Permaculture Archive

Neighbors fend for themselves in wake of storm

Tracy Barnett

Published: June 5, 2010Posted in: Featured, Forest protection, Guatemala, Instituto Meso Americano de Permacultura (IMAP), Permaculture, Reforestation, Watershed protection, WhyTags: Agatha, deforestation, flooding, Guatemala, IMAP, Instituto Meso Americano de Permacultura, Lake Atitlan

Neighbors fend for themselves in wake of storm

SAN LUCAS TOLIMAN, Guatemala – School principal Aroldo Jerez Celada understands the importance of trees in the prevention of disasters like the one brought by Tropical Storm Agatha. He’s also seen, first-hand, the human disaster that keeps the obviously needed reforestation from happening.

“Of course we at the school worry about this, located as we are at the base of these volcanoes. We’ve done more than worry; we’ve actually tried to do something about it.”

A couple of years ago he organized a group of community volunteers and students from the school he directs to do a tree planting on the steep slopes surrounding this town, consulting with the experts to find out which type of tree was the best for these situations and raising the money to buy the seedlings.

The group was proud and exhilarated with their first planting of 500 trees. They had a plan for follow-up maintenance, taking turns to go up and check on the trees and water them through the dry season. But one day the team went up and discovered the area they had planted had been fenced off. The steep incline had been slated for development.

In many cases, local governments tend to be more a part of the problem than the solution. Here, one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods was a government housing complex built on one of these hillsides. The day of the storm, however, and even the day after, government officials were notably absent, Jerez and others told me.

“Our government, unfortunately, needs to be more organized,” said Jerez. “They didn’t have a plan, nobody knew what to do or where to go.”

I began my day with Rony Lec, from the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute (IMAP), and other members of a coalition of community groups meeting in the municipal hall, mapping out an emergency plan, assigning tasks, without any apparent input from the municipal government, which was largely absent. Rony was running the meeting. Like most of the others on this committee, he is working full-time without pay to help organize the response. I left the group at their gargantuan task and headed over to the shelter called Anexo to interview Jerez.

Saturday morning, after some 12 hours of intense and driving rain that was continuing unabated, Jerez ventured out into the downpour to rent a mototaxi and take a look around.

“I realized at 9 a.m. that we had a disaster,” he said. “Already there were many families in the area of the football field whose homes were underwater.”

A few hours later, the first landslides came, and then the people started pouring in. As of today, six days later, he is caring for 40 families, a total of 72 people.

Nobody showed up from the government until the next day. Aroldo had sick children in the shelter, including a small girl with pneumonia, and he took it upon himself to contact an organization and ask for donated medicine, and it arrived 24 hours later. He showed me with pride his ample stock. He had no idea if any of the other shelters had sick people.

Emergency supplies had finally been delivered by the federal government on Tuesday. But there was no one to coordinate the distribution, and the food and other supplies were grabbed by whomever was there.

Suddenly, a knock came at the door. The mayor was finally here.

Here was my chance to get an interview, I thought, and I went out with Jerez to find the mayor surrounded with the shelter’s inhabitants, each trying to tell their story, pleading for help. As the camera rolled, the mayor listened intently, tears in his eyes. He promised to do what he could and headed for the door.

I stopped him to ask for a few minutes of his time, and he told me to meet him in his office in half an hour. “He won’t be there,” one of the men in the shelter laughed.

He was right; the mayor wasn’t there. I waited for an hour. Finally I saw him approaching the central park, flanked by a crowd, talking to many, and then he prepared to leave. I approached, got his attention, his apology and his phone number, and agreed to call him in the afternoon. There was no answer, and his voicemail was not accepting messages, so unfortunately I can’t give his side of the story.

Felix Gomez, a representative of the Fundacion Guillermo Toriello, a community development organization, chairs the committee. He had been instructed in risk assessment and was working in the community to prepare people for disasters like this one when Agatha fell with all her fury, and he was trapped here.

“We heard from news reports on Thursday that the storm was on its way,” said Gomez. “Unfortunately we don’t have a culture of disaster preparedness.”

Gomez had already warned government officials that people should not be living in the high-risk areas at the foot of the mountains but his warning went unheeded.

Volunteers put together a form and went from shelter to shelter conducting a census on the first day and the second day, and I accompanied them. On the third day, we began to go out to the neighborhoods on the periphery and contact the leaders to get a sense of how many had been left homeless but had not come in to the shelters.

Yesterday in Pavarotti shelter, the Sicay family, Juan and Petrona, invited me to their home to see the damage. They lived near the family who had been buried in their home, and they agreed to show me the place.

The Sicays were one of the families who lived near the football field, and their home filled with water on Friday from a flash flood, long before the landslides began. They grabbed their two little ones and the two bigger boys and fled, running down the street in chest-high water. They had nowhere to go, and walked through the downpour until they arrived at the home of a family who took them in until the shelter opened.

They showed me the kitchen, which had only a single piece of furniture – a hutch, that had once held her dishes. Most had been washed away in the storm. I asked where the stove had been.

“I never had a stove – I made my tortillas right here,” said Petrona, kneeling in the mud next to a pair of cinderblocks, where she used to build her fire. “I’m not going to lie to you. This is how we live.”

