I choose for getting influenced by many sides in order to grow into a more and more objective research journalist. Without learning you stand still and don’t really live in my opinion. Recently and thanks to Cyrus Janssen’s talks about China, I concluded that yes: climate change is a fact. Started thinking about it and looked up several natural disasters, interested in finding their causes. And I was astonished to find it wasn’t much about CO2 and nitrogen, but all about pastures devoured by grazing herds for milleniums, geo-engineering in order to have dry summers for more tourism and deforestation. Good news: we can do something about all that in different reasonably cheap and easy ways. I will present some of those methods to you today.
CO2, sustainability, nitrogen, wildfires …
Even if I have lived in Wageningen, a Dutch city with an large agricultural university and heard a lot about climate, environment and agricultural engineering, I am still an alpha who doesn’t really deeply understand all that. I am not able to give you the best options to repair our planet, telling you why this or that method would function. What I can and will do, is letting you know methods that exist and that have helped in a variety of countries to turn dry desert and wasteland into green forests and agricultural regions. Watching videos about that, I understood that enough agricultural scientists know which methods would work best in which places, so we can make this sector grow. At 16 years old I was the youngest board member of Milieudefensie. All I could contribute at that age was to keep the stand in the marketplace every Saturday morning, but I still learned a lot from the people who passed by.
Don’t get me wrong: I am certainly not against sustainability and reducing emissions of CO2, nitrogen and more such gasses. Of course not! What I am against, is the use of wrong methods for those purposes that unnecessarily destroy the economy worldwide and to lie to the people that this would be our happy future. No Greta Thunberg for me in other words, but preferably as many positive methods to support nature on our amazingly beautiful blue planet. No chasing away of farmers in the Netherlands, as these farmers already work in the most effective and ecological way possible and are of utmost importance for the economy of the country. Instead help them to give even better food to their animals and have the animals outside as much as possible, so they won’t emit that so much feared nitrogen.
In Greece the climate is getting hotter and drier because of the numerous wildfires that destroy our forests every year again. The fires are always caused by arson and not by “a warming up planet”. Emitting less CO2 won’t stop the wildfires, but having better and more forest guards will. Just like replanting the forests and this time with trees and bushes that moisture the ground and more such smart things. And an amendment to the Greek law that makes it impossible for greedy crooks to burn down a forest in order to get permission to build yet another tourist hotel by a defenseless judge. And more police at the borders with Turkey, since people from that country also set our forests on fire more often than you imagine. Decreasing CO2 emission is good for making cities more liveable, see? But not for combating climate change, which is a much more ancient problem.
Niger: turning the Sahel into a green forest
Let’s go to the incredible examples of how to fix our planet! Here is number one by Leaf of Life and it’s about Niger. Maybe after having seen this video, you will understand yet another reason for the French not to want to leave this amazing African country alone. The method is called Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration and is really cheap:
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Water for Morocco
In the South West of Morocco fog nets – or rain catchers – drain water out of low hanging clouds on the Atlantic coast. I find this method so much more peaceful than shooting laser beams into clouds:
Orange peels in Costa Rica
This is an awesome story that dates from 1976. A couple of agricultural scientists succeeded in getting permission for a fruit juice company to dump its orange peels in a wasted place of the jungle in Costa Rica. A whole political war followed, but after 16 years when a new generation of scientists went into the same place to see what had happened there, they were astounded! The peels had disappeared and in their place there was a totally new piece of forest. Now scientists are doing tests to use this method in other hot and humid places as well or even to adapt the method so it can be used elsewhere too. In this video there is also a story about Saudi Arabia where they made round fields for agriculture, a programme in China to replant forests in Inner Mongolia in China and a not so well succeeded test with coffee beans.
An ancient agricultural method in Burkina Faso
The host of this video has a terrible grave voice, but the story is wonderful. An ancient, forgotten method called zaï was reinstored by one indigenous man in Burkina Faso and turned thousands of hectares of dry wasteland into forest and cultivated land. He put crops into small pits that he dug and that protects the crops from too much heat and hard winds. The water from the bit of rain that still fell was kept in the pits and that is how easy it can sometimes be to restore nature! On the Canarian island Lanzarote the same method is also used to have agriculture on their vulcanic island.
There are possibilities and they aren’t all expensive!
You see dear folks that there are many possibilities to turn wasteland into green places with forests full of biodiversity and agricultural land. At least some of those aren’t that expensive or don’t even cost a cent! The problem is always again that there are people in and behind governments who don’t want to improve life for all people. This is the only reason why the whole world isn’t yet a beautiful, well-cared for paradise. In my opinion We, The People, (as the Americans say so beautifully in their Constitution) are very well capable of starting this kind of projects everywhere in the world. It is totally not necessary to live in half a world or even in a destroyed world. We the people are far more than those few elite guys who want to stop us!
I found another marvellous thing: an ancient ice machine. In a Chinese series on Netflix (Qin Empire) I saw they had ice cubes in the 4th century before Christ. How it was possible, I couldn’t figure out until I saw this video here underneath. This is a real ice machine from ancient Persia, called yakchal. I add it here as an encore for anyone who supports Untold Times!
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