Climate Change

On the brink of 2012, we see the result of climate change all around us, strange weather patterns, unseasonal rain or drought, earthquakes and all the resulting havoc, I recognise that the way we have been living is coming to an end and we have already started new ways of living and being.

With the COP17 Summit in Durban, I was invited to a Think Well in Kleimond last week, on Transitioning municapilities to being more sustainable.

As I was driving down to Kleinmond the awareness hit me that a couple of weeks back the 7th billion person was born on the planet and how on earth do we think we are going to give 7 billion people, water born toilets, electricity, water to drink, food, never mind homes and employment. And some where along the way schooling, dignity and a sense of safety and responsibility. I am listening to someone on the radio asking us to reduce our electricty use as Escom is under great stress and when I listen to the news all I hear is that our leaders can not come to any sort of concensus about reducing our carbon emmission.

These summits have been a total waste of time and yet have had huge carbon footprints flying in all our delegates to represent us. (Wonder if any of them are going to plant trees to off set their carbon footprint). Costing enormous amounts of money and nothing achieved and our leaders are totally unaware of the individual needs of each town.

I would love to see each area running their own "summit" making their own decisions on how they can off set climate change.We, who live in an area, know the problems and the solutions far better than our leaders do, so let us make the decisions to reduce those carbon emissions, or the rising sea, or the local climate change, or the excess water or the lack of water, or how to ensure that our drinking water remains clean, what ever the issue of your own local town is.

Looking at McGregor, we have sun, wind, water and we could be producing our own energy, relieving the national grid.


This is the housing just built in Kleinmond which made my heart sing when I saw the solar water heating systems, the photovoltac panels and the rain water tanks.

We also saw a DVD on Curitaba which is voted the most environmentally friendly city in the world over and over again. The citizens of Curitaba, followed their Mayor and took their own lives in their own hands and so many projects and solutions have been found. I recommend googling Curitaba. Lets work towards becoming car free, generating our won energy needs, and becoming local, in other words, using items manufactured in your own town, growing your own produce. There is a town in New Zealand, where the elderly said what can we do to help and they have taken on recycling all the paper in the town and in that way produce all the town's paper needs. Start bicycle shops. Farm your needs locally. We have a small farmers assocciation who farm pigs, cows, sheep and chickens. (No hormones, steroides, etc,) Lets develop industries that keep our money in our town, whether it is tourism, recycled goods or fresh produce and put our own effort into climate change, after all it is our own lives, why hand them over to someone else.




Municipalities are forging ahead, developing strategies and rolling out projects and initiatives to both mitigate the impact of their towns and cities, and to improve the resilience of their people to climate change, in partnership with government, business and civil society organisations.

What is government doing: The Department of Environmental Affairs, Department of Cooperative Governance and South African Local Government Association (SALGA), in partnership with GIZ, are developing a toolkit to support the integration of climate change planning into municipality IDP's. The aim of the toolkit is to assist municipalities to effectively respond to climate related challenges while providing municipalities with the ability to meet their sustainable development objectives.

Join leading South African towns and cities as they present their strategies and projects in response to climate change!

And have fun finding a new way to exsist in the new world facing us.Charged with the delivery of services such as spacial planning, energy, water, public transport, waste management, environmental and public heath - municipalities are among the most critical of stakeholder groups that simply must respond appropriately and decisively to climate change, and yet municipalities remain under resourced in this regard.

                                                                                 ooooOOOOoooo

                                     LETS
As money gets tighter and tighter, more petrol increases, and all the related increases that go with a petrol hike, and then the Escom price hike, one begins to feel a little desperate. But what can be done about it. We all feel helpless and just get into a mode of blind acceptance. No doubt there are going to be many increases around goods with a base in Japan …....... and so it goes on.

This is how a group of people in a rural area of Canada felt just as desperate, when they needed to get their children to school but couldn't afford the buses, so they start the first LETS, or Local exchange and trading system. They started swoping skills and what ever else they could.

 How LETS works 

  1. A local meeting is called and the system is explained
  2. Those who are interested register their skills or what they have to offer
  3. One person is elected to run the office doing away with heavy overheads of huge office staff
  4. A board is elected.
  5. You receive your LETS cheque book
  6. It opperates within a five km radius
  7. Everyone starts with a nil balance and when you leave the balance returns to nil eliminating any chance of corruption
  8. A name for the medium of exchange is selected e.g. in McGregor, Apricot.

  •   Criteria
    LETS are generally considered to have the following five fundamental criteria:
  • Cost of service — from the community for the community
  • Consent — there is no compulsion to trade
  • Disclosure — information about balances is available to all members
  • Equivalence to the national currency
  • No interest

  Basically this is how it works – I am a hair dresser and you come to me to have your haircut, we have agreed on a some lets just say R40 for argument sake .You write me a cheque saying I Joe Soap pay Jill Hogan 40 apricots. I take it to the person running the local office and he/she debits Joe Soap 40 and credits me 40. Now I need an electrician, my fridge is not working so I phone the LETS office and ask for a registered LETS Electrician. He finds he needs parts for the fridge outside our 5 km radius so he pays cash and charges me cash for the parts, but charges me apricots for his labour. LETS minimises your monetary needs, does not eliminate them completely.

Now, I am a little old lady with not many skills, and my debts are climbing but you are very skilled so have many credits, the board which assesses the accounts oat predetermined times – quarterly, half yearly,? Will go to you and say. “Joe you have many skills so you have many credits, but Jill's debts are climbing, can she cook supper for you every night.” You are so busy that you and your family are not eating properly so you say “Yes wonderful.” I bring your food to your house every night and now your are eating wholesome food, but you say why don't you join us, so now suddenly from being a lonely little old lady I have a family.
  Productivity in a LETS system has been shown to go up by about 80%.

