Dandelions and weeds are no match for these lawn mowers.
More than 100 goats arrived at Confluence Park (West Nose Creek) on Monday to start their new job for the City of Calgary.
For the next two weeks, they’ll be chomping down on weeds and thistle as part of a pilot to test goats as a way to manage invasive species in Calgary’s parks.
“We have a whole schwack of breeds, from angora and boer to kiko,” said Jeannette Hall, the professional herder managing the goats.
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In America’s early days, the nation’s founders required a potent symbol to communicate the concept of freedom. In colonial Boston, the symbol that became synonymous with freedom was an elm tree.
The Liberty Tree, as it came to be known, was a gathering place for advocates for freedom. Though eventually cut down by opponents, its symbolic resonance only grew, gracing flags and pins, with elms being planted throughout the new nation.
This week following Independence Day, and throughout this summer, I hope that we can all remember the Liberty Tree and why it was such a powerful symbol. And, why the growth that it promises may continue to resonate as we undertake a new struggle for freedom.
The struggle we now face is no less a campaign for self-determination than the American Revolution. Much like the Revolution, what is at stake is personal freedom and the ability to choose your own destiny.
It is a struggle over the freedom to choose what you can grow and eat; each of us is involved, whether we know it or not. The right to choose seems basic. Indeed, you may assume that farmers have the ability to save and exchange seed that they are growing our food with, but you would be wrong.
Seeds are a gift of nature, the result of centuries of labor by farmers worldwide who have conserved heirloom seeds and thousands of natural varieties. But over the past few decades, legislation restricting access to seeds helped diminish small farmers’ holdings and have established industrial agriculture as globally dominant.
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John D. Liu participated in the Permaculture Design Certificate Course conducted last May/June by the World Permaculture Association in Pisa (Tuscany, Italy) with Rhamis Kent as the lead teacher.
This event was convened in order to implement & initiate the World Permaculture Association mission: to mobilize and inspire people to achieve food security by improving human management of natural living systems through the use and application of permaculture principles.
At the moment the World Permaculture Association is mainly focused on building & developing international partnerships in order to augment efforts aimed towards the rehabilitation of large-scale damaged ecosystems as shown by documentarian John D. Liu in his acclaimed films.
The visit to Italy by Mr. Liu, organized in conjunction with the World Permaculture Association, was an opportunity to exchange ideas and knowledge pertaining to the promotion of ecological restoration and permaculture design. Let’s join in on the conversation:
Italian Agronomist Riccardo Tucci (tucci@world-permaculture.org), along with WPA Executive Director Rhamis Kent, interviewed him.
Interview
Riccardo Tucci & Rhamis Kent: It has been a great pleasure having you in Italy, John.
Do you think that this land, particularly affected by hydrogeological dysfunction due to degradation from long-term mismanagement, can provide a valuable testing ground for ecological restoration activities that you often show us in your films? What did you see that made an impression on you?
John D. Liu: Thank you – it was a great pleasure to be in Tuscany again and to share close communication with people striving to understand life and the Earth systems that life depends on.
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The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released Thursday its annual forecast for the size of the Gulf of Mexico “dead zone”—an area of coastal water where low oxygen is lethal to marine life. They say we should expect an “average year.” That doesn’t sound so bad, but as we wrote last year, the dead zone average is approximately 6,000 square miles or the size of the state of Connecticut. Average is not normal.
This is especially troubling when we know that solutions exist for reducing agricultural pollution, which contributes to the dead zone. And for many years, there’s been a lot of effort dedicated to reducing the dead zone’s massive footprint.
The Dead Zone Starts on the Farm
Dead zones—also known as hypoxic zones—can occur naturally, but human activity perpetuates their presence. Hypoxia in the ocean results from low dissolved oxygen, a state that occurs when excess pollutants, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, enter bodies of water. These pollutants have various natural and man-made sources, but they are critical nutrients for plant growth and thus the active ingredients in fertilizers applied to farm fields.
