Compares permaculture practices in New York City and Harare, Zimbabwe.
Global Gardener: Arid Lands
- Description
- Reviews
- Citation
- Cataloging
- Transcript
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BILL MOLLISON is a practical visionary. For three decades he has traveled the globe spreading the word about permaculture, the method of sustainable agriculture that he devised. Permaculture weaves together microclimate, annual and perennial plants, animals, soils, water management and human needs into intricately connected productive communities. Mollison has proved that even in the most difficult conditions permaculture empowers people to turn wastelands into food forests.
'(Permaculture) involves caring for the whole system of earth and spaces, devising model systems with much design drawn from nature, with the end result being a system that's ecologically sound and economically profitable...Mollison provides practical and motivating information for just about anyone interested in gardening, sustainable lifestyles, and similar topics...Recommended.' Rachel Lohafer, Instructional Technology Center Media Library, Iowa State University, MC Journal
'A lively and informative two hour video that will be greatly appreciated by gardeners, farmers, horticulturists, and agriculturists.' Midwest Book Review
'Highly recommended.' Video Rating Guide for Libraries
Citation
Main credits
Gailey, Tony (Producer)
Russell, Julian (Producer)
Mollison, B. C (Narrator)
Other credits
Editor, Simon Dibbs; music, Andrew Garton and Nick Jeanes.
Distributor subjects
Agriculture; Anthropology; Architecture; Biology; Environment; Food And Nutrition; Gardening; Geography; Humanities; Land Use; Regional Planning; Sociology; Sustainable AgricultureKeywords
WEBVTT
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[music]
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Permaculture really starts with an ethic. Earth care,
that’s care of the whole systems of earth and species.
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So we actually devise model systems.
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Much of the design is drawn from nature.
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The end result that we aim
for it to produce a system
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that’s ecologically sound and
economically profitable.
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It can get as sophisticated
or as simple as you like.
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[sil.]
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Every desert has a unique characteristic,
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and here in Sonoran Desert,
it’s the large tree cacti,
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and here it’s saguaro cacti, little further south
it’s the cardon, a much larger cactus in the Sonoran.
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And all of these cacti
originally grew in forests.
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Forests that were usually up above
as high as first limbs of the cacti.
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And these saguaro can’t continue to
exist without a forest around its feet,
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because the young cactus
can’t exist in open deserts,
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such as we see around us. It has to have shade.
So the saguaro is expected to last perhaps
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another 40 years and then
they’ll be gone too.
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So the solitary saguaro, standing on its own in the
sand, has become almost a symbol of the desert.
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Instead it should be a symbol of our stupidity
in not taking care of the total environment.
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[music]
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Like vast areas of America,
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this is part of the great dust bowl of the
1930s when most of the soil blew away.
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[music]
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Between 1930 and 1935, Franklin
Roosevelt had three million American
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out with supervisors and
engineers, repairing America.
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And it’s the first time in American history and
the last time, those are the only very rare times
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in the history of the world
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that anybody in charge of a country has put the people of the country to
work, to repair the damage. They built hundreds of miles of earth banks,
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which held up the runoff water, long
enough to settle out the silt behind them,
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and for some water to soak into the
ground, and this is called swaling.
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And these swales were made by
horses, and scoops, and men.
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And today we have bulldozers, but we
don’t do this repair work on country.
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It’s very rich in the swales,
but the soil and trees,
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now we go down to have
a closer look at that.
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[sil.]
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We’re in the swale. There is a green
cover which is the basis material.
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It covers up all the weeds and makes
the soil the sandwich of weeds
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and silt that builds up slowly.
This is about 60 years old.
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These were built by engineers for
purely physical reasons to stop
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the gully erosion extending in the clearing.
About a night, we’d just taken it over
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and we could have planted it with pomegranates,
fig. You know, looking the soils of these swales,
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they’re moist, they are pretty
rich with organic material
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and a good… and they got a good silt in them and
you just today you could plant them with seeds
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that will wait for the rain.
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So that’s the sort of thing we could do
right through this old swale system.
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And there is thousands of miles
of them in the United States.
