of agriculture
* focus on creating low-carbon alternative living, as in our sustainable village and Transition Towns
* focus on the money system and steady state economy
* focus on organic conversion plus no-till plus perennial crops in Permaculture design plus (perhaps) biochar use as carbon sequestration and soil (and civilisation) preserving strategies.
*focus on making personal carbon quotas workable and widespread

Warmest wishes to all the widespread readers of this blog.
Joanna

Images to go with next post

2009-11-10T22:52:00.000-08:00

Grandchildren, Jackson and Charlotte with Jack.

Grand-daughter Bianca.

Tom, the turkey, displaying to the goats and anyone else around.

Some of the dear little kids.

Text will follow in next post.
Warm wishes,
Joanna

2009-11-01T01:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends, First, the images.
At the top is the reason we went to Canada in August - to see our three grandchildren, and frolic with them on the grass. Jack is with Jackson and Charlotte, Josh and Tracey's kids, 7 and 4. The other is sweeet Bianca, 18 months, Penny and Jonah's daughter.

Next is Tom Turkey, a new arrival on our farm, Te Mara (the garden). He displays incessantly and gobbles continually. I don't know where he gets the energy.

He and his partner live with the goats, who have been busy giving birth to lots of kids. There are 15, and perhaps two to come. They are pretty, gentle, sweet little animals.

The last image, at the bottom of the page, is from a piece of street theatre several of us generated for the Global Day of Climate Action last weekend.
( I think these images have not succeeded, so I've sent them separately in another post. The image of the street theatre may have failed again - sorry.)

Now, let me organise myself a bit better.
A word or two about us.
We remain healthy and 'toughening up' a bit to farm labour. The huge job we undertook this week was to mulch the 'Hillside of 1000 Trees' we planted as a windbreak to the house we'll build. We're getting there, but there are a few creaks and groans in the evenings.

I reckon I'm moving toward qualifying as a New Zealander. Two iconic aspects of the national image are wearing gumboots, and being able to fix anything with number 8 wire. Tick both of those boxes. Add in this. For the street theatre piece, I was asked to play the former Prime Minister, Helen Clark. Of course, she has a pronounced NZ accent, and also a very deep voice. Thanks to Youtube for the coaching! I got a clap every time!

We've almost finished the design of our house. The architect is working on the drawings. Earthworks will begin in a few weeks. It will be built of pressed brick. The inside brick layer will be made of the earth here, if all goes well. The outside includes earth plus sawdust, and currently is only made on the north island, so we'll get it from there. The insulation will be wool, I think. It's passive solar oriented. We've designed the roof to acommodate the the solar hot water device, but the photovoltaic panels will be a separate installation. Attention has been paid to the thermal mass that will retain absorbed heat. There will be underfloor pipes, heated with water from the wood stove. This serves to cook, bake, provide hot water and central heating. The solar heated hot water will have supplementary heating if needed from an 'on-demand' gas heater. Water will be supplied by roof colection. There will be two large tanks downhill from the house. Grey water will drain to the orchard area. The gardens will have a Permaculture design, with perhaps more flowers than usual.

In thinking of the design of this house, we have considered it should last several centuries and accommodate many different families.

We have half resented needing to spend so much time on this. But I found I became deeply absorbed in the design process when I sat down to focus on it, and enjoyed it. Visually, the house is nothing special, quite plain. I hope it will be welcoming and comfortable for all who shelter in it over a long duration.
Global issues. Jack helped to edit Richard Heinberg's latest work, 'Waiting for a Miracle', just out. It's about the quantitative mismatch between demand for energy, and what will be available from renewable sources. It makes the point that conservation, learning to use less energy, is our best strategy.

Climate change has been my preoccupation over recent months. A friend, Katerina Seligman and I decided to give public seminars on the subject, so we had to learn a great deal fast. We also generated the street theatre piece illustrated below. In the photo we are performing it at a lovely country fair in the neaby village of Ngatimoti. The drama centres on the Kotuku, or White Heron, gardian spirit of Motueka. It weaves together Maori themes with a serious message, humour and the beauty of the great bird's slowly flapping its wings. We worked with a wonderful Maori playwright.

Katerina and I also plan to pull together a group of singing Grannies, modelled on Canada's Raging Grannies. We'll call ourselves Gutsy Grannies or Gumboot Grannies or something like that. We'll perform at Climate Change events,

I'm very pleased that a group of health workers, mainly public health doctors, have come together to form OraTaiao, or Climate and Health. They've already published a couple of articles in NZ's medical journal.

Transition Town Motueka Lots of gardening workshops going on. Rudolf Steiner's Biodynamic methods have a huge following in this part of the world. There is a workshop this weekend on that. I'm helping to organise a workshop on scything in a few weeks' time. It seems like a period of skill building.

Finally, Atamai Village At last, there is a real sense of forward movement. More than half the lots have been sold now - for the first phase of building. The earthworks on the first dwelling are to begin tomorrow. People are beginning to come together identifying with the village. Now we share a meal together every one or two weeks. These occasions are very pleasant, with kids running in and out of the adults. Craig and Tracey Ambrose host a pizza potluck
where they provide the pizza dough and the oven. Jurgen and Kyoko do a sushi potluck, where everyone brings a designated sushi ingredient, and Kyoko provides the nori. This was excellent.
Several couples are creating temporary dwellings on their piece of land while they build their houses. Some of the young couples are intent on doing a fair bit of the work themselves.
The cute little sleepout Jeff lived in while he was here will move across to the other side of the hill tomorrow, where it will become part of a cluster for Jurgen, Kyoko and 2 year-old Yuuki to live in while their house takes shape. They will build a Japanese-type house.

The Te Mara gardens are being readied for another season of planting.

So, that's life in Motueka this Spring. May the Kotuku keep us safe, and may we keep her safe.

Warmest wishes to all,
Joanna

Climate grief, family joy

2009-08-05T13:47:00.000-07:00

Dear Family and Friends,

The images here are of our prospective house site, in which you can see some of the recent tree planting (small pale green plastic rectangles on left), a recent chainsaw safety seminar involving all who are using these devices on the properties; and of sunrise from our house. On the plain you can see the lights of the town, Motueka.

I write to you from Auckland Airport, en route to see family and friends in Canada. Such mixed feelings accompany this voyage. Uppermost is longing to see loved ones, especially the little ones. Beneath that is awareness of the ethical conflict of flying in a time of dangerous climate change. I can tell myself that the thousand plus trees we’ve planted recently offset many such flights by usual calculations, but I know this is insufficient moral balance. Underneath this is fear that at some point, who knows how soon, it may become impossible to fly across the planet, or unaffordable. Perhaps it will still be possible to do it by boat, but when I priced the cost of this in 2007, it was unaffordable. So deep down is the awful thought, is this the last time?
News of the village
We are near to having titles available for sale. All that remains to be done is to do the earthworks to prepare the sites for building, and to put roads to them. Finances have recently become available to move ahead on this. A young couple, Tracey and Craig Ambrose, have moved to Motueka with their very new baby, ready to buy a site and begin their home. They bring lots of ideas, youthful energy, many skills, and experience living in an urban ecovillage – Earthsong in Auckland. They liked Earthsong, but realised they wanted land to grow food, so have come to Atamai. They will also value the balance of privacy and community that seems to be what Atamai will offer.
A significant amount of our time is used hosting people interested in Atamai. Many of them are couples with young children, which is very encouraging. All of them have impressive knowledge and skills to bring to an ecovillage, although the manual and practical skills they bring tend to be amateur rather than professional eg woodworking, gardening. A surprising number are involved in IT, probably because it’s a job that can be done from any site.
Jacques will begin Spring planting before long. We are trying to work out whether to plant for a food-box scheme or not. Jack and Jeff have been talking to a number of people with organic gardens to examine possibilities. We are still living to a fair extent on last season’s vegetables – potatoes and pumpkins of many varieties as the staples, with kale, broccoli and a little lettuce.
News of us.
We’ve got serious about building a house. The site is a few hundred metres from our present house, and with mainly mountain and river valley views, with a little segment of ocean. A corner of the pine forest must be cut down to enable clear sun on the solar panels to be erected. Unlike Canada, here this is regarded as a good thing. Pines are not indigenous, and are regarded by ecologists as a pest species. Of course they are regarded by plantation owners as a cash crop. These will be replaced by indigenous species of less height.
Jack and Jeff often work together felling, hauling and processing trees. Jeff also spends time helping the work at Te Mara, most recently tree-planting.
Jeff will remain at home while we travel, and will be joined by his friend, Katy from Brisbane soon. I have a feeling that he’ll receive many dinner invitations while we are away.
This is the rainy season in NZ, so we have done no tramping lately. It’s surprisingly cold in the early morning, often frosty fields are visible as I look down on the coastal plain at dawn. I light the fire and toast my toes as I drink my morning latte. By noon, however, I’ll be stripped to a T-shirt.
I continue to enjoy the Riverside choir. Recently we contributed to a sort of local opera to celebrate the Maori New Year, marked by the rising of the star formation, Pleiades over the horizon. It’s called Matariki, and is a time of reflection on the past year, looking ahead, and awareness of our oneness with Nature. Jeff and I celebrated it on the marae – the local Maori settlement. There was a formal welcome, or powhiri where our credentials of good faith were established and we were accepted on to the marae with speeches and song. It’s customary to respond with speech and song from the visitors too. This is an admirable aspect of Maori formalities – each speech is followed by a song. (Imagine if parliament ran this way – so much more pleasant than the present mixture of speeches, insults and taunts.) Then a wise young man talked to us about the meaning of Matariki (using powerpoint). A bell from the wharekai (foodhall) called us to the meal of traditional food, mussels, cockles, seaweed sauce, fried bread. It was quite a moving occasion.
In the evening, at Riverside, was the local version of an opera. A Maori dramatist had written a script based on the stories of the Waitaha – a pre-Maori people who practised radical non-violence and were massacred by the invading Maori. Local musicians, Maori and pakeha (non-Maori), sang and played, including our choir, which sang in Maori. Local choreographers led the dance. Jeff did the lights. I loved it.
Otherwise, my life has been partially taken over by Climate Change. This is partly because NZ was very late in setting its carbon emissions targets, in fact, still hasn’t announced them. So many of us have been engaged in intense advocacy through July. My friend, Katerina, and I have given talks wherever we can, and dialogued with councillors on the topic. This, of course, has intensified our reading, with the result that she and I became sadder and sadder as the month progressed, realising how terrible the situation is, and how low our chances are of averting dangerous runaway climate change. Grief was what we were feeling, for the passing of the world as we know it, and as we look at the damage and depletion our children and grandchildren will have to cope with.
We know that the targets, which will be announced soon, will be far too low to have a reasonable probability of doing the job. Seems to me this work will be with me for the rest of my life.
Of course, establishing the village is a version of this, with the intention of showing that life at a lower carbon and energy footprint, and less resource use in general, is quite attractive. But this must be combined with action at the political level to attempt the large-scale change necessary to make enough of a difference.
I send my love to the large network of friends and family reading this.
Joanna

Consent to proceed; a new house

2009-06-05T03:01:00.000-07:00

2009 June 6
Dear Blog Friends,
Sorry for a too-long silence. There is much news to report.
Progress of village development: We had a moment of jubilation and relief last month when we finally heard that we had clear District Council consent to go ahead with the first stage of the village project – 11 houses. It has been a long and costly process. Now we need to find ways to help the neighbours who objected understand that they will live with more beauty around them, not less. Under difficult conditions they might benefit greatly from the basic food production that is part of the village, but I suspect that understanding will not be meaningful at present. There are a number of young families near to making a decision to join the village at this time. It’s especially good that these are energetic and enterprising young people with kids. One couple in Auckland had their first baby two weeks ago. They’ll be here in 6 weeks.
There are still difficult steps ahead, the next being to put in roading access to some of the lots, but I feel hopeful about the prospects for this community.
Our house. We had been reluctant to plan a house for ourselves, feeling that it would absorb a great deal of time. But there are reasons it would be good for the development of the village, so we are moving in this direction. We were right about the time it consumes. There are fairly detailed specifications for houses in this project – on-site materials where possible, relatively small houses (~150 square metres), solar aspect, concrete slab for thermal mass, composting toilets, solar hot water, wood stove with water heating to flow into pipes in the concrete floor, gas rings for quick cooking.
We have chosen a site, on a ridge with very beautiful views of mountains to the west, now snow-capped, Motueka River Valley to the north, and, once some of the plantation pines are cut, the sea to the east. Winds blow from the south-west (where the snow lies on the mountains in the winter), so the first thing to be done is to plant a wind-break. This was done a few weeks ago, with the help of many friends and WWOOFers (Willing Workers on Organic Farms). One thousand trees and grasses, mainly native species whose names I don’t recognise, planted for graded heights so the wind will sweep over them. Gil, the engineer working with us, has been using the digger to construct a path above the wind-break. One day I took thermoses of tea and peanut butter cookies in baskets over to the site mid-afternoon. We sat on the ridge top with the team then working on the wind-break, sipping tea and discussing the merits of a steady state economy. Some of the WOOFers are very well-read young people.
Our Learning: I’ve done workshops in recent months on solar ovens and dehydrators, methods of natural building and on composting. The latter two were particularly fun. Natural building involved dancing in a heap of mud to mix the building material. Composting involved leaping around on a metre high pile to tramp down the straw layer. (See photos) In April I went to the North Island to attend a conference on Community Currencies. Four of us went in a friend’s car. She got free passage on the Cook Strait Ferry as she did a singing gig in the ferry bar on the trip. I read a fair bit on the structure and reform of money before going to this. I’ve also read a fine book on organic gardening by our friend Adrian Myers – ‘Organic Futures’. I’ve just reviewed this book, as I liked it very much. Jack and I both read ‘Right Relationships: Building a Whole Earth Economy ‘ by Canadian economists Peter Brown and Geoffrey Garver. Jack reviewed this one. We both think highly of its framing economic activity in terms of our fundamental relationship with the Earth. (If you’d like either of these reviews, we’ll send them to you.)
I recently spent five days in Wellington staying with dear friends, Archie and Lynsie Kerr – retired physicians with a long history in IPPNW and much else. I had a teaching gig at the medical school. This coincided with back-to-back conferences on Pacific ways of reconciliation, and another on the nuclear weapons issue. Malcolm Fraser, a former Prime Minister of Australia was a keynote speaker at the latter conference. At 79, he’s one of the growing number of very senior statesmen who are deeply concerned about the unfinished messy business of the 20th century – getting rid of the abomination of nuclear weapons. He feels it’s very urgent. He pointed out that with the current financial crisis, any sitting government is unlikely to be granted a second term. This means that we may have just 3½ years to take advantage of the much more favourable climate created by Obama to achieve a Nuclear Weapons Convention.
Radio show I’ve continued my Transition Town Show every fortnight. Recent topics have been organic gardening, composting, intergenerational debt.
Village livelihoods We’ve been actively discussing how to create livelihoods from the productiveness of the Te Mara gardens (See photo). Jams, soups, juices, dried fruit and veges have all been suggested. Of course we produced pesto which won considerable approval in the summer. This morning, Jack, Jeff and I went to the Nelson Market to see how people organised their offerings and if there were any unfilled niches. It’s a delightful market, colourful and fun. We met two different friends at the coffee shop.
Jack and Jeff are well. Jack is far too busy with a myriad aspects of the project and has very little time for leisure. He does enjoy it if he can combine the very demanding intellectual work involved with physical work like tree-planting or tree-cutting. Jeff tried out the new road up the ridge cut by Gil, our engineer, on the bike this evening, carrying a box of beer. Unhappily the battery assist didn’t work and Jeff had to push the bike up the ridge – heavy work. This morning my two guys did their lumberjack thing again.
Music. The marimba group returned to its full complement of players and no longer needed a trainee, so my marimba career has been cut short. My friend, the wonderful elder jazz pianist, Emery, continues to try to teach me jazz. I’m a bad pupil. Next week I plan to begin with the Riverside (neighbouring community) choir. I love the music they select – world music with a bias to Maori.
We’ll visit Canada in August, staying with Jonah and Penny in our old home. We hope to see some of you then.
Love,
Joanna

2009-03-29T20:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Family and Friends,

First, the images: a picnic of Friends of Atamai, by the pond. One day we hope that the community centre will be near this pond. Two of the kids, lu and Rimu, exploring the pond. Lu has decided to dress as a girl for the day. Me doing an interview for The Transition Town Show in the studio of the community radio station in Motueka.

A few months ago, Jack did an interview for Worldchanging Canada, with Hassan Masum. I've edited it a little and copied it here, as it gives a very full picture of the aspirations of the village.

Before you get started, I'll just let you know that we are well and hppy, very much enjoying having Jeff here. To celebrate the visit of our friend Doug REberg, adn Jeff's arrival, we did a four day trip to the west coast of the South Island - dramatic rocky coast, gorgeous rainforest, cut by many rivers and waterfalls, limestone caves. We're constantly challenged by needing to learn more about a myriad things - at the level of gardening and managing the land, in the Transition Town work, and, as always, at national and international levels in issues that matter to us. For me, Afghanistan and Gaza are painful concerns, and for Jack, his work with the International Forum on Globalization continues.

Worldchanging Interview with Hassan Masum.
Hassan Masum: Jack, Atamai Village sounds like an interesting concept. What's your 60-second pitch for it?Jack Santa-Barbara: Thanks, Hassan. Well, Atamai Village is a project for anyone seriously committed to contributing to a sustainable way of living as we face the challenges of peak oil, climate change, and a host of other ecological challenges. Our notion of sustainability is based on ecological principles of living within the limits of the planet, and as much as possible, within the limits of the village site itself.

Using a permaculture design we are looking at capturing the existing energy flows on the site (solar, wind, rain and soil), and rather than wasting them as now happens, putting them to good use in meeting the critical needs of village residents. The project is about creating ways of living that are satisfying and enjoyable, while respecting the limits of what the local and surrounding ecosystems can provide.

Considerable research and thought has been put into the design phase of the project. We anticipated the current economic meltdown, we expect it to continue rather than rebound, and we feel that settlements like Atamai will be absolutely essential to living well on a planet that has been pushed to its ecological limits.

HM: Let's see how that would work in practice. Suppose I were to apply and be accepted to move into the village: what are the top few advantages I would experience in my daily life?
JSB: First of all, let me clarify that it is not a matter of applying and having to meet some specific set of criteria to become part of the village. It is an open village concept - anyone who shares the vision and is willing to abide by the covenants is welcomed. We are hoping that people will largely self select.

It is also important to clarify that the village is in the very formative stages - the land has been purchased, considerable research has been done to inform the design process, and a formal application has been made to local council for the first phase of 11 dwellings - later planned to grow to about 40. So there is still lots of opportunity to participate in the design and development process if someone is interested.

The area is physically very attractive - a bike ride to the coast (and neighbouring town of Motueka), surrounded by snow-capped mountains in winter. This is the sunniest part of New Zealand - summers are in the low 20's (Celsius) during the day, and low teens at night. Winters are the wetter season (about 1000mm of rain a year), with very few frost days and the temperature getting into double digits most days - all in all, pretty pleasant.

