Solar Power isn't Feasible!
Saturday, June 23, 2012
The Solar CITIES IBC Tank Biodigestor just got simpler!
Actually it has been this simple for over a year now, but we just got around to learning enough Blender to make these 3D images.
Gosh it's easy to build a family scale biodigestor! All you have to do is buy a used IBC Tote Tank (those 1000 liter/275 gallon practically indestructible HDPE tanks that they ship liquids in all over the world; on Craig's List they can be had for about $125!) and put a 2 inch pipe (usually in two sections) running from about a half meter above the tank to about 15 cm above the bottom for introducing the feedstock (ground up food waste in our case), a 1 inch pipe running from the middle of the tank to a valved elbow for letting out the effluent/fertilizer, and a 1/2 tank fitting with elbowed valve to let out the biogas that results.
You don't have to alter the tank in any way; all the inputs and outputs can be made through the cover.
You may find it a bit difficult to find the bulkhead tank fittings/adaptors in some hardware shops, but check out aquarium, pool and boating shops, or look online and you should find them.
To get the gas and the effluent out you can use garden hoses or clear plastic tubing. No big deal there; this stuff isn't under much pressure at all.
The gas comes right out the top so you don't need any pipe there. The fertilizer comes out of the "dead zone" in the middle of the tank (fats and oils, which contain lots of energy, tend to float, and proteins and carbs tend to sink, so the top and bottom of the tank are biologically acive) so you want that one inch pipe going down to the halfway mark. The feeding pipe should reach to about 10 or 15 cm above the bottom of the tank to leave room for the rocks and active sludge without the food getting blocked on its way down and into the tank.
But that's about it. You'll want the feeding pipe up top to be about a half meter above the tank so that enough of a head can build up to force the gas out and so that you can pour all your food waste in without overflowing since the effluent outlet is half the diameter of the input pipe. As you add the ground up food waste slurry (we use an Insinkerator brand garbage disposal to make it) fertilizer fluid will be coming out of the 1 inch pipe, but it will come out slower. You could use a larger pipe, but sometimes they don't fit the lid easily. We've found with the proper feeding regime the dimensions depicted here work fine!
Make sure the lid has an intact rubber O-ring gasket; one of ours didn't and while it eventually worked out using silcone, you can experience troublesome leaks. Some used IBC vendors sell you lids without the rubber ring inside; check and see just to be sure!
Then just fill your tank with about 50 to 100 kg animal manure, top off with water, screw the lid on and wait for a couple of weeks. When you get your first flammable gas you are ready to start feeding ground up food scraps -- about a 25 liter buckt of mixed food waste and water each day!
Gosh it's easy to build a family scale biodigestor! All you have to do is buy a used IBC Tote Tank (those 1000 liter/275 gallon practically indestructible HDPE tanks that they ship liquids in all over the world; on Craig's List they can be had for about $125!) and put a 2 inch pipe (usually in two sections) running from about a half meter above the tank to about 15 cm above the bottom for introducing the feedstock (ground up food waste in our case), a 1 inch pipe running from the middle of the tank to a valved elbow for letting out the effluent/fertilizer, and a 1/2 tank fitting with elbowed valve to let out the biogas that results.
You don't have to alter the tank in any way; all the inputs and outputs can be made through the cover.
You may find it a bit difficult to find the bulkhead tank fittings/adaptors in some hardware shops, but check out aquarium, pool and boating shops, or look online and you should find them.
To get the gas and the effluent out you can use garden hoses or clear plastic tubing. No big deal there; this stuff isn't under much pressure at all.
The gas comes right out the top so you don't need any pipe there. The fertilizer comes out of the "dead zone" in the middle of the tank (fats and oils, which contain lots of energy, tend to float, and proteins and carbs tend to sink, so the top and bottom of the tank are biologically acive) so you want that one inch pipe going down to the halfway mark. The feeding pipe should reach to about 10 or 15 cm above the bottom of the tank to leave room for the rocks and active sludge without the food getting blocked on its way down and into the tank.
