It is my honor to introduce Dr. Jerry Epps, my friend’s poverty reduction plan. He helped inspire me as I developed the Take it to Zero and Rosetta Interactive Library projects (both still in early start-up stages) as I helped inspire his Recipe for Hope project.
“The goal of Recipe for Hope is to End Poverty (at least 80% or more of it) by creating the economic conditions that enable families to have more money to spend and thereby move out of poverty into the working class.
Stories like this give me so much hope that they’re starting to change my life. The ‘Water Man of India’ reminds me of the Miracle Water Village that we posted about last year and some other related ideas about Restoring Degraded Land. In every case, the ideas are very simple and yet surprisingly effective. Rajendra Singh rediscovered the ancient practice of building check dams to restore the aquifer. This simple method is turning wastelands into productive farmland and enabling rivers that were dry for decades to flow once again. The Guardian named him among its list of “50 people who could save the planet”.
Deforestation is actively destroying about 13 million hectares (32 million acres) of forest every year. The biggest, most valuable trees are logged for timber. Often the smaller, less valuable trees are left remaining… for a while. Then farmers come along and clear the land for field crops such as soybeans, corn and cassava, because the remaining scrub forest doesn’t have much commercial value. But what if the deforestation process stopped after the large trees were cut? You could use the smaller remaining trees to help regrow a forest more valuable than timber – a food forest that continually produces abundant food indefinitely for generations to come without need for cultivation, chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.
Owen,
“We launched our new VelaCreations.com website, with a special focus on our How-To articles, which now number over 50, with another dozen in the works. There’s a lot of shelter-related articles, from our Rapidobe system to ferrocement, to making all sorts of things around the homestead.
“Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,” begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it’s happening to about two-thirds of the world’s grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes — and his work so far shows — that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.”
Thoughts on Vocational Training Centers for Ecological Restoration
John D. Liu permaculturist: “I’m often asked “What can I do to help?” to restore the Earth. Over the years I’ve struggled with the answer.