As for advantages of living in the village - let me list a few:

You will enjoy food security - the permaculture design of the village area itself, and the adjoining garden areas and orchards will mean healthy, local organic food is available year round.

You will enjoy energy security - firstly because your home and the other infrastructure of the village will be frugal by design, requiring minimal energy inputs; also by design, the energy inputs required will be provided by renewable sources - the sun, the rain and the soil.

You will enjoy water security, as the rainfall captured on roof tops and in ponds and dams will provide for domestic and garden use; the dwelling grey water systems will ensure good use is made of all water resources; adequate water storage for fire safety will also be included in the design.

I emphasize these advantages, although many people might take them for granted - in a future challenged by climate change and energy descent, these basic necessities will become increasingly difficult to secure.

HM: Aside from the security aspect, can you be more specific about any positive points I would experience if I moved there?JSB: Yes, there will be many other advantages of the village as well:

You wouldn't have to commute to work because you would likely work in the village.

Your home will be low maintenance and heated with a passive solar design - so very efficient to keep comfortable.

You would stay healthy by walking or cycling around the village sites.

You would have use of village equipment to transport goods - eg a small electric vehicle for hauling goods or people if necessary.

If you need to travel outside the village, you could make use of the village car sharing program - greatly reducing your transportation costs.

As a villager, you are automatically a member of the village trust and participate in decisions about how the village commons are developed and managed.

You will be living in a community where people share some common values about sustainability, but where diversity is embraced and where individual initiative and perspectives are appreciated.

You will be able to enjoy the many amenities the village provides - hiking trails, shared equipment for work and play, recreational ponds and fields, a community centre with sophisticated communications equipment.

You will have a direct say in decisions about where you live, play, and likely work.

HM: It certainly sounds attractive. A number of potential disadvantages come to mind, though, such as cost, remote location, extra responsibilities vs a traditional dwelling, and risk of an untried model. How would you address these? JSB: You've got lots of questions there - and good ones. Let me take them one by one.

Costs are always an issue, but what we are striving for is diversity, as there would be in any traditional village - only we hope this one will be more egalitarian and without a hierarchical structure. So while the costs of the individual land titles will vary and be comparable to similar titles elsewhere, we are also looking for ways that can involve people with limited financial resources.

Rental accommodation will be one option, or a lease to rent approach. We are also looking at co-housing, as well as a sweat-equity option. We are very aware that a genuine village will not work if only people with financial resources live here, but who do not have any real skills that will be essential to sustain a functional village economy. While a final decision has not yet been made, we are looking at reserving a certain number of titles for key trades people - carpenters, electricians, plumbers, permaculturists, etc - to ensure the village has room for these folks. We recognize the need to be creative with attracting people with the necessary skills, and given the current economic downturn, the village actually presents an attractive option for people with these skills, as the village becomes a base for them to both live and work.

The site is less than a half hour bike ride from the neighboring town of Motueka - it's small, but we have been really surprised at the variety of activities and events here. Not only do we have terrific Indian and Thai restaurants, two movie theatres (one offering alternative movies), and two bookstores, but there have also been string quartets, a guitar-violin duo, wonderful marimba performances, gospel choirs, Tibetan flutist, etc. And this is just Motueka - in the neighboring town of Nelson (just under an hour by car) there are regular arts and film festivals, and any products and services you would expect in a town of 50,000.

If you need a Toronto or Vancouver to be happy, this is probably not the place for you. But we are not feeling deprived in any way by the rural character of the area. This area has been a draw for alternative lifestyle people for decades, so there are a lot of interesting folks around. And because the population is relatively small, we have access to politicians at all levels.

You also ask about the extra responsibilities associated with being part of the trust. If someone sees this as a disadvantage, then the village is not for them. If someone sees this as an opportunity to be part of their community, contribute to its well-being, and actually enjoy the working through of issues with like-minded people, then involvement in the trust is an advantage. In the village, people will take responsibility for local decisions and their family's well-being.

Your question about an untried model is also an interesting one. If the climate, energy and economic changes we anticipate come to pass, much of our civilization will be going through considerable upheaval - many people will be in untried waters. The size and structure of the village trust makes the adaptations needed more manageable - local people making local decisions about local issues. We think that this will eventually evolve as the most sensible response to changes that will be difficult to anticipate. The village model provides an opportunity to get ahead of the curve and begin practicing, before driven to it by dire necessity - village life is how most people lived sustainably for most of human history.

Let me also come back to the question about isolation, in terms of New Zealand rather than just the rural setting. Again, this is not for everyone, but the geographic isolation of New Zealand has some distinct advantages, along with the features of a relatively small population (4+ million) and the capacity to produce food and fibre. The country is capable of being self sufficient in essentials - a good thing in a uncertain world. Because it is physically difficult to reach, we will likely not see large numbers of environmental or economic refugees (although New Zealand has taken in many people from the south Pacific whose islands seem to be disappearing). And with a maritime climate, many of the direct impacts of climate change will be reduced. The relative isolation will also push for greater self sufficiency - before economic globalization took off a few decades ago, New Zealand did most of its own manufacturing, and that is possible again.

Whether the "potential disadvantages" you suggest are in fact disadvantages depends on many things - personal tastes, to some extent. But we see some big changes coming for industrialized societies as we know them - changes triggered by more severe climate patterns and the consequences of climate change, energy descent, and the economic turmoil that is likely to ensue from these two major developments. We also think that the current pattern of industrialized societies are unsustainable - even the so called "green economy" initiatives now being promoted. We take ecological limits seriously, and are looking for ways to respect them while living comfortably. We think we will all be forced to face these challenges sooner rather than later, and feel that the sooner we struggle with these challenges, the better off we will all be - this is really the key vision of the village.

HM: Quite a diverse range of factors at different scales, from personal tastes to global trends.

What have you learned from previous intentional communities, regarding what works and what doesn't?

JSB: I should first say that Atamai is not an intentional community in the traditional sense, and we generally don't describe it that way. It is only an intentional community in the sense that there will be covenants to support the ecological design of the village infrastructure and the dwellings.

Most intentional communities are organized around shared social issues - religious beliefs or philosophies. Atamai is organized around diverse ways of living sustainably. A central issue will be creating businesses in the village that fulfil this goal - whether it is organic food production, sustainable forestry, or even an engineering operation geared toward appropriate technologies. We would like to support and encourage these types of sustainable businesses that focus on providing essential services.

Over a year ago, we had a facilitated visioning exercise. It was initially designed for interested parties to articulate their ideal village. In the process it became evident that, while there were many common elements, individuals' ideal villages were very idiosyncratic. It is unrealistic to meet individual ideals. So we stepped back from the question of what is the ideal village from individual perspectives, and refocused on what the common elements were.

What we came up with was the focus on the broad issues of sustainability, social justice and aesthetics - and a healthy respect for individual differences, and acceptance of those differences. In fact, we see the diversity of interests and orientations as strengthening the community, as long as the basics are respected - and we hope to accomplish that with the basic design features, and the formal covenants.

HM: Let's focus in on your own personal story. How did the idea for this village come about, and what motivated you to get involved?JSB: After a friend gave me a copy of Herman Daly's "For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future" back in the mid 80's, I became very interested in [ecological economics], and came to see it as a very important approach to many of the major challenges humanity is facing. So at the end of 1999 I sold the company I had founded some 20 years earlier, and immersed myself in ecological economics. It led me to view climate change and peak oil (along with a number of other major challenges - see my website Sustainable Scale) as critically important issues that we were not dealing with in any reasonable way.

The role of relocalizing the global economy became a unifying theme for moving toward a solution. If part of the problem was ecological overshoot driven by a focus on profits through economic globalization that only exacerbates inequity, then part of the solution had to be integrating the economy and the environment at the local level. My understanding of the implications of peak oil (and other fossil fuels sooner rather than later) made it clear that we were going to be forced to relocalize - whether we want to or not. Our entire industrialized civilization is based on cheap oil. And that is coming to an end, despite the current slump in oil prices.

When you understand peak oil, and the issue of net energy, and the time and effort it will take to reorient our complex societies to these new realities (along with the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss), you realize we are already behind schedule by a significant margin.

The relocalization movement was sticking its head up in a variety of ways - The Natural Step for Communities movement is perhaps one of the older versions of it. More recently, Michael Shuman's work on the benefits of relocalizing the economy, and the relocalization work of the Post Carbon Institute, have all brought relocalization more to the foreground. And the Transition Towns initiatives inspired by Rob Hopkins has a lot of vigour right now.

All of these more recent versions are in addition to what has been happening with the intentional communities and ecovillage and co-housing movements that have been going on for some time. I see all of these as different expressions of the need to reconnect with each other and with the natural world on which we depend - each with its own emphasis and perspective.

While I had been working at the national and international NGO level on these global issues, progress was slow and frustrating. So I decided to rebalance my activism portfolio if you will and put more energies and thought into relocalization. I looked around for a project to get involved with and came across the Atamai project that had already begun in New Zealand. I visited the project and worked with the group for a month, then went back to Canada to discuss the issue with family and friends.

After a lot of discussion we decided to give it a go and make the move to New Zealand and contribute to Atamai. Aside from the benefits of New Zealand, the Atamai project had a unique feature that added to the attraction - the idea of creating a traditional village settlement. Humanity has endured in these traditional village structures for millennia and across continents, so there must be something useful about village life that we need to learn more about.

A lot of thought and research had already gone into the design for Atamai when I arrived, so my involvement has been more with the implementation - working with the local council, beginning to market the project, etc. There is still quite a bit to do so if there are people interested in what we are doing, there is still considerable scope to contribute to many aspects of making the village a success.

HM: It sounds like you decided you could do more good through building an actual community than through advocacy, and perhaps get more fulfilment at a personal level as well.

Could you say more about your personal decision to "give it a go"? How specifically did you move from thinking about the idea to taking the leap from Canada to New Zealand? What factors went into your decision?JSB: Well we don't see it as an "either or" situation. We are still involved with advocacy at national and international levels, but whereas those areas were where we spent most of our time before, now they are clearly secondary to our main focus of the village. There is no doubt in our minds that advocacy at the larger levels is essential -but we also believe a lot of the solutions are local and providing a local working model is a way of connecting the two. It is not a matter of fulfillment as much as where the need is greatest and we feel we can have the most impact.

At a very personal level there is another element at work - our family - grown children and our grandkids. We think there is a more than even chance that industrialized societies are unravelling and that there will be considerable chaos - economic and social. So having a sustainable community - frugal by design I like to say - plus a supportive community, is one way of providing security in an uncertain future. So aside from seeing the issues from a broad societal perspective, there are very personal concerns for the safety and well-being of our extended family. One son will be joining us early in the new year, and we remain hopeful that the other two will in the future.

The area where the village is being planned is a Transition Town, and there are three Transition Towns nearby, so we feel it is an encouraging sign that communities around us are concerned with the same issues and looking at relocalizing existing communities. Although our experiment is starting de novo, I suspect we will learn a lot from each other.

We don't pretend to know what the future will hold - except that there is likely to be much more uncertainty just about anywhere you look. And given the range of uncertainty - from just requiring minor adaptations to a general breakdown of modern civilization - we thought a risk management approach made the most sense. If we believe the future will have some dramatic changes but we cannot predict with any certainty when they will occur and just how dramatic they might be, then the best approach is one where we do things that will leave us better off regardless of what happens.

We think we are doing that. The sustainable village as planned will provide considerable resilience against the vagaries of climate change and energy descent. So if it happens we will be well placed. If the changes take a long time to develop and lots of adaptations occur in the broader society, then we will still have provided a demonstration of how to live comfortably and well with a much reduced footprint - and live in a beautiful place to boot. At the same time, we continue to be involved at the national and international levels on these issues, so there is nothing escapist or isolationist about what we are doing.

HM: That seems like a carefully considered approach. It's interesting, though, that you had to move halfway around the world to find the right community. Shouldn't it be relatively easy to set up a similar community in Canada?JSB: There is an ecovillage movement in Canada, but it is relatively young and there are not a large number of examples. Some are quite small groups - a dozen or so families - and many are clearly counterculture in orientation. All of these initiatives are important experiments and should be nurtured and supported. Due to municipal regulations, it is not always easy to up the structure for an ecovillage. There is a group in Caledon, Ontario that took 10 years to get local council approval for the dwelling design they wanted.

But the local authorities are only one of the challenges to establishing a new type of human settlement - and these challenges exist in New Zealand as well as in Canada. I think it could be done in Canada, and I would encourage more people to get involved.

Our reasons for choosing New Zealand had less to do with the ecovillage movement in Canada than with the idea of what North America would be like if there was a major economic and social unravelling. As the epicenter of the high consumption lifestyle, the shocks of climate change and energy descent are likely to be resisted in North America more forcefully than in other parts of the world. My intuition is that North America may be one of the last places to voluntarily make the adaptations to a sustainable lifestyle. I suspect the notion of entitlement to the "good life" is too ingrained to be relinquished in favor of a comfortable and sustainable frugality.

I don't know what will happen in the future, but it is easy enough to envision a very shaken North America - with significant unemployment, economic depression, social unrest, and increased violence. Concentrations of people in too many large cities could make it difficult to adapt with the changes that are needed - more local food production, focus on the real economy of essential goods and services (now less than 10 % of the overall economy), supportive communities working together to solve problems, and so on. It is not at all clear to me that the number of people now living in North America is sustainable, even with a localized economy - one not dependent on large imports from other countries.

Again, I am not trying to make a prediction about North America, but merely identifying what I think could happen there. If there is any reasonable chance that such a scenario could play out, I would rather be working elsewhere to develop a sustainable form of human settlement that might have some chance of succeeding. Not that New Zealand is a utopia by any means - there are environmental as well as economic and political difficulties here too. But the scale is so different that it makes a difference in terms of the impact you can have, and in some ways it is a simpler society to deal with. Also, the fact that it is an island nation means that it is not far from most people's consciousness that they have to be relatively self-sufficient.

The reasons we ended up in New Zealand are because we first spelled out the criteria for where it might be feasible to successfully establish a sustainable settlement of some sort. We wanted a place where a lot of energy did not have to go into keeping warm. We wanted a place that had a biocapacity surplus - that is, where the lifestyle consumption is less than what the land can provide. While the New Zealand ecological footprint is high by world standards, New Zealand does have a surplus.

We also wanted a place with a small population - just in case there are large migrations of people searching for food and jobs, as in the Great Depression. We wanted a place with a tradition of a parliamentary democracy. Ideally, we also wanted a place that had a tradition of exploring alternative lifestyles - so there would be lots of local examples to learn from, as well as to provide mutual support. If you search the planet for those particular criteria (which others may or may not share), then there are not a lot of places to consider.

These are clearly very personal decisions and I am not suggesting everyone should move to New Zealand. But I do hope knowing about what we are doing and why will encourage others to take these issues seriously and work out what they think is best for their families. Everyone's risk assessments and risk management approaches will be different - and this is as it should be.

HM: Could you expand more on how you engage globally while acting very locally in this way?What strategies and tools do you suggest to others in a similar position? And what role, if any, do you see for the internet and video-conferencing?

JSB: Both Joanna and I remain active with organizations we have been involved with in the past. Jo is a long time member of Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and the Canadian chapter of that organization, Physicians for Global Survival. We are both involved with the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University (a peace through health project in Afghanistan), as well as Transcend: A Peace and Development Organization; each of us is engaged in writing books with the founder of Transcend, Jo on reconciliation, and me on peace business. I am also on the board of a couple of environmental NGOs, and last year wrote a monograph on biofuels for one of them, the International Forum on Globalization. Both of us also continue supervision of students from various universities, and Jo has been invited to do some guest lectures in Wellington later in the year.

I guess one of the lessons here is that you don't have to disengage from many of the activities you are already engaged in- many of these are not location dependent. And if the organizations you are involved with are truly international, then you have a readymade network wherever you go. While we may not have the same face to face contact with former colleagues, the histories we have with them remain meaningful. And internet with video calls and conferencing can go a long way to staying involved.

Another activity that is planned is that the village will engage in educational work. This will be both onsite, as well as via the internet. This educational work is part of the mission of the trust that is developing the village. That is one of several reasons for planning a major communications facility within the village. In our wilder moments, we envision consulting on developing sustainable villages in other locations.

Another aspect of the larger-picture connectivity is that international experts actually come to our area. Last night, we had our second dinner in as many weeks with two Transition Town trainers from the UK who are on a world tour of existing and potential transition towns. Today. we had lunch with a local colleague who spent several weeks at Schumacher College last year and is planning to return there for more workshops later this year. We discussed his giving a public lecture when he returns. A few weeks ago, a local colleague who is involved with the World Health Organization and looking at the relation between climate change and human health on a global level led a discussion over dinner, along with a visiting Australian member of the IPCC on the climate - health connection.

The internet also plays a continuing role in our connecting with colleagues over proposals to the new US administration, as well as formulating and endorsing petitions on a variety of issues.

So you can see we have no sense of being isolated or removed from the "broader society." I think it is a bit of an illusion that one has to be in any particular place to remain active globally - indeed, it is an illusion to assume we can act "globally." We can only engage with specific issues - some of which are local and some of which are elsewhere. But, other than for strictly local issues, engagement can be done from anywhere, even the sun-drenched hills of Motueka.

Recipes for pesto and terra preta

2009-02-23T01:16:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends and Family,
There is lots happening in our proto-village. The photo shows what our house looked like one day last week. On the left, Gil (project engineer) and Jack are conferring about something. On the right, Cheryl and Jacques (land manager) and Amala (resident part-time worker) are stripping leaves off basil. This was a trial run. We worked out our recipe - basil, garlic, walnuts, Parmesan cheese,lemon juice, olive oil, salt. On Friday we're going to make a LOT of pesto. We'll use Riverside's big kitchen to do it. On Sunday we'll sell it at the local market (I hope) and also perhaps, other outlets.

Another enterprise began today. A huge amount of intellectual work went into devising a recipe for soil amendment, based partly on ancient terra preta of the Amazon. This involved biochar, compost and soil.. Our recipe includes biochar, rock-dust, composted bark, seaweed, blood and bone and Effective Microorganisms. Jeff will pick this up as a business. Two new professorships have been funded at one of NZ's universities (Massey) to study the properties and manufacture of biochar. I've begun a dialogue with one of the engaged academics around questions I have about the large-scale production of biochar. This is being promoted as climate change mitigation. It's a controversial issue.

Our son Jeff arrived a few days ago and is rapidly orienting himself to what is in many ways a new world. He, like us, is mourning the loss of friends and family, and is also excited and happy to forge a pathway for himself in this new world.

For the rest of this blog, let me introduce you to aspects of this biochar controversy. It's very interesting indeed. My friend, Metta Spencer, editor of 'Peace Magazine', asked me if I'd write on this topic. She kindly agreed to my using the essay in this blog.

I'll sign off here, and hope you enjoy exploring this fascinating issue.

Warmest wishes to all,
Joanna

Gardening to mitigate climate change
Or
Can biochar save the world?