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[music]
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I first found these old swales in 1986-87.
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And I’ve been putting in hundreds of miles
of swales, but I couldn’t have seen it
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as far as that I’ve been
putting in, in 60 years time.
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And it’s just tremendous confidence that
you get from finding these old structures
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that have never been looked at, they have never been repaired,
and they have never been noticed by the population.
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And found to be (inaudible) working
for 60 years without any maintenance.
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And I think it’s marvelous, fantastic, actually. They didn’t
make any mistake. Say, they did almost everything right.
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They had a lot of good
hydrologist, good engineers,
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and good common sense, practical
people working for them.
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It’s a shame that modern nations
can’t turn all their people
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out to any country today, God.
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They’d be really fascinated with that,
because the idea of integrating the tribal
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and wildlife packs is… is very
(inaudible) all of assets as you know.
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We will be doing that in Kenya in
September by the way. Okay. In the West,
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we have been accustomed to reducing areas to
desert and then moving our operations elsewhere.
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But in Africa, and in the Kalahari,
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there are several language groups
for whom this desert is their home.
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[music]
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So quite obviously this is an area of great need.
It’s also a very tough proposition for us to tackle.
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I have been invited here by
some of my student teachers,
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the Botswana people to come into the desert
and see some of their tribal student at work.
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And also bringing some new foods in, because there
are more and more people and we need to feed
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more people. We will have success,
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because we keep trying, in a few hours we will
have success, and then we must teach other people.
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The people here are hunter-gatherers. And
at one time the desert was thick with game.
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Cattle have destroyed 60% of the
food plants they used to gather.
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There are very few left indeed.
As for the game, the EEC
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demanded that fences be put across
the Kalahari for production of beef.
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This has successfully killed off
most of the migratory animals.
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So with the death of those animals, and death of
their plants, people have to take up gardening,
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some were very unused to.
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[sil.]
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In order to regress the problems
of the remote area dwellers,
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we have been invited here
by the tribal people
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and the Ghanzi District Council to see students
and teachers of playschool (inaudible),
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where gardening is just beginning.
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[sil.]
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[music]
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In every compound, are the animals
of a boarding for shelter from lions
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or from predators not before.
Previously all the compound
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and the fencing materials built
out of trees, which are now gone.
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So, the first request of any group in the Kalahari will be through
(inaudible) and for guides, because there is many miles before he come
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to the tree country. So, we are
showing how to adapt local material
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to new conditions.
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[music]
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Here, we’re demonstrating you don’t have to cut down a lot of
trees to make the walls of a pin. It’s a natural gud (inaudible)
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in middle of a standing clump and where
there is no trees in the circle,
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the roots are cut below the ground. So you
can use living trees to fill the gaps.
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And it’s already quite fit on the side, by the
time the goats will be in here for a while.
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It will be more fertile. And then we can use it for our
garden. And so what we’re teaching here is growing…
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growing of that (inaudible), cutting down the
environment and making in lot of (inaudible).
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A well fenced family compound
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takes just over a thousand large
cashew trees from the desert.
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And that means that much of the trees around the
settlements are removed simply for fencing.
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In about 20 years, the termites eat them off
and you have to go look for more trees,
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but there might be no more trees. So the
introduction of just one species here
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Euphorbia tirucalli, which
are close set as cuttings,
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will stop all cattle and goats,
but are not eaten by them.
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This is a great benefit because there
is no longer any need to cut the trees.
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[music]
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Six months ago, we gave across the women
of East Hanahai 100 kilometers away.
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And I was very interested to see
how their garden was getting on.
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Although East Hanahai is extremely
dry, 300 people live here.
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Therefore, any strategy, no matter how small,
that we can use to catch waters of great use.
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Well, this is a runoff pan
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made of concrete and the water… the
rain comes down, and down this pipe
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and into the underground system
were it won’t evaporate.
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And we use exactly the same
system to setup wells in
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the desert for people or for game
animals, quail or guinea fowl.
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We built a pan system here some
months ago costing only $200.
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And it enables us to get a garden
going and seedlings watered.