But that's about it. You'll want the feeding pipe up top to be about a half meter above the tank so that enough of a head can build up to force the gas out and so that you can pour all your food waste in without overflowing since the effluent outlet is half the diameter of the input pipe. As you add the ground up food waste slurry (we use an Insinkerator brand garbage disposal to make it) fertilizer fluid will be coming out of the 1 inch pipe, but it will come out slower. You could use a larger pipe, but sometimes they don't fit the lid easily. We've found with the proper feeding regime the dimensions depicted here work fine!
Make sure the lid has an intact rubber O-ring gasket; one of ours didn't and while it eventually worked out using silcone, you can experience troublesome leaks. Some used IBC vendors sell you lids without the rubber ring inside; check and see just to be sure!
Then just fill your tank with about 50 to 100 kg animal manure, top off with water, screw the lid on and wait for a couple of weeks. When you get your first flammable gas you are ready to start feeding ground up food scraps -- about a 25 liter buckt of mixed food waste and water each day!
What is Solar CITIES and how can you help?
About us:
Founded in 2006, Solar Cities is a nonprofit organization that works on capacity building in developing countries through an
industrial ecology approach to sustainable developlement. Through green collar education, gender equity empowerment and poverty alleviation we help families develop sensibly scaled technologies for creating
affordable enivonmental solutions at the household level.
Solar
C3ITIES
e.V. is a not-for-profit organization based
in Germany. We work all over the world, particularly
Africa and the Middle East, developing home-scale
sustainable development solutions with,
by, and for families and communities.
Our current focus is on providing low-cost high-efficiency biogas systems and system integration training for "food-waste-to-fuel-and-fertilizer" biodigesters at the household and community level. We incorporate in-sink food waste grinders like the "Insinkerator" brand garbage disposal into our biogas systems as the "jaws and teeth" of our "artificial sacred cow" biodigester.
Mission:
To Provide low income families, both nationally and globally, with
safe, clean, climate friendly, hot water, sanitation, light and
microenterprise opportunities.
Who
are We:
Founders;
Executive Director;Dr. T.H. Culhane, Dr. Sybille Culhane
Ahmed
Khalifa: Secretary/Treasure,
Moustafa Hussein, Hanna Fathy, Heidi Fink, Hussein Farag, Joram Samoan, Mike Rimoin: Solar CITIES Innoventors and Practioners
Current Projects:
Soylent Green is People, but Food Scraps are Solar Energy!
We build biodigestors because we see proper utilization of kitchen and toilet wastes as the best way to bring solar energy to the city!
It
is our contention that food wastes, whether in the form of high energy raw table scraps and plate scrapings, or processed through an animal gut, are the most cost effective and reliable
form of stored solar energy. Unlike fossil fuels, which are also stored
sunlight, food waste is climate neutral and, when turned into methane
and fertilizer through a biodigester, produces no harmful toxins or
pathogens and can no longer provide sustenance to mammal, bird or insect
vectors of disease. Unlike direct sunlight, or other forms of transformed solar energy like wind power and hydro power, food wastes are available come rain or come shine, night and day, 365 days a year. And since so much of the world's stored solar energy is accumulated in our cities as uneaten plant and animal parts, left-over and thrown out food scraps and human and animal manures, we believe that any true "Solar CITIES" will transform these substances, now considered liabilities dumped into landfills or discharged into rivers lakes and oceans, into the primary sources of fuel and fertilizer. A real solar city would exhaust all of its organic wastes first before turning to other forms of sunlight, and would save fossil fuels, which are ancient solar capital reserves useful for investing in big infrastructure projects, for last.
It is for this reason that our top priority is helping everybody on earth first make use of their stored solar energy by teaching them how to grind food wastes and tranform them into clean burning biogas for cooking, heating, lighting, refrigeration and electricity generation and nutrient rich soil for growing healthy food and fighting desertification and deforestation.
Philosophy:
By
tapping into the spirit of community cooperation and
extending it to a global scale, experiments in more sustainable
living can be run on a huge scale at a very low
cost and in a way that invites community and stake-holder
participation. By using only off-the-shelf, locally
purchased or manufactured, recycled and ‘found’
materials we strive to give everyone a chance to
take
control of their own destiny as they pursue a dignified
and comfortable path to fully sustainable
development.
