Tag Archives: environment

Wiki-Solutions for a Hungry World

7 Apr

Sculpture: Natalia Porter

This month AlertNet, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s news site for humanitarian issues, is posting submissions from the general public for its multi-media special report on  solutions to global hunger. This is my “silver bullet” idea:

A tragic paradox envelops the lives of small holding farmers throughout the Global South. They want to make a living from the land, but the economics of small scale farming force them to migrate to constantly expanding urban slums. Food prices rise as millions of peasant farmers lack the means — from enough land to sound eco-agricultural advice — to produce enough of a surplus to sell to the hungry. The world needs farmers while at the same time they make up the majority of its poor.

Yet the answer to the dilemma rests with peasant farmers themselves, and in ever increasing numbers, they know this. They are organizing themselves in democratic grassroots movements throughout the developing world, not only demanding but also working for change. From Indonesia to Senegal, and from Haiti to Brazil, the landless and the land poor are finding solutions to the contradictions of today’s macro-economic imperatives.

Here are just a few examples: The Serikat Petani Indonesia is not only working with their 700,000 members to reclaim land stolen during the Suharto dictatorship, but encouraging increased yields using organic techniques that cost nothing. In Senegal, regional farmers organizations, like the Union of Peasant Groups of Mehknes, ask all members to surround their plots with trees and to grow the drought-resistant crops their forefathers planted. Participation in Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement, or MST, has permitted more than 350,000 families to own land and to run cooperatives, schools and small enterprises. Even in Haiti, where land is at a premium and instability a seeming fact of life, peasant organizations working with La Via Campesina and Partenaires de Developement Locale are taking the initiative and breaking free from both top-down solutions to improve and manage better production methods. The government of Brazil, for example, is basing all of its agricultural foreign aid to Haiti on advice from the La Via Campesina and the MST.

These are just a few of the many organizations flowering throughout regions we typically associate with poverty and helplessness. Other developing world nations with national peasant organizations include the Philippines, Thailand and Mozambique.  While their members don’t lack ideas, a sense of initiative or  a determination to succeed, finding the funding to expand their outreach is always a challenge.

Meanwhile, little of the billions of dollars affluent nations spend on foreign aid is going to support farmers and their families.  Rather, too many First-World development policies comprise a vision of letting giant agri-business conglomerates take care food production and leaving farming families no choice but to join an already vast labour force that will struggle to survive on cut-rate wages in modern factories and sweatshops. No wonder donors are asking themselves why so much poverty still exists in the countries to which they have been sending their money for decades.

At the same time the effectiveness and purpose of so many aid projects are being questioned, simple solutions are at hand — and have been for quite some time.

Just imagine if those of us in the rich countries could help the millions of small farmers in the developing world achieve land justice and plentiful crops.

Try and picture the results in farming villages when agriculturalists embrace their knowledge and abilities to produce healthy crops to sustain themselves and their urban counterparts.

Ask the average person who donates money to charity, and they are likely to react with enthusiasm at the idea, at the image of productive land, life-giving clusters of woods, decent schools and clinics, and vibrant markets filled with the fruits of the peasant farmer’s labour rather than wasted aid dollars, pounds and euros.

It is time to change the picture of rural poverty to one of rural power. Along with our donations to those NGOs that concentrate on empowering farmers, we can also pressure our governments to switch from foreign aid conditionalities that impoverish Third World economies to ones that insist on meaningful re-distribution of fertile land. In the United States, Canada and Britain, average people can tell their governments that we no longer want our tax money to spent on food dumping but on buying locally produced food for feeding programs and on practical help for farmers. How? Using a number of methods, from social media and the Internet to Amnesty International-style letter-writing campaigns, average people can influence government policies.

Aside from alleviating rural poverty, two immeasurably valuable consequences will come with this. First of all, we will find peasant farmers themselves taking on the task of conserving and protecting local forests and other fragile habitats. Environmental protection is already a hallmark of most if not all peasant movements.

Secondly, as their livelihoods improve, rural populations will feel empowered to demand accountability from their governments, insisting on honest and wise use of their nation’s financial resources.

The rural poor don’t want handouts and they don’t want banishment to dysfunctional lives in a slum. They want to land to till, fair markets in which to sell the fruits of their labour, and respect.  We can and must make it clear to our leaders and policy-makers that we want the same.

