Posts related to 5. Aid and Development
It aims to examine aspects pertaining to the fields of aid and development – how will you contribute?
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19 November 2011 - Aquaponics – eFISHient food production in Palestine
Aquaponics in the West Bank
During our stay at Bustan Qaraaqa in Palestine, we have been lucky enough to volunteer one day a week with Phil and Lorena from Byspokes on aquaponic systems (their website is where the following information comes from). Aquaponics is a combination of aquaculture, which is growing fish in water, with hydroponics, which is growing plants in a liquid. Since they arrived in the West Bank in July 2010 they have been researching, developing and trialing the FIRST EVER aquaponic system constructed behind the Wall!
They have been developing integrated aquaculture/irrigation systems and aquaponic systems to enhance food security in rural areas of Palestine, where as much as 44% of the population are chronically food insecure. In general, water and space for agriculture here are in short supply, and this is nowhere more apparent than in high density urban areas such as refugee camps. For the last 60 … Read the rest
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14 November 2011 - Talking rubbish – Turning trash into treasure
Here at Bustan Qaraaqa they don’t simply sort their recycling, compost their vegetable scraps and put out the rubbish to be collected weekly – they take REDUCE, REUSE and RECYCLE to a whole new level. With no municipal waste management in Palestine, they have adopted a policy of ‘what comes on site, stays on site’, often collecting other peoples waste too! Using permaculture, creativity, knowledge and passion they educate and demonstrate by living sustainably themselves and maintaining a philosophy that there is no such thing as waste - just a failure of imagination. They hope to inspire Palestinians to stop throwing their rubbish down hillsides or burning it on the side of the road and for foreign guests to understand their role in the waste cycle too. What would you do if your council didn’t collect your waste? How would you consume differently? What would you do with your rubbish?
This … Read the rest
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26 October 2011 - The politics of olive harvesting in Palestine
We are currently staying at Bustan Qaraaqa in Palestine and just happen to be here during olive harvest season… we are also here during an interesting time because of the Shalit Deal, where Israel swaps one Israeli soldier for 1027 imprisoned Palestinians… so, how do we link olives with the Shalit Deal??
Well, ironically, the olive leaf is a symbol of abundance, glory, wisdom, fertility, pureness and peace… but here people are oppressed, getting their olive groves and rain water cisterns destroyed by Israel as the natural water resources are monopolised (on average Israelis have access to 4 times as much water as Palestinians). People’s ability to sustain themselves is being taken away from them. In the past every self respecting family in Palestine would produce their own olive oil but now many are shifting to buy their oil as access to their land is taken away and their trees are uprooted… more about that later!This post … Read the rest
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02 October 2011 - Growing forests in deserts…
It has been a long time without posting… we do apologise for such a long silence but the truth is we’ve been extremely busy! We spent most of August hiking in the Swiss Alps and we do hope to be able to share with you our experience with the makers of the über-famous Gruyere cheese… Anyway, after this great holiday, we then went to Jordan to study permaculture. We ended up doing a Permaculture Design Course for two weeks in Amman (it’s now Carly’s second PDC!), followed by a week of conferences/discussions/experience sharing in the Wadi Rum desert, exchanging about agriculture and water harvesting in arid climates; cross-fertilisation of the aid and permaculture sectors; using permaculture in regions where there are land rights conflicts such as Israel and Palestine; using carbon footprint offset taxes to finance permaculture projects, etc… After that, we went to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to visit some of … Read the rest
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02 June 2011 - Insecurity in Central America, a little heard story
I just come back from Central America where I was doing a consultancy for a British humanitarian organisation and, given that we don’t hear much about the region in the news, I thought you might be interested to know a bit about it.
The organisation has been operating there for decades but has recently questioned its presence given the drastic deterioration of the security there in the last three years. Indeed, statistically, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador (now known as the “Northern Triangle of Death!”) are amongst the most dangerous countries on earth. While in each of these countries, the levels of insecurity vary from one area to another, this means that aid workers (and of course the population) are living in high-risk areas. In light of this, the aid organisation asked me specifically to assess whether they could continue working in these countries, and if so, provide them … Read the rest
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23 April 2011 - Living well in the West Bank?
If you follow this blog regularly (which we are grateful for!
), you know that I’ve recently come back from the Middle-East and already expressed some reflections about my stay in Israel in a previous post. Today I would like to share some thoughts about my stay in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
As you know, ‘Palestine’ does not exist as a legal entity (although around a hundred countries recognise it as a country and it is likely more will later this year) and is rather referred to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, composed of two disconnected and fragmented territories, namely the West Bank and the Gaza strip. While the former is governed by the party Fatah, the latter is de facto led by the Hamas, an Islamist movement. Although both territories are populated by Arab Palestinians, the West Bank is also occupied by Israeli Jews, essentially settlers. The International Court of
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20 November 2010 - What ‘Peak Oil’ means, and how you can benefit
We don’t know how you feel about it, but personally, we struggle with the concept of Peak Oil. The concept itself is easy to understand – basically, Peak Oil refers to the maximum extraction rate of oil after which, oil being a finite resource, the rate of extraction declines.
What we struggle with then, is not the concept itself, but the consequences it implies for me, for you, for us all. As we’ll see below, our industrialised societies are oil-junkies. But try preventing an addict to get his drug by dramatically decreasing his supply in a short amount of time and you’ll rapidly see the effect: tensions at best, hostility at worst.
As we said, the concept of Peak Oil is easy to understand, but the dramatic effects it carries with it are just too daunting to be able to fully comprehend them. The first problem is that major … Read the rest
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14 November 2010 - Top 10 eye-opening ecological documentaries – and how to watch them easily
Images often speak better than words. Part of this blog’s aim is to contribute in raising readers’ awareness to certain issues and offer some ideas to deal constructively with them. True to this aim, we present to you today a selection of ecological documentaries that we consider as must-see. Indeed, if they are daunting, they are also eye-opening, inspirational and serve as helpful triggers for change. We assume that you’ve already watched the awards-winning An Inconvenient Truth, so we haven’t included it here. Do watch it (here) if you haven’t yet though…
To encourage you watching these 10 documentaries, we’ve also added links or given hints on how to access them easily. So that you can’t say you didn’t know!
So, here are our top 10 ecological documentaries:
1) Food, Inc. It’s a must-see. It provides a rather objective – if scary – assessment of food production in the … Read the rest
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15 September 2010 - Five daunting climate change scenarios
The UNFPA 2009 State of the World Population report recalls that “Walter Kälin, Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, has identified five climate change scenarios, each of which has a different impact on the pace or scale of migration or displacement:
• Hydro-meteorological disasters, including extreme weather events such as hurricanes, flooding and mudslides, which may lead to sudden-onset displacement.
• Environmental degradation, including desertification, water scarcity and soil exhaustion, which may result in gradual migration or displacement.
• Losses in state territory, including erosion and coastal flooding resulting from rising sea levels. Persons living in low-lying coastal areas and the so-called “sinking” small island developing states, such as the Maldives, Tuvalu and Vanuatu, will be most affected by this scenario. It may lead to gradual migration and displacement, and possibly even to statelessness.
• Designation of “high risk” areas by national authorities, including territories that are prone to disasters and that are designated as unsafe, leading to the forced relocation of its inhabitants. This scenario may cause gradual … Read the rest
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