In 2006, Santa Barbara Permaculture Network convened a three day
conference in Santa Barbara called: Permaculture & Sustainable Aid
for the 21st Century; How to Change the Paradigm of Emergency
Disaster Relief and Development to a Model of Life Affirming
Assistance. America had just experienced Katrina in New Orleans
the year before, and closer to home, deadly mud slides in the small
community of La Conchita just south of Santa Barbara.
The keynote speakers for the conference were Geoff and Nadia Lawton, and
Andrew Jones, who had worked with CARE International on a project in
Macedonia, and as a result of that work, were exploring the possibility
of forming a non-profit to be a permaculture disaster response
organization, with trained permaculture people ready to respond at a
moments notice to immediate needs of countries in trouble, but also with
longer term regenerative
landbased strategies based on permaculture.
With Haiti, we see the need is great. We have so many PDC grads
now, many looking for where their life focus can be. Many long term
permaculturists have extraordinary skills in this area, so much to
offer. In 2001 there was a brief opportunity to convert a 5000 acre
army supply base in Lousianna that was being closed to a green industrial
park, but also a center for permaculture disaster training. But
when the war in Iraq started, that opportunity was lost. Geoff
Lawton and others were seeing the idea of training sites as essential,
maybe a time to re-explore that idea.
There is a need to think very deeply about the kind of aid offered,
especially when a nation and country is so vulnerable. In the next
couple of days we will send out articles written by key people, including
Bill Mollison, Rosemary Morrow, Robyn Francis and others on the
subject. John Calvert is putting together and launching soon a
website called "Permaculture Haiti" to provide a place for all
things permaculture in Haiti, how to help, and a place for a forum and
articles people want to share. Thanks John for this very positive
effort. Margie Bushman, Santa Barbara Permaculture
Network.
From the New York Times:
Country Without a Net
![[]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/01/14/opinion/14opedimg/articleLarge.jpg)
By TRACY KIDDER
New York Times
Published: January 13, 2010
THOSE who know a little of Haiti’s history might have watched the news
last night and thought, as I did for a moment: “An earthquake? What next?
Poor Haiti is cursed.”
But while earthquakes are acts of nature,
extreme vulnerability to earthquakes is manmade. And the history of
Haiti’s vulnerability to natural disasters to floods and famine and
disease as well as to this terrible earthquake is long and complex, but
the essence of it seems clear enough.
Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans,
who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the
Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own
republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their
freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment
from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for
years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934;
by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted. (In
more recent years American administrations fell into a pattern of
promoting and then undermining Haitian constitutional
democracy.)
Hence the current state of affairs: at least 10,000 private organizations
perform supposedly humanitarian missions in Haiti, yet it remains one of
the world’s poorest countries. Some of the money that private aid
organizations rely on comes from the United States government, which has
insisted that a great deal of the aid return to American pockets a
larger percentage than that of any other industrialized country.
But that is only part of the problem. In the arena of international aid,
a great many efforts, past and present, appear to have been doomed from
the start. There are the many projects that seem designed to serve not
impoverished Haitians but the interests of the people administering the
projects. Most important, a lot of organizations seem to be unable and
some appear to be unwilling to create partnerships with each other or,
and this is crucial, with the public sector of the society they’re
supposed to serve.
The usual excuse, that a government like Haiti’s is weak and suffers from
corruption, doesn’t hold all the more reason, indeed, to work with the
government. The ultimate goal of all aid to Haiti ought to be the
strengthening of Haitian institutions, infrastructure and expertise.
This week, the list of things that Haiti needs, things like jobs and food
and reforestation, has suddenly grown a great deal longer. The earthquake
struck mainly the capital and its environs, the most densely populated
part of the country, where organizations like the Red Cross and the
United Nations have their headquarters. A lot of the places that could
have been used for disaster relief including the central hospital, such
as it was are now themselves disaster areas.
But there are effective aid organizations working in Haiti. At least one
has not been crippled by the earthquake. Partners in Health, or in
Haitian Creole Zanmi Lasante, has been the largest health care provider
in rural Haiti. (I serve on this organization’s development committee.)
It operates, in partnership with the Haitian Ministry of Health, some 10
hospitals and clinics, all far from the capital and all still intact. As
a result of this calamity, Partners in Health probably just became the
largest health care provider still standing in all Haiti.
Fortunately, it also offers a solid model for independence a model
where only a handful of Americans are involved in day-to-day operations,
and Haitians run the show. Efforts like this could provide one way for
Haiti, as it rebuilds, to renew the promise of its revolution.
Tracy Kidder is the author of “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” about Haiti,
and “Strength in What Remains.”
Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
an educational
non-profit since 2000
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie@sbpermaculture.org
www.sbpermaculture.org
"We are like trees,
we must create new leaves, in new directions, in order to grow." -
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