James Lovelock, remarkable for his just-in-time discovery of the ozone hole, and then for his fruitful Gaia hypothesis (that the Earth is a complex interacting system which self-regulates to preserve life), was recently interviewed on mitigation of climate change . At nearly 90, he pulls no punches. It is too late to contain carbon emissions, he says. Trying to sequester carbon dioxide in underground caverns is a waste of time, and there is little to be hoped for from alternatives to fossil fuel energy.

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their
agricultural waste -- which contains carbon that the plants have spent
the summer sequestering -- into non-biodegradable charcoal, and
burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty
quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite
fast.

What? And we’ve been agonizing over fossil fuel emissions, carbon tax, alternative energy and so on? We just have to bury charcoal? Let’s examine this proposal, beginning with the carbon cycle.

Carbon cycle
Two of the greenhouses gases threatening the health of the biosphere as they accumulate in the atmosphere are carbon molecules – carbon dioxide and methane . Methane is 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide in its global warming action. The third main component of greenhouse gases is nitrous oxide (8% and 298 times as potent), which we will discuss later. Carbon in various forms resides in the deep layers of the earth; in the surface, biologically active soil; in the ocean, both deep and shallow levels; in the layer of plant and animal material on the surface of the earth; and in the atmosphere.

In the deep layers of the earth and of the ocean, there is little movement of carbon, except when humans unearth it as fossil fuels and send it into the atmosphere. Between the atmosphere and the shallow ocean, the soil and the living beings of the biosphere, there is continual exchange of carbon. This is the carbon cycle. Our problem is that human activity has altered the carbon cycle in ways that have increased atmospheric carbon. Carbon dioxide and methane, together with water vapour and nitrous oxide, act to trap radiant sun energy near the Earth’s surface. This is causing climate change.

Human impact on carbon cycle
The human activity contributing to this change is:

• Burning fossil fuels, sending carbon into the atmosphere
• Deforestation (reduction of volume of trees whose living matter holds a large amount of carbon stable for tens or hundreds of years)
• Exposure of bare soil, leading to soil carbon returning to the atmosphere faster. Tilling the soil speeds up this process.
• Grazing of millions of domestic animals, most of whom produce large quantities of methane due to their mode of digestion. Soil degradation with loss of carbon also occurs.

It looks as if our modes of growing food, feed for animals, fuel and fibre are part of the problem. It’s not only burning fossil fuels. Our forestry and agricultural methods need to be part of the solution. Stopping deforestation, returning land to ecosystem restoration, ‘no till’ agriculture, new methods of grazing and animal management that mitigate the worst greenhouse gas effects, and especially organic methods of food production are important parts of problem-solving. These will all keep more carbon in the soil and in living organisms and less in the atmosphere.

But Lovelock and others suggest we can go much further in restoring carbon cycle proportions (between soil, living organisms and atmosphere) that support life as we know it. The idea is to turn agricultural waste, which otherwise would decay and release carbon to the atmosphere, into charcoal, which is highly concentrated carbon, and bury it. Carbon in this form is relatively non-biodegradable, and remains stable for thousands of years. It would be the equivalent of returning to the earth some of the carbon we’ve mined and put in the atmosphere.

Biochar
This form of carbon is called ‘biochar’. It is made by burning organic (mainly plant) material at a low temperature with little oxygen. Pre-Columbian Amazonians made biochar by burning plant material in pits covered with earth. They then mixed it with compost and soil to create what European colonists called ‘terra preta’, or dark earth. They were not attempting to reduce greenhouse gases, so why did they do this?

Biochar has numerous benign properties the Amazonians made use of: it increases availability of soil nutrients, thus reducing the need for fertilizer and increasing productivity; it helps retain water; it reduces deforestation, because by converting from ‘slash and burn’ to ‘slash and char’, soil fertility remains satisfactory in a given site for much longer. And, it turns out, it decreases emissions of methane and nitrous oxide, the other greenhouse gases. In modern kilns, the manufacture of biochar can produce both oil and gas used for energy purposes. Several different technologies are under trial in low income countries to power cooking stoves and ovens, as well as to enrich soil. One type uses gas from the making of biochar to power cooking stoves. Another type uses small household stoves to both make biochar and cook food . These endeavours may increase human health by reducing indoor smoke from inefficient open wood fires.

Beyond soil enrichment needs, can carbon be buried in the earth at a scale that would make a difference to atmospheric carbon? According to Sara Scherr and Sajal Sthapit in the 2009 State of the World Report ,

There is a global production potential of 594 million
tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in biochar
per year, simply by using waste materials such
as forest and milling residues, rice husks,
groundnut shells, and urban waste. Far more
could be generated by planting and converting
trees…

Advocates calculate that if biochar additions were applied
at this rate on just 10 percent of the world’s
cropland (about 150 million hectares), this
method could store 29 billion tons of CO2-
equivalent, offsetting nearly all the emissions from fossil fuel burning.

Metta Spencer, editor of this magazine, has pointed out the huge amount of wood biomass (living and recently living material) in trees destroyed by the pine beetle in western Canada and the US. Conversion to biochar and use as soil amendment would be a large-scale process which could be a very significant contribution to mitigation of climate change and to impending unemployment expected from the global economic depression.

Four cautions must be borne in mind: firstly that making biochar on this scale by modern methods would require enormous investment in kilns in all agricultural areas of the globe. Considering the many co-benefits, including poverty alleviation, this could be considered an excellent investment. There are many current projects running on exactly these assumptions. (See sidebox) If biochar were made by the ancient methods, some of its benefits would be retained, but the potential for energy generation would be lost.

Sidebox:
In Egypt, over 20 million tonnes of rice straw are burned annually after the harvest, contributing to air pollution. The ash residue increases soil salinity, decreasing fertility. Researchers from the University of Mansura in Egypt and the University of Copenhagen are working on a rice straw gasifier which will produce fuel gas (syngas) and biochar. The gas will power flatbread baking ovens, and the biochar will be returned to the fields to increase soil fertility and water retention. This project will involve five villages.
The Mongolian Biochar Initiative is working with small-scale herders, vegetable growers, women farmers and forestry workers at an individual and community level. The aim is to produce biochar to increase income, improve soil fertility and combat global warming. They are using family level low technology biochar production units based on feedstock common to rural Mongolia. The hope is to reduce desertification currently affecting the land. There is also the intention to make the stoves suitable for cooking and to replace current methods of using wood and dung for cooking and heating. The cleaner burning stoves will also be introduced into urban areas where currently wood burning causes serious smog in the winter months. {end of sidebox}

The second caution is that continued soil fertility depends on nutrients being returned to the soil that would be burned in biochar production. There is current research aiming to understand what proportions of plant material can be turned to biochar without incurring deficiencies. The New Zealand government has funded two professorships in biochar, one to pursue its behaviour in soil, and one to advance knowledge of the process of turning plant material to biochar. The long-term soil fertility effects of modern biochar are not yet known.

Thirdly, the dynamics of charcoal-humus mix are not well understood. A ten year experiment with buried carbon in boreal forests showed more rapid decomposition of humus and release of below-ground carbon in carbon dioxide, thus partially offsetting the benefits of biochar as a long-term carbon sink. In addition, it is not yet clear that modern biochar remains as stable as Amazonian biochar.

Fourthly, to produce enough biomass to make a difference to atmospheric carbon may mean land use conversion, for example forest clearing in order to plant ‘energy crops’.

Clearing of forests or grasslands to make way for
energy crop monoculture results in large quantities of emissions, reduces future sink
capacity and causes further collapse of ecosystems and the biodiversity on which we
depend for climate regulation. As widespread freshwater shortages are predicted, the
regulation of rainfall by healthy forests and soils becomes increasingly critical, and the
allotment of water for irrigation of energy crops increasingly unsustainable.

In addition, such land conversion may displace indigenous people from so-called ‘marginal lands.

We must note that there are large corporate interest involved in the promotion of biochar; they are doing so before all the data are in. Approaches to the issue from these directions are likely to lack a broad ecological perspective, and risk being a replay of the biofuel mistakes in adverse ecological and human impacts.
.

Biochar has some prestigious supporters. Besides Lovelock, Tim Flannery, Professor of Earth Sciences at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia and author of The Weathermakers said recently,

Biochar may represent the single most important initiative for humanity’s environmental future.

Nitrogen cycle
Now we must return to the third greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.
It is nearly 300 times as potent in climate change effects as carbon dioxide but is present in smaller quantities. Fossil fuel burning has resulted in a 6 or 7-fold increase in oxides of nitrogen (including nitrous oxide) in the atmosphere. Other increases have been caused by manufactured agricultural fertilization (a major effect), burning plant material, cattle management methods. Nitrous oxide not only acts as a greenhouse gas, but affects human health in two other ways. It depletes the ozone layer (thus causing skin cancer) in the upper atmosphere, and in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, it increases ozone concentrations (thus contributing to respiratory illness.) This is a pretty bad actor. How do we respond?

Getting nitrous oxide out of the atmosphere
We need to stop burning fossil fuels and stop making artificial nitrogen fertilizers. Once again, organic horticulture practices come to the rescue. They greatly cut fossil fuel use in growing food, and entirely eliminate artificial fertilizer use. Biochar production would replace the high oxygen burning of plant material which sends nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.

Implications for the ordinary worried citizen:
• Stop using fossil fuels and keep on with political advocacy in this area.
• Buy organic food. It could be proposed that the health of the planet is a much more important reason to do this than individual health benefits. Better still, grow your own and add biochar to your soil.
• Stop eating meat, or choose meat, such as chicken, whose production causes less greenhouse gas emissions.
• Cut back on dairy products.
• Support forest protection and restoration, locally and in other countries.
• Support small-scale biochar projects where you can find them .
• Although burying biochar as a climate change mitigation project seems both closer to natural processes than other ‘geo-engineering’ proposals, and has more long-term evidence behind it, there are still many unanswered questions about its sustainability. We need to watch closely as this knowledge emerges and to apply what is useful as soon as possible. The time is short. Let’s hope the knowledge emerges soon.
.

Joanna Santa Barbara is a peace and ecological activist, now contributing to the development of Atamai, a sustainable village in New Zealand which incorporates many of the recommended practices, including biochar and organic gardening.

Going Solar

2009-01-27T16:21:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends and Relatives,
This is a notable day for us - we have just gone solar for our electricity needs. We have been preparing for this over the last year by cutting our electricity consumption. In the photos you can see Jack and Gil preparing the site, and then the solar array in the sunshine.
I think we'll have plenty of energy!
I need to experiment with timing of electricity use. Early morning use of the washing machine was OK today, but after the wash (avoiding simultaneous use), turning on the electric oven triggered the back-up diesel generator. I'll wait until full sunlight to do my baking.

After a little investigation, I am impressed with the potential of solar dryers to preserve tomatoes, fruit and herbs, but not impressed with solar cookers or ovens at this latitude. The one I saw in action at a friend's house required constant adjustment of the reflectors, and although I burned my fingers when I touched it, took ages to boil water.

The other new thing is the incorporation of WWOOFers in our lives. The acronym stands for Worldwide (or Willing) Workers on Organic Farms. People, usually young people, travel around offering four hours work a day, for which they receive accommodation and food. It is very commonly done in NZ. Our beginning has been very pleasing. A delightful woman, Helen, came from Dunedin with her equally delightful young sons to see if she'd like to join the village. And a US student stayed for a few days. We are expecting two other groups now. It's a big help for Jacques in watering, mulching, transplanting, etc.. When there are no WWOOFers, Jack and I join Jacques and Cheryl to water for 1-2 hours each evening.

Warmest wishes to all,
Joanna

2008-12-15T21:10:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,
The images: the first one is of me at a beautiful karst forest over the ‘marble mountain’ (Takaka Hill) from here. When my niece Sky visited recently, we wandered through this extraordinary place.
The second one is of Sydney Harbour from my mother’s house, taken when I visited to help with her rehabilitation after a fall recently.
And the third is to do with the subject of this blog – our friend Gil Claus installing a second rainwater tank at our place.

Some personal stuff:My main ‘work’ over this period has been with Transition Town Motueka. We’ve held a public meeting and workshop on analysis of problems with the current financial system, and the alternative of local currencies, Christoph Hensch visited from Christchurch to speak on these issues. Soon after this the Motueka Skill Swap or MO$$ was resurrected. It’s a local currency system. I’ve yet to familiarize myself with its workings. I’ve been trying to educate myself in this area however. I’ve read Margrit Kennedy’s ‘Interest and Inflation-Free Money’ and have taken an excellent ‘Crash Course on Economics’ by Chris Martenson on line. http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse Now I’m reading Thomas Greco’s ‘Money’. Jack finds it most amusing to see me reading a book with this title, as I’ve been so entirely uninterested in the topic heretofore.
Now I need to resume work on the Reconciliation book with Johan Galtung.
I’ve learned to operate enough of the technology of the local radio station to do interviews for a fortnightly ‘Transition Town Show’. This is fun, and I’m very grateful to the young producer, Duncan Eddy for teaching me. I’ve done sessions on Biocapacity, Energy, Sustainable Business and Complementary Currency, as well as the one I’m drawing from to write the main part of this blog. It also amuses Jack to see me with headphones on, pushing buttons and lights on the control board of the studio – an unlikely scene, he’d have thought.
Jack and I have gone on some good day hikes around here. I’m eager to go further afield. We’ll do that next week, the other side of the ‘marble mountain’, by camping in the wilderness and hiking out from there.

TechnologyI’ll write a little about technology in this blog. Curiously, its etymology has to do with study of arts and crafts, but the meaning for my purposes is more like the study of the tools we use to accomplish our goals. Last week I interviewed engineer Gil Claus for my Transition Town Show on local radio. Gil is French Tahitian in origin, and beyond engineering, he studied graphic arts and information technology. He works for Sustainable Villages on IT issues and on assessing technology for the village. If you want to know what’s the best kind of composting toilet or solar hot water heater to use here, ask Gil; he has researched the issue. Gil also does some hands-on engineering work. He dug, or rather sculpted our irrigation ponds with a big digger, and recently he installed our second rainwater tank, as you can see in the photo. Gil has lived for 20 years in a very beautiful off-grid house he built himself. He is passionate about sustainability issues and has a spiritual orientation to living in harmony with the Earth.
Recently, having brought our electricity use down to a sufficiently low level, we bought photovoltaic panels. It’s necessary to have a back-up generator to cope with a run of sunless days. Gil’s research suggested that the best one for the purpose was an old design from 1929, called the Lister engine. It has few parts, is slow revving, doesn’t make a lot of noise, can be maintained with standard tools, adapts easily to many fuels, including biofuels, and is known to last 40-50 years. It is made only in India now. It is not very expensive. We have one on order.
Some of the principles that Gil applies to assessing technology are:
Durability, ease of maintenance, using renewable energy source (preferably gravity, sun, wind, water height), affordability, easily understandable principles of operation, low carbon footprint from its point of origin, waste can either be used for another purpose or disposed of in a way that isn’t ecologically damaging, social acceptability, aesthetic acceptability, made from local resources, efficient, ethical in all its aspects, integrates with its surrounding systems, fits the skills of the existing society, consequences of use are understood and not harmful.
It would be an unusual tool that met all of these criteria. The Lister engine, for example, meets most, but is made far away in India.
There is the idea of ‘life cycle analysis’ applied to technology. We have a wry smile about this. In Canada we had replaced our car with a Prius hybrid, believing its energy use made it an ethical choice (if one had to have a car at all). Later on, a life cycle analysis became available. The energy and materials used in making the Prius make its impact on the Earth anything but benign, and comparable to many of the gas guzzlers we deride.
There is also the concept of ‘layered technology’ from our colleague in the project, Jurgen Heissner. This is the idea that while high tech solutions to problems exist, if they meet many of the criteria above, they should be used, but that it’s most unwise to depend on technology that may be hard to recreate or maintain in an energy- and materials-constrained world. Essential services, like food, water, shelter, sanitation should be able to be maintained without vulnerable technology. So, in the planned village, there will be ‘intra-net’ computer connexions between houses. Booking a car, for example, will be done on this system, but computers will not run essential services like water supply.
According to Gil, Third World farmers and villagers invent some of the most appropriate technology.
The solar oven fits many of the above criteria. They’re not available in NZ. Of course, I could make one, but haven’t yet. Recently we disconnected from our electrically heated hot water system and installed an ‘on demand’ gas heater. This doesn’t keep a quantity of water hot for instant use. The high intensity heater turns on when the water does, and delivers just the amount of hot water you want after a short delay. This is an old technology, common in Europe.
We dispensed with a certain amount of technology in our experiment in living – dishwasher, freezer, drier, TV and video player. I miss the freezer a bit, not the others.
Water comes from the roof into tanks. We installed the second tank to be able to water kitchen gardens, and in rainless times we use a lot of our grey water on the trees.
Technology is an issue in an entirely other way in my life. In the range of responses to climate change and peak oil, many believe that the answer to these problems is to be found in technological developments. They cite the remarkable record of human adaptation to straitened circumstances over the aeons. The party currently in power in NZ affirms the reality of climate change, but is ready to renege on Bali climate change commitments. The Environment Minister believes that technology will save the day. I do not. I believe we will benefit greatly from further technological developments in our adaptation to the difficulties we’ve brought on ourselves, but that, at least in the coming decades, we will have to learn to live more lightly on our seriously damaged and overly full Earth.
Worse still, in my opinion, are those who look for a geo-engineering solutions to the mess we’ve created – wanting to release millions of floating mirrors to reflect the sun, or create a gigantic infrastructure of artificial trees to absorb carbon dioxide, or seed the oceans to grow more algae to absorb more carbon. To their credit, some of the advocates of these solutions are folk who have an appropriate sense of urgency about climate change. But their blindness to the ecological integrity of the web of life frightens me. We haven’t known what we were doing so far, as we wrecked coastlines to create fish farms, extinguished species, desertified huge areas, exhausted soils and continue to deforest the Earth. We learned about the ozone hole almost accidentally, and perhaps just in time. We still have only the barest understanding of some parts of this ultra-intricate system of Earth. To presume to disturb it further on a massive scale with no way of knowing the consequences seems very arrogant to me.
Finally, here’s another piece of technology some people here are ready to dispense with: consider that carefully engineered article using advanced materials of many kinds that is wrapped around our babies’ bottoms – the disposable diaper. There’s a move among young mothers I know to have their babies ‘diaper-free’. The mums say they learn the babies’ signals and either take them outside or hold them over a pot. They say they miss at times, but find the whole thing acceptable, a lot cheaper than the several alternatives, and very easy on the Earth. I’ve been told that the health authority has even paid to have seminars given to expectant mothers on how to do it.
That’s it for technology for today, folks.
Warmest wishes to all,
Joanna

Artichokes andAfghan Puppets

2008-11-09T01:02:00.000-08:00

Dear Family and Friends,

A word about the images. The first is of an artichoke plant - the first time I'd seen these exotic things growing.

The second is of some of the hundreds of seedling plants you'll read about below.

The third is Jacques and Joni working to complete the vegetable garden they created in front of our house.

The last is of a performance of our Afghan puppet story at the 2008 Parihaka event (story below).

Spring is turning to summer here and gardens are burgeoning. The air is scented with jasmine and every dawn the birds enthusiastically let all others know about their territory or need for a mate.

