4 ms·

These articles always seem strange to me. There was another story a few years ago, also from Jordan if I recall correctly, where some member of the royal family

These articles always seem strange to me. There was another story a few years ago, also from Jordan if I recall correctly, where some member of the royal family did some permaculture thing with some Western group. Great success, look at all the plants, amazing, greening the desert and all that, fancy YT videos, and they were celebrating some anniversary. Now here's another one, and they're creating a forest on 250sqm. It feels like they're starting over and over, but either there's other successful projects "next door" which the articles never really mention, or the other projects were shut down or failed some time before. Did they? If so, why? The same thing happens in Saudi Arabia where they had some amazing results by (oversimplified, yes), digging some swales and putting some rocks on steep hills. The grass was coming back, trees were growing. And that's it, cut, no more info. You'd think that this would be naturally adopted by each neighboring community immediately, and the whole desert would be greened in no time. But somehow it isn't. Why? These countries are fairly autocratic, and obviously these projects have the blessing of the rulers, or they wouldn't happen, and surely the rulers would love to have the forests restored and the desertification stopped and all that, and it makes for great photo ops, too. Why then, don't they decree these projects to happen at scale? I'm not saying it's all bullshit, maybe it's just journalists who need a new story every other years, but these are, to me, obvious questions, that I'd answer if I was writing an article about these things, and it's suspicious that they aren't being answered, ever.

actionfromafar 4y ago
After the PR piece is done, actual work is just superfluos steps. It can only bring unneccesary risks to everyone involved. If it fails, heads must roll, and nobody is interested in that for its own sake.
zeristor 4y ago
There’s Geoff Lawton’s work mentioned. The idea being that referencing a desert being a real test of permaculture: https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/about-us/ https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/about-us/ I think it isn’t a trivial thing to scale, people need skills. Geoff Lawton himself was inspired by the 2000 year old Green valleys in Morocco which alas appear to be threatened: https://youtu.be/wd-b_C7a_es https://youtu.be/wd-b_C7a_es
- luckylion 4y ago
  But they've been doing it for some 15 years, right? With those types of success, I'd expect the map to look like those virus-spreading maps where it starts somewhere and then expands to all directions at exponential speed. That it doesn't hints at there being some issue. Do you need to tend to each plant constantly with someone who has learned some special skills and that doesn't allow for scaling? The advantage to having trees instead of desert seems so obvious, I can't see why everyone isn't jumping on it, unless there's some not-talked-about problem that limits these projects to touristy projects and YT filming locations. And with the amount of money that's going around for environmental projects in the developing world, I can't imagine that it's about lack of funding.
  - zeristor 4y ago
    I guess the economic vested interests that have to be dealt with. From what I understand if there's a large amount of sheel and goat agriculture that eat so much vegetation there's little chance to survive, and if that is how people earn their living they'd need to be won over, or have some other way of making a living. I'm a Data Engineer in a different continent so armchair farming is no doubt insulting. But these things don't seem to be common knowledge, so much comes from studying how rain falls on the land, how to slow it down so it can penetrate into the soil, and raising the groundwater level which can take years.
  - carapace 4y ago
    It's purely inertia. These systems work. They scale (which is not surprising when you think about it, they are made of four-billion-year-old self-improving nano-technology that optimizes for exponential reproduction at all levels simultaneously, aka "life".) If there's one systemic problem it's that Permaculture is diametrically opposed to extractive economic systems. (E.g. modern agriculture is/was more akin to mining than ecosystem design.) Monsanto (just to pick on them) has no place in a tessellation of ecological small-holdings. Another factor is that many Permies elect to charge money to teach Permaculture, and even the main textbook "Permaculture: A Designer's Manual" has been scarce on the ground and hard to get for years. I think it's a little better now? You can order it online and get it delivered. I think Permaculture et. al. would have spread faster if people taught it for free (and made money from selling the surplus they developed on their Permaculture farm, eh?) These days it has reached "critical mass" and the concepts of applied ecology are rolling out all over. You can search the Youtube for videos of massive projects in India, for example.
youngtaff 4y ago
Geoff Lawton’s project is still going https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/ https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/
PicassoCTs 4y ago
You can actually peak and get a realistic picture. Google maps shows lots of those greening projects (like the green wall of africa) https://goo.gl/maps/bxpneCxBeMvXMELt9 https://goo.gl/maps/bxpneCxBeMvXMELt9 Also most of these programs are basically wood plantations, that regularly fail and continue existence just as propaganda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China)#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China)#Criti... Its overall not very effective. Better outcome would be had by planting diverse dessert-adapted plants and trees at locations were the landscape protects them, so they form "islands" of recovery without needing human intervention. You compute were water in the landscape is most likely to exist and assemble, while protected from dust storms. Then you fire a seed shell from a drone towards the location, similar to this. https://www.fastcompany.com/90504789/these-drones-can-plant-40000-trees-in-a-month-by-2028-theyll-have-planted-1-billion https://www.fastcompany.com/90504789/these-drones-can-plant-... A alternative approach is to use robots to 3d print sand into a watercollecting structure that supports a plant seeded nearby while it drives its root towards ground water. https://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2011-09/you-built-what-seven-foot-high-3-d-printer-uses-sun-transform-sand-glass-object/ https://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2011-09/you-built-what-se...
- luckylion 4y ago
  Thanks, Google maps is a great idea. Is there a list of these locations with historical images? The approaches you mention are basically what I'd expect: mass-scale efforts that are hit and miss but will overall result in large effects. I suppose the end goal is different between this and other groups: one is "we need trees, lets plant trees" the other is "we need trees but we also need to repair our relationship with nature and create sustainable projects", and the latter probably has scaling-problems built-in. I assume there's a lot of unrelated problems doing that in Africa, but North America has deserts too. What's keeping tech-loving tinkerers with a passion for drones and robots from transforming Arizona?
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    American deserts aren't anthropogenic.
sampo 4y ago
> The same thing happens in Saudi Arabia where they had some amazing results by (oversimplified, yes), digging some swales and putting some rocks on steep hills. The grass was coming back, trees were growing. And that's it, cut, no more info. You are probably talking about Al Baydha. As far as I understand, the project ran 2009-2016, and last information in Wikipedia is from 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Baydha_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Baydha_Project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T39QHprz-x8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T39QHprz-x8
- baud147258 4y ago
  The pictures in the Wikipedia article are supposed to date from January this year.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
The entire article reads like some sort of religious parable. It hits all the woke undertones. Man bad, nature good. Man kill nature. But one woman will save nature. Give birth to forest. Almost ready for a Hollywood movie. I've seen Dubai growing grass in the desert, and it literally requires almost always on sprinkler. They can grow trees too, but they water them daily. Which necessitates taking water from the ocean, and desalination. Which requires tons of energy and chemicals, and industry. Which costs tons of money. So keeping a tree, might be similar costs to what keeping a horse is here. All of it requires lots of money, and cheap labour from developing countries. Skinny malnourished men, from some poor village in India, and Pakistan working in scorching heat in the middle of the day. So yes they can they can grow trees in the desert, because every time you fill up with gas, they get a large cut from the oil, and thus the money to grow them. So you filling up your car, grow trees in the desert. Reality.
- mcdonje 4y ago
  Iraq is mostly desert but it used to be the fertile crescent. Did the hanging gardens of Babylon go away because they turned off the sprinklers? What actually happened was successive waves of deforestation. The same deforestation that made Jordan arid. Reforestation is a reasonable course of action.
  - dukeofdoom 4y ago
    Well yeah, there used to be palm trees growing in Edmonton. Doesn't mean you can grow them now in -30 degree modern day Winter. Wind patterns change over time, and so does level of participation and temperatures a region receives. Not really surprising. I'm not sure about Iraq, but if you're getting months of 40+ degrees daily and almost not rain, you're not growing a forrest without a source of water. Sorry. A single peach tree in California typically requires about 25 to 40 gallons of water per week during the summer months. https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/new-prehistoric-palm-1.393927 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/new-prehistoric-palm-1.39392...
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Trees, grass and shrubs might be costly to kickstart but they retain water in the soil and that kind of thing compounds. It’s obviously an effort to kickstart the greening of a desert.