A huge hole in the back of the kitchen floor showed where the river had found its way through their house.
Next they all filed into the small bedroom area, where mattresses were tightly packed into the cramped space, and a dresser overflowed with wet clothes. A clothesline stretched the length of the room, where ears of corn had been hanging to dry, and were now beginning to cover with mildew.

“We would take our clothes out and try to save them, but we have nowhere to take them,” Petrona explained.
The older son, Juan Antonio, was out back, trying to rescue what was left of the tiny corn patch, but there was little left to salvage. Most was covered in mud.

Finally I asked them to take me up to the place where the family had refused to leave their home and had been buried, the father and mother and three children, together with a neighbor who had been trying to rescue them.

The day ended with a ray of hope from a source higher than the government. The night before, I noticed a crowd gathering in the streets to marvel at a bright light that was shining from the hills above. It was so far up that there was no way someone could have climbed up there to place a light.

On the other side of the landslide gleamed something else – a white image of the Virgin Mary, gleaming from a patch of barren stone.

I went to the foot of the hill with Emilio and Eliazar, who had been canvassing the shelters and neighborhoods with me, to get a closer look. A campesino was in his backyard when we passed, and I asked him what he thought of it. “Well, the good book says there’ll be lots of signs in the last days,” he said with a hearty laugh. “I think we’re seeing them.”

Emilio and Eliazar had another take on the situation. “I was seeing it as more of a sign of encouragement, like it was saying things are going to be all right,” said Emilio, hopefully.

Today, as I made my way back from the destroyed homes, people were gathering in the streets to witness another marvel – a group of young people making their way up the mountain to pay their respects. My friends Emilio and Eliazar were among them.

Here are a few images from my second day in San Lucas.

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The river will find a way: Visiting with the victims

Tracy Barnett

Published: June 3, 2010Posted in: Featured, Guatemala, Instituto Meso Americano de Permacultura (IMAP), Permaculture, Reforestation, Watershed protection, WhyTags: Agatha, disaster relief, Guatemala, IMAP, Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura, Lake Atitlan, permaculture

The river will find a way: Visiting with the victims

SAN LUCAS TOLIMAN – I arrived at the home of Rony Lec of the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute (IMAP) at 9 a.m. and found him meeting with a group of young men from Ajpu, a local youth group. The post-storm response of the government was slow and disorganized, I had heard from various people around town, and the group echoed this concern.

Emergency food and supplies had arrived from the federal government and had been carried off by whomever happened to be around instead of being distributed in an organized and equitable way; nobody had any idea how many people were now homeless; people who were not in the shelters were not being taken into account; the list of immediate problems went on.

Rony was organizing a group to help with the immediate disaster response, gathering data that would allow IMAP to respond with a long-term plan to help with recovery and prevention. I had offered my services as a documentarian for a few days, to try and get the story out about what’s going on here.

After a quick meeting, we decided to divide into two groups: Rony and Felix would attend the meeting being called by local NGOs, and Emilio and Eliazar would accompany me to the affected areas and to the shelters to do interviews.

We headed downhill to the edge of town, where a series of landslides had occurred. It didn’t take long. Within five minutes we encountered a woman picking through the remains of her brother’s house.

Ismael Santiso Yoxon had lived with his family in this house for 16 years; it was built on land he had inherited from his grandfather. He had survived many storms, including Hurricane Stan, with no problems.

A huge chunk of hillside had fallen off and slid down, smashing into his home, flattening the back wall and filling it with dirt. The chicken house with its 50 chickens was buried, along with his other animals.

“He doesn’t have any idea what he’s going to do,” said his sister, Elvira. He and his wife and daughter are currently staying with his mother-in-law, but there’s not room to continue living there.

The case is a typical one; the land above his house, like much of the land on the hillside, was divided up and rented out with the blessing of the municipal government, despite the instability of the soil. The neighbors began cutting trees and put in a milpa on the slope just above Yuxon’s house, and this cornfield was what had collapsed.

We wished Elvira well and made our way up the hill, where we encountered an abandoned house with the front torn off. Inside, the bed was covered with dirt, and a cluster of green bananas had landed on top. The walls were askew, and dirt and rocks practically filled the structure.

Children’s schoolbooks and backpacks and clothing were scattered about in the mud, with what was left of a manual typewriter tossed in the middle of the pile.

No one was near, so we made our way back down the hill, past two other abandoned houses, where we encountered Ana Cu and Romelia Guarcha Sep, two women in traditional dress who said they knew the affected families and would take us to them. We accompanied them to the stricken neighborhood called Nuevo Amanecer, or New Dawn.

Regina Castro was standing on what was left of her back porch, looking out at the expanse of mud and the fallen trees that covered what was once her brother-in-law’s house.

“We were here on Saturday in the rain and we started hearing the sounds and we got scared, so we grabbed the children and ran,” she said. “We didn’t have time to get anything together – we just ran. Fifteen minutes later, the hillside fell down.”

Ana and Romelia’s homes had not been damaged, but they didn’t feel safe living there anymore, seeing what had happened to their neighbors.

Marcelino, Leandro and Luis Acibinac were the three brothers who lost their homes nearby. We found Liandro just up the hill, looking over the mud that buried his home. The only sign was a small pile of clothing on top. How they had gotten there, I didn’t know – perhaps they had been drying on the line.

“Here was the kitchen… here was my bed,” he said, pointing out where his house once was. “We didn’t have time to recover anything; we only have the clothes on our backs. Only God knows where we will go now.”

