RE: [Permaculture] African deserts

[John Schinnerer <John-Schinnerer@data-dimensions.com>]

Aloha,

-----Original Message-----
From: CtopherP@aol.com [mailto:CtopherP@aol.com]

>What is it that the people in these areas want? What kind of quality of
life  
>do they envision for them selves? What do they need to do and produce in 
>order to move towards that kind of life? What does their landscape need to 
>look like far, far into the future in order to sustain what they  need to
do 
>to support their quality of life? When these questions have been answered
to 
>some degree, then we can start talking about what tools will help get them 
>there.

Thanks, Christopher, you have illuminated my concerns to a great extent.
The way it's been presented thus far, swaling a million acres of foreign
desert (or whatever industrial-scale project) sounds like any other foreign
aid project where someone knows what's good for someone somewhere else but
isn't from there, doesn't live there and maybe hasn't really asked them.  

So in this situation in Africa, who are the stakeholders in this designing?
Have they been asked any of the above and related questions, and listened to
long and hard?  What do they want?  How much help do they need, and how
much/what kind would be detrimental?  (Like George Bush's big food drop into
Somalia, which fed some starving people for a little while *and* put a bunch
of Somali farmers out of business for a long while).

Scott writes:
>The main cause of desertification is
>not drought but mis-management of land, including overgrazing and felling
of
>trees and brushwood for fuel."

So who's mis-managing, and why?  Who's overgrazing and cutting trees and
gathering fuel beyond what the bioregions can support at present, and more
importantly *why*?  To me, good ecological designing requires considering
more than just methods, techniques and technologies to catch more water and
grow more biomass.  I don't doubt that bulldozer permaculture can effect
significant vegetative and ultimately climactic changes, but if the current
mis-managers will still be in charge of management and maintenance, if the
various human organizational/cultural/infrastructure/population/etc. factors
are left out of the designing, the design is likely to be insufficient.
Maybe this is all being done in this case; if so I'd love to hear all the
details as it would be a great example to document.  Thus far I don't hear
of it being done.

John Schinnerer