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Here are the women gardeners, just
beautiful. The beds arise so the
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silt will go down through the soil. The seedlings
are in here, and there’s a lot of seedling, onion.
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And under here, which
look like little huts is
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actually young seedlings for the winter
green. So they’re fully shaded in here,
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and they’re growing very well.
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In the center of this little
Mandela bed is a… a cashew tree.
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It will provide nitrogen
for the beds and shade.
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And all the natural vegetation is being lift in
this garden. It doesn’t look bare and barren.
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And it provides a material
for the shade houses.
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And it’s just great actually,
considering only it’s November
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to pick up their first course. They’ve used
exactly the same techniques of little shade huts
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to get their fruit trees growing and this
would improve the vitamins in their diet.
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Yeah. I like this garden very much.
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No, I think it’s very good.
It’s very hot conditions.
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[non-English narration]
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Once a group of women are
well organized in a village,
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they’re the best source
for us to work with.
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Their information is the best and
they are the most motivated.
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And I prepare progress reports and bring
them in for discussion and meetings.
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[non-English narration]
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The women’s report specifically requests help
in dealing with the new type of vegetables.
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In response to the request
like this, Dorothy Indabah,
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one of my first students and now a
teacher, has brought some of her friends,
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and they have come up to show these women
at (inaudible), precisely what to do
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with the vegetables growing in the Kalahari Desert
and how to make the best nutritional use of them.
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From Elaine in Paris
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we found out that people in
this district were not used
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to using melons the way we
are going to use it today.
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The good thing about it is that no
part of the melon is thrown away,
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right from the stalk where it has green leaves,
we use the green leaves for vegetables
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and then we use the young melon for eating.
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And then when the melon is mature,
it’s used as I’ve described.
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So, this is completely new to them,
making pudding from the melon pulp.
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(inaudible) makes a marvelous porridge,
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no other water is needed. My African
students were amazingly efficient
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in becoming teachers, because in
Botswana, there is a real need
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for food and nutrition. We’ve had seven years of
drought and everybody was beginning to starve
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and with real need, human beings organize
themselves and respond very quickly.
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We were very nervous
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and the first day was a real hell.
We thought the sun would never set.
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One thing we are happy about is
that most of our past participants
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are very active in permaculture,
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and especially the East Hanahai people,
they are looking very successful.
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The nervousness of the
first course is gone,
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and now we feel confident
to face future courses.
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When all the work is finished,
the traditional songs
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and dancing with everybody enjoys can begin.
People imitate the hunt and younger people learn
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about hunting from the stories,
and songs, and the dance.
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So the system spread itself
and is adapted by each group
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to their particular needs. I can comeback as a
visitor and I know that when I go the groups
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that they have been teaching, I will learn a great
deal more about permaculture than I know now.
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Please ignore your seat number. Okay.
It’s free seating. All right.
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[sil.]
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Whenever I’m flying over deserts,
I look out the windows a lot,
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because I get a lot of inspiration from the
ground patterns and the things I see down below.
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Here, looking down in Botswana,
you see curious dots,
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and they are caused by very important
insect. Before I left Africa,
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I went to seen an old student, John Turner, who
has been studying the ecology of termite mounds.
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Southern African landscape
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is dotted with these termite mounds.
It’s a macrotermes
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and it’s compost building termites. It gathers and
chops up the grasses. They’d remove all these grasses
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by the time the winter is over. And its
builds compost heaps inside the mounds.
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And it seeds fungal spores
into the compost tubes,
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and it eats the mycelium of the fungi. But
on these mounds, which arise fairly high
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above the landscape here, clay pond
landscape of clay, grow all sorts of trees.
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Probably the best known is the
mopane tree, very valuable tree
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for animal, for fodder. It
produces extremely good wood.
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There’s many other rarely useful
berry trees, timber trees,
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medicinal trees, dye trees,
they’re all located here.
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Yeah. And many of the farmers plant special
crops on here. And, of course, they collect the
00:17:05.000 --> 00:17:09.999
flying termites in their valuable in addition to diet.