1. First of all, news about the village.
The most impressive aspect of progress on Atamai Village is what is happening in the gardens. I want to include here the report just in from Jacques on accomplishments of the last two months. I can hardly believe that all this is the work of two highly skilled, hard-working men.

September, October report
The big emphasis for the last two months has been on seeding and planting.
In the green house: we have onions and leeks, tomatoes, peppers, squashes, cucumbers and pumpkins all to be transplanted soon in the gardens. We will have Melons, eggplants and gourds too.
In the shade house: we have artichokes, asparagus and rhubarb ready to go into larger pots, expecting 400 plants to transplant in the garden by the fall
Trees in pots (seeded earlier in the winter) they are almonds, walnuts, chestnuts, Northern spy apples, prunes and loquats as well as grapes, figs and some kiwis and pine nuts. We expect to produce 500 potted trees in the shade house.
In the parking lot: Many culinary herbs have been seeded to be transplanted into pots or into garden borders. Our target is to produce 2000 plants. We located the operation there to avoid carrying flats and potting soil around too much.
In the nursery beds We have seeded a lot of trees, walnuts, chestnuts, hazelnuts, ginkgo, honey locusts, locusts, carobs and tree lucernes. I expect to produce 1000 trees in the beds. We also have 100 cuttings of black mulberries, some basket willows and some black currants. Raspberry plants are starting to flower, the strawberries are ripening. Some rhubarb is ready to pick. We just planted thirty thornless blackberries all in one bed.

We made two kitchen gardens by the house. They are fully planted in spring greens. We have started cutting the pine trees that were shading the garden sites.
In the upper med* garden we have broad beans, some wheat and some decent garlic.
In the lower med garden: we have planted potatoes, peas, beans, some tomatoes and beans so far.

The nursery beds have been fully mulched with bark compost (about 30 tons) and some of them have received grass mulch on top of that. The surrounding meadow is completely mowed.
The nursery fence is almost complete (need a gate system)
The nursery irrigation system is fairly complete
The nursery orchard (Asian pears, pears, apples, figs, sour cherries, almonds, Chinese hawthorns) has been mowed and all the fruit trees are stacked, tied, fertilized and heavily mulched and the irrigation lines are installed and ready to go when needed
The south wind break along the driveway has been mowed and mulched
The trees on the slope under the house, (chestnuts, hazelnuts, walnuts, figs, ginkgoes, linden, Chinese hawthorns, mulberries and many more) are growing well and are been mowed, fertilized and mulched this week and next week.
We are installing irrigation for the med gardens and I am looking for an efficient portable pump to bring water up from the ponds to temporary tanks by the house.

Next month will be pretty much all planting and mowing.
We will seed or transplant most of our summer vegetables.

We will mow and mulch trees in the Atamai orchard.
We will cut down the perimeter gorse along the road way.
We will bring in much more bark compost into the lower med garden (this has already been started)
We will fence the lower med garden
We will replant the top of the dam on one of the pond
And so on

*I think this stands for Mediterranean (JSB).

While the plants are flourishing, we have met opposition from some of the ridgetop neighbours to the building plans. Many of you will know this from the recent article in the Hamilton Spectator (http://www.thespec.com/News/Local/article/460779) that there is some local opposition to the village project. Jack has written a letter to the editor in response (which may or may not get published, so here it is ( click here for a link). An irony of the situation is that one of the accusations against the project is that it has been secretive. In fact, most if not all the neighbours were told about what was envisioned for the village, and this vision has been on the website for some time. When the formal application was made to council for the project the application was publicly available. We have not been able to discuss specific plans with neighbours because the local council does not like this to happen before the council itself has approved the plans – so we have been in a bit of a bind there. But the application is approaching a point where all interested parties will be able to discuss what is proposed. While we know there will be some opposition, it will be a relief to be able to discuss it openly.
We can understand that people are averse to change. We hope that once they have a better understanding of what is envisioned, and the benefits to the area, that they will feel differently.

There is no doubt that experiments such as ours are important. A few days ago, a UN report on organic farming in Africa came out. It showed that productivity was greater than either traditional methods alone (although traditional methods were incorporated into the organic methods) or industrial farming. The organic operations require small-holder farming, and are more labour intensive than industrial farming. Here’s the link to the report http://www.unctad.org/TEMPLATES/Download.asp?docid=10693&lang=1&intItemID=3830

Another report that came out in the last few days was leaked early from the International Energy Agency. It stated that the 400 largest oilfields in the world are running down at the rate of 9% per year. You will be aware that new discoveries are not nearly keeping pace with this. This rate seems huge to me, and suggests to me that we’re at or over the peak of oil production. Of course this also relates to the reason for what we’re doing in learning to live on much less and eventually no fossil fuel.

2. News about Transition Town MotuekaYesterday, working with Duncan Eddy, the Motueka producer for Fresh FM, we launched the Transition Town Show. This will be fortnightly radio sessions on the myriad aspects of Transition Towns. Last night was an introduction. The next will be on biological capacity of the region to support human population, biodiversity, ecological footprint and ecological deficit. These sessions will go into an i-pod series and eventually provide an audio-course on Transition Towns.
The various working groups are shaping their visions of what Motueka will be like in 2020 in their respective areas eg food, energy, education.

3. News about us.We’ve been working on our own gardens – herb and vegetable. The vegetable garden has a rabbit and pig-proof fence. I laughed when I was reading about a similar project in India run by a group of Gandhians. They had tall electric fences around their vegetable gardens, to protect against marauds by….wild elephants. None of those here, but we’ve had a wicked pukeko (blue-black water-bird with red beak and legs) who goes around uprooting newly planted potatoes, even pulling out the labels, boldly defying humans who try to shoo it away.

I had a wonderful day in Takaka last Saturday. It’s a town over the ‘marble mountain’ , as they say, from Motueka. The choir there had secured the services of a brilliant music director from Wellington . He specializes in world music and had us singing the most exotic harmonies from Africa, Serbia, Georgia, the Appalachians.

Today we were visited for lunch by Kate Dewes and Rob Green. My peace movement friends will recognize these names. Kate was central to the World Court project, and Rob has written important material on nuclear deterrence among other things. Kate is now a member of the UN Sec-Gen’s Consultative C’tee on Disarmament and has something to do with the Sec-Gen’s recent endorsement of the model Nuclear Weapons Convention.

A few weeks ago I travelled to Wellington to attend a meeting of the NZ affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, followed the next day by a meeting of the National Consultative C’tee on Disarmament. I was delighted to meet old friends from NZ and Australia, to make lovely new ones, and by the level of knowledge and experience in the meeting.

I took a day off in Wellington and spent it with the family of my wonderful hosts on Matiu-Somes Island in Wellington Harbour, building nesting boxes for the colony of Little Blue Penguins that resides on the island. The children did the building.
A few days ago, Jack and I performed a puppet story from the Afghan Children’s Peace Programme in an unusual context. The stalwart contingent of readers of this blog from its beginning may recall a description of the commemoration of Parihaka, an amazing manifestation of Maori nonviolent resistance to land invasion. At this year’s Parihaka event they asked us to enact one of the Afghan stories. This was alongside Maori songs and drama.

Warmest wishes to all,
Joanna

Artichokes and Afghan Puppets

2008-11-09T00:56:00.000-08:00

Preserving Food, Preserving Friendships

2008-09-25T22:20:00.000-07:00

Hello dear , dear friends and family.

To those we were fortunate enough to spend time with during August and September, thanks for your wonderful warmth and generosity. To those we didn't manage to see, we were sad that we couldn't see everyone we love and care about.

The first image here is one across the Atamai land taken a few months ago. You can see, if you look hard, the scalloped pattern of the terraced orchards. At the top of the hill with the pine forest is our house, hidden by trees.
The second image is grandchildren, Charlotte and Jackson, playing in a 'band', part of our merriment together. The third is an ancient hut we passed last weekend on a hike. It is for hikers, or 'trampers', as they're called in New Zealand, to stay in overnight, and actually has some amazingly old tins of food in case you haven't brought your own.
The last image I took from our front door in the Fall here.

The Village
In July we had a seminar on food storage. There is a good deal of expertise in this area in the group. Here are the main things I learned:
• Reduce need for storage by eating seasonally. Change diet to get used to eating staple energy foods that grow easily where you are. A reduced variety of foods may be compensated for by much better taste of organic foods.
• Storage is needed for use of surplus, for sale, for emergencies and for seed. It may even be considered as part of a defence system, if privation was very severe – to be able to give food rather than fight over it.
• Storage without energy use includes use of root cellars, built on slope for ventilation. Dry grains can be stored in raised structures or in old freezers. A village should have a year’s supply of grain in storage. Atamai will need a grain mill.
• Storage with energy use includes solar drying (first priority), bottling, vinegar making, processing oils, smoking fish and meat.
• I’d add to the above learnings by suggesting that we all prepare for emergencies by having at least a few weeks’ basic supplies available. Food should be drawn from this stock in rotation so it doesn’t become stale.

Splendid work has proceeded developing the food-producing capacity of the land, under Jacques’s leadership. The trees on the terraced orchards, planted a year ago, are doing very well. The contoured gardens, created in a maze-like drainage pattern, are planted with vegetables. Another very large contoured area on the same hillside has been tilled.
There is so much to learn for one as ignorant as I. I thought I might be able to help weed around the trees on the terraces, and imagined ripping out the copious weeds to leave bare brown earth. But I asked Jacques’s advice. Here is his interesting answer:

"Hi
From the ecological, permaculture point of view weeds in an orchard have several important functions.
They mine mineral nutrients from the subsoil and from the air, hold it in their tissues and return it in a stable organic form to the top soil and the fruit trees
They shade and protect the soil surface from UV rays and prevent surface erosion in rainy weather
They shelter and feed a balanced population of microorganisms insects and predators, limiting the development of diseases and pests.
They attract and feed pollinating insects outside the flowering time of the fruit trees
The ecological orchardist want to see a healthy diversified sward growing under his trees
With this outlook no weed is truly undesirable in an orchard provided, it does not shade a tree or compete for irrigation water with its roots.
The best approach for tall weeds (Mustard mainly, lupins, also night shade)away from a tree and shading it is to clip it and use it to mulch a tree.
In the root zone it is better to pull a weed out to prevent water competition. But lupins (important nitrogen fixers are better clipped or broken
White clover need only to be clipped. (It also feed rabbits and deter them from eating the tree)"

This kind of detailed knowledge fascinates me.
Other aspects of the Atamai Village project need to move much more slowly than hoped. The global financial crisis has significant repercussions in New Zealand. It has suddenly become impossible to get loans for the kind of thing we’re doing. This means we can proceed only at a pace that matches the investment of potential villagers in village plots. And we can’t advertise these until we get the District Council’s consent, also a slow process.

Transition Towns
In June, when I made the last blog entry, we had barely begun this effort to facilitate the process of adaptation of the town population. In July we held two public meetings – the first to present the idea of Transition initiatives to interested people of Motueka and surrounding settlements, the second to begin the process of self-organization into working groups. These were very successful. About 70 people came to the first, and there was a feeling of enthusiasm about it, a mood of ‘It’s about time. We need to act.’
The second was attended by over 60 people and was well facilitated in Open Space process. People designated areas of their passion and expertise and worked in small groups. The following groups formed: Food Production, including Community Supported Agriculture and Open Orchards (public plantings of fruit and nut trees); Transport, including organized carpooling and hitchhiking, and making walking and cycling more attractive; Energy, with a focus on solar energy; Sustainable Business; Voluntary Simplicity; How to stay sane, have good meetings and resolve conflict; Liaison with Government.
These events were well covered by local newspapers and radio.
A meeting last night (September 25th) showed that efforts were moving ahead at a steady pace in this very creative group of townspeople.

Us – Sept 1st.
July was dominated by organizing the Transition Town meetings for me, and by pressing Atamai Village issues for Jack. August began for me with a week in the village of Statdschlaining in Austria, teaching a course in Peace Psychology at the European Peace University. I had 25 Master’s level students who represented a rich range of experience in nongovernmental organizations and UN agencies, and an extraordinary range of national origins – Ethiopia, Uganda, Turkey, Australia, Canada, USA, Austria, Switzerland, Germany… I began each day with an hour’s walk in the surrounding hills with the rector, Dietrich Fischer, a gentle man with a great depth in Peace Studies and an extraordinary ability to recount jokes to match any topic. His hospitality extended to providing breakfast and lunch to visiting instructors. One day we decided to challenge him by just calling out topics to see if he could match a joke to them. ‘Cheese!’ He had three cheese jokes. ‘Shoes!’ He was equal to the challenge.
The rest of August and the first week of September has been for Jack and me a simply wonderful time visiting family and friends in Canada. We returned to our old home, now occupied by son and daughter-in-law Jonah and Penny. There we got to know our new grand-daughter, Bianca, now 6 months. Nothing matches living with a loved child, seeing her in all her phases, laughing her glorious baby giggle, bored, a little grizzly, playing with her adoring subjects, enjoying her bath and so on.
We’ve had similar opportunities with our other grandchildren, Jackson and Charlotte. We have come to a place dear to us, The Dekars’ cottage on an island in Georgian Bay, where we’ve spent summer weeks every year for the last 14 or so. Here we’ve had these two little ones with us, together with their parents, Josh and Tracey. We’ve had hikes in the bush, enjoying their mastery of rockclimbing and finding their way, swum and canoed and sat at night around the campfire chatting. Nothing is so conducive to leisurely conversation.
In the second week, youngest son, Jeff brought his girlfriend, Becky to visit, together with old, dear friend, Doug Reberg. Long mealtime chats, lying on the dock watching the stars, canoe journeys for the young ones and birdwatching for Doug have been part of the overall awe at the beauty of this place. For me, each day has a glorious beginning, as I sit on the rock and watch the sunrise. The sky just now is beginning to redden, reflected in the still lake, and the first birds of the morning are making tentative noises.
Jack and I spent some of yesterday preparing talks to give at an event in Hamilton tomorrow, organized by Environment Hamilton and Hamiltonians for Progressive Development. Jack will give an overview of the Village and I’ll speak on Transition Town ideas.
In six days we leave. It’s going to be hard.

Us – Sept 26.
I was enormously gratified while in Canada to hear how many people read and enjoy this blog – thanks, friends. Hard to account for my long gap in communicating. Back in harness in New Zealand we are; it’s mainly Jack who is harnessed, I must say. I have an easier time. Last night I was able to participate by ‘phone in a Telemed conference with nursing stations on northern Ontario First Nations communities – the very same communities I had visited thirty years ago as a mental health consultant. The topic was how to deal with the issue of media violence with children of these communities, where interpersonal violence is often a serious problem. My colleague, Marilyn Koval, family physician in Sioux Lookout, organized this. The only problem was that I needed to do my bit at 1am my time, and I nearly wrecked things by not waking when the microwave timer beeped. However, it all worked out and I was happy to be able to do this.
We’ve found time to do a couple of good hikes since being back.
Very warmest wishes to you all,
Joanna

2008-06-19T23:00:00.000-07:00

Hello, dear Friends and Family,
The image below is of one set of the new ponds on the village garden area, with the beginning of tilling for Spring planting on the slopes to the right.
These are hopeful, encouraging things, but my mood has been one of unease, as you will see below.

Our personal life continues to be very pleasant, apart from missing beloved people. Jack works on the village, I work on the Transition Towns endeavour and preparing a course on Peace Psychology.
Yesterday, the architects who specialize in 'green' buildings met at our house to discuss the design of the first houses. And last night we spent with a small group of friends planning the first large public meeting for Transition Town Motueka. First all five of us went to a film in 'The Gecko', a tiny movie theatre. We saw 'Grow Your Own', a British comedy I recommend to all. It's about healing through gardening and the acceptance of refugees in a community - delightful film. We walked a few steps to a pizzeria which we often use as a meeting venue and began our planning over pizzas. When the pizzeria was ready to close, we moved back to the movie theatre and occupied one of the small theatres with permission from the very friendly guy running the place. We completed our planning there. This kind of informality is one of the delights of a small town.

I hope you're sitting comfortably with a cup of tea or coffee by your side for the next bit. I see darkness and fog out there.

The unravelling has begun

A few weeks ago I made a presentation to Tasman District Council, as part of a public consultation process about their annual plan. My purpose was to get them to factor oil scarcity and climate change into their planning. I led with the point that the plan was based on a stated assumption that oil cost $60 a barrel and would remain at that price for the year. As we all know, this assumption is laughable. I pointed out that their vehicles would be able to travel only half as far as planned on the budgeted fuel and that they would be able to build or repair only half the road kilometers planned. I went on to discuss climate change impact. At least four other people presented on closely related topics to the council.

They listened most politely. A week or so later, the mayor mentioned to me in conversation that he was considering joining the Communities for Climate Change Protection, as he had found it didn’t bind him to any difficult commitments. Several of my colleagues had made this specific request. This is, without doubt, a good thing, and I will certainly want to convey this to the Council if they go ahead and do it. But what about this extraordinary budget discrepancy? What do they think is going to happen? I assume they think, along with many others, that the price of oil and food is a temporary ‘spike’, to use the term commonly applied. (Of course if oil ‘spikes’ at $120 for half the year, it will need to be totally free of cost for the other half if it is going to average $60, but this absurdity hasn’t occurred to the planners, it seems.) I don’t think so. I think this is the lower slope of an ongoing upward trend in prices, inevitable on the other side of Peak Oil. It will never be the same again.

There is nothing unusual about the people on this Council. It’s very hard for all of us to get our heads around this shocking fact. And there’s lots of noise to help us deny it. Price-gouging by Big Oil, excessive government taxes, intransigence of Middle East oil sheiks, too little investment in oil infrastructure, pesky environmentalists stopping drilling in national parks…. And above all, the faith-based mantras, the market will take care of it, and new technology will save the day.

Coal (climate change disaster), biofuels (human hunger disaster) and nuclear energy (ecological, economic and security disaster) are the immediate solutions being sold. Some assume that energy from wind and sunshine will fill the gap, not realizing that it will take decades and lots of scarce oil to build their infrastructure, and the amount of energy to be hoped for from these sources will not come near that available from cheap oil in the near future.

While wishful thinking and bad solutions hold sway, airlines are going broke, cutting staff, routes and passenger space, merging and grounding planes. Automobile companies are closing plants. Food is increasing in price, affecting the poor in rich countries and the masses in poor ones, refugees dependent on food aid perhaps most of all. Here’s a cheerful datum: in the US there’s less car use and fewer car accidents. Urban houses are diminishing in value. Economic recession seems about to hit everywhere in the globalized economic system. Recession? How about collapse - slow or fast ?

We are not ready for this!!

A friend who works for the Department of Conservation here remarked cheerfully over lunch last weekend that we had better prepare ourselves for when the DoC is unable to continue its pest control functions. DoC is a heavy user of helicopters, aeroplanes and four-wheel drives to keep habitat and agriculture-destroying pests under control. ‘We’ll be overrun by possums, pigs, rabbits, weasels, stoats and goats,’ she said. (I thought of our orchardist neighbour whose eyes light up with joy at the thought of a pig to hunt.)

I am not ready for this!!

