Some solutions just plain make sense. In the clips below, Bill Mollison, the founding father of the Permaculture movement, gives us a quick tour of one of his many projects. This time we're in central India, a couple of hours north of Hyderabad -- walking amongst mangoes, bananas and a wide variety of other fruit and vegetables. What's special about it is this 'food forest' sits on what was, only a couple of years earlier, a dry, hard, barren wasteland.

Instead of our present focus on plugging into the globalised market -- turning survival into a commodity many can't afford, planting monoculture crops for long distance export, dismantling local economies and driving droves of rural refugees into urban slums in the process - here we see a 'complete' solution, one that solves several problems in one hit: biodiversity, climate change, food security, food miles and economic vulnerability. The only losers here are the mega-corporations that lose sales on GMO seeds, pesticides, herbicides and heavy machinery (emphasis on losers). It fascinates me how, when we stop battling nature for a moment, and turn to work with it instead, just how fast we can get rewarded for our efforts. These solutions can should be applied in millions of places worldwide.

Further Reading:

• Greening the Desert (Clip)
• Permaculture News: The Challenge of Tanzania
• Permaculture Solutions to the Challenge of Tanzania
• The Rise & Predictable Fall of Globalized Industrial Agriculture
• Chemical Based Farming Systems Robbing Us of Nutrients