[Sdpg] Goeff Lawton Miracle in the desert of Jordon

Mon Dec 2 11:34:37 PST 2002

Greening the Desert
Friday, 15 November  2002

They laughed at him and said it couldn't be done. Nothing could be grown in 
that salt laden dustbowl. But Geoff and Sindhu Lawton had other ideas. They 
travel the world teaching others how to repair trashed environments that 
are beyond hope of becoming productive.

In this story, Geoff talks about re-greening the deserts of Jordan. By 
applying the principles of permaculture, they managed to salvage a heavily 
salted environment and turn it into a green oasis.

Geoff and Sindhu live and teach at their farm near The Channon, a small 
community not far from Lismore. Geoff boasts that despite not having a 
police station or church, The Channon has some of the most tolerant and 
friendly people in Australia.

Transcript - Geoff Lawton

So we went in and had a look and we thought “Oh, no!” This is the end of 
the earth. This is like as hard as you can get. This is hyper arid. 
Completely salted landscape. Four hundred metres below sea level - lowest 
place on Earth. Two kilometres from the Dead Sea. About two kilometres from 
where Jesus was christened. Hardly got any rainfall. We’ve got temperatures 
in August that go over 50 degrees. Everybody is farming under plastic 
strips - spray, spray spray! Everybody’s putting synthetic fertiliser on. 
Overgrazed with goats! Just like maggots eating the flesh off the bone, 
down to the bones of the country. Literally like maggots giant maggots 
eating it to nothing.
So we designed up a system that would harvest every bit of rainwater that 
fell on it.

On ten acres, there’s one and a half kilometres of Swale  water harvesting 
ditch on contour. And when they’re full, one million litres of water soak 
into the landscape. And they’ll fill quite a few times over a winter. And 
then we heavily mulched those swales with organic matter which was trashed 
from organic fields nearby. We put that almost half a metre deep. So we 
saved that and mulched our swales which were about two metres wide and half 
a metre deep on the trench. And then we put micro irrigation on the trench. 
And on the uphill side of the water harvesting trench we put Nitro fixing, 
very hardy desert trees which helped shade and reduce wind evaporation and 
also put nitrogen into the soil. And structure the soil for us. And on the 
lower side of the trench we put fruit trees. Majoring in date palms as the 
long-term over-storey in the end. And then we put in Figs, Pomegranates, 
Guavas, Mulberries and now some Citrus.

Within four months we had figs, a metre high with figs on, which is 
impossible. We done a course, male and female course. Trained up some 
locals. And we got a translator whose working for the project. He had his 
degree in agriculture, in the Jordan University. And he got onto his mates 
in the agriculture department, “Well,” he said, “you (said we) couldn’t 
grow figs. We got figs growing. We got figs on ‘em. You better come and 
test the soil because no matter what you say, we’re either growing in salty 
soil what we shouldn’t be growing or we’ve desalted the soil! And we’d like 
to know what we’ve done?” They came in and the salt levels were dropping. 
So they became interested. The salt levels were dropping around the Swales. 
They said, “You’ve must have washed it through.” See, normaly you put this 
huge amount of water on ‘em and wash the salt to the lower levels which 
just makes the ground more and more salty. In the end, you’ll salt it 
twenty metres deep if you keep doing that. And then it’ll take a thousand 
years to recover. And we used only one fifth the amount of water. So the 
water they thought we’ve washed it all through, no  we used one fifth! 
That really got ‘em. When they realized how much water we hadn’t used. With 
the same amount of water normally used on that much area, we could have 
done 50 acres.

Originally people laughed at us because we didn’t put straight lines in. We 
went on contour with these swales. They thought, “Why don’t you, you got a 
bulldozer, you can flatten the desert, you can straighten--” We said, we 
want to go on contour, because we got a longer edge and we can harvest the 
water passively. And then we planted more non-fruiting trees than we did 
fruit trees. So they laughed at us. (They said,) “You’re planting 
unproductive things more than productive things. What the point? You know. 
In soil that wont even grow anything. And then we covered all the inside of 
the swale with huge amount of mulch where they scrape all their organic 
matter off and burn it, like most traditional agriculture.

In the middle of winter we got a funny email saying “We’ve got a problem. 
We’ve got mushrooms growing in the Swale. Well they call it fungus, but 
when we saw a photograph of it, it was mushrooms because they’d never seen 
mushrooms, because they never had so much humidity in living history in the 
soil. And when you open up the mulch, there’s all these little animals 
there, you know those little insects and the soil has come alive. And the 
fungi net that’s underneath the mulch, is putting off a waxy substance, 
which is repelling the salt away from the area. And the decomposition is 
locking the salt up and the salt is not gone. It’s become inert and insoluble.

So we could re-green the Middle East. We could re-green any desert. And we 
could desalt it at the same time. And if we can do it on an insignificant 
little bit of flat ten acres of depth desert, if you give us something with 
catchment, or a Wadi, or a canyon or any of those erosion gully’s, we can 
turn it right around. Completely.

You can fix all the world’s problems, in a garden. You can solve them all 
in a garden. You can solve all your pollution problems, and all your supply 
line needs in a garden.

And most people today actually don’t know that, and that makes most people 
very insecure.

see pictures: http://www.abc.net.au/northcoast/stories/s727970.htm

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grow." - Anonymous

>
> May no bomb fall on your head
> or on your child's head or on your enemy's head
> or on his child's head
> or on the snail
> in his garden.

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