Elephants are afraid of bees

Checking in to the news, there's much to be glum about when it comes to the environment. A comment in a recent New York Times article by Elizabeth Cline had me a little disturbed yesterday. The viscose-rayon in a t-shirt may well have come from a tree in the Amazon!

Viscose-rayon is a wood pulp product. How does one know where the wood for the viscose was sourced? And here I thought shopping for clothes and keeping to cotton, linen, wool, viscose or rayon and avoiding polyester (a plastic) was doing a good job for the environment.

Degradation of the environment - like deforestation of the Amazon, the impact of climate change and the far-reaching effects of plastic pollution are ever-present topics in the media. So it was a welcome respite from all the doom and gloom to come across a positive, uplifting story. It's set in Sub Saharan Africa.

Digging crescent shaped trenches, courtesy Justdiggit

The region south of the Sahara desert has become badly degraded and the once fertile grassland is largely barren. This is partly due to climate change but also due to overgrazing by cattle and the increasing pressure of a growing population. The result is a denuded landscape, lacking in its natural cover of grass and trees. With the exposed bare earth local temperatures have increased, rainfall has become erratic, and in places soil erosion has washed away up to 30cm of top soil. This all has serious implications for the local people who live off the land and whose cattle are their source of wealth.

The good news comes in form of the Justdiggit organization. They believe that 'if we can warm up the earth, we can also cool it down.' They have devised a number of projects to regreen huge swathes of land. The impressive thing for me is not just the scale of it or the success of the undertaking, but that it is being carried out by the local people who are being trained to implement the beneficial methods and who recognize that some of them were traditional practices that have become lost over time.

Who would have guessed that simply digging crescent shaped trenches, an ancient water harvesting technique, could regreen unproductive land? These 'bunds' trap precious rainwater. They allow it to percolate deep into the soil, raise the water table and sustain the germination and growth of seeds.

Who knew that elephants are afraid of African bees? Placing beehives around a fenced off plot of land keeps the elephants out and allows the trees and natural vegetation to regrow. Harvesting honey provides income for the women who look after the hives.

Who would have thought that trees cut down for their wood would send up shoots from their stumps that can be trained and regrown into useful trees? The trees cool and protect the area around them and this encourages other vegetation to regrow and in turn provides a further cooling effect.

Some women have been trained to grow grass seed banks. These little plots provide grass seeds that can be harvested and sold for reseeding grassland elsewhere. The grass can be cut and sold as hay when pasture is inadequate for the cattle.

Those are just some of the initiatives that have been implemented. And they are so successful in Kenya and Tanzania that a number of north African countries have expressed interest in implementing similar programmes. The scale of the undertaking is vast and the results have to be seen to be believed.

There are some videos on the Justdiggit website that are well worth watching. Each one reveals a little more about the regreening programme. Click here then click on the projects and scroll down. Click though the photos till you find the videos.

How delightful to have such good news, to know that it's possible to rehabilitate large areas of land, improve the lives of local populations and also have a positive impact on global warming and climate change - something which affects us all.