But we are trying to prepare ourselves. We have largely stopped eating fossil-fuel dependent food that gets to us by fossil-fuelled transport over long distances. We’re working on our own transport modes, using bicycles more and sharing a car. I’ve even had one pleasant experience hitch-hiking, which I definitely will try again soon. I have a substantial store of staples in case supermarket supply chains should be suddenly cut. We are trying to build a community that will incorporate people with many skills contributing to self-sufficiency. We are learning from experienced gardeners how we can together grow much of what we need. We are trying to work out what we need to get that might be hard to find in the future, or unaffordable – solar panels, for example.

It’s very clear that governments will not lead in these areas, as my above example with our municipal government shows. Our former municipality, Hamilton, Ontario, was worse. Here the Green Party, from whom we might expect most, has made a conscious decision that it will not talk about consuming less, or about the problems of a growth-based economy, because it will lose seats if it does. That’s a pretty dismal state of affairs. (I must add that the Maori Party does address these issues, thank goodness.) In both NZ and in Canada, government will not lead in these issues. We are on our own with the unravelling of the infrastructure of our society and our economy.

Energy supports complexity of society. We can expect a less complex society as available energy diminishes. Highly elaborate divisions of function will diminish. To avoid collapse, we must plan intelligently for devolution of complexity, evolution of human-scale communities with appropriate technology not available to human-scale communities 200 years ago before fossil fuel energy spike, for example, modern windmills, large windows for passive solar architecture..

We need planning at a global level for fair distribution of the remaining oil, with steady cuts in use. If this doesn’t happen, poor countries will be totally unable to buy oil at all and their slender essential industries and services will grind to an early halt before they have had time to make an adequate adjustment. We need measures to promote food self-sufficiency in poor countries – trade rules to prevent dumping, support of small-holder, organic farming.

We need planning at a national level for the priority use of oil. We should assign a very high priority to building infrastructure for the post-carbon society - erecting windmills and making photovoltaic panels, rebuilding the rail network, expanding public transport, retrofitting buildings, supporting changes in agriculture towards sustainability.

We need planning at the municipal level for public transport, for assistance to local food production like farmers’ markets, community gardens. We need changes in land zoning, the retrofitting of existing buildings to use less energy, requirements for new buildings to be passive solar, support of small-holder organic gardening.

We need planning at the personal level - engagement with others to form communities and plan self-sufficiency with backyard food production, Community-Supported Agriculture, food co-ops, protection of peri-urban rural land, forming one or two-child families, giving up the car for alternative transport. Readers of this blog know the rest of this list. But let me add water care, composting, vegetarianism, jobs near work, jobs that make sense with future projections of a less complex society, more time gardening for food production, and time to push governments to do the planning at the level only they can do.

We are not ready. It is very difficult to prepare in the face of such uncertainty. Might we overprepare? What if the unraveling is not as bad as predicted? Wouldn’t we look silly? Maybe, but not nearly as silly as we’ll look when our children and grandchildren wonder why we didn’t begin the work of an easy energy descent and prevent enormous misery for them.

Well, dear ones, that's my mood for the Winter Solstice.
I send you all the warmest wishes,
Joanna

Food

2008-05-18T19:50:00.000-07:00

The first image here is tonight's dinner for us. The second is one of the sketches of Jacques, the land manager, for food growing areas of the village we're building.

Dear Friends,

Food is on my mind a great deal as item after item crosses my screen on rising food prices and shortages. More people are hungry, more kids are malnourished. I want to share some thoughts on this, but first...

Personal update:

The month has been a fairly hard one for Jack, taking over the general manager's tasks while Jurgen (co-director and general manager) visits his parents in Germany, and coping with expectable bumps in the road of this innovative project. He has stayed sane and fit by running on the beach, swimming and taking a pick to cut a bike path across the land so we can cycle up the steep hill. He spends a fair bit of time in meetings. Mondays Jack cycles into Motueka for a general management meeting with the now 7 employed people and with various consultants.

We spend a fair bit of leisure time with other people, particularly those involved with the village. The four young guys lacked a kitchen until a few days ago, so we had them up for dinner several times. We sit around with others discussing the fascinating aspects of building a village like what mudbrick-making machine to buy, should we get a grain-mill, how to make houses affordable, how to get heritage apple seeds, how to make arbours and where the walking paths will go.

Since coming to live at Te Mara (the house lower on the ridge), five-year-old home-schooled Lucien has decided I'm part of his daily routine, so makes the long hard climb up the ridge to see me. We spin stories, draw, make music (broadly defined), and act a little crazy.

Jack and I are using our bicycles more, and I'm very impressed that the battery can get us up the very steep climb of the ridge. We can get to town in 35 minutes and home in 40, so we do this for day-time journeys.

I continue to be impressed at the cultural life available. I've been recently to a string quartet performance and one of baroque harp, and I've joined a group singing for pleasure. The skilled director, one of the treasures of the old community of Riverside (she may have been born there), has us singing in 3 and 4 part harmony with ease.

Once I found that my sewing machine worked with the transformer dealing with the voltage difference between North America and NZ, I rediscovered the pleasure to be derived from making garments this way. I made Jack a black polar fleece, hooded dressing gown. He looks like a character from Star Wars in it.

Atamai Village:

While Jack sits at a desk and works at a marketing plan and what covenants will apply to purchases of lots, Gil, the engineer has been operating a digger and has dug five ponds for irrigation. Jacques has tilled graceful curves of garden over the hillside of Te Mara to be ready for Spring planting. The young guys Nick and Nigel have constructed a big shade house for new plants, a new guy, Johnnie is taking care of the orchards, and another new guy, Bomun has created a woodwork shop in the garage of Te Mara and will begin constructing cold frames, etc.. The ponds are filling already, and astonishingly, Gil has seen eels in them.

We are resuming our monthly potluck seminars, with the next being on food preserving and storage.

Motueka and region:

A group is forming around the idea of Transition Towns (Google it), a concept that began in the UK and has now been picked up in a few dozen towns in NZ. It concerns how a built urban settlement can respond to peak oil and climate change in areas such as transport, land use, domestic heating, insulation, water provision, local food provision, and so on. We have made brief presentations at the Council meeting, at the Community Board (the Council includes several small towns, the Community Board is the Motueka representation), and on radio.

Global:

Besides the food issue, another one that has aroused me in the last month has been further attempts to silence criticism of human rights infringements by Israel against the Palestinians by labelling such criticism anti-Semitism. This is a sneaky ad hominem argument, and when made recently by Stephen Harper, Canada's Prime Minister, had to be strenuously resisted. I wrote to Harper and to the Ottawa Citizen on this.

Now, Food.

It's no news to any readers of this blog that more people are hungry, that there are food riots in Africa, Asia and South America. If it's not crossing your screen with at least an article a day, you're catching it in the mainstream media, where, after a lag-time of a few years, it's beginning to appear. How is the average person to understand this, and how is the average person to respond? As a non-expert in any relevant area, here is how I understand what is happening in terms of predisposing structural vulnerabilities and precipitating events.

Predisposing vulnerabilities:

Land tenure: Highest productivity from agricultural land, other factors being held equal, is from small-holder or cooperative structures. Comparisons have been made in China, where there are diverse structures of land ownership. Large industrial holdings and communal holdings are less productive. Over the last several centuries the trend has been towards larger industrial agricultural holdings, with the former peasants who lost their land to this process working as labourers on the properties or migrating to city slums. The global economic institutions, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have pushed this change strenuously. Some call it the 'depeasantization' of global agriculture.Most remarkably, recently the heads of these three institutions have made a statement saying that what is needed to deal with global hunger now is a return to small-holder farming. Oxfam has echoed this. The UN statement on food and agriculture agrees, and adds that there is a need to turn from industrial agriculture with oil-based inputs, to organic methods. The western writers who talk about response to peak oil and climate change speak of the need for 'reruralization' of the countryside, which has been extensively depopulated by industrial agriculture. It will need to be repopulated to provide a more productive and more labour-intensive agriculture.

Closely related to the above point about the relationship between land tenure structures and land productivity is the kind of farming done and the kind of food produced. WTO, WB and IMF pushed indebted poor countries into what is known as 'structural adjustment', which among other things, meant that regional agricultural arrangements that produced for local consumption and a degree of food self-sufficiency were shifted to industrial agriculture producing food for export, such as tea and coffee, and non-food products, such as flowers for western markets. Countries such as Haiti, which were once self-sufficient in staples like rice, quickly became net importers of these staple foods. New Zealand, which some describe as 'one big farm', exports huge amounts of food all over the world. Does it feed itself? No. Half of what NZers eat is imported. This dependency on oil-based agriculture for exports to get the cash to pay for imported food brought in with oil-based transport is catastrophic for a country like Haiti, where the rise in food prices immediately bites as worsening hunger.

Population increase. Up until recently, most of the literature dealing with feeding the world insisted that there was no problem producing enough food to feed all the people in the world. The problem was one of distribution - the poor didn't have the money to buy the food available. There was much evidence to show that famines in various parts of the world were caused or exacerbated by political decisions, and would have been averted under democratic functioning.

Now we must consisder that the population that can be supported sustainably depends on the kind of technology being used and the throughput of materials and energy. I don't see anyone asserting now that we can grow enough food for a world of 9 billion people insisting on the lavish use of energy, some of which will be biofuel.

Precipitating factors:

Climate change has affected food availablity in several ways. Drought causes crop failure; most outstandingly the years of Australian drought had a major effect on global wheat production. Some query use of the word 'drought' as meaning a time limited condition, being convinced that the change is permanent. Climate change also causes increased number and severity of cyclones and floods which destroy crops.

Oil scarcity. My reading of this is that we are on the plateau of global production while global demand is swinging sharply up. This leads to high prices of fuel and other agricultural commodities (especially fertilizer, which has more than tripled), which leads to higher food prices. It actually leads to some land going out of production when farmers cannot afford the fertilizer on which they are dependent in the system of modernized agriculture.

Oil scarcity leads to biofuel production, causing agricultural products to be diverted from food to fuel production, and increasing food prices.

The increased global demand for meat leads to diversion of grain to feed animals and away from feeding hungry people. Of 2.3 billion tons of grain produced in 2007, less than half went to feed people. The rest went to feed animals and biofuel production.

The enormous global speculative market. Speculators buy up what is scarce. Food is scarce, so speculators are buying it, increasing prices for hungry people. This has been called a criminal activity. In recent months I've read, mainly from US newspapers, several informative analyses of the food problem, ending with advice on how to make money out of it.

Of all of these factors, my reading of the situation suggests that high oil prices, biofuel production and speculation on food commodities top the list for pushing hunger to present levels. As I write, the radio tells me that 6 million Ethiopian children are malnourished, 60,000 of them so ill they require specialist feeding, because of drought and high food prices. Aid money to alleviate the problem is scarce because people are giving to Burma and China.

What's to be done?

Global measures:

A global moratorium on biofuel production would help. A possible form for this would be a change in the requirement many governments have made for inclusion of a percentage of biofuels with fossil fuel petroleum. This would increase global availability of grain and lower prices. It might allow restoration of the depleted global grain reserves. It would contribute to lowering carbon emissions and require rich country populations to face the necessity of adapting to lower energy use patterns. The claim that there are no problems in using non-food plants for biofuel requires careful examination. Whatever plant material is used, organic material is extracted from soil or water, depleting the ecosystem from which it comes, and leaving it less able to keep producing.

Support food sovereignty for nations. Economic globalization of food provision needs to be reversed to national or regional food self-sufficiency. The transition in agriculture is likely to need state support, and to require economic instruments to protect it. Trade in non-essential food items is desirable, but the capacity of regions to feed themselves needs to be restored, after having been systematically and deliberately destroyed. This will increase food production and the problematic level of nutrition in many areas. It will increase employment.

Support land reform. This is a notoriously difficult area politically. However there are few measures with such a dramatic effect on food production and population health.

Support organic agriculture. Techniques of organic agriculture have benefitted from global knowledge growth. Permaculture principles are recognized widely as maximizing productivity, diversity and resilience of food production. Not only is more food produced, less fossil fuel is used and more carbon is sequestered with these methods of agriculture.

Take food commodities out of the speculation market.
Support the discussion of population policies, which have largely been an unmentionable topic in discourses like this one.

What can we do ourselves?

Right now, as usual, the adversities of hunger are affecting mainly developing countries and not most readers of this blog. This may not continue. The factors listed above that will not change in the near future are oil scarcity, climate instability, population growth. They will all get worse, of course. We don't know how they'll affect us in the lucky countries. It will be increasingly difficult to import food and to keep growing it with oil-dependent methods.

Grow your own food to the extent possible.

Join or create a community garden if you haven't land to plant.

Get your food from a Community-supported Agriculture farm (CSA) This is likely to be organically produced, and is, of course, local.

Move towards vegetarianism.

Consider joining a sustainable village, which will enable you to move further in the direction of low-energy self-sufficiency and provide a greater range of food and other products locally grown.

Help your town or neighourhood make these transitions by organizing under the Transition town, Natural Step or Post-Carbon Cities frameworks. The first began in the UK, the second in Sweden, and the third in North America. All are now global, and aim to enable a broad range of adaptations to peak oil and climate change, beyond food self-sufficiency. (See http://www.transitionculture.org/ , http://www.naturalstep.org/ , http://www.postcarboncities.net/ )

As part of such moves, the need to adapt to lower energy use is central, shifting away from the maladaptive move to replace oil with biofuels.

Make sure none of your invested money is going to food speculation.

Some of the readers of this blog may have insights that will deepen my understanding of this complex issue. Please consider posting comments that may help us all.

Warmest wishes to all,

Joanna

Transition Towns

2008-04-11T20:51:00.000-07:00

Greetings, dear Friends and Family.

A little on our lives

The photos are of Jack having an early morning consultation with Jacques (Belgian-French land manager) and Gil (Tahitian engineer) on building new structures in the village; and of me watering our little kitchen garden.

The unpromising shed-like structure with the glorious view has been converted into a home now. We've had old friends Ed and Maxine Crispin to stay en route from the IPPNW Congress in New Delhi, and now there is a flow of young people coming to see what we are doing here. The house is so small that guests sleep in the living room, so we are discussing adding a room.

Friends drop in. Yesterday, Jacques and his wife and son came by to drop off Sid, the sheep-dog, at the end of the day. Lucien, five years old, said, 'I wonder if you're going to invite us in for a cup of tea and cookies as you usually do.' And, indeed, that is becoming a pleasant pattern, particularly at the end of the week.

We've taken a bit more time for leisure in recent weeks. There are surprising cultural offerings - tonight a Tibetan instrumentalist performs at the cultural centre of the nearby long-established community of Riverside. We'll dine with Gil and his wife before going.

Jack is extremely busy. There are now two directors of the project, the third having dropped out. Jurgen, the other one, is away for two months visiting aging parents in Japan (his wife's) and Germany (his). So Jack is carrying the development of the village. There are five people on staff, Gil and Jacques in the photo above, an admin assistant in the office, and two young guys, Nick and Nigel, who do a lot of the physical labour. Right now, Jack is slashing bush to make a cycle track, as a form of exercise.

Attention has shifted away from care of the 7000 trees since a drip irrigation system was established, relieving the need to manually water them. Now the focus is on establishing a plant nursery, identifying and buying trees to plant on the garden property, Te Mara, for both orchard and shelter belt purposes. Vegetable oil, I gather, will be from walnuts. Olive trees are expected to do well. (It's easy to buy olive oil grown within a few km of here.) Currently there are 15 cows grazing on the land, but they are visitors, paying rent. Jacques plans to have sheep and is especially keen on a small breed called Jacob's sheep, whose fleece comes in many colours. (Sid will be very happy when this occurs.)

This reminds me of a delightful visit I made a few weeks ago to a sheep farm to buy some newly shorn lamb's wool, which I hoped to use to stuff cushions. The farm had sheep of every colour you can imagine sheep to be, and beautiful displays of raw fleece, carded wool, spun wool and knitted garments - a feast for anyone who loves textiles. I bought a large bag of wool. When it is teased, it's excellent for stuffing cushions. The teasing is both time-consuming and sensually pleasant. I began teasing as I chatted with Jacques, Cheryl and Lucien over tea and cookies yesterday. Before long, everyone was teasing. Jacques, who often seems to know just about everything, told me that having built spinning wheels in the past, he has decided that the world's best spinning wheel is a Louet (or Louette), a Canadian wheel. He also remarked that, while he regards a frig as an optional extra in life, he sees a sewing machine as an absolute essential. Having admired the knit tops the family of three wears, I told Jack I thought they must be imported from France. I later found that Jacques makes them himself.

I occupy myself in various ways. I had an article on Canada's role in Afghanistan published in the online Globe and Mail last week. Today I finished a book review of three books dealing with the transition of towns and cities to adapt with the need for sustainability, energy decline and climate change. I'll append this to this blog. My colleague, Neil Arya and I are doing the last bits and pieces on our Peace through Health book. Seems to me I've said that before; surely these really are the last! I've started designing a display for Transition Towns (see review below) for a Motueka festival in a few weeks' time. I hope this helps me identify folk who are interested in doing something about the issues.

Just came back from the Motueka Sunday morning market. I stopped at my favourite spray-free vegetable stall and filled my bag with aubergine, broccoli, beans, peppers and potatoes. I handed the bag to the farmer so he could add the bill, but he smiled and said, 'That's $12.50. I watched you put them in.' My friend, Margot the dancer, at the Riverside stall had me taste some wonderful apple juice from their orchard. Irresistible!

Very, very much love to all my dear friends,

Joanna

HOW SHOULD WE LIVE?

Book Review:
The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience, by Rob Hopkins (Totnes, UK: Green Books, 2008).

Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty, by Daniel Lerch (Sebastopol, USA: Post Carbon Press, 2007).

The Natural Step for Communities: How Cities and Towns can Change to Sustainable Practices, by Sarah James and Torbjorn Lahti (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2004).

Joanna Santa Barbara
Atamai Village Council, Motueka

Are you looking for inspiration and ideas to transform your town, city, neighbourhood into a vital community, producing its own nutritious food, supplying its own energy, resilient to expected shocks of climate change and energy depletion? All three of these books offer therapy for those suffering from ‘post-petroleum stress disorder’, to use Rob Hopkins’s apt phrase, or from climate-change catatonia.

There is no doubt that a soul can get shaken to the core by facing the realities of the multiple ecological crises facing our planet, together with descent from ‘peak oil’ production, and now also threats to global financial stability. Facing uncertainty in many dimensions, a very strong argument can be developed for a risk management approach. The potential gains are greater and losses are fewer in preparing for the worst than by hoping that life will proceed as usual indefinitely.

But what does such preparation look like? Some folk are electing to start ‘from scratch’ to build the infrastructure of communities that can work in a post-carbon, climate-unstable future – the sustainable villages movement. Others start where they are, planning to convert both structure and function of their towns, cities, islands and regions in the direction of sustainability and resilience to shocks. These initiatives will all surely complement and aid each other. These three books are about the conversion of existing urban areas. The difference between the books is that Rob Hopkins (UK) describes the movement from below, the grassroots, the people’s initiative; Daniel Lerch (North America) directs his recommendations to local governments, that is, to city councillors and town planners; James and Lahti (Sweden) begin with local authorities and move to a democratic community development process. The three books fit very neatly together. Their visions are strongly compatible. Their approaches are sufficiently different to make reading all three worthwhile.