actionfromafar 4y ago

After the PR piece is done, actual work is just superfluos steps. It can only bring unneccesary risks to everyone involved. If it fails, heads must roll, and nobody is interested in that for its own sake.

zeristor 4y ago

There’s Geoff Lawton’s work mentioned. The idea being that referencing a desert being a real test of permaculture: https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/about-us/ https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/about-us/ I think it isn’t a trivial thing to scale, people need skills. Geoff Lawton himself was inspired by the 2000 year old Green valleys in Morocco which alas appear to be threatened: https://youtu.be/wd-b_C7a_es https://youtu.be/wd-b_C7a_es

luckylion 4y ago
But they've been doing it for some 15 years, right? With those types of success, I'd expect the map to look like those virus-spreading maps where it starts somewhere and then expands to all directions at exponential speed. That it doesn't hints at there being some issue. Do you need to tend to each plant constantly with someone who has learned some special skills and that doesn't allow for scaling? The advantage to having trees instead of desert seems so obvious, I can't see why everyone isn't jumping on it, unless there's some not-talked-about problem that limits these projects to touristy projects and YT filming locations. And with the amount of money that's going around for environmental projects in the developing world, I can't imagine that it's about lack of funding.
- zeristor 4y ago
  I guess the economic vested interests that have to be dealt with. From what I understand if there's a large amount of sheel and goat agriculture that eat so much vegetation there's little chance to survive, and if that is how people earn their living they'd need to be won over, or have some other way of making a living. I'm a Data Engineer in a different continent so armchair farming is no doubt insulting. But these things don't seem to be common knowledge, so much comes from studying how rain falls on the land, how to slow it down so it can penetrate into the soil, and raising the groundwater level which can take years.
- carapace 4y ago
  It's purely inertia. These systems work. They scale (which is not surprising when you think about it, they are made of four-billion-year-old self-improving nano-technology that optimizes for exponential reproduction at all levels simultaneously, aka "life".) If there's one systemic problem it's that Permaculture is diametrically opposed to extractive economic systems. (E.g. modern agriculture is/was more akin to mining than ecosystem design.) Monsanto (just to pick on them) has no place in a tessellation of ecological small-holdings. Another factor is that many Permies elect to charge money to teach Permaculture, and even the main textbook "Permaculture: A Designer's Manual" has been scarce on the ground and hard to get for years. I think it's a little better now? You can order it online and get it delivered. I think Permaculture et. al. would have spread faster if people taught it for free (and made money from selling the surplus they developed on their Permaculture farm, eh?) These days it has reached "critical mass" and the concepts of applied ecology are rolling out all over. You can search the Youtube for videos of massive projects in India, for example.

