Every Problem Can be Solved

Healing the landscape on a massive scale

Almost every media outlet, whether big or small, alternative or mainline, is addicted to sorrow. They focus almost entirely on the negative, and ignore solutions that are everywhere. Well, every problem can be fixed - we only require will and understanding. The next time you hear a media report about some devastating problem in the world, whether drought, water shortage, famine, flood, wildfire, soil erosion, toxic algae blooms, etc, do two things: 1: know that you will not hear anything about the solution from whatever outlet told you about the problem. 2: assume that there is solution, and set to work looking for it.

Here is one real world example, out of millions, of how a gigantic problem was fixed. The state of Maharashtra in India receives around 8” to 12” of rainfall per year. Many villages in this area have often not had access to adequate drinking water, or water to irrigate their crops. Many villages were forced to spend money they could ill-afford to have water trucked in from distant regions. Many villagers were forced to look for work in the cities, because it was nearly impossible to eke out a living from the arid landscape.

The Paani foundation decided to tackle the problem. They organized thousands of villages in Maharashtra to undertake a massive drought remediation program. The first and most important step in drought remediation is to prevent rainfall from running off, and sink it into the ground, where it can regenerate the water table. There are many ways to do this, but the principle methods which they employed in Maharashtra were continuous contour trenches, percolation ponds, and check dams. They mobilized in a massive way, and added more than 145 billion gallons of water storage capacity to their landscape over a four year period.

Water that runs off causes erosion, which leads to many other problems. Water that sinks in restores life - to humans, animals, and plants, and soil. The massive Maharashtra water project causes 145 Billion-plus gallons of water every year to sink in, rather than run off. The outcomes have been totally massive. Villages no longer have to truck in water. Fresh water springs literally sprang out of the hillsides, where before had been only dry. Water wells have been recharged. Birds have returned. There is ample water now for both drinking and irrigating. Farmers don’t have to abandon their farms, for low paying jobs in the mega-cities. Find out more about this amazing revolution here:

Here’s another one. Every year we hear horror stories about devastating wildfires in California and other western states. Virtually 100% of the time the news story tacks on some sort of statement about how climate change is exacerbating the situation. This tends to give one the vague idea that if we just build enough solar panels, or buy more EVs, or outlaw internal combustion engines, or something, that will somehow fix the wildfire problem. But fixing the environment involves interacting with the landscape in a positively creative way, not just pumping more high tech stuff out of a factory.

Jean Pain actually figured out the solution to this problem 43 years ago and detailed it in his book, Another Kind of Garden. What we need to do is thin the vegetation in fire-prone areas to reduce the fuel load. This material then needs to be ground up and composted in very large piles. Fuel load reduction is expensive, but it is less expensive than homes being destroyed, and compost sales can offset the cost of it. Jean Pain also figured out a practical way to recycle the waste heat from compost piles to heat buildings. He also invented a method to capture methane from his piles, and used it to run his truck and wood shredder.

His compost was nothing more than brush and small trees, shredded up. He experimented with growing vegetables in it, and discovered that plants grown in this medium could produce a yield in the blazing hot and dry summers of southern France, where he was located, without irrigation. The compost could also be returned to the forest itself, which would increase the water holding capacity of the soil, which would make the vegetation less vulnerable to wildfire. If water harvesting earthworks were added to the regimen, the amount of water held in the soil would increase yet again, increasing fire resistance even more.

Currently, the common practice for fuel reduction in wildfire areas is to cut the excess fuel in the wet season, concentrate it into piles, and burn it. But all that material is wasted, literally going up in smoke. Maybe the wastefulness that is built into this system is the reason that it is not done on a side enough scale to really reduce the severity of wildfires. In a Jean Pain system, the thinning process would actually generate a return, in the form of compost, fuel, and heat for buildings. We know that we need to reduce the fuel. But instead of wasting the fuel, it ought to be turned into useful products.

So why aren’t Maharashtra-type water harvesting techniques and Jean Pain style management ubiquitous throughout the western states of America? That region would be far less vulnerable to fire if it were. I don’t know. It may be an unconscious defeatism, or a lack of will, or something else. But whatever it is, we can turn it around.