So you could say that termite mounds in Africa,
00:17:10.000 --> 00:17:14.999
India, and all the deserts,
is that they islands of lot
00:17:15.000 --> 00:17:19.999
and have very important and
unique place in the landscape.
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And we also know that they keep pace with the erosion
processes, so they in fact, the termite preserve the landscape.
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When we arrived back in Australia
and looked down that landscape,
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we realized we have lost the
intricate patterning of the nature
00:17:35.000 --> 00:17:39.999
and we’re looking at an idiotic
patterning determined by machines.
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Here we can no longer talk about
the termites, they’re long gone.
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We can no longer talk about the natural
processes that restore the land.
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There are no natural processes
on most of these fields.
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This is dry flat land. We bring water into
it, we’ll grow a gigantic amount of crop
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and we’ll turn it into desert. And when
the problems occur, they’re devastating,
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and here the problem is solved.
00:18:10.000 --> 00:18:14.999
In western central Victoria, everywhere
we travel, we see dying trees
00:18:15.000 --> 00:18:19.999
and solid lands. Nature has
rejected as simple solutions.
00:18:20.000 --> 00:18:28.000
[music]
00:18:35.000 --> 00:18:39.999
Somehow, we see the limitless
food grain we’ve created insane,
00:18:40.000 --> 00:18:44.999
boring landscapes without trees and without
people and without anything of interest.
00:18:45.000 --> 00:18:49.999
There are hundreds of miles
of these on-land irrigation
00:18:50.000 --> 00:18:54.999
canals throughout the irrigation
areas and drains of those.
00:18:55.000 --> 00:18:59.999
And the potential evaporation
here is about 18 feet.
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So, as we put the water on these fields,
00:19:05.000 --> 00:19:09.999
evaporation takes off the water and leaves the
salt, but there’s also the water floods down here
00:19:10.000 --> 00:19:14.999
and picks up further ground silts.
00:19:15.000 --> 00:19:19.999
So all in all there’s no wonder that in… in
these irrigation lands the… the fields flood
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and salt very easily and rather quickly.
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As the salt exceeds 1% in soil, it’s (inaudible)
as crystals, where the salt starts to dry out
00:19:30.000 --> 00:19:34.999
and you get a sparkling
crystal forest of salts.
00:19:35.000 --> 00:19:39.999
The first (inaudible) we had all
00:19:40.000 --> 00:19:44.999
the problem was in 1979. We didn’t
even have a map of the salt,
00:19:45.000 --> 00:19:49.999
that was very rapidly established with the
height of old schools across Victoria.
00:19:50.000 --> 00:19:54.999
Here the students of Dimboola High
School take their salt measuring devices
00:19:55.000 --> 00:19:59.999
into the local river forest in the middle
of winter, and they get a rude shock.
00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:04.999
(inaudible) take out these
readings when they’re steady.
00:20:05.000 --> 00:20:09.999
And it’s actually surprising
to (inaudible) that high.
00:20:10.000 --> 00:20:14.999
It’s increased from a couple of months ago.
00:20:15.000 --> 00:20:19.999
Years ago this just wasn’t very salty at all in (inaudible),
if you get in mouth, we can really taste the salt.
00:20:20.000 --> 00:20:24.999
(inaudible) the seawater and come up with bumps
and, you know, swimming in here now, I came up
00:20:25.000 --> 00:20:29.999
with those bumps, you
know, just like seawater.
00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:34.999
So, I can’t go swimming in the river no more. Our
data we’re collecting today along with schools from
00:20:35.000 --> 00:20:39.999
roughly 500 or 600 schools
around the state,
00:20:40.000 --> 00:20:44.999
all that data is being sent to the Rural Water Commission
in Melbourne, and they’ll in turn collate all data
00:20:45.000 --> 00:20:49.999
and sent it back to the schools in
the form of maps. Yeah, (inaudible).
00:20:50.000 --> 00:20:54.999
That’s actually salt line, it’s three times
00:20:55.000 --> 00:20:59.999
the salty seawater (inaudible). Right. The cleaner water in this area isn’t
suitable for drinking. I mean, it’s fine for animals, farm stock to drink,
00:21:00.000 --> 00:21:04.999
but the town supply is roughly
about a 1000 EC units,
00:21:05.000 --> 00:21:09.999
which is above sort of
recommended health levels.