The movement of water causes nitrogen to “leach” through the soil or “run off” into bodies of water, while phosphorus most commonly escapes from farm fields with sediment and soil erosion. However they get into water, these pollutants make delicious food sources for algae, which “bloom” as a result of the buffet. Dead algae sink and decompose in water, which depletes oxygen, suffocating other marine organisms.
The second largest dead zone in the world is the one predicted Thursday, in the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi River empties into the Gulf and many other bodies of water that run through the Corn Belt and other major agricultural regions of the U.S. feed the Mississippi.
It has been a wet spring across most of the U.S., including the Midwest and it is true that the amount of rainfall (and thus water moving through and over the soil) impacts the size of the dead zone from year to year. But so do the practices on farms and these are much more within our control than the rain.
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STUTSMAN COUNTY, N.D. — Over the past few years, Neil Shook has watched his world burn acre by acre.
“I could tell something was happening,” Shook recalled, when he first noticed the plumes of smoke in 2011. By 2013, fires were raging every day, sending smoke billowing into the air — imagery that reminded Shook of Kuwait’s burning oil wells during the Persian Gulf War.
Hundreds of acres of rolling green grasslands in North Dakota were being intentionally burned, plowed and planted in a matter of days. Shook, who manages the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge and surrounding conservation area, watched as landowners backed out of federally funded conservation programs, opting instead to cash in on the state’s economic boom.
“This was all grass,” Shook shouted as he wildly gestured toward a vast expanse of plowed, brown farmland near the wildlife refuge in June. “Now, what do you see?”
In the mid-2000s, a perfect storm of conditions led to a decade of grassland destruction in North Dakota’s share of the prairie pothole region, a vast expanse of grassland and wetlands that stretches from eastern Alberta to northern Iowa. Corn and soybean prices were high, climate change had extended the growing season and genetically modified crops could now survive in the northern plains. And then the oil boom hit.
Between 2005 and 2015, more than 160,000 acres of Stutsman County mixed grass prairie — an ecosystem that can support more than 100 plant species per square mile — was converted into single-crop farmland. In just six years, North Dakota lost half of its acreage that was protected under the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) as biodiverse grasslands fell to the plow.
For hundreds of years, parts of sub-Saharan Africa have suffered from poor soil. Weather, shifting populations, and slash-and-burn practices have left wide swaths of land relatively useless for growing food without major commercial intervention. But that’s not the whole story of African farming.
In Guinea and the forests of West Africa, there is a hidden history of enriching the soil with natural techniques handed down through generations to sustain food crops without artificial fertilizers. And there just might be something the rest of the world can learn from it.
“The capacity of people to make soils where soils weren’t good … [has been] completely overlooked,” says James Fairhead, professor of social anthropology of Sussex University. That is, until now.
Fairhead, who has been exploring settlements in the forests of West Africa since the 1990s, had for years observed locals planting crops on the grounds of former villages. As an archaeologist digging for historic artifacts in the same locations, it could be something of a nuisance, he acknowledges, but he started to wonder why it was happening.
He looked for scientific literature on African soils and turned up nothing until he stumbled upon a similar discovery of soil improvement in the Amazon as far back as 5,000 years ago.
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Ethiopia is in the midst of the worst drought in 50 years, affecting over half of the country’s 750 districts. Earlier this month, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), called Ethiopia’s condition “a deteriorated humanitarian situation”.
Now, Ethiopia is drawing on its business community and public sector to do something about it. Earlier this year, the country agreed to join the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100), a country-led effort to bring 100m hectares of land in Africa into restoration by 2030. The initiative was launched formally at COP21 in Paris.
AFR100 will see governments working together with regional institutions, public and private sector partners and international development programs to restore productivity to deforested and degraded landscapes, mostly through restoring forests and planting trees on agricultural land. “AFR100 seeks to realize the benefits that trees can provide in African landscapes, thereby contributing to improved soil fertility and food security, improved availability and quality of water resources, reduced desertification, increased biodiversity, the creation of green jobs, economic growth, and increased capacity for climate change resilience, adaptation and mitigation,” the group’s mission states.