What do you think can be done to alleviate global hunger? I would love to hear your comments and your own ideas.

Earth Hour Smearth Hour

2 Apr

Call me an Earth Day Grinch if you will but I find the whole notion of thinking there is any benefit at all to turning off our lights and appliances for an hour one day a year is just absurd. The local news photos I saw of Dundas Square in Toronto just before and during Earth Hour — the only reason I know it even took place — seemed to sum up the futility of the exercise pretty well.

During Earth Hour, only a few of the scores of the scores of towering, blindingly bright signs, screens and ads that have become the hallmark of this strange Tokyo-like space were darkened or turned off. Giant backlit posters continued to attempt to convince hapless consumers that if only they could buy the outfits or gadgets portrayed, their lives would be truly wonderful. Cars still rushed up and down Yonge Street, contaminating the urban air, and pedestrians remained glued to their energy-sucking cell phones.

Electricity use province wide only dropped by 2.7 percent apparently, and I’m not surprised.

Earth Hour is another one of these easy-way-out endeavours that require practically nothing from us, and as such, do nothing to really address or begin to address our voracious mining of the earth’s fuels and minerals. The vast majority of us in the world’s affluent nations don’t want to change our lifestyles in any meaningful way, so that per capita we consume and toss away use far more non-renewable resources than people in the developing world.

The Conservative government, meanwhile, clings to its horrible tar sands project as if it were it were capable of working miracles and now, having left the Kyoto Accord, act like environmental standards are just a sort of nuisance bone to throw to those inconsequential few who didn’t vote for them in the last election.

Next month I will be in Port au Prince, where every hour, just about, is Earth Hour and people would love to have even one tenth of the commodities and services we enjoy and take for granted here.

But I think if we really want to do the earth a favour, we ought to leave on the lights and think about the big picture, dark as it is.

An interview with Dr. Ian Burton

11 Apr

Burning Rainforest in the Amazon

Dr. Ian Burton is a scientist emeritus with the Adaptation and Research Group of the Meteorological Service of Canada and adjunct professor with the University of Toronto’s Institute for Environmental Studies.  He also works with the Red Cross-Red Crescent Climate Centre in The Hague. He recently attended the conference on Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change in Bangladesh.

What kind of organizations attended the Conference?

I’m not sure what the proportion was, but perhaps the larger proportion was made up of development and to some extent research NGOs, but mostly development NGO, with an international network (like) Care, Greenpeace and Oxfam. They were mostly organizational people who have been working at the community level.

It started off focused on climate change but many, many people came there with a community development view that was not necessarily focused on climate change and was in fact using the climate change vehicle for getting support for the things they wanted to do anyway. More holistic, more integrated, but this is an area that has been relatively neglected in development.

So what are poor communities doing to adapt to climate change?

Just a tremendous range and variety of things, so it’s hard to generalize about people and the problems they face in mountain regions or on the Bangladesh coast, in semi-arid regions and in tropical rainforests.

Can you give me some examples?

Rainwater collection, people who are short of water or seasonally short of water can and do benefit themselves by roof collection systems. It’s just one example, (but) it’s a simple technology; it doesn’t cost a lot; it’s been in use for a long time in a lot of different places. So a lot of this movement that is going on is about trying to expand that to other communities that haven’t been doing that. And in respect to climate change, there are situation where either you know now or can anticipate in the future where water availability will decrease. Doing that is a cheaper and more self-reliant alternative than asking somebody to come and put down a tube well.

Also preserving forests, not holus-bolus chopping down forests, trying to reduce that, replanting forest, planting different varieties, different species.

What about agriculture?

That was quite a pervasive theme. One thing that I saw that was actually quite interesting was down on this southwest coast of Bangladesh, (where) they are suffering from slow incremental sea-level rise but the more acute problem at the moment is salinity. These were mostly small subsistence farmers producing rice for their own consumption. And now there is quite an interesting growth in shrimp cultivation. I saw some rice paddies full of water with a dyke around it and it would have a net diagonally strung across it. And on one side they would be growing rice, and on the side there would be shrimp.

