And again in the furious flurry of blogs and obtuse opinions out here on how we would, could and should do things, I receive interesting and arresting images from Allan Savory on headway made in stopping desertification in places he has been working for years with his careful manangement practices. Here is a tickle from the report on Africa upon returning this June of 2006:
Only one thing will end that violence and that is to reverse the desertification of Kenya and surrounding countries. Two main things are leading to such violence – diminishing resources due to land degradation and rising populations.
Commonly, people and organizations trying to help in such situations engage in three automatic responses that are fully understandable and come from the heart. These are:
To provide new water points (boreholes, dams, etc)
To improve the local economy in various ways including micro-banking.
To feed the starving mothers and children.
Unfortunately:
Providing water points, without holistic planned grazing, only serves to accelerate land degradation resulting in less grass and less water.
Improving the local economy, as long as women are subservient, results in the people having larger families.
Feeding the starving mothers and children as long as women are subservient results in people having larger families.
Thus, tragically and unintentionally, the three most common measures to address the situation end up worsening it through higher populations on more rapidly desertifying land. After one of my talks in which I made this point a women from one of the major aid organizations said to me "Oh how true this is. We have been feeding these people for forty years and there are now five times as many people!"
For any development, health or food aid to really succeed, and not worsen the situation, two things are essential no matter how many billions of dollars are expended by governments and the international community:
A component of that aid must involve training people to reverse desertification as is now so clearly demonstrated at Dimbangombe.
Secondly a component of that aid must involve education and empowerment of women. It appears that only when women are educated and truly equals with men do we see a balance in family size with resources.
Both of these components are, as you know, central to the work we are doing with the Hwange community alongside Dimbangombe where encouraging results are attracting increasing interest.
The developmental models that are being brought forth are just plain off the ground and this disconnected language between dynamic systems talk and the ecology that is essential to our physical ground is a red herring on a wild goose chase. Yes, women must go forth and find our ways, yet without profound change in our land management, in our relationships to food, we will make as much of a mess of things that men do for the reasons articulated above.
This is true everywhere on this earth, being that soil is so important, indeed the base of all economics.
And to chant this refrain once again:
Let us learn of the soil foodweb, of our basic places in the food web and in the life/death/life cycle, our very own composting civilization. Let's tell it in a bizzilion languages in many ways possible, as we consider Development In a Box. Holistic Management and measuring soil life can be offered as best practices all around, within and throughout this world.
Let us not forget that in his maturity, Maslov added two levels to his pyramid, those of cognition, acquiring and understanding knowledge and, finally, aesthetic sense. It is odd to me that Barnett and DeAngelis bring up this pyramid all the time, for its incompleteness and then as a coupla networked guys who enjoy a woven reality. I do understand their basic display of the security platform on which they have built so carefully, though.
And, Mr Savory, thank you for showing us myriad ways of landing, of falling up into ecological complexity and out of mechanical complications. Robert Sardello impresses me with a fine essay called "Violence and the Longing for Beauty" in his Facing The World With Soul, which wraps these ideas in a set of vital, regenerative images, a psychology at once more profound, dynamic and quietly fun than reductionist behaviorism.
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