Esdras Mardoqueo Baran was picking over the remains of his sister’s house, nearby. His house had not been hit, but he didn’t feel it was safe to continue living there.

“We’re all at risk,” he said. “The river finds its path, and the rainy season has just begun. What will we do? Only God can say.”

Up the hill, Salamon Alvarez de Leon was checking out the remains of his friend’s home. The land above their homes had been converted to a coffee plantation, which doesn’t have the same ability to hold the soil as a native forest.

His friend, Rafael Ajcot, had had six children, ranging from 6 to 16. “This is part of the problem – all of the people,” said Alvarez. “The deforestation, the population growth – in 1970, we had 5,000 people living in San Lucas. Now we have 40,000. Where are they all supposed to go?”

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Albert Bates on The Great Change

Tracy Barnett

Published: April 22, 2010Posted in: Belize, Climate Change, Featured, Food Security, Maya Mountain Research Farm, Permaculture, WhyTags: Albert Bates, biochar, climate change, peak oil, permaculture, The Great Change

(above: Albert Bates, left, with fellow permaculture instructors Hector Reyes and Maria Ros.)

Today in honor of Earth Day I am posting a recent interview with Albert Bates, co-founder of The Farm in Tennessee, the Global Ecovillage Network, author of “The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook” and the upcoming “The Biochar Solution.”

It was my privilege to spend some time with him and fellow permaculture teachers Maria Ros and Hector Reyes at a permaculture training course at Maya Mountain Research Farm in Belize recently, and I can honestly say that few people have inspired me as he has of the urgent necessity to return to the basics of caring for ourselves and our Mother Earth.

I wrote about the workshop in “Life lessons on Maya Mountain” and “From one jungle to another: A modern-day pioneer.”

I was also able to do a brief three-part interview with Albert, which I’ve just edited and uploaded to YouTube. In Part I, he discusses what he calls The Great Change – the inevitable shift to a society less dependent on petroleum and other resources that are approaching their natural limits.

“Can we have a transition that’s graceful and fun, and can we create a society that comes after that’s better than the one that was before?” Bates asks. “That’s a matter of some debate – some people believe that won’t be the case, but I believe that it is possible.” His book “The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook” discusses this theme in depth and gives practical solutions, which he discusses in this interview.

Since The Esperanza Project, my new media initiative, is focused on the sustainability movement in Latin America, in Part II, I asked him to discuss the lessons he’s learned in his travels in the south. His answers are surprising.

In Part III, Bates discusses his new book, “The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change,” he discusses the potential of a biological technology called biochar as a source of clean energy, a rich soil supplement and a powerful carbon sequestration device.

For more information, see Albert’s blog, The Great Change.

Farm to Table, Bolivia to Santa Fe

Tracy Barnett

Published: March 27, 2010Posted in: Bolivia, Featured, Food Security, Permaculture, Santa Fe, WhyTags: Edible Institute, Emigdio Ballon, Food Security, Four Bridges Traveling Permaculture Institute, permaculture, Seeds of Change, Tesuque Pueblo

By Anne Banas
Esperanza Project guest writer

Born in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and of Quechua descent, agronomist Emigdio Ballon has built an impressive resume when it comes to helping communities throughout the world restore their connection to traditional yet sustainable farming practices.

He is Director of Agriculture at Tesuque Pueblo near Santa Fe, co-founder of Seeds of Change, and Executive Director of Four Bridges Traveling Permaculture Institute. As a plant geneticist, he has done extensive research on quinoa and amaranth grains, and has studied biodynamic farming, which involves a unified and self-sustaining approach to agriculture that follows natural earth cycles and cosmic rhythms, particularly lunar cycles. As if that wasn’t enough, he also practices ancient planting rituals, which he learned from his shaman grandfather in Bolivia.

This past winter, I attended the first ever Edible Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a meeting of influential writers and advocates dedicated to promoting integrity and security in our food supply. While a thick blanket of snow coated the city, notable voices such as Grist food editor Tom Philpott and localvore cookbook author Deborah Madison (a localvore, in case you hadn’t heard, is a person who tries to consume only locally produced food, to the greatest extent possible) gathered inside the warmth of Bishop’s Lodge Ranch to discuss our foodshed—defined as the flow of our food in a given area, from farm to table, and any aspect in between—and how we as local food enthusiasts can contribute to its betterment.

For many of us, it was a time to bond with like-minded thinkers and garner story ideas. But it took the quiet fire of Emigdio to invite spirit into the conference room and inspire us beyond words.

His panel, “The Southwest Foodshed: Sustaining the Culinary Heritage of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma,”—shared by Deborah Madison, as well as food and farming advocates Miguel Estaban and Gary Paul Nabha—focused on his work in New Mexico, particularly at the Tesuque Pueblo. His words, however, resonated at a global level and beyond.

Miguel Esteban, Emigdio Ballon, Deborah Madison and Gary Paul Nabha

Before he began his talk, this otherwise reserved and quiet man stood up and asked the spirit world, in his native Quechua, for guidance on what to say to all of us. After kissing the earth, as part of his ceremony, he reached down and picked up a produce box filled with natural products—an ear of “Mother Corn,” a jar of local honey, a bottled herbal remedy. He spoke emphatically as he held up one item after another, each a symbol of both abundance and loss. His accent was strong, but his message was clear. All of us have become separate from the land, but “we have to be in connection with the spirits because Mother Earth has given us everything,” he said.