What I see going on is very encouraging. It’s additive to what’s been going on anyway. The existence of the climate change threat and the general acknowledgement that it’s going to hurt the poor countries and poor people most, so NGOs are picking that up and saying we need to factor climate change into all the things that we’re doing on community development.

So while the focus was on community-based adaptation to climate change, it’s also community-based adaptation to everything else.

Readers can find out a lot more about the conference by checking out the videos posted at www.oneworld.org

 

So it’s the year of forests …

8 Jan

Forest

The UN has declared this year the “International Year of Forests” and so I am going to devote my first blog of 2011 to not only forests but people who live in and from the forests.

They add up to about a billion and are among the poorest people on earth in terms of what they earn. Yet their main problem isn’t so much poverty as  invisibility. It isn’t easy to make a billion people disappear but logging and palm-oil companies, plantations and governments all do a pretty good job of it.

Older blog posts in The Global Kiosk tell some stories of forest dwellers who have been forced out of their forest homes, from areas where they have lived sustainably for eons. Some collect and sell forest products, others farm beneath the trees, using one patch for a few years before leaving it to go fallow for decades and return to their natural state.

So hopefully this year not only the forests but the many organized communities who struggle for tenure rights and the protection of their forest habitats will get some much-deserved attention. In Indonesia, the SPI campaigns for the rights of forest dwellers, while in Nepal, an organization called FECOFUN does the same. In Brazil, the National Union of Rubber Tappers have long used a class interpretation to assert the value of keeping loggers, ranchers and dam-builders out of the Amazon, while in Thailand, the Assembly of the Poor take on the issue of forest dwellers who have been evicted from wooded areas, so that pulp-and-paper companies can have free rein in destroying trees and replacing them with so-called green deserts: expanses of eucalyptus that kill anything around or underneath them.

And unfortunately, conservationists in rich countries have also added to the problem, standing by while forest tribes – especially in Africa – are kicked out of their homelands in a mistaken attempt to protect bio-diversity.

A few far-thinking NGOs, like the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development are coming out with studies showing the crucial importance (and simple common sense) of letting forest dwellers protect and manage their forests themselves. Let’s hope that international bodies like the UN take notice of them – as well as the cause they have decided to champion this year.

Tar babies

19 Sep

Originally uploaded by Greenpeace International

The Petroleum Producers Association of Canada is running a series of promotional spots on television these days. They show nice, just-regular people who happen to work for them in technical capacities, showing us all the great tree-planting and water filtering the Alberta tar sands industry takes on as it extracts usable fuel from the difficult oil laden bitumen.
Yet it is just as difficult to look at some of the deformed fish that are appearing in ever-larger numbers in Lake Athabaska, which is downstream from the oil sands. They have tumours and lesions and missing spines. Their bodies are loaded with contaminants and, as Robert Grandjambe told a Canadian Press reporter, “A lot of people are afraid to eat fish from the lake.”

Various scientific studies have found toxins in the lake, and local doctors are noticing higher-than-average rates of auto-immune diseases, cancer and other medical conditions among the residents of nearby communities. What’s more, another study done a few years ago found that average Albertans gain little from the tar sands boom, with massive profits going to the oil industry and their suppliers alone.

It takes two tonnes of the bitumen to produce a barrel of oil. The process of steam injection and refining it generates anywhere to two to four times the amount of greenhouse gasses per barrel of oil as the production of conventional oil. And six square metres of tailing are created for just one square metre of the bitumen to be mined. Those tailings now sit in extensive ponds, lakes really, of toxic sludge that kill thousands of migratory birds every year. What’s more a 2007 report for one company, Suncor, found that 5 million litres of polluted water had leaked from its lake into the groundwater.

But both the provincial government of Alberta and the Harper government are shrugging off the plethora of studies showing just how damaging the tar sands industry is turning out to be. Since it represents hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and is now responsible for at least half of all petroleum mining in Canada – the largest supplier of oil to the United states – they working hard at maintaining the fiction that this industry is largely benign.

Just like the green, sun-dappled images of those television spots. In reality, only about 2 per cent of ruined land has been reclaimed – a little more than one square kilometre of the 602-square kilometer total. 

The tar sands industry is making itself a lot of money with this archaic energy source. But at the same time, it’s giving rise to successive generations of sick people and even sicker wildlife: Canada’s tar babies, being born into an increasingly devastated environment.
To learn more about the human and environmental toll, check out Tar Sands Watch, and its roster of frightening statistics.