The UK and North American books begin with an overview of the problems of ‘peak oil’ and climate change. The Swedish book begins with an explanation of the Natural Step – four principles of sustainability which will be applied to the structure and function of towns and cities. These are: In the sustainable society, Nature is not subject to systematically increasing:
1. concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust
2. concentrations of substances produced by society
3. degradation by physical means
and in that society,
4. human needs are met world-wide.

It can be readily seen that such principles lead directly to limiting fossil fuel use (responding to both ‘peak oil’ and climate change issues), use of natural materials, organic agriculture, systematic protection of all ecosystems, as well as attention to justice and equity. These fundamental markers of sustainability underlie and guide a great range of derived principles and strategies.

Community resilience is an organizing principle of Rob Hopkins’s thinking about Transition Initiatives. He foresees shocks to human settlements from oil decline and climate change and asserts that the features that enable resilience of a system to shocks are diversity, modularity and ‘tight feedbacks’. Diversity refers to kinds of people, connexions between them, kinds of land use, kinds of economic activity. Modularity refers to the capacity of parts of the system to self-organize in the event of a crisis. Tightness of feedback concerns how easily the system registers when things are going wrong or right. A resilient community will be self-reliant for basic needs, although it may benefit from trade relationships for nonessentials. The community will be capable of feeding itself, providing its own energy and water. It will build with local materials and have a strong local economy, possibly with a local currency. There is therefore a focus on smaller-scale communities – town or neighbourhood-sized.

A strong feature of Rob Hopkins’s book is his inclusion of many ‘tools for transition’, teaching devices and exercises for groups working in this direction. Both his book and the James and Lahti book deal with the psychology of change, recognizing that the change in values and attitudes required to build resilient, sustainable communities in harmony with the biosphere requires major shifts for most people. Those who want to move to action on transition in their own communities will find the pathway mapped by Rob Hopkins extremely helpful, even though it is recognized that each community will tread a unique route. To whet the activist appetite, his suggested twelve-step programme is:
1. Set up a steering group and design its demise from the outset.
2. Raise awareness.
3. Lay the foundations by networking with pre-existing groups and activists.
4. Organize a ‘Great Unleashing’, an inaugural event.
5. Form groups around major theme areas, for example, food, retrofitting houses, energy, land use.
6. Use meeting strategies that maximize inclusion of the ideas of many people, and release creativity, such as ‘Open Space Technology.’
7. Develop visible practical manifestations of the project, such as a community garden or a structure built with local materials.
8. Facilitate the ‘Great Reskilling’, recovering dwindling skills for survival in a low-energy future, for example, food preserving, composting, scything, tree grafting.
9. Build a bridge to local government.
10. Honour the elders, who have experience in living at lower energy and material consumption levels.
11. Let it go where it wants to go.
12. Create an Energy Descent Action Plan.

One might add to the latter step, create a plan that also includes adaptation to climate change, water problems, and sea level rise if that is relevant to the site.

All three books agree on the sectors of needed action, although each has different emphases. Lerch, writing for city councils, begins with urging cities to join global networks of other municipalities working in the same direction and to sign the Oil Depletion Protocol as a city, in order to reduce vulnerability. He goes on to say, ‘Deal with transportation and land use (or you might as well stop now)’. He charges city councils with responsibility to encourage energy conservation in private use, assertively engaging the business community ‘to reinvent the local economy for a post-carbon world’. His slogan is ‘Reduce consumption and produce locally.’ He cites several case examples of cities on the way to adaptation to a post-carbon world.

The Swedish book by James and Lahti is organized by sectors of action: renewable energy, transportation, housing, green businesses, ‘eco-economic development’, ecological schools and education, sustainable agriculture, waste, land use and planning. The book is rich with case studies. The approach is being used in scores of towns and cities around the world, including the city of Christchurch, and is also applied by businesses. It is perhaps the most extensively applied of the three approaches.

While Rob Hopkins’s book focusses primarily on the process of change. he does examine specifically the envisioned sectoral changes in food and farming (with emphasis on the merits of Permaculture), medicine and health, education, economy (with emphasis on the merits of local currencies), transport, energy, housing. There are several case studies of Transition Towns in progress, and many examples of creative ‘visioning’, as recommended by the writer.

The Transition Towns approach is being rapidly adopted by scores of UK towns and about 35 New Zealand towns.

I found all three books to be potent sources of learning and will return to them many times in the future. I have a couple of criticisms.. The first is a failure of the Hopkins and Lerch books to place their creative recommendations in the very big picture of inquiring about the scale of human impact on the region or bioregion of interest: ‘How much human economic activity, of what kind, can this segment of the biosphere cope with without degradation? How many humans, at what levels of consumption, can it support?’ It is possible that we may reduce consumption significantly and still continue to degrade the place we live in, though at a slower rate. The answers to these questions are not easy to come by, but we need to know. Secondly, we need to get our minds around working out an economy with a steady-state material through-put, that is, no material growth in the economy. This idea clashes seriously with the prevailing assumptions. All the more reason it needs to be incorporated into our ideas of envisioning and moving towards future resilient, sustainable communities.

That said, all three of these books provide a feast for those wanting to take action on these issues. Judging by the entries on the Transition Towns website, this group of folk and the list of towns in which they live are multiplying by the day. Networks of interest are:
New Zealand Transition Towns http://www.transitiontowns.org.nz/
Living Economies, Aotearoa/New Zealand http://www.le.org.nz/

How to feed people and conserve soil

2008-02-19T16:18:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,

The previous blog on Permaculture led to an interesting conversation with an old and treasured friend, Herb Jenkins, professor-emeritus from McMaster University. When Herb's enquiring mind played on the issues of our present endeavour, I knew we were in for an interesting conversation. This blog will reproduce part of it, with Herb's permission. I'll begin, however, with

What's happening to us.

Jack and I have moved to a house we'll be in for some time, ending our nomadic phase. This house was already on part of the village land and has no aesthetic or ecological merits, having been built with a permit for a shed! It is redeemed by the marvellous views of ocean and mountains, sunrises and sunsets. Our goods arrived and, amazingly, have made it feel something like a home. We even have a temporary dog. Sid, a working sheep dog, arrived with his owner who became the project's land manager. There is no other convenient place for him to stay, and I enjoy having him.

Jack has been working hard on the necessary planning to get Regional Council approval. He and I worked on the section on Recreation and Conservation, in both of which areas the village provisions far exceed Council requirements. The conservation measures planned are quite extensive, especially with respect to native forest.

Jack has just attended the board meeeting of the International Forum on Globalization in San Francisco. He presented a discussion paper on the population issue, a delicate one for any organization. The IFG Board is strong on Third World representation, which ensures a wide range of views on this issue. Energy issues was another area in which Jack had particular interests and responsibilities.

He has gone from there to have an immersion experience in frolicking with the two grandchildren in Troy, southern Ontario, and is hoping that the third, due any day now, arrives while he is there.

Last month I spent some time at workshops on democratic functioning - seeing this as very relevant to developing a well-functioning community. It was more experiential than any learning I've ever undertaken, and I think has added to my understanding and skills. These were held at Riverside, the established community I've mentioned - a great asset to the region.

Now to the conversation with Herb.

Discussion of how to feed people and conserve soil.

Herb's letter:

Hi Joanna,
We have read your blogs with great interest. The one on the idea of a village was very provocative. I was struck by the boldness of what I take to be the major claim behind village based permaculture; namely, that living in major urban concentrations dependent on distant sources of food produced by large scale specialized food production is not sustainable. Urban depopulation, rural repopulation, and ecologically sensitive, science based, smaller scale, village based, agricultural production could be sustainable.
The prescription appears to go against the view that we need residential intensification to contain or reverse the environmentally costly, land gobbling, urban/suburban sprawl. But maybe it doesn’t really go against that view since residential intensification is talked about in the context of agriculturally non productive land use. But are you worried that if the village-permaculture movement became widespread, it might entail the conversion of much undeveloped land to habitation and mixed agricultural production? Does village permaculture lead to low density sprawl?
A major part of the argument for village based permaculture is that the combination of a big reduction in food transportation costs and more ecologically sensitive agricultural methods means that village permaculture is more conserving and less polluting than our present system. I have the impression that the assessment of net environmental cost of different systems is complex and in many cases uncertain. The present system in industrialized countries is highly specialized. Large areas are planted in one crop, or in the production of one kind of farm animal. Isn’t this specialization efficient? If so, might the gain in efficiency in production balance the environmental cost of transportation?
I understand that there is also the argument that permaculture conserves the soil and other land based resources. But is it not possible to go some distance toward a more soil and water conserving agriculture without giving up on large scale specialized production? It seems to me that is also an important goal because large cities dependent on distant food production are going to be with us for a long time (if there is a long time).
I recognize that village permaculture has appealing values quite aside from its possible role in moving the planet toward a sustainable way of living. What I am questioning is its potential for increasing the chances of the survival of a planet with, say, 10 billion people on it.
I think that what you and Jack are doing is really admirable. You have the courage of your convictions, a rare and wonderful thing. I can see that the enterprise is totally engaging and exciting. I trust that you will take my questions as an attempt to understand, not to undermine.
With all best wishes, Herb

Our responses:

Joanna:
Dear Herb,
You are the very model of a modern inquiring mind; you asked great questions - thanks.

I'll have a go at answering your questions and send my effort to Jack and others for more comments. Here's my best for now:

You wonder if current agricultural practices, often referred to as 'industrial agriculture' (see second photo above), may be the most efficient way of producing food for Earth's population now, and in the future as we increase to the projected 10 billion. You recognize the fossil fuel emissions involved in the global network of food transportation, but ask if this might be balanced by the efficiency of the process. You wonder if industrial agriculture could be modified to improve soil and water conservation.
You ask if reruralization may incur the array of ecological problems of suburban sprawl.

Current agricultural practices are not sustainable. They contribute a very substantial proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions. They do this through the use of agricultural machinery, through the heavy application of fertilizers necessitated by depletion of soil nutrients, the application of herbicides and pesticides necessitated by monoculture practices, and by the huge amount of oil-fuelled transport the system involves.. In addition, heavy tillage of soil releases carbon to the atmosphere. (No-till systems sequester it.) We must find ways to grow food that restore the carbon-sequestering property of soil, the fertility of soil, that do not contribute to gg emissions and that are minimally dependent on oil. These things must be done for two reasons - to mitigate global warming in the long run and to avoid potentially grave effects of peak oil in the short run.

It is not surprising that we experience the present system as efficient; global food prices have been steadily decreasing, at least since after WWII, and until 2005. (Now they are increasing, because of the impact of global warming on agriculture, the steady rise in the price of oil and because food, and food-producing land is being used to produce ethanol. This increase is haing serious effects on some populations.) Oil-fuelled farm machinery has replaced human labour, reducing production costs and depopulating farmland. Oil-based inputs to agriculture have replaced the need to take care of soil. This 'efficiency' in producing food is theft from those who come after us, and must deal with global warming and depleted soil. A related problem is the reduction of genetic diversity caused by industrial agriculture, with loss of many species and variants of such things as potatoes and rice, reducing resilience conferred by diversity.

Jack: One way of understanding the inefficiencies ( and thus unsustainability) of current agricultural industrial practices is to look at the net energy return of the food produced. I don’t have the reference handy, but the calculations show that for every calorie produced by these methods, it takes at least 10 – 15 calories of inputs. This is the very definition of unsustainability – take away the high energy inputs and you can no longer produce the outputs. We are about to lose the inputs with peak oil and peak natural gas. We are also fouling the water required, and the levels of phosphorus are declining. The pulse in food production (and population) created by the introduction of fossil fuels into agriculture over the last century and a half cannot be repeated ( at least I know of no reasonable hypothesis of how it can).

Another perspective on industrial agriculture has to do with the introduction of genetically modified organism – eg to grow in saline soil (created by poor irrigation practices), and other high tech solutions. These approaches which interfere with the natural flow of ecosystems and their slow evolution will undoubtedly have unintended consequences we cannot begin to appreciate ( note the unintended consequences of both CFCs for refrigeration and the extensive use of fossil fuels). Nature is the way nature is because it is the most efficient way of creating biomass and protecting living organisms. I suggest that as a species we are much better off trying to understand the complexities involved and working with these natural processes rather than attempting to “improve” them for our short term benefit.

I have my doubts that the human population will ever reach 10 billion because of the vulnerability of our food system. But I also believe that more people will receive adequate nourishment if industrial agriculture ( and a host of other energy intensive practices that are unsustainable and essentially unhealthy for people and the planet eg mining, warfare, etc) are abandoned and we base our food system on local production with permaculture and related food production practices.

Just a few days ago we had a small workshop here at Te Mara to plan for food production on the land here and for the village. The first stage will be to prepare a little more than 1 Ha of land for crop rotation. With two full time people and two part time, we expect to be able to feed about 20 people from this parcel – with a surplus. We will use a combination of permaculture and French intensive gardening. The process grows soil as well as crops, insuring the sustainability of the practice. We will use some fossil fuels to begin preparing the land ( and we will try to measure these inputs so we can establish a baseline and reduce it in the future) as a temporary measure. The objective is to move quickly to a fossil fuel free system and we believe this can be done in just a few years.

Joanna:
Permaculture (see first hoto above) and other organic agricultural practices counter these problems. I understand they can restore depleted soil, minimize external inputs, and minimize tillage. I also understand that the food production per hectare is greater in total than in monoculture, the product comprising many diverse foods rather than one. The implication of this is that a change to this for of agriculture would have a better chance of feeding human populations than would industrial monocultureagriculture. Organic practices involve small scale monocultures, are strong on nurturing soil, and are labour intensive. Permaculture practices, I'm told, after achievement of a mature garden, involve rather little labour input, mostly focussing on perennial plants. But the permaculturist must live in their garden to observe and make adjustments.

It would seem possible to apply such agricultural practices to urban centres up to a certain size. This happened successfully in Cuba after their sudden loss of Soviet oil in the 1990s. They implemented multiple adaptations,including input from Australian permaculturists, intensive urban gardening, use of draft animals for agricultural energy input and a science-based approach. I understand that Havana was able to supply 80% of its food from within a 5-10 km radius of the city centre, and smaller towns were able to grow 100%. I imagine this meant people moving out of the city into the near countryside.

Jack: see above. I would also add that I think cities will and must shrink in population. Sustainable agricultural practices will require more people on the land and involved in food production. Reruralization is needed. See the writing of Richard Register for the thinking of an architect who has been looking at these issues for some time, and who has useful ideas about how to transform cities into a system of villages.

Keep in mind that cities also now contain a lot of people who are essentially unproductive from the perspective of meeting basic human needs - think of people in the financial services, insurance, advertising, PR, even the food and trucking industries, etc. Many of these jobs could go without too many people really missing the services provided (aside from those whose jobs might be lost). A return to localization of the economy, especially regarding basic services ( food, shelter, education, health care, culture, etc) will create a much more efficient system and allow many more people to survive.

Joanna:
Does this mean worse urban sprawl?
Not in the form of settlement we're working on. The problem with urban sprawl is that water, sewage and electricity and roads must be supplied over a huge area of urban infrastructure at great expense, and then people must travel long distances to work and education. Also there is likely no meaningful community in their settlement area, and certainly little economic interdependence. In the form of settlement we are developing, water, sewage and energy will be taken care of in the village, food will be grown in the village area, and there will be a strong effort to have as many jobs as possible based in the village. Some of these may depend on internet (while this technology is available), and it is recognized that some people will need to work in the nearby town or city. Transport will be shared. Houses are to be built on the less productive land, usually rather steep slopes.

Jack: Much of current “development” takes place on green fields ie agricultural land ( this is one of the big issues about the expansion of an industrial park around the Hamilton airport). It takes productive farm land out of production and transforms it to a use that requires ever more energy and material inputs. No matter how “efficient” this process becomes, it is inherently unsustainable on the scale it is now occurring (and perhaps at any scale).

Several of your questions talk about improved efficiencies. I have two comments: Jevon’s Paradox needs to be considered – whenever there is an increase in efficiency there is also an increase in total material throughput – when things are more efficient we use more of them. Secondly, being efficient at the wrong thing cannot be sustainable. We have become increasingly efficient at creating unsustainable practices and are approaching “peak everything” ( a recent book by Richard Heinberg – recommended). A basic principle of ecological economics is – frugality first ( set limits to ensure we stay within the capacities of natural systems to regenerate) and then be concerned with doing that efficiently.

One of the things that really excites me about the project we are doing is that we are taking marginal land (only good for grazing sheep at best – which NZ has too many of anyway) and turning it into productive land thru permaculture, making it visually attractive (again via permaculture), and providing basic services for people (water, waste water management, energy, food) from the land itself. We will require almost nothing from the district council in terms of services ( in fact, I can think of none). Even the materials for the homes will largely come from materials on the land itself. I am hoping we can do a materials and energy audit of both the construction and operating phases to learn more about what we are actually doing and to learn how this can be improved.

Joanna:
Can this form of settlement pattern take care of the needs of 10 billion people? I don't know and I have doubts that it can, despite the claims of higher productivity in Permaculture. While I have seen predictions that the present form of agriculture can feed 10 billion, these projections take into account none of the problems of GHG emissions and peak oil. The recent notes on rising food prices and diminishing grain reserves suggest that we are running into problems of food supply (rather than only food distribution) right now. I am very interested in understanding more about how many humans can live sustainably on the Earth.

Jack: Again, see my comments above. When I hear questions like this, the I = P X A X T formula comes to mind. We cannot separate the population (P) question from consumption ( A for Affluence) and technology ( T). Clearly, the total impact we have on ecosystems that support and maintain us ( and everyone living thing) is a complex function of P, A and T. We tend to focus on improving T ( because we have some much excess energy with fossil fuels),and generally avoid looking at A and P. But there are three parameters we have to work with, and if we are going to be losing the unrepeatable energy services of fossil fuels( which has made the incredible T we have possible) then we had best learn to deal with both the A and the P. The real goal is reducing our I ( impact on ecosystems), and we will need to radically alter all three parameters – making technologies more efficient and focused on doing the basic tasks, learn to live more frugally ( which is totally consistent with high levels of both human satisfaction and well being – objectively measured), and reduce our population. Ultimately, it is the I ( for Impact) that counts.

Joanna:
Well, dear Herb, that's it for me now.Warmest wishes to you and Adair,
Joanna

Further comments: I read the following account the other day: When the massive exodus of Tibetans flowed into India, they were given land in various parts of India and began agriculture. This was in the hey-day of the green revolution and the adopted its methods. Much later it was realized that the soil had become sterile, devoid of all the living matter that makes up healthy soil, due to these methods. the dalai Lama pointed out that the infrastructure of all Tibetan settlements must be nonviolent. Agriculture changed to organic methods and productivity improved. (Chris Turner. The Geography of Hope, 2007 )

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Alternative Currency

One friend, commenting on previous blogs, noted that nothing has been said about a complementary local money system (like the Toronto dollar). I had been imagining that this would be worked out at a later stage. However, some more recent reading, stimulated by Joy Kogawa who was instrumental in the Toronto Dollar system, suggests to me that sooner rather than later should be considered. I was very happy to find that our ecologist, Helle Janssen, has past experience in establishing alternatie currencies. I'm sure to return to this topic.