00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:14.999
That’s right. Well, it’s great that
00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:19.999
you’re doing all that. And that… And it’s particularly good to
students I think so they’ll and understand what’s going on.
00:21:20.000 --> 00:21:24.999
Now, we know the intensity of the salty.
00:21:25.000 --> 00:21:29.999
We know the extent of the problem. We
know the rate of increase of salting
00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:34.999
in Australia, and it’s enormous. I we know the
only thing to do is to allow the water table,
00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:39.999
and we know the only way to allow the water
table is to reforest the catchments.
00:21:40.000 --> 00:21:44.999
And we have a lot of trials out there that will tell us
what trees we can use in what areas of the catchment.
00:21:45.000 --> 00:21:49.999
Trees are effectively non-mechanical pumps.
00:21:50.000 --> 00:21:54.999
They can pump the water table
down, and with it drops the salt,
00:21:55.000 --> 00:21:59.999
but it’s a matter of advancing from areas that are clean enough
to hold trees to areas which are just beginning to salt.
00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:04.999
We can’t plant the trees and pump down the
water table and continue the irrigation system
00:22:05.000 --> 00:22:09.999
and expect the trees to survive.
00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:14.999
So we gotta make some sort
of choice between irrigation
00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:19.999
and survival, our survival. If you
would like to see what these areas
00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:24.999
will like in 10 years time,
we have to take to Arizona,
00:22:25.000 --> 00:22:29.999
where in 1940, they irrigated cotton for the war
effort, those are what you can do to a healthy desert.
00:22:30.000 --> 00:22:34.999
Once you cleared it, mined
it for cotton, salted it,
00:22:35.000 --> 00:22:39.999
abandoned it, and left it to blow away.
00:22:40.000 --> 00:22:44.999
This salt pan was a cotton field,
irrigated cotton during the war.
00:22:45.000 --> 00:22:49.999
And this was a mesquite tree, which
germinated about here someway,
00:22:50.000 --> 00:22:54.999
and this would all have been soil. The
rate of salt formation here is very slow,
00:22:55.000 --> 00:22:59.999
it’s a millimeter per 1,000 years, which is much slower
than most areas, but it’s dry, and it’s very flat,
00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:04.999
so that’s understandable.
00:23:05.000 --> 00:23:09.999
And the dust from the
clay pattern obliterated
00:23:10.000 --> 00:23:14.999
the roads and they were accidents. So the department arrives and
out of the small banks and sowed four-wing saltbush on them.
00:23:15.000 --> 00:23:19.999
What we see along here now is four-wing saltbush,
but the mound is gone. It’s blown away
00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:24.999
and it’s also melted down, deflocculated
because the soil is full of salt.
00:23:25.000 --> 00:23:29.999
However, it did stop the dust
going across the highway beyond
00:23:30.000 --> 00:23:34.999
that now attempt to rebuild without the salt pan
is being made, well that’s possible to do so.
00:23:35.000 --> 00:23:39.999
The fact that the only rehabilitation we’ve
attempted here is to protect the automobile,
00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:44.999
it says a lot about this society.
00:23:45.000 --> 00:23:49.999
We have the technologies to fix up and bring
back into production a lot of eroded desert.
00:23:50.000 --> 00:23:54.999
We’ll go and look at one of these
techniques invented by Bob Dickson,
00:23:55.000 --> 00:23:59.999
an agricultural scientist. It’s a great machine. Good to
see you. Good. I’ve come to have look at your machine,
00:24:00.000 --> 00:24:04.999
to see what you are doing here.
Get some explanations.
00:24:05.000 --> 00:24:09.999
So it’s a curious thing, isn’t it?
00:24:10.000 --> 00:24:14.999
Yes it is, quite different as pitters are
fairly common, but this does make (inaudible)
00:24:15.000 --> 00:24:19.999
we refer to it as a land imprinter.
Please drive that (inaudible).