The skills registered can be any thing useful – washing or walking the dog, knitting, cooking, laundry, washing a motor car, baby sitting, growing seedlings, legal advice, medical care, caring, bookkeeping, plumbing, electrical work, building, cat sitting, house sitting, gardening, theraphies......... and so I can go on. A friend of mine in Bath in England makes most of her LETS credits from letting out her cat basket.
  If shops link into the system they would take my excess butternuts, eggs or peaches for credits and then I can buy my butter or cheese or milk on credits. The more inventive the system becomes the better. As I write this I think of more and more I can do. What could you contribute?

Interest is a big issue. We all know that interest makes the rich, richer and the poor, poorer so LETS works with credit unions and no interest. This means that if you invest your money locally it will be used locally not away from your town and often out of the country, as happens at present. For example in McGregor the community decided they would like to attract a doctor or blacksmith, the credit union will finance their setting up and then they can pay back the credit union interest free. As we are then addressing our own community needs everyone wins. The Bristol LETS system once lent their municapality a huge sum of money which was paid back in bobbins their LETS medium of exchange. In Detroit at one stage you could even buy your motor car through LETS.

"I found a whole pile of alternate money systems in USA check these two links"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_community_currencies_in_the_United_States
and
http://www.fourthcornerexchange.com/

One of the biggest LETS systems is right here in South Africa – Talents, in Cape Town.

I feel it is now time to take our own lives into our own hands and find ways to make our lives less stressful, the toll of the way we are living is just to high.

ooooOOOOOoooo

Food Security
One Indian Farmer commits suicide every
38 minutes!!

 
  Traditionally Indian farmers were subsistance farmers. They grew a variety of Heritage crops so
  1. had a bio diversity of seasonal food

  2. being heritage they could harvest the seed and replant with the guarantee the crop would grow again (today most seed is hybridised, meaning the first crop grows beautifully, but if you harvest the seed, it probably won't grow and if it does it will be a weak plant and not bear fruit) Heritage seed grows well year after year, so they harvested their own seed and did not buy seed from the co-op each year

  3. growing heritage plants allowed a variety of each species, so if one crop became diseased, seeds from the next valley were obtained and planted and losses were minimal

  4. Heritage seed is very hardy so needs minimal fertilisers

The farmers have been talked into planting:

  1. One crop as they would get more money from it. But by growing only one crop, when it fails they lose everything. Usual this crop cannot be used locally, and marketing skills are naïve so often the crop goes to ruin instead of being exported

  2. Being hybridised they can't harvest seed so have to buy new seed every year, from the co-op, falling into more and more debt

  3. The new hybridised seed has minimised the variety of crop species so when disease hits one farmer it spreads very quickly

  4. The hybridised seed needs heavy fertilisers, which are supplied by the (guess what) the co-op

Eventual the farmer is so in debt that he commits suicide hence the “ One Indian farmer commits suicide every 38 minutes

 

Picture
Monoculture - the growing of just one crop as this wheat field
 

We cannot afford monoculture (planting one type of crop) any more. We need to switch over to local and bio diversity of crops. How do we do this? Well by looking at stacking our system, looking at both space and time. What do I mean by this? Well, looking at space, your system needs to be planted in layers:

  1. First layer is the canopy, the tall trees like, avo's, walnuts and other nuts for example

  2. Second Layer is the deciduous fruit trees – peaches, plums, apricots, figs, nectarines, persimmon, custard apples, apples, pears, mulberries, for example but also citrus, lemon and orange, tropical – banana, pawpaw, quince, guava,almonds

  3. third layer is periennal, pomegrante, gooseberry, okra, herbs, lavender, rosemary, gooseberry

  4. fourth layer is annual intensive veggie gardening, tomatoes, green peppers, brinjal, salad greens, spinach, baby marrow, patti-pans - this is planted outside your back door where you always see and use the veggies

  5. Fifth layer is the root crops potato, sweet potato, carrots, beetroot, onion, parsnips, turnips, and more

  6. sixth layer is the ground cover – pumpkin, butternut, squash, strawberries, various other berries

  7. Vertical crops – climbers, grapes, kiwi, granadilla,

In this way one fills your space no matter how big or small, with a health variety of food in such abundance that there will be plenty to take to the local market

Addressing time, make sure that in planting a variety of food, that there is always something ripe so at any point you can walk around your system and eat. Added to that is the health aspect of eating seasonal. Only eat food that is in season, live food, not stored food as that becomes dead food.

Add to this eggs from your chickens which are used to clean up fruit and veggies that have come to an end

You will bring down your medical costs as your families will suddenly become more healthy

  The Herb Spiral is at Gibbs Business School in Johannesburg. Gibbs is the biggest business school in Africa and has its own restaurant for its students and delegates. The permaculture gardens supply the restaurant with it's need.

  There are a group of young women in Jefferys Bay, who have an organisation called Kouga Urban Harvests and they will maintain you garden for you, but, with a difference they don't plant just flowers they also plant veggies, herbs and fruit and then supply you with a box of veggies a week from you garden. They do a number of gardens and the produce is shared so you always get even when the veggie is not ripe in your garden, and the excess is sold. Wonderful local and organic!!!!!! Well done girls, I salute you!!!! Google Kouga Urban Harvest a site well worth visiting

  To revise, we now need to change our approach to food security, and see it in the light of

Space and Time