Like perhaps many others in the room—mostly farmers, activists, food writers, and publishers ofEdible Communities magazines who are well versed in the subject at hand—I was mesmerized as much as I was moved.

His concern for indigenous people was far from sentimental and came with a signal of warning. He explained how even native cultures are caught by the “great dependency for this humanity,” where laws and mechanization fostered by society and corporations have caused them to “forget what their ancestors taught” with regard to growing food. He explained how his people successfully grew quinoa for over 1,000 years on dry land. “It worked because they knew how,” he said. “Indian people already have knowledge of ‘new’ techniques like biodynamics, [but] we forgot them because society demanded profit.”

“For what?” he asks. “For killing people.”

Once he finished, he sat down just as quietly as he stood up. There was a silent pause in the room, and then everyone in the audience burst out with a heartfelt ovation.

The danger he refers to is the use of genetic engineering, which not only keeps farmers dependent on big corporations for seed stock but also results in sub-par food quality that doesn’t provide much nutrition and is potentially poisonous to our health. Also, he said, many farmers have been more or less tricked into buying “terminator seeds” (seeds that can’t be replanted after being harvested) which they can’t afford to re-purchase year after year. Faced with financial ruin, some have even resorted to suicide.

But there’s hope. Much of Emigdio’s work specifically focuses on helping native communities to become self-sufficient by teaching them the importance of saving seeds that are “descendants from Mother Corn” rather than continuing to farm with genetically modified seeds. After the panel, I sat down with him for a few minutes to talk about how he employs this philosophy at Four Bridges Traveling Permaculture Institute (permaculture, a concept that began as permanent + agriculture, has evolved into a design system that promotes a “permanent culture” in every aspect, striving for communities in harmony with nature).

He told me that his main goal for the organization is to “bring together a community of people of Hispaniola to help them become independent in the way they produce food.” The keyword in the name of the organization is “travelling,” which indicates how he spends much of his time helping poor farmers and communities in other countries as well as in New Mexico.

Similar to the theme of his talk, he told me how each culture has a traditional way to practice farming but has become very separated from it, where their ancestors have “lived 1,000 years one way but now use fertilizer and pesticides.” When I asked how he thinks the revival of agricultural traditions can contribute to a more sustainable future globally, he explained how everyone needs to understand the quality and benefit of “clean food,” and that “overall, these efforts will help humanity, not just indigenous people.”

To see his work up close, he invited me to visit Four Bridges’ home base, Sken:nen Ken’hak (Peace Forever) Educational Farm, which he started with Lorraine Kahneratokwas Gray, a member if the Mohawk Nation from upstate New York. In less than a year, the couple has built a solid foundation for an educational center for children and anyone else interested in seeing how a closed-system farm works. While still in its early stages, the farm will soon serve as a working model for what Emigdio and Lorraine teach around the world, particularly in Latin America.

While I missed Emigdio, who was off fetching a new hutch for their eight recently donated rabbits, Lorraine was excited to show me their new goats and take me around the three-acre property. With a four-month-old puppy tugging at my pant leg and Lorraine’s gaggle of curious children close behind, we walked past a row of fruit trees and into a cleared field primed to serve as a “three sisters” (corn, beans, and squash) garden. A good portion of the side yard is set up as a pen for goats, turkeys, chickens, and other farm animals, and future projects include an herb garden and a building to house workshops for making soaps and other products like the healing salve Lorraine gave me as a souvenir.

But it’s not just about farming and teaching. For them, it’s also about reconnecting to nature in the deepest sense. Behind the small house was a newly laid labyrinth, and soon, they hope to build a wooden fence to ensure privacy for moon and other spiritual ceremonies (Mohawk, Quechua, and others). “Not only can people see a more sustainable model for farming, but also share traditions. Anyone wanting to do something spiritual is welcome,” she said.

Even though I didn’t officially partake in a ceremony, I internalized quite a bit about how our survival might be dependent on reconnecting to the source in a multitude of ways. As I walked to my car with a hand in my pocket, lightly grazing the jar of healing salve with my fingers, I reflected on what Emigdio said at the panel about how “Mother Earth has given us everything.” I took one last look at the beginnings of the farm and was filled with a new sense of hope and motivation. I thought to myself, “Yes, if we just start somewhere, no matter how small, one by one, we can help restore this connection, heal the earth, and ultimately heal ourselves.”

From one jungle to another: A modern-day pioneer

Tracy Barnett

Published: March 16, 2010Posted in: Belize, Featured, Maya Mountain Research Farm, Permaculture, Reforestation, WhyTags: Albert Bates, Belize, Christopher Nesbitt, Maria Ros, Maya Mountain Research Farm, permaculture

From one jungle to another: A modern-day pioneer

(above: Nesbitt’s daughters, Esperanza and Zephyr, make an appearance during the farm tour as “Princesses of the forest” in their palm-leaf costumes, designed by Esperanza.)

It may not look like it at first, but Christopher Nesbitt has a big crew working for him here at Maya Mountain Research Farm.

There are the chickens, who recycle kitchen scraps into eggs and meat. There are the soldier flies, who recycle what the chickens don’t want into larvae for chicken food. There are the leaf-cutter ants, who aerate the compacted soil and serve as more chicken feed. And then there are the vast armies of microbes working to bring back the natural balance to what was once a stripped and sterile cattle farm.