Zatoun- Extra Virgin and Fair Trade

11 Aug

 

Zatoun comes from the Arabic word for 'olive'

 

Sometimes my husband gets a little carried away at the supermarket. He buys something that appeals to his sense of novelty or curiosity, not minding much about the price. I’m the one who minds about the price.

So yesterday my eyebrows rose when I noticed that the bottle of olive oil he dropped into our shopping cart cost twenty bucks.

But taking a closer look I see that this is indeed something novel – olive oil from Palestine called zatoun. Extra virgin and fair trade.

It’s marketed by Palestine Peace Awareness, an organization that helps farmers, replants olive groves, promotes peace and sets up arts and education programs for young people. Now that’s a lot of good in one bottle

I won’t go into my personal conviction that two secular states where people of all religious beliefs can flourish as much as the beautiful olive trees so often destroyed by the occupation might be one way to end the conflict in the Middle East. Or dwell on the terrible waste in lives, land and resources that conflict has brought about for so many decades now. Instead I’ll just take this opportunity to congratulate the makers of Zatoun and wish them good luck in their efforts to, as they put it, “open an opportunity for North Americans to experience another people’s everyday but precarious life.”

Peru Attacks its own People — and its Forest

4 Jul
 


JungleExplorer_039

Originally uploaded by thekjkev

Even as the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico rivets the attention of people all over the world, people in many other places continue to suffer the catastrophe of petroleum production completely unheeded. I’ve already posted something about the vicious toll oil companies have imposed on the poor of Nigeria. Now in Peru, oil companies have set their sights on that country’s Amazon basin. According to the website of the Red Ambiental Loretana (the Loreto Environmental Network) “there are hundreds of kilometers of rivers and streams that have never received any treatment after the oil spills.”

It’s really no wonder. The Peruvian government is firmly on the side of the oil companies. Avid for petro-dollars, it has refused to listen to the complaints and proposals of the indigenous people who actually live along those river, in places like Loreto, Bartra, and the Rio Tigre. Just a few weeks ago, it resorted to the kind of unhinged violence to smash through a road blockade that left at least one hundred dead. It has used the police to beat and torture protesters and the navy to break through flotillas of canoes arranged across the affected rivers — essentially funding the repression of Peruvians in favour of multi-nationals from the public purse. 

Lately the Interior Ministry has gone so far as to expel a Catholic missionary, Brother Paul McAuley, and forbid him to ever return. Government bureaucrats are calling him a terrorist. McAuley’s crime? Encouraging the inhabitants of the rainforest region to stand up for their rights.  Yet many student, civil and grassroots movements support the work of Brother McAuley, and the right of the people of the Peruvian Amazon to decide what is in their best interest.

No doubt the Peruvian government is saying it will use all the money it can earn from petroleum and gas production to better the lives of the poor. The governments of countries with these kinds of resources always do. But it never seems to happen. (Check out Paul Collier’s ‘The Bottom Billion’ for statistics on the economic performance of African nations ‘blessed’ with natural resources.)

Could oil and gas be extracted and produced without harming a rainforest environment and benefiting local people? Well, it’s a good question, but one on which no oil company I can think of wants to waste profits on trying to answer.

Copenhagen catches fire

17 Dec

I’ve been watching what is going on in Copenhagen with a mixture of emotions: first of all disgust at the utter inability of world leaders to take the issue of climate and change and global environmental destruction seriously, and envy at not being able to join with the protestors there, taking to the streets to insist they do so. I have heard about the 1200 limousines that had be driven to Copenhagen so that world leaders can travel in style to their meetings. And I have read about the cages where Danish police are locking up protestors to keep them away from this new chattering class of the inept and unwilling. It makes me angry, but I can’t say that I am surprised. Just watching the bored and lethargic expression of Canada’s Environment Minister, Jim Prentice, on the television news each night sums it all up: No, they don’t care about global warming. And they don’t want to lose a penny of profits or a smidgeon of control over the people who must live with the consequences of their ignorance.

A couple days ago, I received a press release from the IIED, in the form of a message from Saleemul Huq, a senior fellow in their climate change group, and I’d like to end with its first few paragraphs.

