Are You Part of the Solution?

A healthy Forest near Dondo, left is rapidly turned into wasteland, right, by corrupt logging and charcoal making, followed by intentionally-set fires to clear the land for two seasons of cultivation.

I am just back from the Mezimbite Forest Center in Mozambique. I am working on a long term project there, chronicling the work of the project and its founder, Allan Schwarz. Schwarz is trying to slow the destruction of Mozambique's woodlands. No one knows how much forest is being lost but Ashoka Fellow Schwarz says at the current rate of loss, within fifteen years most of the country's remaining forest will be logged and burned out of existence.

As I have mentioned many times in this blog, the forest is mostly being lost to power the energy needs of rural and suburban people of Southern Africa. Rural people earn rare money by making the forest into charcoal, and selling it to urban dwellers. They also move onto these cleared areas and farm for a few seasons before the land fails, and then they move on, leaving scrubland in their wake.

Even though I have been to the area many times, the actual frontlines of the forest destruction is far from the project, which has been focusing on replanting areas already lost. But last week I went looking for the "battle front" of the destruction and I ran into an unholy alliance. Loggers, working for a Chinese company, were clearing out the big hardwood trees, and the charcoal makers were felling the small ones, piling them up into big mud-covered roasters, making charcoal on a huge scale out of what was left of the forest.

It affected me deeply, and today I spent the day in a deep hole of unhappiness. There is really no one in the area other than Schwarz trying to stop this cycle of destruction, which is being played out on a massive scale throughout the region. Why aren't the logging companies forced to replant the forest? Why are they not working sustainably, cutting only what the forest can sustain? Why doesn't the money they give the government help support local communities so they are not forced to hammer their only resource, turning it into charcoal and unproductive farmland?

Schwarz is only one man with one project, and try as he might he can't make even a small dent into what is going on just in his province. The enemies (corruption, greed and mismanagement) are too strong and it is clear that without an international effort, they will prevail.

Americans and Europeans buy hardwood flooring from China all the time in big warehouse stores for as little as a dollar per square-foot. Where do clients think these woods come from? China? Not on your life. They come from Mozambique and other corrupt countries in Africa, and the cutting of these woods and the Chinese loggers presence here leads to other losses like poaching.

In South Africa 198 Rhino have been lost this year to poaching. Elephants and many many other animals are being wiped out in Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania on a scale never seen before by members of these logging syndicates. Much of this destruction is funneled out of the countries by corrupt officials in cahoots with the logging workers.

But strangely, unlike the 1980s, there is no huge international outcry.

The silence of people in Europe, America, and other democracies is astounding. That lack of interest and outrage is as much a part of the poachers arsenal as high caliber bullets and corruption. And that means your inattention, your lack of interest. In our resounding silence and lack of outrage these nefarious killers of biodiversity are making a mockery of conservation on an international scale.

When you buy hardwood from China, you are paying for this death, it is your fault directly. There is a war against the last bastions of nature on our planet and if you are not part of the solution, you are the problem. The sides are clear. Recycling at home is not enough. You need to be informed about your decisions because you are responsible, your money is driving this destruction. And yet being a smart consumer is only part of the solution. Everyone must become an active participant in stopping this, because if you are not active you really are the problem.

So now you may be sitting there thinking, "but what can I do?" "I try to be thoughtful, and recycle, and walk to the store more and bring my own bags instead of using paper or plastic. Isn't this enough?" From someone at the battle zone, watching things you and your children will never see simply disappear, I can tell you that it is not.

But here is the good news. You don't have to do anything different, or tie yourself to a tree to stop the loggers or live in penury (yet). Right now all you have to do is your job. If you are an architect join Architects Without Borders and design appropriate low-cost solar housing for the 3rd world in your spare time. If you are an accountant, create a group of accountants that audits and follows the paper trail of multinational corporations who are paying for the widespread destruction. Name and shame offenders on blogs, Twitter and newspaper websites. As I said before, nefarious projects and poachers operate with our silent consent because we do not choose to practice oversight.

If you are a writer, take time out every month to write something about the environment, and research NGOs like the Mezimbite Forest Project that are important parts of a global solution, sharing them with the rest of the world. If you are a politician, teacher, librarian, used car salesman or concerned parent, do your job. Do it for our home, the Earth, on a regular basis.

Stock the library with consciousness raising books and articles and create an email newsletter that shares that list with your community. Troll the internet looking for news articles that are raising these issues, and share them through social networking sites and put pressure on companies bankrolling this chaos to stop. Everyone can be a part of the solution to this problem.