“Every component on this farm gives us one of two things: a good, or a service,” says Nesbitt. “Sometimes they give us both.”

Our tour of Maya Mountain Research Farm was a lesson in natural cycles, from the compost barrel to the chicken coop, from the piggery to the agroforestry plot, from the aquaponics system to the composting toilet. The farm has become a research, demonstration and training center for sustainable agriculture, and Nesbitt has worked with local and international agencies to implement both permaculture and solar technology solutions to regional problems.

Nesbitt, a native New Yorker, came to Belize at the age of 19 and loved it so much he decided to stake a claim.

“I went from one jungle to another,” he jokes.

He bought the farm three years later and set about bringing it back to a natural state. The labor it must have taken to build two houses, two dorms and a number of outbuildings is staggering, especially considering that everything that didn’t grow here had to be poled in on a canoe-sized dory. Nesbitt has gotten so good at it that he can find his way two miles down the river to the next town in the dark of night – and frequently does so.

Nesbitt went a considerably different route than the rest of his family. One brother is a decorated Navy veteran; the other is a dot-com millionaire. For his part, he’s found his happiness up here on Maya Mountain with the simple things in life – like chickens, pigs and solar panels.

“Pigs have a natural inclination to tear things up,” Nesbitt explains. “So we take that behavior, which could be seen as destructive, and turn it into a constructive activity.” The pigs, which he’s preparing to add to the farm in the next year, will be cycled through paddocks that are planted with native root crops like coco yam, or tarot, and yuca, or cassava, to provide them with food as they root around and convert garbage into meat and fertilizer. When they move on to the next paddock, this space is a richly fertilized and plowed field, ready for planting beans, corn, sesame or whatever else he might want.

The barn is designed with concrete channels that are engineered to carry the waste to a central point, where the gases will be channeled into a biogas digesting system to provide fuel, which will be piped to the kitchen.
Nesbitt isn’t a big meat eater, but the animals will provide important services as well as generating revenue for the farm.

He’s also planning to add sheep, for milk and for meat. “Animals are a fantastic element to any system, because they can utilize things that we can’t,” Nesbitt says. “We could chew grass all day long, but I’d rather have them do it, and drink the milk.”

Animals also help with the timing factor. “When we have breadnut, everyone has breadnut, so we can’t sell them,” he says. “So we cycle the breadnut through the pigs and we get the pork and methane gas, then we return the slurry to the soil in fertilizer.”

Tropical soils tend to be very poor, he explained, and nutrient cycling is even more essential here than in some places. Agricultural and forestry practices over the past several centuries have badly degraded and eroded the soil, and traditional farming has produced fewer and fewer yields.

Agroforestry is the logical answer to this problem, Nesbitt believes, and he leads us on to one of his favorite slopes and has us take a seat.

“What you’re looking at is the equivalent of a biological flywheel,” he said, gesturing out toward a lush, multi-layered forest. “It’s an area that has finally ‘snapped’– it’s reached a point where it requires little or no maintenance. We get star apple, bukut (a leguminous pod-producing tree), peach palm, avocado, bananas, hog plum, coffee, cacao, sugar cane, breadnut, pineapple, turmeric, ginger, chi’kai (a vegetable that tastes like the cross between asparagus and artichokes)…. We get a lot of calories out of it, and we don’t put a lot of calories into it.”

One of the special features of Maya Mountain Research Farm is that it’s located amid the Lubaantun Mayan ruins, dating to 750 AD. Nesbitt holds the view that ancient Maya cultures built their civilization on agroforestry, simply because it’s much less work than the trinity of corn, bean and squash. He says corn was an important source of food, particularly for elite classes, but that the amount of energy invested to energy returned wouldn’t be enough to support such a society. He cites one scientific article that postulated that the primary food of the ancient Maya was the ramon nut, also called Maya breadnut.

“My neighbors have trucks and tractors, steel machetes, Roundup, 2-4 D and hybrid seed, yet none of my neighbors manage to make much surplus. They manage to get by, for life. There’s no way the Maya, who had none of these comparative values built a complex society on beans and corn.”

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Life lessons on Maya Mountain

Tracy Barnett

Published: March 13, 2010Posted in: Belize, Climate Change, Ecovillages, Featured, Forest protection, Permaculture, Reforestation, WhyTags: AlbertBates, Belize, HectorReyes, MariaRos, MayaMountain, permaculture

Solastalgia – 1. A feeling of loss at demise of Earth; mourning for Gaia; profound ennui.
2. Lost connection to nature; an eco-psychological imbalance.
Antidotes: Ecological restoration
Permaculture

So begins Albert Bates in his introduction to permaculture – a design system whose name originated from the idea of “permanent agriculture” and evolved into a system promoting permanence in the human culture itself.

“Solastalgia is what happens when we find that we are one of the only animals that soils its own nest, and then lives in it. Then we get sad and depressed,” he says. “We ask ourselves, ‘Can we survive?’”

Bates, a founder of the Global Ecovillage Network and a prolific author and public speaker, has made his way through miles of Mayan villages and tropical forest to Maya Mountain Research Farm in southern Belize, as he does every March. It’s part of a hectic schedule that has him traveling all over the globe, from Estonia to the Holy Lands and beyond, preparing willing participants for what he calls The Great Change: a transition to a world less dependent on petroleum and other carbon-based fuels, and more in harmony with the Earth.