“I have been working on climate change for many years, first as a researcher in my native Bangladesh and later as head of the climate change group at the International Institute for Environment and Development, and as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

I have seen first-hand the threats climate change poses in places such as the drylands of Africa, the mountains of the Himalayas and the vast low-lying deltas of Asia. I have observed years of inaction at UN climate change summits that have failed to deliver the response needed because negotiators have chosen to protect narrow national and economic interests instead of rising to the challenge of protecting future generations.

I have jousted verbally with climate-change deniers who have strong links to polluting industries and who have never set foot in the vulnerable villages and urban communities where climate change is already having impacts. If they did they would realise the damage their ideology does to the people who have contributed least to this global threat.

And, now in Copenhagen in December 2009, I believe we have reached a tipping point. I truly believe that Copenhagen will be remembered in years to come, not for what happens on 18 December when world leaders meet here, but for what just happened yesterday on 12 December.

This marked the day that people from all walks of life all over the world seized the initiative from our so-called leaders. Regardless of the words these presidents and prime ministers decide in a “protocol” or “agreement” next week, it is the people of the world who have put the writing on the wall!

The leaders who choose to read those words will take us forward. Those who ignore them will be swept away by the tide of history.”

This is why the protests are so important.  And why people will need to keep the momentum up once all our governors have dispersed and the limousines driven back to from where they came.

Organic Farming, Indonesia

28 Dec

 The SPI, as I mentioned below, has succeeded through struggle and unity in taking 1 million hectares of land from companies and government entities, much of it in fact reclaimed after it was stolen from peasant farmers during the years of the Suharto regime.

Now, like the Movimento dos Sem Terra in Brazil, they are working to convince peasant farmers to go organic. In July, I went from Jakarta to the coastal city of Padang, on the island of Sumatra, and from there to  Nagari, where the SPI have an organic farming school. I did not have my trusty interpreter Adi with me on this trip, relying instead on Rustam, an SPI leader from nearby West Pasamant. A tall rangy fellow, with a square jaw and jokey manner, Rustam had participated in a lengthy and violent struggle there to reclaim land taken by a palm-oil company, one that resulted in the death of one Union member and the imprisonment of many others. His command of  English, while eccentric and rather endearingly — if confusingly, at times – informal, was my path to communication with his Mingabau-speaking comrades.

Before talking about the school, however, I must say something about the amazing architecture of this part of Indonesia, immense wooden houses with curving roofs like the horns of a buffalo, or the prow of an old-fashioned ship, called rumah gadang, which translates simply as big house. What’s more, this island, or what I saw of it, is particularly lush with jungle vegetation, riven with streams and waterfalls, much of my bus trip from Padang to Payan Kumbuh along the route of a now-abandoned train track built by the Dutch.

The organic school in Nagari was run by a taciturn man named Adek, who had taken a six-month course in Medan, North Sumatra, back in 2002. Adek was chosen to take the course, said Rustam, “because he is interested, and clever – more clever than most.” Beyond the small house where Adek lived with his family, dozens of different species of vegetables grew in furrowed strips, often surrounded by flowering plants useful for fertilizing or pest control. At the bottom of a slope, a stilted pen had been built for the school’s collection of five goats, whose manure was added to the piles of biologically rich compost, which contained everything from leaves to burnt rice husks. They were also making a liquid organic pesticide, said Rustam, “but we don’t use it much. We focus on how to manage different species of insects in this area. Some are bad, some are friends. You always have to figure out the needs of the plant.”

Since its inauguration in 2006, about 100 people had come there for courses, staying in simple constructions made of wood and bilik,  also used for classrooms. Most of them were SPI cadre, coming one day a week for a year, but local peasant farmers had also begun turning up to ask for advice. “When we built the school, everyone laughed,’ said Rustam, “but then they started coming, one by one.” Even the government was sending a group of 60 students for an intensive six-day course in August. Meanwhile, its broad choice of organic vegetables and fruit were being packaged at the school and distributed for sale in various towns and villages nearby.