The
low costs associated with the Solar CITIES project make it affordable
and scalable and appropriate for microfinancing opportunities. We
work in a modular „build as you go“ fashion. Each dollar spent
adds to the growing capacity of the systems and capacity building in
the communities.
For
example, when you support solar CITIES, every donation has an
important place in the ecology of development:
25
dollars will pay for a local metal worker, welder or plumber to spend
a full day helping us build a renewable energy system.
50
dollars will purchase the glass for solar collectors for three
families
100
dollars will purchase one of the two tanks needed for a family biogas
system
150
dollars will purchase the copper pipes for a family solar hot water
system
200
dollars will purchase the aluminum sheeting , paint, insulation and
plumbing fittings to build a two panel family solar hot water system
250
dollars will purchase the materials an entire single family biogas
system that provides 1 to 2 hours of cooking gas a day
300
dollars will purchase the materials to build a treadle pump so
families without electricity can provide themselves with water
350
dollars will hire a local youth worker for a month to assist her
community in building renewable energy and waste management systems.
400
dollars will provide an airline ticket to bring a Solar CITIES
trained trainer to another African country to train more trainers
450
dollars will purchase the materials for a family biogas system that
provides 3 to 4 hours of cooking gas a day (or can run a gas
refrigerator for 24 hours).
500
dollars will purchase the materials to build and install a full solar
hot water system on a family's roof.
750
dollars will pay the salary of a Solar CITIES expert to spend a week
in a new location starting a project.
1000
dollars will purchase an airline ticket to send a Solar CITIES
trainer to a new location to start a project.
There is a PAYPAL donate button to the right of this post at the top of the sidebar column. Go ahead and click and show your support today!
Because
we TRAIN AS WE BUILD, every activity becomes an educational
opportunity. Thus ever donation is directly contributing to
re-education and capacity building. Beneficiaries pay for their
education through donating extra time and labor to the project by
sharing the expertise they acquired in their own home or community to
others. This way every dollar stretches beyond the borders of any
particular project site.
Vision:
To produce a sustaibable asset-based, low income approach to income
to poverty reduction through job training and hands on productionto
provide capacity building of all the stakeholders involved.
What
is the Problem:
Most
of the energy and water consumption and waste
generation in a household or community occur
in
the kitchen and the bathroom.
• Kitchens
and bathrooms are traditionally female managed
domains so most health risks associated
with
energy, water and waste are incurred by ‘voiceless’
women and children.
• The
technologies associated with energy production, water
supply and waste disposal are traditionally forprofit male
domains that occur outside the household without
consideration for the well being of women and
children in poor communities.
• Solar
CITIES brings these domains together by bringing
sensibly scaled technologies and design
information
for creating household level industrial ecology
solutions to families around the world.
Goals
and Objectives:
• Industrial
Ecology Approach toSustainable
Development
• Asset-based
Approach to Poverty
Reduction
• Stake-holder
Participation Approach
to Urban Planning
• “Green
Collar” Job Training Approach
to Education
• Gender
Equity Approach to Community
Empowerment
• Collective
Intelligence Approach
to Problem Solving
Honoring
Diversity and Lessons Learned
Solar
CITIES works on small
infrastructure issues with
an expertise in
renewable
energy. Solar
CITIES is principally
involved with
‘watergy’
issues that can be
solved using appropriate
technology.
Solar
CITIES trainscommunities
to build small
biogas, wind and solar
systems.
Solar
CITIES conducts outreach
and education workshops
using holistic learning,
multimedia and
edutainment.
Started
by a husband and wife team while they
were living in the slums of historic Cairo,
Solar CITIES was conceived as a way of
working with collective intelligence at the
household
level to solve the daily challenges of
securing basic amenities like clean water, hot
water, energy, food and hygienic waste management.