An integral part of his lesson plan is permaculture. Developed by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, permaculture has grown into a global movement, an approach to sustainable development that strives to work with nature instead of at cross purposes with it. Today, he and Mexican permaculture leader Maria Ros are giving us an intro to the principles of the system. But first, Bates administers a little shock therapy – a collection of seemingly random facts that all add up to a wakeup call for a hypnotized nation.
In 2008, he tells us, “USAnians” – he refuses to submit to the convention that has expropriated the name of the whole New World for the sole use of one country – purchased 68 million vehicles, 85 million refrigerators and 1.2 billion mobile phones. The average European consumes 43 kilograms of resources per person, while the average American consumes 88.

“If we used as much energy per capita as Europeans, we’d be an oil-exporting nation,” he tells us. At this point, the richest 7% – most of whom live in the US – produce 50% of the carbon.

It might not matter, he says, except that our acquisitive ways are driving the planet to the brink of destruction.
One-third of the world’s largest rivers are losing water 2½ times faster than they gain it; they are drying up. 150 villages in Northern Syria have been abandoned due to drought. The same thing is beginning to happen in Mexico, Africa and southern Spain.

“Whole villages are having to pack up and leave. Where are they going to go?”

Desertification, increasing frequency and intensity of hurricanes, disappearing water supplies and rising sea levels are expected to produce an estimated 1 billion environmental refugees by 2050.

“We’re in a cycle we created half a century ago that’s still unfolding,” he said. “The carbon from muscle cars of the ‘50s and the industrial plants of the ‘60s and ‘70s are still making their way into the atmosphere, going through chemical changes.

“We need a shift in human design.”

Permaculture strives to use “more observation, less perspiration” by studying the lay of the land and the patterns of nature and working with them to create a harmonious design. The objective, he says, is to make oneself obsolete; in a good design, “the designer becomes the recliner.”

That’s why the hammock is an essential part of a good permaculture design, he maintains – although with his busy schedule, I’m having a hard time imagining him doing much hammock reclining.

“We have to ask ourselves: Can nature do it for us? Can we go with the flow? What is the flow?”

The three key principles, he says, are Earth care, people care and surplus share. That last part caught my attention. “If you don’t share the surplus, it becomes pollution,” he said, using as an example the fruit from an apple tree. Shared, it becomes a resource; left to spoil on the ground, it becomes a mess. The same holds true for any surplus production, he says. I imagine how different the world would be if sharing surplus were to become a part of the general ethic.

In fact, before the invention of money some 500 to 1,000 years ago, that was the case, he says. Early tribal people like the Cahokians created great trading centers that stretched from Nova Scotia and Alaska to the tropics, but trade was based on a friendly exchange, and hoarding wasn’t a useful behavior.

Alternative and local currencies have been developed in recent years, giving greater emphasis to the trust-building component of building a local economy. One recent example is the Totnes Pound, created in Devon, England, as a part of the first Transition Town, a movement that is now gaining ground throughout the world.

Bates talked of many things: the process of personal change, the first step in social change; the principles of permaculture, which draws on concepts like biomimicry and stacking functions; and Peace Through Permaculture, a program that has brought together Israelis and Palestinians in innovative initiatives like the Marda Permaculture Project, despite pressure from the Israeli government.

“This is where we became a permaculture army that doesn’t have boundaries,” said Bates. “We’re not fighting for a nation, we’re fighting for a planet.”

The afternoon brought some graphic demonstrations of permaculture principles by Maria Ros, an amazing woman in her own right, who left a successful career as a professional dancer and university instructor to learn and teach permaculture and build an ecovillage in Quintana Roo.

Maria and Hector Reyes gave a session on designing for catastrophe, a subject they know well, living as they do in the hurricane zone of the Yucatan. Hurricane Wilma destroyed much of the work she had done on her permaculture farm for the past four years.

She remembers her house shuddering in the howling winds, fearing for her walls and roof as she looked out a window at the thatch-roofed Maya house next door. The palm fronds lifted and fell with the winds, emerging unscathed.

The experience was a traumatic one, but she learned an important lesson: The more we observe nature, and the more we incorporate those observations into our designs, the more sustainable our designs will be.
“The Maya design their homes with thatched roofs, so they are not only strong but they let the wild energy move through instead of blocking it,” she said. “In my house, the walls were crying against the wind.”

Bates chimed in with a dramatic illustration of the concept that I will always take with me.
He drew two circles on the chalkboard – one the size of a quarter, and several feet across.

“This is the earthquake in Haiti,” he said, “and this is the earthquake in Chile.”

Then he drew a corresponding quarter-sized circle inside Chile and a large circle around Haiti, representing the number of people who had died in each quake – slightly over 100 in the case of Chile, and thousands in the case of Haiti.

“That’s the result of design,” he said emphatically.

More on this concept can be found on his blog, The Great Change, which is well worth the read.

The day passed with many more lessons, and this was just the beginning. Tomorrow, we’ll get a look at Maya Mountain Research Farm, with a tour by founder Christopher Nesbitt, who bought it from a cattle rancher in 1988 and converted it from a depleted, eroded and relatively unproductive tract to a richly diverse forest.