Sticking our collective heads in the sand will not make this problem go away. Our planet is really in peril. Our coastlines are under threat, our migrating species are dying, our oceans are being plundered on a scale that is hard for experts to measure, and our forests are being wiped out of existence for the profit of a few. Sticking our collective heads in the sand will not make this problem go away. Get active, get involved, get informed and stop being part of the problem.



Skeletal trees hang in the sun after loggers and charcoal makers have reduced this forest to ruin near Dondo, Mozambique.


Chinese logging companies remove hardwood trees and the charcoal makers move into the forests, creating a double-destruction cocktail that leaves the land bare and unproductive.



Forests are wiped out after charcoal makers and logging companies level forests. The charcoal makers like this one are aware the forest is in danger, but they say, "we are poor, what can we do?"


After logging and charcoal making few of the hardest trees are left standing, their skeletons seeming to reach imploringly to the sky.

Getting out there, making a difference

Villagers using a solar cooker for the first time, near Kanye in Botswana.

Crosby Menzies from Solar Cookers For Africa is traveling through Africa, visiting isolated communities, and trying to create a groundswell of public interest in Solar cooking. This former Wallstreet worker has created a project that takes him out from in front of his computer and into the wilds of Africa, and the reactions are overwhelmingly favourable. Armed with cookers, a simple flyer, and a huge smile, Menzies has made solar cookers his mission. I joined the Solar Caravan in Botswana, near the town of Kanye.

This country of 2 million people enjoys one of the highest solar indexes in the world, and last year the government made a commitment to develop solar energy over the next 20 years. At the moment, most of the people of this desert country use scarce firewood for their household energy needs, but Menzies sees a time when 80% of those needs will be met with solar, using today's technology.

Under the big Botswana sky Menzies trundles up in his white 4x4, bringing technology and new ideas to rural Africa.


Crosby Menzies is on a mission to distribute Solar Cookers all over Africa.


Earnest Batulo 11, learned how to use the Solar Cookers For Africa cooker in less than five minutes.

Good News....Great News!

Hells Gate National Park, the Home of Africa's Geothermal Future
Okaria 3 has about 100 Megawatts of Proven Geothermal reserves, with about 50 Megawatts developed by 2010. It sits in Hells Gate National park in Kenya. Ernest Mabwa is the Plant Manager, and he has about 30 full time employees. It is the only privately owned and operated geothermal plant in Africa.

When I was down in Cape Town last week visiting the sea and old friends, one of them mentioned to me that most of the reporting on the environment and in fact much of my blog is fairly negative. Now, it is my and other journalists role to bring up the problems in the world and hope we reach a critical mass of people that can actually change things, so people do need to know the problems around the issues. So don't expect this column to be a rosy greening over of the very serious environmental train-wreck we seem to be heading towards. However, sticky ego aside, its also true that there is much to be excited and proud about. See my column about standing on the shoulders of giants like John Muir for a positive synopsis of our past environmental heroes.

Anyone interested in seeing some great stories with some great news for humanity, look no further than Energy Entrepreneurs at Global Post. This fascinating 25 part series has upliftment aplenty for those of us looking for positive environmental news. Follow 25 entrepreneurs across the globe working to create a greener economy.

These are people with vision and drive working on their dream of a sustainable future. Overlook the fact that Shell Oil paid for the advertising, someone has to and with their oil money we have been able to make something truly unique and inspiring.

Too Many Of Us

Gliese 581c, By Graphic Artist John Kaufman


There is simply too many of us. Looking around the world, traveling as I do for my job, its obvious that there are simply too many humans. We are eating ourselves out of house and home. Tiara Walters, a South African journalist working for the Sunday Times here in Johannesburg wrote in her column today that "human demand on the biosphere more than doubled between 1961 and 2007, but the global population is only projected to stabilize at 9.22 Billion people in 2075".

Already, according to Lester Brown and other thinkers, we have passed the Earth's renewable carrying capacity and are living on ancient water deposits and borrowed time.

That we are running out of food, fuel and everything needed to make people happy and healthy members of society may not be apparent to people in developed nations. They have the financial resources to stand closer to the front of the growing queue. But in Developing countries such as Mozambique or Bangladesh the people are much further behind, lacking the cash resources to afford the rising costs that are becoming a measure of food scarcity. Bread riots last month in Mozambique are a perfect example of how even a modest cost rise can lead to civil unrest when people are living hand to mouth.