At some distance away were the rice paddies, set in a much larger area of terraced green fields, and offering a stunning view of mountain ranges, purple and misty, extending toward the horizon. Water veined the entire landscape, running through swards of rice in various stages of development, from the brilliant, almost luminescent green of bunched young plants to waving fields of ripe, pale-gold grain. The yield from using organic was almost vertiginous: people were harvesting seven tons of rice per hectare, compared to just four or five using traditional fertilizers and pesticides.  If, as Rustam said, the SPI began discussing organic farming “to see about how to lose our dependence on commercial fertilizers and the  big companies that sell them,” their endeavours had been enormously successful.

The next day in Sibaladuang, I went to a meeting of organic farmers, who had transformed a 66-hectare piece of land that had been theirs since ancestral times, taken over by a cattle ranch, then won back by them trough occupation and pressure in 1998. I asked them why they had decided to adopt organic practices and, in spite of the higher yields they were getting, no-one mentioned that as motivation. “I do it first of all so as not to be dependent on fertilizers and pesticides from factories,” said a man named Jastil, “because the factory gives the peasant very little information about what it really contains and what the effects are.” Another simply expressed confidence in this latest SPI campaign. “As an organization, it has the power to kick out the ranchers, and bring us many solutions and alternatives,” said Beni, secretary of the Sibaladuang base, “to improve agriculture and our livelihoods.”

But the most faithful adherent, perhaps, of organic techniques was Sukardi Bendang, 39, from nearby Tanjuang Pati, where he farmed one hectare of his grandmother’s land and raised a few cattle. “I first got information about organic farming from reading about it in newspapers and seeing things on television,” he said. “Shortly after, in 2002, I joined SPI. I discussed this with them and decided to take a one-week intensive course in Medan from the same teacher Adek had. After growing the first plot of organic rice, I felt really good. I got a very good crop, about 200 kilos more than by doing conventional farming.”

Sukardi had moved back to where he had grown up from the similarly named village of Tanjuang Pauh, where his wife’s clan had farmed. But “in 1996,” he said, “the government moved us because they were building a dam there and gave us two hectares for planting and another half hectare for a house in another place. But this land was very steep and no good for farming.” An NGO had initially organized the peasants against the dam-building project, he said, but once their funds dried up, they left. This NGO, said Sukardi, “only took on one project, the dam, but the SPI struggles for long-term issues that can last a whole lifetime.”

In Tanjuang Pati, Sukardi began to organize the peasants there “step by step. I have invited members to start growing organic. And I still campaign,” he said, “so that the landless can get land and for agrarian reform. Government politicians campaign and say that ‘yes, organic is very good for the peasant,’ but these are just empty words. They give no support for it. They only support the peasants who are in favour of them; they’re the one who get loans, for example. If we want these loans, we have to really pressure for them.”

Sukardi had been so successful with his organic production, that not only had he recently been invited to work with the local Farming Board – a sign of official backing he took with caution – but allowed him to purchase two more hectares of land. Nevertheless his primary reason, he said, for promoting organic farming so strenuously was because “it is healthy for families who eat our products.”

So far about a fifth of SPI members are farming organically, but that number is growing. In Batang, Central Java, the local SPI had also set up an organic showpiece, hoping to convince members and non-members alike to go organic by giving them visible evidence of its success. As in Brazil, the switch from traditional methods isn’t an easy one, but at least it is beginning.

On a final note, I was told back in Jakarta that Padang is famous for its cuisine, with many restaurants all over the country attracting diners by announcing that their cooks are from there. I’m ashamed to say that (except for the excellent slap-up meal we ate sitting on the ground in Sibaladuang) I never had time to eat a good Padang meal while here. The only place where I stopped to eat on my final day – and this is really embarrassing, I admit – was Kentucky Fried Chicken. 

But I can’t close without mentioning the amazing little hotel where I stayed: a lovely large old house, huge, beautifully furnished room and the friendliest staff imaginable, all for about $27 a night. It’s called the Hotel Mayang, and is located just off of Jalan Veteran Dalam.

 pagaruyung

This wonderful photo of a rumah gadang was taken by Michael J.  Lowe and downloaded from Creative Commons.

 

Responsible Tourism in The Gambia

16 Apr

Mandina Lodge

It was Christmas Day in 1992 when James English, who had been out partying all night with his nephew Lawrence Williams, saw the piece of land on a bend in the Mandina River that he knew was the place he had been looking for all his life. “I said to Lawrence,” he said, “’this is it. I’ve found it. I’ve what I was looking for.’”