The featured film, “The Lessons of the Loess Plateau” by John D. Liu reveals the pitfalls of agriculture. Yet it gives hope for the future — if we take the correct route. Man has done great damage to the environment with our short-sighted vision for food security and the production of goods.
Yet projects such as the regeneration of the Loess Plateau in China show that when we make the right corrections, we can reestablish a thriving environment once more, and much quicker than expected.
The Loess Plateau was until recently one of the poorest regions of China where centuries of agriculture had taken its toll. Erosion turned once fertile soils in this mountainous region into a desert-like landscape, unable to support plant growth. Similar situations exist all over the world.
In fact, according to Maria-Helena Semedo, Ph.D., of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), if the current rate of land degradation continues, all of the topsoil around the world will be gone in 60 years.1 There is hope though — provided we DON’T continue the way we’re currently going.
Soil scientist Liu of the Environmental Education Media Project (EEMP) has followed the Loess Plateau regeneration project for the past 15 years, and today, the once barren landscape is again filled with thriving forests, and farmers are again able to produce abundant amounts of food.
The film documents this truly historic project, and how lessons learned at the Loess Plateau might help restore fertility to barren lands around the globe.
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Everglades National Park (ENP) is our only national wetland park, and one of the largest aquascapes in the world. Perhaps more than any other U.S. national park, ENP’s treasures are hard to defend. Lying at the southern end of an immense watershed the size of New Jersey, ENP is caught between the largest man-made water project in the world upstream and a rapidly rising ocean downstream.
The park and the wider Everglades ecosystem have suffered immense ecological damage from years of overdrainage to prevent flooding and promote development. In 2000 Congress approved the largest ecological restoration project in the world – the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, which is expected to take more than 35 years to complete and cost at least US$10.5 billion. In addition to repairing some of the damage to this unique ecosystem, the restoration is designed to ensure reliable clean drinking water supplies for South Florida cities and protect developed areas from flooding.
The plan is making progress – but the closer it gets to its goal, the more the details matter, and some of those details have become roadblocks. As I complete my 30th year as an ecologist studying and trying to restore this great place, it is increasingly clear that restoration can work and will benefit both wild spaces and people. However, that view rests heavily on the assumption that we will commit to fixing a central problem – water storage.
Managing water flow
The Everglades drainage area stretches over 200 miles, starting near Orlando and reaching south to the Gulf of Mexico. At least 100 miles of it is made up of the wide-open grasslands called the Everglades. Nearly 83 percent of the Everglades lies outside of the national park, mostly on agricultural or state-protected lands.
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It’s not news that anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) is accelerating at unprecedented rates, according to climate scientists. Fifteen of the 16 hottest years ever recorded have occurred since 2000, and this year is on track to be the hottest year ever recorded — by far. And the pace of planetary warming is only increasing, as is made dramatically clear in this recently published graphic.
Hence, the need to do everything possible to work towards mitigating this crisis is obvious. There is no way to completely reverse the trend, but as more and more people acknowledge our shared moral responsibility to mitigate the impacts, some are uncovering creative strategies for fighting planetary warming. For instance, an unlikely epiphany led one man towards an effort to preserve and protect mangrove forests, a tactic that would not necessarily be most folks’ first tactic to address climate disruption.
In 1992, Alfredo Quarto was in southern Thailand working on an article about fisherfolk when he became aware that mangrove forests were under threat by the shrimping aquaculture industry.
“The common threat I saw to all these local farmers [was] outside investors who were destroying both their lands and livelihoods by destroying the mangrove forests they depended upon in order to make more shrimp farms,” Quarto told Truthout. “I was deeply moved by a village headman whose father had been murdered by a local shrimp mafia because he defied their cutting down the mangroves.”
Quarto said that the man told him, “If there are no mangrove forests, then the sea will have no meaning. It is like having a tree with no roots, for the mangroves are the roots of the sea.”
The man’s words made a profound impact — in fact, they shifted the course of Quarto’s life. Quarto went on to become the cofounder and co-director of the Mangrove Action Project (MAP), whose aim is the preservation and protection of mangrove forests around the world.
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