Warmest wishes to the enduring souls who have read all of this.

Joanna

Permaculture

2008-01-13T20:18:00.000-08:00

Dear Family and Friends,

In this blog, I'll try to convey something about the systems of agriculture to be used in Atamai, the village project we're working on. The aim is to achieve a high degree of food self-sufficiency (but not complete self-reliance), to do this with minimal fossil fuel input and efficient use of human labour among other energy inputs. The potential of growing plants for other uses is also of interest - fibre, fuel, medicinal purposes, for example. The images above represent a New Zealand Permaculture garden (not ours) and a Permaculture map or land plan, which looks rather like the maps that appear at the meetings we have on this issue.

Permaculture is one of the forms of food-growing that will characterize this project. It is particularly relevant to the use of somewhat degraded land for production, or for steep or marginally fertile land. The best land in the village area will likely be cultivated by French Intensive gardening methods, which has in common with Permaculture very close attention to the health of the soil, and differs in that plants are grown in beds, and these plants are mainly annuals.

Permaculture is a contraction of 'permanent agriculture' and focusses on the development of a complex, very diverse, designed system of mainly perennial food plants. It originated in Australia in the 1970s with founding thinkers Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. They describe Permaculture as 'an integrated and evolving system of perennial or self-peretuating plant and animal species useful to man....a philosophy of working with rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labour, and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating an area as a single product system. '

Permaculture has since been adopted in many places across the globe, with research being done on most continents. Australian Permaculture experts helped Cuba reorganize its agriculture during the 'special period' after Cuba lost its source of oil when the Soviet Union dissolved. It makes the assumption that food security requires sustainable agriculture, and that the high degree of dependence of industrial agriculture on oil to restore nutrients to dead soil, to provide herbicides and pesticides to pest-attracting monocultures and to fuel soil-compacting farm implements, is not sustainable. In addition, the destruction of diversity of strains of plants useful to humankind, such as has occurred in rice in industrial monocultures, threatens the resilience of food-growing systems to challenges such as climate change.

In Permaculture there is minimum tillage, fertilization and weeding and no use of chemicals for insects and other pests. Its proponents claim that the amount of food (of many varieties) produced per hectare is greater than in industrial monoculture. There is a role for animals in a Permaculture system; however a diet based on Permaculture would likely derive most nutrients from plants, and include fewer grains than a current western diet.

A Permaculture garden has plantings in 'zones', starting at the kitchen door, based on the frequency of need for humans to visit that part of the garden or of elements of the garden to require human attention. Culinary herbs, salad greens and citrus trees should be reachable without getting your slippers wet. The chickens should be not too far off; vegetable gardens and orchards are next in priority. Grains and forest are further off. Outside that, ideally, is wilderness.

Fruit and nut trees are of major importance in the system. The first element in the design of Atamai, after terracing of the steepest hillsides, was the planting of 7000 fruit, nut and forest trees of considerable diversity. There has been much attention to agricultural water, with a visit from an Australian expert in 'keylining', a system of making the most of scarce agricultural water. We may require energy input (oil-based) to dig ponds and contour some parts of the land. Soil has been tested. 'Terra preta' (an Amazonian agricultural method of returning carbon to the soil) has been prepared. Tools have been purchased. There is a small team of young people working on a variety of tasks, such as caring for the tree plantings. Road layout for agricultural purposes has been planned. In a few weeks, an exerienced land manager will begin work to implement an overall plan of work. A yield is expected next season.

Finally, it is important to remind ourselves that about a third of greenhouse gases contributing to climate change are the result of current agricultural methods, with tillage being part of the problem picture. It is a matter of urgency to change these methods globally in the direction being developed in Atamai and other such experiments. These will reverse carbon emission from soil to carbon sequestration in soil.

Notes on ourselves: Some of you kind enough to take an interest in these issues have said you'd welcome a few notes at a more personal level, to tell you how we ourselves are getting on. Glad to oblige!

We're both very well. Jack is slender and fit and succeeds most days in prodding me to walk or cycle.

For a few weeks we have actually been living on the land, in a pre-existing house which we share with a young family. The property is called Te Mara, Maori for garden, orchard, cultivation, as it is destined to be all of these. Living here is very pleasant. The little kids of 5 and 3 are delightful, and help to soothe our deprivation of grandchildren (of the same ages, as it happens.) They bring me loquats and strawberries they find growing here, and decorate my computer keyboard with nasturtiums and bracken. Who could fail to be inspired when working at a flower-bedecked keyboard! It does have an effect on work output though. Yesterday I sat on the floor (we have very little furniture) to read about Permaculture; within a minute I had small people sitting either side of me, and we were reading 'Froggy Went A'Courtin'' instead.

We have hens, a rooster, a duck and a bantam, all of whom came with the property. The lay astonishingly large brown eggs which we greatly enjoy. The children and their Mum walk down the road to feed them and put them in their coop every evening.

Cycling to get groceries certainly satisfies requirements of a daily work-out. The families share a car and other resources. Jack and I are waiting for our ship to come in, bringing our household stuff. We will then move to another pre-existing house on the land. I'll be sorry to move away from this family; we will get more work done, though, and it's only an 8 minute walk (at a 45 degree angle, no kidding) up or down the ridge to visit.

Jack spends most of his time on this project. The other thing he's doing is to work on a discussion paper on population issues for a meeting of the International Forum on Globalization in February in San Francisco. I've helped with this in a minor way. I've continued with some of my work by e-mail, relating to students in Canada and elsewhere, helping a bit with the Afghanistan work. I'm also trying to catch up on some broad learning in relation to the project. It's very stimulating to sit in on meetings dealing with such things as Water (last Saturday's topic) and listen to a pretty high degree of expertise on the subject. Last week I attended a 3-day workshop on 'Practising Democracy'. which seemed relevant both to this stage of many work-meetings, and to the subsequent social organization of the village. It was entirely experiential, a novel educational experience for me; I learned useful things about consensus -seeking and relating to authority. It was held at a nearby community, Riverside, established over 60 years ago by Christian pacifists. The community is no longer Christian, but continues as a very interesting group of people.

I visited my Australian family over Christmas, and was able to spend a good deal of time with my mother and my siblings and their families, watching in my last few hours there, the magnificent Sydney Harbour fireworks display to welcome the New Year.

I recently read former NZ prime minister David Lange's account of how New Zealand adopted its nuclear-free policy, and will try to write a review on this soon. I think there's a useful analogy to explore in NZ's relationship to the ANZUS treaty and Canada's to NATO.

I send my heartfelt love to the many dear people who read this blog.

Joanna

Sources:

Bill Mollison and David Holmgren (1978) Permaculture One - a Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements. Tagari Publications.

Bill Mollison (1979) Permaculture Two - Practical Design for Town and Country in Permanent Agriculture. Tagari Publications.

David Holmgren (2002 )Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability.

Atamai Village

2007-12-25T18:30:00.000-08:00

Dear Family and Friends,

I hope the warm seasonal gatherings of this time of year have brought you much joy, and I send you my best wishes for 2008.

On January 2nd, I'll return from my visit to Australia to live in the house you might dimly discern in the centre of the second photo. Jack is already there, together with a young family with whom we'll share the dwelling. The fields you see here will begin to be cultivated over the coming year and will eventually be an important component of the food supply for Atamai Village. This part of the village lands is known as Te Mara - Maori for 'the garden, orchard, cultivation'. The first photo is of the very pretty stream at Te Mara.

The pine woods you see here are also part of the village lands. They are a Pinus radiata plantation. They are non-native, bad for the soil and do not sequester carbon. They will slowly be replaced by native forest trees and bushes and ferns.

Over the ridge of the pine forest is more village land - a fairly steep bowl of former grazing land. Most of the dwellings will be built in this bowl, including the village centre complex. Some of it has been terraced and much of it has been planted with 7000 fruit, nut and forest trees.

Let me describe in more detail the intentions for this village. You already know that designs for the village have grown out of a need to respond to the threats of climate change, oil and other resource depletion. It is intended to provide for the growth of a settlement that will:

show that 'living sustainably within our means' on Earth is both feasible and attractive

contribute to ongoing learning about how this can be done

withstand possible coming economic and resource shocks, and demonstrate to others how this can be done

Planners work with the idea that settlements evolve in response to their environment and to changing human needs and that, in the words of a scholar of settlements, Christopher Mare, 'A truly sustainable village must be skilfully designed to create itself.' It will need to be revised and changed over time, yet should be built to last centuries.

Atamai Village can be considered in relation to the following dimensions:

Scale: Optimal scale is a tension between two needs:

big enough to have a complex economy with specialization of function, enabling a high degree of self-reliance in basic needs

small enough that everyone knows everyone else, more or less, enabling safety, accountability, and increasing moral responsibility for the common good.

Atamai can grow to a population of several hundred people. It may be too small. Many writers suggest that 500-5000 is optimal.

Food provision: An experienced UK organic gardener and an experienced French land manager are involved in this group. They consider that Atamai can produce a food surplus beyond its own needs before long. There will be communal fields on the land you see above, private gardens around dwellings and the food-bearing trees planted all over the property. Domestic animals may be involved. (We already have some resident chickens at Te Mara.) The above folk, Adrian and Jacques, will soon produce a land management plan for agriculture. Permaculture and French intensive gardening methods will predominate. Both methods pay close attention to soil. The 'terra preta' system of soil enrichment is already in use with the recent tree plantings, and will continue. This may evolve into a small business providing for other regional farmers and gardeners.

Water, waste and sewage: Water will be from rainwater collection and from wells. Gravity will be used as much as possible in water arrangements eg tanks from house above supply house below and so on. Composting toilets will mean no so-called 'blackwater' to take care of. 'Grey water' from household use will be used for garden irrigation. There will be an effort to move towards a 'no waste' economy of materials.

Health: I anticipate that people will be healthier. They will be doing more physical activity (walking, cycling, digging, hoeing) and they will eat better. A village structure as described fosters healthy human relationships - people cooperating in common endeavours and caring for each other. This fosters good mental health.

Forest: Another person associated with the project is Helle, an expert on regeneration of New Zealand native forests. He will produce a plan for conversion of the pine forest to native forest, outlining (I hope) the uses of the pinewood eg construction and fuel.

Dwellings: A team of architects, green builders and designers is working on plans for construction of some dwellings in the early New Year. There will be some mandatory specifications - limit on size, use of locally available building materials (clay, mud straw, stone, wood), passive solar design to minimize heating costs, rainwater collection, composting toilets, possibly wood stoves, photovoltaic panels. The houses will be aesthetically pleasing. Some of us hope for designs that intrude minimally on the landscape. There need to be family homes, space for extended family, eg aging parents, rental accommodation, places for people in the WWOOFer system (travelling organic farm helpers), places for seasonal workers, possibly co-housing areas with some shared facilities. Diversity of design will be encouraged; aesthetic unity will be imposed by the local construction materials. It is hoped that villagers will learn to construct and repair their own houses

It is expected that many houses will have their own food gardens. Common areas will be landscaped for beauty as well as productivity.

Village Centre: This may comprise a meeting hall, performance area, AV facilities, central laundry, restaurant and bakery, perhaps a centre for spiritual activities. Some houses and workshops will be clustered in this area.

Transport: Private cars will be discouraged; there is no provision for them in the settlement arrangement. Much movement will be by foot and bicycle. There will be a system of paths throughout the village, and electric vehicles available when needed. A small company will operate a shared car system, and possibly provide regular trips to Motueka (the town 6 minutes away) and Nelson (the city 45 minutes away). The bike trip to Motueka was timed by Jack the other day - 30 minutes. Soon we'll have our electric battery-assisted bikes to help with the hills. (Jack and I haven't had a car of our own since leaving Canada.)

Economy: It is hoped that from an early stage at least half of Atamai Villagers will find employment in the village. The community will own the infrastructure; some livelihoods will be directed to village maintenance, and some to goods and services beyond the village. Other people may earn their livelihood in the local town or nearby city, but it is hoped this will not be a general pattern. It may be that a local currency system will evolve.

Child development and education: There is a considerable focus on having the village be a safe, loving and stimulating place for children to grow up. With no cars, children should be able to move freely throughout the village, to enjoy and learn from many people. There will be many economic activities proceeding, involving skills that children could acquire. Some children will be home-schooled. Others may go to the local school.

Lifelong learning and research: In the shift from our highly consuming, fossil fuel-dependent way of life to the way of life described here, there is an enormous amount of learning to be done. The group designing this village already has been holding potluck dinner-seminars and workshops. The group includes experts in a range of areas. We are eager to learn from each other, from an abundant literature and from the experience of other similar efforts. Subsequently we hope to engage in research relevant to the village and to contribute to the learning of others. This latter function will be carried out by a planned Bioregional Institute, which we hope will serve settlements in this region and others.

Arts: Arts are seen as an important aspect of village life and will be encouraged. There is an aspiration to have occasional artists in residence. There will be a performance space and audiovisual facilities.

Leisure: Much leisure equipment can be shared eg kayaks, camping equipment. This has to do with a value held in this group to minimize material acquisitions, but maximize quality of life.

Values: The above value is part of attempting to live with minimal harm to the Earth and within the biophysical limits of the planet. Nonviolence to both people and Earth is a paramount value. Sharing, cooperating, helping each other, caring for the less able, respect for persons and for diversity; organizational values of honesty, transparency and accountability are all held to be important. It is not supposed that those who join this endeavour will be unusually highly moral or spiritual people. The hope is to create a social structure which will foster the good inherent in everyone and minimize the potential for bad behaviour.

Social structure and governance: This must ultimately evolve with those who live in the village and cannot be designed or prescribed. Those currently involved value participatory democracy with consensus decision-making and close attention to dealing constructively with conflicts.

Process: The group working on the village shares an understanding that supporting the process of village evolution is important, rather than having a clear vision of the final form. Living organisms are self-organizing; a village will be so. It is hoped that Atamai will be the first of many. Each will be different and will learn from and support the others.

As you can imagine, dear friends, this is an enormously interesting project, and the people involved are for the most part, delightful to work with. Jack's business skills give him an instant niche to fit into. My skills are more in the social area; my role hasn't crystallized yet. That's OK for now. I'm grateful to be working with people with high degrees of knowledge and expertise on a project that offers hope for human survival and thriving.

Warmest wishes to all,

Joanna

Parihaka - a nonviolent village

2007-11-05T19:31:00.000-08:00

Dearest Family and Friends,

I was in the middle of doing some research for a blog on the concept of the village, when the remarkable evening Jack and I spent last night demanded that I devote a blog to it. The focus is the history of Maori nonviolent action, but it is also the story of a village. The images above are firstly, the village event of Parihaka's men returning from years in gaol, in 1898, and secondly, an artist's collage of many aspects of this history. (They should be reversed, but my blog skills grow only in tiny increments.)

Last night, Jack and I drove the short distance to Riverside Community, a 65 year-old settlement founded by Christian pacifists. It is no longer Christian, but maintains a strong peace culture. Members of the community had worked with local Maori to produce this event. It took place in a beautiful hall which once was the Methodist Church for the Riverside Community. The event began with a calling into the hall by conch horn. The 100 or so people who moved into the hall spanned infancy to advanced age. The narrative was told in Maori and English, in voice, dance and song, very movingly. Then four community members rotated to the four quadrants of the room, speaking simultaneously quotations of key figures on nonviolence. A Maori Anglican priest spoke, then went to the courtyard to bless the ample and delicious potluck dinner.

Over dinner Jack and I conversed with a Maori public health worker who wants to move forward with plans for a Maori village, and is interested in what we're doing, as we are in what she's doing. We'll have dinner with her next week.

Then there was another 'coming together' of people in the hall, singing a most beautiful Maori song, which seemed known to many folk there, including nonMaori. A young Maori spoke spontaneously of the importance of the occasion, and of unity between peoples. He said that in Maori gatherings a speech to the community was followed by a song. He would play one on the flute about All-encompassing Love. Even the little kids listened quietly.

Then, astonishingly, seven giant marimbas were carried in and set up, and the place erupted in Zimbabwean music played by 9 local (white) people. Everyone, of all ages, was bouncing with joy. You can't imagine how loud seven giant marimbas could be. I never saw Jack dance so happily and for so long. There was a pause while the players reminded us that Zimbabweans weren't themselves having much fin these days...we noted, and then bounced on. How is it, I ask, that this little town (popn. 6000) has such a group? I was told that another little town over the mountain pass in Golden Bay, has an even bigger Zimbabwean marimba group.

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So, what's the story of Parihaka?

It's set in the mid- to late 19th century, when land developers were encouraging European immigrants to come to New Zealand, and attempting to take over Maori land for that purpose. The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, but in this shameful phase of NZ history, was flagrantly ignored. The NZ government supported this surge of land acquisition and European settlement, desiring the tax revenues that would accrue. Worse still, there was an influential group of landowners, known as 'the Mob', profoundly racist, who actively desired war with the Maori, expecting and hoping to exterminate them. They were supported by some New Zealand newspapers. War erupted in 1860 and after stalemate and truce, flared again as settlers moved in and took over Maori lands. In the south-west of the North Island, in the shadow of beautiful Mount Taranaki, lay the lands of a people headed by two men generally referred to as 'prophets' -- Te Whiti (pronounced 'te fiti') and Tohu. Together they generated a philosophy of radical nonviolence in response to this situation and strategies to implement it. Te Whiti was described as the greatest orator in New Zealand at that time; Tohu was more retiring.

Prior to incursion on their land, Te Whiti and Tohu had shown the utmost friendliness to pakeha (Europeans), speaking repeatedly of the need to share the land, and expressing willingness to give up some of it for European settlement. 'Enough blood has been shed for that land. Let no more be shed.' They founded a new village at Parihaka. On the 17th of every month, the anniversary of the beginning of the wars, thousands of people came to Parihaka to hear Te Whiti speak. The two men were known by all as a peacemakers. Their village was known as a model village.

Certain elements of the government were determined to provoke a war. Surveyors were sent in to the cultivated areas around Parihaka to mark settler holdings. They cut through gardens and trampled crops. The villagers quietly removed their pegs overnight. Eventually, on Te Whiti's orders, the Maori in the area surrounded the surveyors, packed them, their instruments and their camping equipment on to carts, and conveyed them all out of the area.

When settlers came to take up their holdings, teams of ploughmen were sent out by Te Whiti and Tohu. With their horses, they began before dawn and ploughed until dusk, conveying symbolically that this was their land for cultivation. They were described as 'very civil and dignified' and no settler was ever threatened. Te Whiti said, ' I am cutting a furrow to the Governor's heart.' Two hundred ploughmen were arrested. the government passed a bill allowing Maori prisoners to be held without trial. The government collapsed; Te Whiti ordered the ploughing to cease.

The new Native Minister was John Bryce, whose answer to the problem of disputed Maori land was to take it all by force. He moved hundreds of troops to the area on the pretext of repairing the roads. 'Even though the bayonets of the soldiers blind your eyes with their brightness, do not flinch,' Te Whiti told his people at Parihaka. Te Whiti announced that he wanted the road repaired and sent several cartloads of food to the soldiers working on it. In return, the army band performed for them.This was not at all what Bryce had in mind.