youngtaff 4y ago

Geoff Lawton’s project is still going https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/ https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/

PicassoCTs 4y ago

You can actually peak and get a realistic picture. Google maps shows lots of those greening projects (like the green wall of africa) https://goo.gl/maps/bxpneCxBeMvXMELt9 https://goo.gl/maps/bxpneCxBeMvXMELt9 Also most of these programs are basically wood plantations, that regularly fail and continue existence just as propaganda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China)#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China)#Criti... Its overall not very effective. Better outcome would be had by planting diverse dessert-adapted plants and trees at locations were the landscape protects them, so they form "islands" of recovery without needing human intervention. You compute were water in the landscape is most likely to exist and assemble, while protected from dust storms. Then you fire a seed shell from a drone towards the location, similar to this. https://www.fastcompany.com/90504789/these-drones-can-plant-40000-trees-in-a-month-by-2028-theyll-have-planted-1-billion https://www.fastcompany.com/90504789/these-drones-can-plant-... A alternative approach is to use robots to 3d print sand into a watercollecting structure that supports a plant seeded nearby while it drives its root towards ground water. https://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2011-09/you-built-what-seven-foot-high-3-d-printer-uses-sun-transform-sand-glass-object/ https://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2011-09/you-built-what-se...

luckylion 4y ago
Thanks, Google maps is a great idea. Is there a list of these locations with historical images? The approaches you mention are basically what I'd expect: mass-scale efforts that are hit and miss but will overall result in large effects. I suppose the end goal is different between this and other groups: one is "we need trees, lets plant trees" the other is "we need trees but we also need to repair our relationship with nature and create sustainable projects", and the latter probably has scaling-problems built-in. I assume there's a lot of unrelated problems doing that in Africa, but North America has deserts too. What's keeping tech-loving tinkerers with a passion for drones and robots from transforming Arizona?
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  American deserts aren't anthropogenic.

sampo 4y ago

> The same thing happens in Saudi Arabia where they had some amazing results by (oversimplified, yes), digging some swales and putting some rocks on steep hills. The grass was coming back, trees were growing. And that's it, cut, no more info. You are probably talking about Al Baydha. As far as I understand, the project ran 2009-2016, and last information in Wikipedia is from 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Baydha_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Baydha_Project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T39QHprz-x8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T39QHprz-x8

baud147258 4y ago
The pictures in the Wikipedia article are supposed to date from January this year.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

The entire article reads like some sort of religious parable. It hits all the woke undertones. Man bad, nature good. Man kill nature. But one woman will save nature. Give birth to forest. Almost ready for a Hollywood movie. I've seen Dubai growing grass in the desert, and it literally requires almost always on sprinkler. They can grow trees too, but they water them daily. Which necessitates taking water from the ocean, and desalination. Which requires tons of energy and chemicals, and industry. Which costs tons of money. So keeping a tree, might be similar costs to what keeping a horse is here. All of it requires lots of money, and cheap labour from developing countries. Skinny malnourished men, from some poor village in India, and Pakistan working in scorching heat in the middle of the day. So yes they can they can grow trees in the desert, because every time you fill up with gas, they get a large cut from the oil, and thus the money to grow them. So you filling up your car, grow trees in the desert. Reality.

mcdonje 4y ago
Iraq is mostly desert but it used to be the fertile crescent. Did the hanging gardens of Babylon go away because they turned off the sprinklers? What actually happened was successive waves of deforestation. The same deforestation that made Jordan arid. Reforestation is a reasonable course of action.
- dukeofdoom 4y ago
  Well yeah, there used to be palm trees growing in Edmonton. Doesn't mean you can grow them now in -30 degree modern day Winter. Wind patterns change over time, and so does level of participation and temperatures a region receives. Not really surprising. I'm not sure about Iraq, but if you're getting months of 40+ degrees daily and almost not rain, you're not growing a forrest without a source of water. Sorry. A single peach tree in California typically requires about 25 to 40 gallons of water per week during the summer months. https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/new-prehistoric-palm-1.393927 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/new-prehistoric-palm-1.39392...
edgyquant 4y ago
Trees, grass and shrubs might be costly to kickstart but they retain water in the soil and that kind of thing compounds. It’s obviously an effort to kickstart the greening of a desert.