https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reCemnJmkzI

Bon visionnage et faites circuler surtout :)

ce travail a-t-il progressé ailleurs ?

encore merci

Voici la transcription de la première partie; je ferai le reste au fur et à mesure. Je peux faire la traduction aussi, si ça peut être utile.

Greening the Desert
Part 1:
So we went in an had a look, and we thought, Oh no! This is like, this is the end of the earth, this is like, as hard as you can get, this is hyper-arid. And it’s ten acres of almost dead flat, completely salted landscape, 400 meters below sea-level, the lowest place on earth, two kilometers from the Dead Sea, right? — about two kilometers from where Jesus was christened.

Hardly got any rainfall. We’ve got temperatures in August that go over 50 degrees, everybody farming under plastic strips, everybody spray, spray, spray, everybody’s put in synthetic fertilizer, overgrazed with goats, just like maggots eating the flesh off the bone, down to the bone of the country, literally like maggots, giant maggots, eating it to nothing.

So we designed up a system that would harvest every single bit of rainwater that fell on it, on ten acres. There’s one and a half kilometers of swale, water-harvesting ditch on contour. And when they’re full, one million litres of water soak into the landscape. And they’ll fill quite a few times over a winter.

And then we heavily mulched those swales with organic matter, which was trash from organic fields nearby. We put that almost half a meter deep. So we saved that, and mulched our swales, which were about two meters wide and half a meter deep on the trench.

Then we put micro-irrigation underneath the mulch, and then on the uphill side of the water-harvesting trench we put nitrogen-fixing, very hardy pioneer desert trees, which help shade and reduce wind and evaporation and also put nitrogen into the soil and structure the soil for us.

And then on the lower side of the trench we put fruit trees, major inundate palms as the long-term over-storey in the end, and then we put in figs, pomegranates, guavas, mulberries, now some citrus.

Within four months we had figs a meter high, with figs on, which is impossible.
We’d done a course, male and female course, trained up some locals, and we got a translator who’s working for the project, he had his degree in agriculture in the Jordan University, and he got onto his mates in the agriculture department and said, Well, we couldn’t grow figs [before], [now] we got figs and with figs on them. You better come test the soil, because no matter what you say, we’re either growing in salty soil what we shouldn’t be growing, or we’ve desalted the soil. And we’d like to know what we’ve done.

And they came in and the salt levels were dropping. So they became interested. Salt levels were dropping around the swales. They said, You must have washed it through. See, normally they put huge amounts of water on and wash the salt through to the lower levels, which just makes the ground water more salty. In the end, you’ll salt it twenty meters deep, if you keep doing that. And then it’ll take a thousand years to recover.
And we used only one fifth the amount of water. So the water, they thought we’d washed it all through. No! We used one fifth — that really got them, when they realized how much water we hadn’t used. With the same amount of water normally used on that much area, we could have done 50 acres.

Originally people laughed at us, because we didn’t put straight lines in. We went on contour with these swales. They thought — why didn’t you… you’ve got a bulldozer, you could flatten the desert, you could straighten(?)… We said, well we want to go on contour, because we’ve got a longer edge, and we harvest the water passively.
Then we planted more non-fruiting trees than we did fruit trees. So they laughed at us. They said we’d planted non-productive things more than productive things, what’s the point? In soil that won’t even grow anything, so, you know. And then we covered all the inside of the swale with a huge amount of mulch, where they scrape all their organic matter off and burn it, like most traditional agriculture.
In the middle of winter, we got a funny email, saying, We’ve got a problem! We’ve got mushrooms growing in the swale. Well, they called it fungus. But when we saw a photograph of it, it’s mushrooms. They’d never seen mushrooms, because they’d never had that much humidity in living history, in the soil. And when you open up the mulch, there’s all these little animals there, you know, there’s insects, and the soil has come alive. And the fungi net that’s underneath the mulch is putting off a waxy substance which is repelling the salt away from the area.
And the decomposition is locking the salt up. And the salt is not gone, it’s become inert, and insoluble.
So we could…we could re-green the Middle East. We could re-green any desert. And we could desalt it at the same time.
And if we can do it on an insignificant, flat little bit of.. ten acres of flat desert, if you give us something with catchment, or a wadi, or you know, a canyon, or any of those erosion gullies, we can turn it right around. Completely.
You can fix all the world’s problems in a garden. You can solve them all, in a garden. You can solve all your pollution problems and all your supply line needs in a garden.
And most people today actually don’t know that. And that makes most people very insecure.

8 years later:
So. These examples have to be set, so that the world can have a positive future.
But we have to explain that unless this soil management is fully demonstrated, extended and enhanced, then we don’t have any future. The world’s just going to turn into dust.

[TEXTE:]
Jordan Fact sheet:
total population: 5.4 million
more than 92% of Jordan is desert land. that percentage is growing.
the remaining area is arid highlands (Amman) and the arid Jordan valley at 400 metres below sea level — the lowest place on earth.
most of population squeezed onto 3% of total area
Jordan is one of the most pro-western countries in the Middle East.
in 2000 joined the World Trade Organisation;
social classes are increasingly stratified.
Jordan hosts 700,000 Iraqi refugees and many more from Afghanistan, Palestine, Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere.
Jordan has one of the lowest levels of water availability per capita in the world and is in water overshoot — drawing from non-renewable deep aquifer reserves.
much of its irrigation is brackish, saline water from sewerage treatment plants.
the population and economy are growing.
resources are diminishing and climate change is exacerbating the problem.
like other countries, most of Jordan’s water use is for agriculture — industrial agriculture.

Al Jawfa, Jordan (or Dead Sea) Valley

Très heureuse de trouver des gens qui pratiquent la permaculture en France!
Merci pour votre excellent site.

J’ai regardé la vidéo de Geoff Lawton tant de fois que je connais le texte pratiquement par coeur. Je l’ai montré quelques fois à des amis, en leur faisant une interprétation simultanée, l’anglais n’étant effectivement pas très facile à comprendre.

Je veux bien m’occuper de la transcription dans les jours qui viennent.

A bientôt.