What is about humanity that we think that the right to reproduce is inalienable and permanent? This is clearly at odds with the carrying capacity of this particular piece of farmland that we call the Earth. So I have been thinking up solutions, some off the cuff and some simply impossible, but the status quo must change, of that there is no question. Population pressure will push out all of our wilderness into city parks and the margins of maize fields, with a massive extinction and an even higher risk of the sensitive food distribution system collapsing. (Systems become more susceptible to catastrophic failure the more highly organized they become, according to the law of entropy).

This is scary stuff. Not many voters, writers or thinkers are seriously even considering espousing many of these ideas, since they inevitably smack of the "one child" Chinese policy, with all its ghastly implications like infanticide. I have left out the more nightmarish "final solution" type ideas and focused on what may be the most equitable and random way of doing away with our excess folks.

1) Create a breeding ticket lottery. A yearly lottery is held that prospective people can enter and receive a breeding ticket, completely randomly.
Hitch:
This idea can only work in highly organized societies, the kind of societies where a rising birth rate is not a problem today, replete with good medical care and a draconian civil police force with informers and the idea of neighbors ratting out neighbors about that secret child in the basement.

2) Cyanide capsules on a rolling system that slightly increases the death rate in an equitable fashion.
Hitch:
This needs a less organized society and is a much more democratic process since everyone would be required to participate. However, the idea of popping a pill once a year in the chance that you will be that unlucky one in fifty that kicks it would probably turn off voters.

3) Focus the capital of the world in the pockets of a few countries that are insulated, with enough food to get them through bar environmental catastrophe, and let rest of the world's uneducated and poor people starve slowly to death.
Hitch:
The moral implications of this are perhaps the most ghastly, rivaled only by Hitler
-no wait, even he killed most people quickly.

With the discovery of Gliese 581c only twenty light years away, there could be a chance we could get off of this planet and take over another. Obviously twenty light years is still far away, too far even, but the implications of this discovery go beyond this odd little world that has all the goldilocks qualities we have been looking for. The reason we found it is because it is so close to its dim, cold star. But since there is a planet that could be habitable in such an unlikely planetary system, most astronomers feel that planets could be as common as pickled cabbage at a Korean wedding. Meaning that aside from euthanasia, breeding tickets and certain death for the poor, there may be a close-by neighbor we could invade and occupy in our time-honored human tradition.

All levity aside, what do we do? Its a conundrum, it is serious, it is the worst kind of political hot potato, and its only going to get worse. So rather than point fingers at people who may have taken the go forth and multiply idea a bit far, we should all be thinking about what we can do to sort it out, or nature will do it for us.

An Energy Revolution: Micro-Hydro Power

Watch The Video:




Pat Downey lives in the tiny little town of Hofmeyer, South Africa. This little town on the edge of the great Karoo Desert seems like an unlikely place for one of Africa's most innovative water engineers to live. There is a small general store, a gas station where you have to wake up the attendant, and surprisingly, a lot of rushing water in the Fish River, used to irrigate the dry farmland scattered around the desert hills.

Downey is a gentle, unassuming man, with the language of an inventor and a slightly stooped gate. Since the 1970s he has been pioneering technology that generates electrical power from small water-driven turbines. These turbines do not need a dam to build up water pressure, but rather they divert a small part of a river and harvest electricity from the kinetic energy generated by a small drop in height.

Water is a storehouse of kinetic energy. The hydrological cycle that lifts water out of the oceans and off the land through evaporation is run on solar energy. The sun heats the water and the air, evaporation occurs and the kinetic energy from this process is stored in the water. Then the water, full of energy, falls on distant mountains high up, and runs down rivers to the sea, all the while giving up that energy as splashing waterfalls and crashing rapids. Every gorgeous waterfall is a massive release of stored kinetic energy.

For a large-scale hydro-electric dam, those gorgeous waterfalls are flooded by a big lake, the stored water is backed up into a stunning gorge that will forever be lost to admiring eyes. Not so with micro-hydro systems like the ones Downey makes.

These smalls systems divert a small amount of water around the waterfall. Generally less than 1% of the total flow. The water falls through a pipe, spins a small turbine, and is dropped into the little pool at the base of the waterfall. For an average sized river like the Fish, a little fifteen foot (4m) drop can generate enough electrical power for fifty low-cost houses.

Small hydro systems like this can survive floods, they have a very small impact on the environment, they never silt up, and they can operate for as long as they are maintained, unlike massive dams which fill up with sediment and become useless over the years.

So why are they not more widespread?
Electricity in South Africa has been kept at an artificially low price for decades. The country sought to spur investment and growth with electricity subsidies to farmers and towns. Downey tried to sell these systems, but their initial cost was just too high. That has changed now. The national electrical grid has had to become profitable, and to do that they have had to raise prices by a whopping 140% in the last three years.