00:24:20.000 --> 00:24:24.999
Well, yeah. Now these angles are imprinting teeth,
they will make funnel shaped depressions in the soil,
00:24:25.000 --> 00:24:29.999
which will in fact funnel the
rain water and seed together
00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:34.999
so that you can take a little rainwater and you get
the seeds to germinate and to… to become established.
00:24:35.000 --> 00:24:39.999
People sometimes think that
maybe it’ll make rain.
00:24:40.000 --> 00:24:44.999
I don’t claim that it’s a rain maker, but it’s
a rain stretcher. So this eight-pointed star
00:24:45.000 --> 00:24:49.999
turns out to be idea of configuration. The
importance of this design is the fact
00:24:50.000 --> 00:24:54.999
that it takes not nearly so much weight
to… to push the angles into the soil.
00:24:55.000 --> 00:24:59.999
Well, once the soil was pitted
00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:04.999
and wind blows, 86% of all seed ends
up in the pits and that’s in nature,
00:25:05.000 --> 00:25:09.999
but as well as the seed, little bits of
manure like rabbit manure and sheep manure,
00:25:10.000 --> 00:25:14.999
they roll into the pits. And so,
whether I put it in the pit or not,
00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:19.999
it will get in the first wind,
00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:24.999
it will… most of that will get into bottom of the pit. And then when
it rains, then these pits will infiltrate as much as fifteen inches
00:25:25.000 --> 00:25:29.999
of wet soil and random, you’ll get
infiltration of a very little water.
00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:34.999
So you can see that they’re
totally beneficial for kicking
00:25:35.000 --> 00:25:39.999
life back into the desert. Now, this is a
00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:44.999
stark contrast contrast. Yeah, this is the
way it looked before it was imprinted.
00:25:45.000 --> 00:25:49.999
Yeah, it’s like that. Just essentially
barren and… and where all the
00:25:50.000 --> 00:25:54.999
water either runs off of the
barren surface or… or evaporates.
00:25:55.000 --> 00:25:59.999
So, ‘83 you imprinted. Did… Did
you seed at the time or not?
00:26:00.000 --> 00:26:04.999
Ah yes, this was… Spectacular!
00:26:05.000 --> 00:26:09.999
[music]
00:26:10.000 --> 00:26:14.999
When rain occurs here
00:26:15.000 --> 00:26:19.999
it obviously sees nothing but grass
and… and so the soil surface
00:26:20.000 --> 00:26:24.999
remains open and receptive
to… to rainwater.
00:26:25.000 --> 00:26:29.999
And you can see that if water is not
lost by surface evaporation and runoff,
00:26:30.000 --> 00:26:34.999
it can grow a tremendous
amount of vegetation.
00:26:35.000 --> 00:26:39.999
Somebody once said that man has left a
desert in his footprints wherever he’s gone.
00:26:40.000 --> 00:26:44.999
Well, I think you can see that in this case. We… We
created a beautiful prairie in the… in the footprints
00:26:45.000 --> 00:26:49.999
of a land imprinter.
00:26:50.000 --> 00:26:54.999
We can use technologies to restore
00:26:55.000 --> 00:26:59.999
the present deserts to the original
prairies that they once were.
00:27:00.000 --> 00:27:04.999
We can bring back the wonderful complex of animal species that once
yielded so much from the prairies of North America and Africa.
00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:09.999
They were hardly productive for
protein and much more productive
00:27:10.000 --> 00:27:14.999
in the beef they conceded them and the beef
after all were responsible for the deserts.
00:27:15.000 --> 00:27:19.999
If we can do that and it is our duty, I
think, to do it as stewards of earth,
00:27:20.000 --> 00:27:24.999
then our grandchildren may be able
to see something of the abundance
00:27:25.000 --> 00:27:29.999
that their great grandparents encountered
when they first came to those continents.
00:27:30.000 --> 00:27:35.000
[music]
Distributor: Bullfrog Films
Length: 28 minutes
Date: 1996
Genre: Expository
Language: English
Grade: 7-12, College, Adult
Color/BW:
Closed Captioning: Available
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