Here’s a quick glimpse into my first amazing day at Maya Mountain. Stay tuned for the farm tour tomorrow, what Bates refers to as “one of the best examples I’ve seen of permaculture in action.”

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

At home with the Subcoyote

Tracy Barnett

Published: February 21, 2010Posted in: Alberto Ruz, Climate Change, Ecovillages, Featured, Forest protection, Indigenous rights, Latin America, Mexico City, Permaculture, Reforestation, Spiritual, Tepoztlan, WhyTags:

Outside in the darkness, up in the hills not far from here, a chorus of coyotes is greeting the coming of the dawn. How appropriate, I think with a smile. Here in Huehuecoyotl, place of the old, old coyote, I’ve just bid farewell to the greatest coyote of all, Subcoyote Alberto Ruz Buenfil, who is letting me use his home as a base for a few days. Now it’s his time to head into Mexico City, where he is taking the lessons of the Rainbow Caravan for Peace into the barrios of that other place of coyotes, Coyoacán.

I’ve come to Huehuecoyotl to meet his family and some of the people who form this core group of world-changers. I’ve come to break bread, share stories, and glean advice for the journey ahead. Alberto has been in a whirlwind of activity since I arrived – he’s playing a lead role in a film about Fellini’s spiritual journey through Mexico, and the ghost-spirit of the great Italian filmmaker was just here to supervise from another dimension the shooting of some scenes; longtime friend Jose Arguelles, author and visionary, just spent some time here. During my two days here he’s just finished another book and sent it out to the reviewers, underwent a root canal and many hours of community meetings and obligations, and bid farewell to his daughter who is on her way back to Spain; now he’s preparing for a thousand-drum salute and fundraiser for the people of Haiti and a visit from Bolivian President Evo Morales, but still he took time to show me around, orient me to the solar shower and the composting toilet, share photos and reminisce about the incredible 13-year nomadic ecovillage whose trail I now follow, from Mexico to Patagonia.

***

An old legend tells of a time when the Earth is in crisis, and life itself is in danger. In these times, the legend goes, a new type of warrior will arise: a tribe of all races, creeds and nationalities who will be known by the universal symbol of the rainbow, and driven by love, their mission will be to save the planet from extinction.

So writes Alberto in his book, “Los Guerreros del Arcoiris.” (Rainbow Nation Without Borders-Bear & Company publishers)-Alberto has dedicated his life to nurturing this tribe, leading the Rainbow Caravan of Peace on an epic journey through Mexico, Central and South America. This nomadic ecovillage traveled from country to country, led by Alberto’s old schoolbus, La Mazorca, colorfully painted to resemble the iconic ear of corn. The ever-changing tribe sought to connect groups active in resistance to the destructive corporate model. They set up camp in jungles and mountains, in indigenous villages and urban ghettos, sharing music, theater and seeds of practical eco-wisdom: green building techniques, simple alternative technologies, natural healing techniques and more. At the same time, they gathered up bits of local lore and wisdom and connected the disparate groups into a hemispheric network. In August of 2009, the tribe finally disbanded, each dispersing to different parts of the continent to continue the consuming work of social change.

Alberto returned to Huehuecoyotl, the picturesque ecovillage established in 1982 in the mountains near Tepoztlan by Alberto and his community of rainbow warriors. He is letting me use his home as a base for a few days as I organize myself for the next phase of my journey. The beautiful adobe-brick home is filled with light from the arching windows that look out upon the grassy valley below; out the front door, past a tall green row of fragrant hoja santa plants, limestone cliffs tower protectively beyond the beautiful home of his son Odin, a musician and one of Mexico’s leading permaculture practitioners.

I will see Alberto once again before I go, when he hosts Bolivian President Evo Morales for a brief visit to the city on Sunday. Meanwhile, here is a short interview I did with him recently, at his office in the Casa de Cultura Reyes Heroles in Coyoacán. His warning comes as a coyote howl in the fading moonlight.

“Like the Mayan Zapatistas said, we have had a long time to dream. Now is the time to wake up. Because any dream we don’t manifest becomes a nightmare, made by somebody else.”

Huehuecoyotl: An eco-power center in the hills of Morelos

Tracy Barnett

Published: February 18, 2010Posted in: Alberto Ruz, Ecovillages, Featured, Gaia University, Mexico, Permaculture, Tepoztlan, WhyTags: Ecovillages, Huehuecoyotl, Mexico

Huehuecoyotl: An eco-power center in the hills of Morelos

Long before I ever planned this trip, I learned of Huehuecoyotl, an ecovillage inhabited by an international group of movers and shakers nestled into one of the most magical valleys of Mexico, up in the hills outside of Tepoztlán, about an hour outside of Mexico City.

This week I finally got a chance to go and see it for myself, and to meet some of its inhabitants. It was as beautiful as I’d imagined; constructed in the early 1980s by artists, green architects and permaculturists, the community is infused with a colorful yet gentle aesthetic that pleases the spirit as well as the eye.

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Guadalajara Guerreros: Fighting for a better world

Tracy Barnett

Published: February 15, 2010Posted in: AJAGI, Camara Rodante, Ciudad Para Todos, Climate Change, Com:Plot, Ecovillages, Featured, Forest protection, GDL en Bici, Guadalajara, Huichol lands, Indigenous peoples, Indigenous rights, Mexico, Permaculture, Reforestation, Spiritual, Transportation, Urban green space, What, WhyTags: activism, environment, Guadalajara, Mexico

Guadalajara Guerreros: Fighting for a better world

Today I awoke in the verdant mountains near Tepoztlán in Central Mexico, far from the commotion of city life in Guadalajara. Before I move on, I want to take a few moments to acknowledge the work of 24 extremely dedicated, talented and creative people I met during my time in that city, people who touched my life and gave me hope for a better future.