Correspondingly the demand for his systems has gone through the roof. At today's prices, the systems pay for themselves in three to four years. Today he cannot keep up with all the orders, "the emails just come flooding in, we can't keep up!" He explains in his wavering excited voice.

For a man who struggled and worked for years in obscurity, waiting for just this moment, he is clearly enjoying every moment of it.

Accessorizing Sustainability- An Economic Model for Forest Conservation

Cutting raw Palpretto logs from a sustainably managed forest. Every tiny piece of these logs will be used for something.


Small offcuts after the logs have been processed.



Turning the offcuts into small cosmetic jars


American model and activist Summer Rayn Oaks showing off the finished jars filled with sustainably harvested forest oils for skin care, made by subsidiary Bom Oils of Mozambique.


I have just returned from another trip to Mezimbite Forest Center, a project run by Ashoka Fellow Allan Schwarz. Schwarz has been pioneering projects around the city of Beira, Mozambique from his small replanted forest grove. The area has been hard hit by deforestation for the energy trade. Most of it has fallen for charcoal, to power the stoves of the rapidly growing urban population. This area is not unique. Throughout Africa, as I have mentioned in previous posts, there is a massive problem with deforestation.


Cosmetic jars for the Bom products, like lip balm, all made from wood offcuts from forests that are managed sustainably.

Charcoal is the main form of energy for most rural and urban households, and this has driven the continuing destruction of the forests. As the forests "run away" the cost of getting the charcoal into the cities rises, and the cost of charcoal goes up, making it more lucrative to cut the trees. It is an energy cycle that is completely un-sustainable, since virtually no one is replanting the forests. No one except for a few individuals like Schwarz.

He runs the biggest network of nurseries in the region which have been used to replant forests under his care. He pays for this by carefully removing certain trees from these well-managed forests and employing former charcoal cutters to be trained as skilled wood turners. Communities then see a greater value in their forests than making charcoal and have managed to keep some of them standing.


Tables for the European Market

One aspect of Schwarz's operation is value adding along the supply chain. Instead of selling this sustainable wood harvest at a premium, he has a working mill that employs between forty and a hundred people at any one time.

Every tiny little scrap of wood is used for something, from crochet needles for the eastern market, make-up compacts for American women, to bangles and jewelry for the French. A tree that falls for charcoal will end up being valued at roughly $1.50 for the end product of charcoal, and only 25 US cents for the cutters. With Schwarz's model however, a single tree may net thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars, with that money equitably distributed to communities, workers and crafts-people. A craftsman at his facility earns about 250$ a month, more than twenty-times the average income in Mozambique.


Knitting needles made from wood offcuts at the Mezimbite Forest Center

Value adding at a local level is driving projects like this around the world. Schwarz believes that only by including local communities in this value chain can he create awareness that forests are more economically productive as a healthy system than as charcoal. Communities are the only guardians of their forest resources, but they must benefit directly, and in Mezimbite they are included as an important part of an economic system that puts special products in the hands of environmentally aware consumers.

Far from being clunky symbols of green, the art he and his team creates is sleek, gorgeous and just happens to make the world a better place. Go to his website, or the AD Schwarz design site and explore some his designs. This award winning designer, architect and forester has created a model of sustainable design that symbolises the finest of African conservation and craftsmanship.

Homegrown Wind Power For Africa

What is an appropriate technology transfer from the western world for African villages? The answer, as Bob Dylan suggests, is blowing in the wind, at least on the Mozambiquan coastline. Jason Morenikeji explains in this short film.





These are big ideas, and they deserve a good hearing. The film I created is short but there is scope here for a much larger conversation (and a longer film- anyone interested to help?) about cross-platform sharing and sustainable power solutions that are not only in the bush but atop our apartments, houses, and even cars.

Jason, who is here in Johannesburg for an investors conference, suggests that power solutions, offered by companies like his, should be comprehensive and utilizing all available forms of generation. No wind? Use your solar panels. Stormy day? use the wind. As a back up for important medical equipment or in case of an emergency, have a basic diesel generator that can be turned on. In some sites, near hills or mountains, it is possible to put a small hydroelectric generator in as well.

These are not pie-in the sky technologies. As Jason shows us in the video these things are being crafted using local resources and skills even in the most back-water places of the world. A local pilot project using a hybrid system of wind and solar can pay back the cost of the system in saved diesel fuel in eighteen short months. Far from being over-priced or too complicated to maintain, these are the systems of the future, investors take note.