A tributary of the Gambia River, the Mandina was thickly lined with mangroves and wound its way through high canopy rainforest that had remained untouched over the years. It had longed been considered “the devil’s land” by the local Mandinka, said English, so no one had ever settled, farmed or even hunted there. The pair bought four acres from the Sane clan, only to find a year later that much of it had been cut down by refugees from Casamance in Senegal and others fleeing various West African conflicts, in order to grow rice.

English said he was once told by a medium in Alaska that he was a man destined to have a lot of space around him and a lot of people working for him. But even more uncanny was the reaction of the local people when they expressed their concern over the cutting. Their legends had it that some day two Englishmen would come and look after their forests, and they now wanted them to become custodians not only of their own four acres but another thousand.

They told us, he said, “that we were expected. For us, it was like a joke, at the beginning, but when we heard from the marabouts and people that we were expected, all of a sudden it dawned on us. We began to realize then that this was quite serious.”

The pair’s original plan was to set up a backpackers camp on their four acres, something that would allow them to keep indulging in their really quite remarkable passion for constant travel. For most of his life, James worked in construction for three months a year and spent the rest of the it spending all he had earned traveling the world. The responsibility of being custodians of 1000 acres of forest was “a nightmare,” said English. “I lost a lot of sleep over it.” Yet that was how both uncle and nephew, originally from the quiet London suburb of Wimbledon, ended up building an extraordinary five-star hotel, and setting up a whole series of environmental projects in Makasutu.
A sandy three kilometer road leads into Makasutu from the highway just outside the town of Brikhama, past enormous orchards of mango and cashew trees. Once through the gate to the lodge itself, steeples of thatch rise almost magically over the river landscape, and pathways wind through gardens of palm and Senegalese cherry trees, past the bar, a restaurant and the swimming pool to a series of docks leading to the Lodge’s four floating dwellings. Three more lofty brick houses sit in gardens a few metres away from the river. That makes for just eight rooms, which are fully booked all winter, said accountant Baba Suaa, and have been almost since the Lodge opened for business.

In spite of the solar panels and compost toilets, this is definitely not a case of Survivor: The Gambia. Guests are provided with their own waitress, chambermaid and guide for the length of their stay. Some fifty people work at the lodge, others run a nearby craft market or grow produce to supply the Lodge, which has made subsistence farming no longer necessary for them and their families.

But it has not only been through jobs that the villagers of Makasutu have been convinced of the importance of environmental preservation. What we’re trying to do now is to create educational programs where local people are actually informed about diversity,” said Lawrence Williams. Along with planting 20,000 trees and digging 70 wells, they have done seminars, created the Makasutu Wildlife Trust, and persuaded the U.K.-based Eden Project to come down and do a ‘Gardens for Life’ project as well.

“You’ve got to create something new,” said Williams. “If their livelihood is cutting trees down and you create some kind of tourism venture, they can work through that make money without having to cut trees down.”

Now the project has expanded to include anther 750 acres, encompassing the Makasutu Cultural Forest, wetlands and two other forest reserves. English and Williams want to build more wooden tree-house rooms and have brought 14 neighbouring villages on board. Their idea is to find some kind of money-generating enterprise for each.

“We’re looking at all sorts of things,” said Williams, “something different in each of the fourteen villages.” So far their ideas include making brickets for cooking fuel using forest debris, a fruit drying plant, a fish farm, a glass-recycling business, and even a bio-fuel generator for the waste from the hotel rooms. What’s more, each village will have its own community forest park.

Williams and English are now ardent promoters of what is being called ‘Responsible Tourism,’ a vision of travel that goes well beyond the beach holiday and bit of local shopping, to instead search for ways for developing world societies to reap more from the tourism industry than they have n the past, as well as curbing its often notorious devastation of local landscapes in favour of Lego-block style, all-inclusive hotel resorts.

As a result of their and the villagers’ many efforts, birds and wildlife thrive in the area. While there it was difficult for me to chose my favourite moment: floating in the pool under the flock of red-beaked fire finches on the overhanging branches of a kole tree? Walking through the high-canopy rainforest, listening to the sounds of baboons? Or simply sitting on my verandah at dusk, watching the swallows swoop and dive over the tranquil flow of a bend in the Mandina River.

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