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

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flying termites in their valuable in addition to diet.
So you could say that termite mounds in Africa,

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India, and all the deserts,
is that they islands of lot

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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

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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.

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In western central Victoria, everywhere
we travel, we see dying trees

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and solid lands. Nature has
rejected as simple solutions.

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[music]

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Somehow, we see the limitless
food grain we’ve created insane,

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boring landscapes without trees and without
people and without anything of interest.

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There are hundreds of miles
of these on-land irrigation

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canals throughout the irrigation
areas and drains of those.

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And the potential evaporation
here is about 18 feet.

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So, as we put the water on these fields,

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evaporation takes off the water and leaves the
salt, but there’s also the water floods down here

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and picks up further ground silts.

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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

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and you get a sparkling
crystal forest of salts.

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The first (inaudible) we had all

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the problem was in 1979. We didn’t
even have a map of the salt,

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that was very rapidly established with the
height of old schools across Victoria.

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Here the students of Dimboola High
School take their salt measuring devices

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into the local river forest in the middle
of winter, and they get a rude shock.

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(inaudible) take out these
readings when they’re steady.

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And it’s actually surprising
to (inaudible) that high.

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It’s increased from a couple of months ago.

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Years ago this just wasn’t very salty at all in (inaudible),
if you get in mouth, we can really taste the salt.

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(inaudible) the seawater and come up with bumps
and, you know, swimming in here now, I came up

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with those bumps, you
know, just like seawater.

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So, I can’t go swimming in the river no more. Our
data we’re collecting today along with schools from

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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]