To read about them, please visit Guerreros de Guadalajara, a bilingual entry in my Flickr account.

La Minerva, warrior woman of old and symbol of modern-day Guadalajara, photo courtesy of TheLittleTx, Flickr Creative Commons.

Coffee with the Subcoyote

Tracy Barnett

Published: January 14, 2010Posted in: Alberto Ruz, Ecovillages, Featured, Mexico, Mexico City, Permaculture, WhyTags: Alberto Ruz Buenfil, Ecovillages, Huehuecoyotl, Latin America, Rainbow Peace Caravan, sustainability

By Tracy L. Barnett
Yesterday I had the rare pleasure of meeting and visiting with a true original – a man who, together with a core group of compatriots, has done more for the environmental movement in Latin America than perhaps anyone else, and has done it in his own inimitable way.

Alberto Ruz Buenfil, otherwise known as Subcoyote Alberto, would be the first to say he didn’t do it alone – there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of collaborators along the way, and I hope to meet many of them in my coming travels. But there is no doubt that in a lifetime dedicated to social change, and in the 13 years he dedicated to the Rainbow Caravan for Peace, he inspired a generation of writers, artists, gardeners and activists dedicated to a more sustainable future – including yours truly.

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Alberto grew up surrounded by the Mayan mysteries of Palenque, where his father, the internationally known archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier, discovered the most important ceremonial structure in the ancient city, the subterreanean tomb of Pakal the Great. The younger Alberto went on to study everything from chemical engineering to economics, political science and finally theater, first at the Autonomous University of Mexico and then in Cuba.

The Vietnam War shifted his life into a different focus when he joined the anti-war movement and traveled to the United States, spending time with Chicano leaders and the Black Panthers, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopians and all manner of social change currents erupting at the time. He settled into the life of a nomad, traveling in Africa, India and the Far East, studying intentional communities from Sweden’s Bauhaus to Israel’s kibbutzim to the ashrams of India. It was in India that he launched his first nomadic theater tribe, the Hathi Babas, and later The Illuminated Elephants, which traveled throughout the U.S., Mexico and Guatemala performing, entertaining and spreading seeds of a different way of life, one based on peace, sustainability and mutual respect.

In 1982 he finally decided to take a break from the nomadic life and plant his roots, returning to Mexico with members of his tribe to form Huehuecoyotl. The community was built on sustainable design principles, making it the country’s first Ecovillage. It was here that he took the name Coyote, based on the name of his new community. Huehuecoyotl means “old, old coyote,” and he began a series of communiques with the name “Viejo Coyote.”

The call of the road never left him, however, and in 1996, he formed the Rainbow Peace Caravan, taking the lessons of the ecovillage with him. One of the group’s first stops was in Chiapas, where they participated in a council with the Zapatistas.

“I had always identified with the Mayans,” Alberto explained. From his conversations with Zapatista leader Subcommandante Marcos, his new moniker evolved: Subcoyote Alberto Ruz. “I was leaving the community and it was time for someone else to take charge,” he pointed out. “So I became Sub-Coyote.”

The title is a fitting one for a person whose lifelong commitment is expressed with a touch of whimsey; the seriousness of the lessons taught by the nomadic tribe was always leavened and livened with theater and the arts, storytelling and dance, and a sense of good fun.

(Galeria Tarso Sarraf/Flickr)

Hundreds of people from all walks of life joined the caravan at different points along the way, particularly at the international gathering in Cuzco, Peru, “The Call of the Condor” in 2003. That was when I became aware of this traveling phenomenon, because my sister Tami joined them for awhile. Her story of the experience left an indelible impression that was to tug at me for seven years until I finally succumbed. Now, in a strange way, I’m following the Coyote’s trail, and my sister will join me along the way.

The caravan continued all the way to Tierra del Fuego, and at this point the Subcoyote had planned to end it – “unless there was a miracle,” as he recalls it.

Indeed, there was a miracle. Brazil’s then-Minister of Culture, the famed musician Gilberto Gil, invited the caravan to come and travel through the country giving workshops on sustainable living. The caravan rolled northward and through the deepest Amazon, spending four years in some of the poorest regions of the country.

Finally, in August of 2009, Alberto has returned home to Huehuecoyotl. But not to rest on his laurels. At the age of 65, when most people might assume they’ve earned a peaceful retirement, he’s begun a new project, at the behest of Mexican bestselling author Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate): he’s joined the staff at the Casa de Cultura Jesús Reyes Heroles in Coyoacán, Mexico City’s beautiful historic neighborhood, to look for ways to share the lessons of the Rainbow Peace Caravan with the at-risk youth of the district.

I caught up with the Subcoyote just as he was beginning to settle into his new job, and we shared coffee and stories. There’s much more to share than I have room to tell in a blog entry, but watch this spot for selected cuts from the two hours of video I shot with him.

Next month, we’ll pick up the conversation where we left off when I visit him at his weekend home in Huehuecoyotl and meet his extended family.