The chief surveyor changed the course of the road and drove it through the Parihaka gardens, breaking down the fences around them. In the morning the army returned and found the fences repaired and the road blocked. They broke them down again and the Maori rebuilt them again and again.The colonel in charge telegrammed Bryce to say that the Parihaka men were very reasonable and wanted gates across gaps in the fences. Bryce refused to authorize gates and ordered the fencers arrested. Day after day Te Whiti sent new teams to repair fences after each team was arrested. This was played out 40 or 50 times. Some prepared themselves for arrest by wearing their best clothes and holding out their hands for the handcuffs. At one point, 300 men and boys descended on the roadline, dug up the road, sowed it with wheat and put up a fence. Bryce introduced more legislation to make erecting a fence punishable with two years' hard labour. Hundreds of Maori from the area received this sentence. As the men dwindled in numbers old men and children carried on the demonstrations, the singing children known as tatarakihi - cicadas. The government had had enough. Bryce was ordered to stop taking prisoners. He resigned as Native Minister.

But the land confiscations did not stop. Te Whiti's thousands of acres of mountain forest, plains and beach was to be reduced to an inland town, its inhabitants living on handouts and surrounded by white farms. An armed force was sent to amass outside Parihaka. Te Whiti never wavered in his attempts to accomplish 'an extraordinary political feat - to forge a permanent and not merely an expedient peace between two of the most bellicose peoples in the world, the English and the Maori' (Walker).

It is not right that fear of war, or imprisonment, should be made master of the world, and that the great and strong, by coercion, should become masters of creation. It is not right that the men of the island should be made slaves to fear of war, anger and vexation or that the land should be relinquished from that cause. If it happened to be the case that the world had been created in a feeling of anger and vexation, then it would be right that these moods should continue to rule the world, and conclude all things. But no, the world was created through love and all things made upon the face of the earth were created out of affection and love. Therefore I say, since things commenced with love, our affairs should continue by love, through to the end. (Te Whiti)

Then Bryce, back in power, unleashed the dogs of war. Volunteer whites streamed into the area. The army was ready to strike. Te Whiti gave a last address to 2500 to 3000 people, including many pakeha.

The canoe by which we are to be saved is forbearance. Let us abide calmly on the land...Be firm, that the world might be informed and hear the good word.

Tohu said:

I shall place no weapons in your hands. You were imprisoned for ploughing and fencing, but there is no imprisonment for what we are now doing. I will not take you away from death or from the mouth of the guns; I will thrust you into the mouth of the guns and on the point of the sword.
"I will not save you or give you any means of escape. If any warlike man among you ask me what is to be done I will not answer him ... I have no place to hide you except in this marae, and we cannot be overcome ... Those who flee from the guns will fall by them. If you are overwhelmed in this day be patient ... have faith ..."

A Maori policeman was sent out to invite Bryce and his escort into town. Bryce declined. Bryce had imposed a news blackout, but five journalists sneaked by the patrols, were welcomed by Tohu, hid in the cookhouse, saw and recorded everything. The thousands of people of the town sat quietly on the marae, the forecourt of the great meeting house. One of the journalists described 'a prevailing sadness, as though they felt a great calamity were approaching...It was saddening in the extreme; it was an industrious, law-abiding, moral and hospitable community calmly waiting the approach of men sent to rob them...'

The army advanced. 'At the first sight of the soldiers, a great cheer rose from the gates of Parihaka. Two hundred children, the cicadas, ran out to meet the soldiers. The boys began to sing and perform action dances. Behind them were girls with skipping ropes and 500 loaves of bread that had been baked during the night for the soldiers.
The advance guard marched on the children and wheeled away at the last minute, unsure of how to proceed. Bryce then ordered a cavalry charge, but the tatarakihi sang on as the horses thundered towards them. "Even when a mounted officer galloped up and pulled his horse up so short that the dirt from its forefeet spattered the children, they still went on chanting, perfectly oblivious, apparently, to the pakeha,' one old soldier recalled...' (Walker) He described how he found his way blocked by skipping parties. When he grabbed a skipping rope, he suffered a rope burn. He picked up one girl and carried her to the side of the road. He looked back to see his men grinning at the ridiculous sight.

Officers went to the packed marae and read the Riot Act. The crowd did not acknowledge them and kept their eyes fixed on Te Whiti. Tohu spoke briefly:

Let the man who has raised the war finish his work this day. We will wait where we are...Even if the bayonet be put to your breasts, do not resist...'

For an hour, nothing happened. Then Te Whiti and Tohu were arrested. As they were led away, both spoke words of encouragement to the assembly and urged them to remain steadfast in peace.
A woman began to cry. Another said to her, 'Why are you sorry? Look! He's laughing as he goes away with the pakehas.' The people remained on the marae all day until darkness fell. The next day the town was destroyed and the people dispersed.

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Parihaka was rebuilt by Te Whiti when he was released from prison. Today it is the site of an annual international peace festival.

Several more things were said in the oral narrative we heard on Monday night. One was that the children born of rape after the destruction of Parihaka were accepted and loved by their communities. Another was that Gandhi heard the story of Parihaka in South Africa. I am immensely moved and inspired by this story. The captain of the arresting party said that if one rifle had gone off by accident among the Maori, there would have been a mass slaughter. No one was killed. (One officer suffered skipping rope burn!)

For a long time, I've been told, Parihaka Day, November 5th, was commemorated in the mood of 'Look what they did to us.' Now the mood is 'Look what we, the Maoris, invented in the 1880s in response to the brutal colonial treatment. We have a message for the world.'

Love to all my family and friends,
Joanna

Sources:
Walker, Peter. The Fox Boy: the story of an abducted child. Bloomsbury, 2001.
Oral narrative of Parihaka Peace Gathering, Riverside Community, 2007.

The Idea of the Village

2007-11-01T19:44:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

In this blog entry, I'd like to convey some of the ideas that have been developed about the characteristics of villages to be built in this project.

Why a village at all? While most humans have lived in villages (settlements of 500-5000) for most of human history, the last century has seen a strong and continuing trend to urbanization, recently passing a milestone in which about half the global population now lives in cities. Many who live in villages would rather live in cities, especially in the low income countries, where cities offer better education, better health care, more stimulus and novelty, sometimes greater acceptance of diversity. Yet nostalgia for whatever people imagine a village represents is readily apparent. Bits of cities are often wistfully labelled 'villages', as are retirement homes and gated communities. What is it people long for?

This particular village idea of the Sustainable Settlements group is a response to the complex global ecological and economic crisis of climate change, coming oil scarcity and other resource depletion. The thinking behind it is that humans are very rapidly degrading the Earth's capacity to support many species, including ourselves, and we must learn to respect and live within the biophysical limits of this capacity. It is not only the ominous climate change effects of greenhouse gases, it is degradation and depletion of fresh water, of soil, of fish stocks, of coastal ecosystems and so on. It is the addition to the ecosphere of chemical and radioactive substances foreign to it, and of genetic combinations that did not evolve in the web of life, but in the laboratory, and have unknown effects on the web.

The thinking behind this village development includes an awareness that an adequate response to the climate change crisis entails a need to stop and eventually perhaps reverse the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This obviously means minimising the use of fossil fuels. The peaking of oil supply will support this process, but, as a result of inadequate planning for it, it is likely to cause severe economic disruption in the short term. It is important that populations, whether rural or urban, plan for so-called 'post-carbon' living.

Technological development, especially in alternative energy resources, will be part of the solution to these challenges, but this needs to be done very carefully. Since the unthinking application of technology has got us into this species-threatening mess, we need to appraise very carefully the impact of old and new technologies on the web of life over time. We, the group working on this project, believe that both the need to respond to climate change and the need to prepare for peak oil are urgent issues. We think it is unlikely that alternative energy sources will be able to fill the gap that will grow between demand for energy at current rates of consumption and supply. Even if projected levels of energy demand could be met at some time in the future, we contend that use of that energy to move and change matter in the biosphere will unbearably strain its biophysical limits to a point incompatible with supporting large human populations.

We are convinced that alternative energy sources, though important, will not solve our fundamental problems, and that we must experiment with different ways of living. We need to live so as to move ourselves and our goods around much less, that is, we need to be closer to the sources of supply of our basic material needs. We need to use less energy generally and to take care of water, soil, wood and so on, with lower material throughputs in our economies.

In addition, since about a third of excess carbon in the atmosphere comes from changes in agricultural practices exacerbated by cheap oil, we need to move quickly to take care of the soil in such a way that it becomes a carbon 'sink' and not a carbon 'emitter'. Returning organic matter to the soil through 'no-till' methods and other agriculture methods is crucial, urgent and scarcely mentioned in general discourse on this topic. The technologies for this are known, but as with cheap oil, government subsidies are perverse and keep the wrong practices going. The agricultural practices that will accomplish this are more labour-intensive. They would reverse the global trend to rural depopulation. There needs to be reruralization of the land.

Over the last 30-40 years, the idea of agriculture that works with Nature rather than dominating and 'denaturing' Nature has developed. One of these developments, Permaculture, originating in Australia, has now been applied successfully around the world. It demonstrates the capacity to restore damaged land and to enable growing food on poor and marginal land. Its 'healing' of the soil entails the soil holding, instead of releasing, carbon in organic matter, thus extracting it from the atmosphere. It has a strong focus on knowledge - of land, water cycles, natural energy systems and storages, species that benefit humans, evolution of manmade ecosystems and the need for constant study of the land. I'll say more about Permaculture in a future blog.

Here, of course, is where the idea of village fits - a human settlement where people learn to live with lower consumption of energy and materials, to grow food, fuel, fibre and building materials near to where they use them, by means of agricultural systems that restore rather than damage land and improve natural carbon sequestration.

They will need to

live in well-insulated and smaller houses with passive solar heating

grow food close by with more intensive land-care, although not necessarily more laborious agriculture

rehabilitate land to better support human settlements by use of Permaculture technologies, restoring fertility, productivity and beauty.

restore native habitat in some areas, thus preserving species

This will mean people will be more closely connected to the land that supports them, and will be more aware of how many it can support.

This way of living, whether done in rural or suburban areas, cannot be done by isolated families very easily or effectively. It needs a community, and a highly knowledgeable one. There needs to be expertise in hydrology, soil, Permaculture, botany, food processing and preservation, ecology, land management, land and forest restoration, animal husbandry, architecture, business, economics, small scale democracy, conflict resolution, political advocacy, education and research in a range of areas.

But large, dense conurbations of many millions of people, hundreds of kilometres from their food sources, with infrastructure needing high energy inputs, may find it difficult to reduce their fossil fuel dependence and their dependence on destructive carbon and methane-emitting agricultural practices. This kind of human settlement is possible only with high energy inputs, which are unlikely to be available in the future.

While historically, villages grow organically and slowly, experiments along the lines decribed need to take place rapidly, and with the expectation of errors. It will be an advantage to have multiple experiments, and systems of rapid learning from each other. There are Permaculture villages in Africa, India and other developing countries from whom to learn.

There are aspects of this transformation that may seem unattractive at first glance - less car use, growing one's own food, smaller houses, travelling much less. What about access to high culture and higher education and the stimulus of city life?

We need to consider that some of the health problems of urban life, obesity, diabetes etc., are closely related to ways we transport and feed ourselves. And what is it that people long for in the idea of 'village'? Most clearly, they long for community, to be part of a small population of people that belong to a place and take care of it and each other. Is it possible to have great intellectual stimulus, higher education and high culture in such settings? There is clearly enormous intellectual stimulus in the application of a whole range of abilities to the problems to be solved in living in a way that doesn't hurt the Earth. Villages generate arts in music, dance, visual art. ( A good deal of the cultural and intellectual activity we've participated in over the last six weeks has been centred in Riverside, a nearby community far smaller than a village, but with a 65 year tradition.) Christopher Mare, who has studied human settlements from a historical perspective, claims that the two most sustainable civilizations in human history, classic Egyptian and Mayan, were village-based. They both comprised clusters of villages that related to centres of religious activity. These civilizations generated some of the world's most impressive architecture, visual art and intellectual accomplishment. Regarding higher education, young people may continue to benefit from travel to centres of higher education; technologies of distance education advance continually.

It will be important to demonstrate that a Permaculture village is an attractive way of life. Currently, very large numbers of people are acutely aware of global ecological problems and willing to act on them. But beyond blue boxes and light bulbs, they often don't know how. The technologies of a Permaculture village can be partly applied to suburbs and to small towns or less dense areas of cities. Retrofitting houses, converting land to grow food in or near urban areas, working near to home and public transportation will be part of what needs to be done. But it will also be important to get more people on to the land to reverse that one-third contribution to greenhouse gases and sequester carbon in soil.

All of this is not a sufficient response to either the climate change crisis or the problems of peak oil. Political advocacy at all levels from local to global is needed. Issues of carbon tax, transportation, land use, housing, economic incentives and many more require social action. This action may be more powerful if it comes from people and groups who are living the solutions to the problems.

Notes on Landing

2007-10-17T12:49:00.000-07:00

07/1018

Dear, dear Family and Friends,

It feels very good to be communicating with you. As we begin to construct a new life here, my links of love and appreciation to you are very real to me. We would not be who we are, doing this, but for you, even those of you who think it's odd, at least, or plain wrong.

I'll begin with first impressions of these eight days, and end with notes on what the project is about.

The town

Motueka is on the northern coast of the South Island of New Zealand, or Aotearoa, the name preferred by many. Its population is 6000 in the non-tourist season. It's near three national parks.

The houses are mainly smallish and many have quite wonderful gardens. It's Spring, so Jack and I are stopping often to gaze at beautiful and outlandish plant forms. 'Like Dr. Seuss illustrations,' says Jack. We are renting at 30A Poole St., Motueka. (Phone no. 011 643 5280189). We'll be here until the end of November.

Motueka means 'island of the weka bird', but it is not an island. A few days ago I cycled to the beach at first light to see the sunrise and do a little yoga on the beach. Behind the town are mountains which are still snow-capped. It is, in fact, cold, much colder than in Hamilton when we left. The town seems to arrange with its artists to create public art, including benches and rubbish bins. There are four second-hand stores, three bakeries, three stationery stores with books, and one serious bookstore.

The town is surrounded by orchards and vineyards, with sheep and cattle grazing here and there.

The people

People are helpful and friendly. Bureaucracy is easier to negotiate.

Not everything is beautiful in this delightful land. As I walked with Japanese-born Kyoko through the streets of Nelson, the nearby city, a passing car full of young men hurled racial insults at her. She said this happens from time to time.

The Sustainable Settlements group

So far we have engaged with three young families. Two of the guys are the founding thinkers of the endeavour. They met us at the airport, and one of them had stocked our frig. He then lent us his car indefinitely. We are treated with great kindness. Between the three families, there are children of 5,3,3,3 and 8 months. Two are twins. To some extent, this group already functions as a community. A few days after our arrival, 10 of us travelled to Nelson, 40 minutes away, in two cars to join the 3rd family. The plan was to go to a street festival, a children's masked parade. It was an amazing event with hundreds of families having fun. The children paraded as whole schools. The theme was protection of the environment. They had wonderfully creative costumes and masks and performed dances and songs about 'Reduce, Recycle, Reuse' as they capered through the street. One school was all dressed as worms to illustrate the merits of composting. This event was followed by a Japanese meal prepared by Kyoko, one of the group.

Peter, one of the founding thinkers, is arranging monthly 'Atamai Tramps' for the group. 'Atamai' is the name of the first settlement site and is Maori for 'common sense'. 'Tramp' is the NZ term for 'hike'. There will be an alternative route for little ones, and a meeting point with the big trampers.

Several of us helped one family unpack their container full of goods in the last few days, while I made dinner for everyone. In the evening, Chris, the father of this family, cycled here to help us with computer problems.

Transport

Car-sharing, which will be a feature of the settlement, is beginning between Peter's family and us. Happily, our rented place has two bikes; Jack and I find it far preferable to use them to go where we need to.We have ridden to the beach and towards the mountains a few times.

Food

The very pretty garden of our house has many greens and a small, prolific lemon tree of which I've been freely making use. I've been experimenting with kumara, a Maori staple related to yam. The chocolate cake I made for the group was a very big hit with the children, who rarely have anything with sugar.

There is a fine farmers' market on Sundays.

Music

I can't believe my luck. On my second day I saw, in the supermarket, an ad for a drum workshop featuring African rhythms. On my fourth day I attended it. The brilliant teacher, Damara, who has just returned from Ghana, had us doing 5-part rhythms with multiple instruments. It sounded amazing. This afternoon I've had my first lesson with her.

How did I get a drum to practise on? The workshop was held at a very long-established intentional community called Riverside. It has a strong arts orientation and an excellent cafe, where Jack and I had lunch after cycling through the countryside to get there. While we ate, a whitehaired man came in and began to play excellent jazz on a good piano. When I finished with the workshop later, I found Jack was chatting with Emory, the pianist, a resident of Riverside. As we talked about music, he asked if I had a drum, and offered to lend me one. As it was raining, we didn't take it then and slipped away to ride home. Before we had our helmets on, Emory was back with a borrowed car, offering to drive us home.

At the children's festival, I heard a wonderful group of unaccompanied male voices from New Caledonia. The music sounded very exotic to my ears, with marvellous bass voices.

Radio New Zealand has pleasant music so I often have it on.

The village

It was a thrill to see the Atamai Village site. The photo above shows its undulating nature and also that it is old grazing land, pretty bare of all but grass, except for the ferny gullies that cross it. Since that photo, a part of the land has been terraced, and pathways have been cut. Seven thousand fruit, nut and forest trees have been planted, the ground between some of them sown with lupins and mustard. The soil was prepared with 'terra preta', an ancient soil technology invented by Amazonian indigenous people.

Land for us

We are looking at sites contiguous with the village, in order to extend its useful area. I've seen one site - lovely land, extremely odd house.

The project

The purpose of our being here is to contribute to the development of sustainable communities - several of them, working cooperatively with each other. This is in response to the multiple ecological threats of climate change, oil scarcity and other resource scarcity. There is every reason to continue to work at all political levels, municipal, national, global on measures such as carbon tax, fuel efficiency standards, the Oil Depletion Protocol to make 'oil descent' more fair and orderly, less catastrophic for small countries and less likely to lead to violent conflict. At the same time, there is reason to attempt to move out of a growth-dependent economy and to experiment with living at significantly lower levels of consumption, especially of energy. This will require growing food near to where it's consumed, working near to where one lives, public transport, renewable energy, houses that are passive solar and well-insulated, stimulation of local economies. This will involve changing forms of agriculture, with more people inolved in cultivating, reversing the flight of people from the land of the industrial age. It will involve changing suburbs to function more as local communities, growing food and taking care of basic needs. It will involve careful use of technology, assessed for its impact on culture and Nature. It needs many intelligent experiments, of which this is one, to work out how to do this and to show that it can be done while maintaining or improving quality of life.

We hope we can contribute something to this.

Warmest wishes to all friends,

Joanna