We take a neighborly ‘barnraising’ approach
to solving global issues and
making the world a better place
The
Solar CITIES approach is to work at the
level of the family, building capacity
through
building relationships. At
Solar CITIES we turn the normal development equation
on its head. We choose to think locally -- i.e. we
think of how to solve problems in our own homes,
in
our own back yards, within our own communities -- with
the faith that by coming up with solutions that are good
for you, are affordable and can be created at home
using
available materials, the best ideas will by themselves
diffuse and spread through personal social
networks
until they have reached the entire world. The key
is to build a network of families and friends and acquaintances
that is blind to nations, cultures, races, religions,
and borders.
With
todays social networking technologies, people now
share information without great effort and news travels
very fast. Solar CITIES takes advantage of this by
working only with people we have gotten to know, and
then expanding the network each time, so that we know
ever more and ever more different people. Many people
talk about the downsides of globalization and urbanization,
but Solar CITIES, cofounded by
a multicultural couple holding doctorates
and specializing in urban planning
and education, sees these two trends
as potential solution generators
Solar
Cities takes advantage of social networking to connect us with
likeminded people and people in need that makes our global network
expand each day.
Due
to the vast migrations of people around the planet, and
our interconnectedness through constant travel and telecommunications,
awareness of each others needs and
mutual problem solving can be vastly accelerated. Multiple
perspectives can brought to bear that vastly reduce
redundancy and wasted resources through needless
trial and error. Through site visits and multimedia
internet communications we have been able to
bring technologies and ideas from India to Egypt and
from
Egypt to California, from Alaska to East Africa and
from Central America to South East Asia.
Solar
CITIES at work around the World
Quotes
from Solar CITIES stakeholders
Mother
in the slums of Cairo: „ It used to take me up to 7 hours to bathe
my 6 children because of the time it took to fetch and heat the
water. We had to boil 20 liters at a time on an open flame and it
was dangerous work. Many children in our community get third degree
burns and some die each year because of scalds, and houses have
burned down, to say nothing of the air pollution using kerosene
stoves generated. Now, because I was able to build my own solar hot
water system on my roof with Solar CITIES, I have 200 liters of safe,
clean hot bath water every day at the turn of a tap. Because the sun
never stops shining here, we know we will never run out of hot water,
and everybody can bathe whenever they like. The burden is off of me
and I can devote more time to studying and learning a trade.“
Young
man in the garbage area of Cairo: „Garbage is my life, because I
am a recycler. But garbage can be very dangerous – my baby niece
was killed by rats that were attracted by the kitchen waste and ended
up in her crib instead. Now that we build biogas systems next to our
homes and on our roofs, the organic waste all goes into the sealed
tank and has no smell. For this reason no rats, dogs, cats, flies or
other disease causing or dangerous animals come around anymore. We
simply don't have smelly garbage near our house or in our streets
anymore. Instead we get all of our cooking gas from our kitchen
scraps. So we've turned a terrible problem into a promising solution
to clean up our city and improve our health and lives.“
GET
INVOLVED!
YOUR
HELP OR DONATION CAN PROVIDE A
FAMILY WITH SAFE AND CLEAN, CLIMATEFRIENDLY AND
INFLATION-RESISTANT COOKING
FUEL, HOT WATER, LIGHT,
SANITATION
AND MICROECONOMIC OPPORTUNITIES.
There is a PAYPAL donate button to the
right of this post at the top of the sidebar column. Go ahead and click
and show your support today!
Sunday, June 17, 2012
"Keep off the Grass": A Diet for Emerging Explorers
Slaves on a sugar cane plantation in Jamaica "cutting the grass"... |
My commitment to "keep of the grass" was clinched during a conversation I had last week at Base Camp with National Geographic "Explorer of the Year" Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner -- the first woman to summit all 14 of the earth's highest mountain peaks without supplementary oxygen.
The conversation included her husband and frequent climbing partner Ralf Dujmovits as well as John Francis, vice president for research, conservation, and exploration at the National Geographic Society. And it revolved around the question "what is the best diet for explorers who routinely go into extreme conditions?".
Don't get me wrong -- the conversation didn't take place in extreme conditions, it took place at the National Geographic Headquarters "Base Camp" in Washington DC, a far more comfortable location for discussion than the base camps Gerlinde usually hangs out in for weeks in the Himalayas or other daunting mountain ranges. But it included discussion of my own visit to Everest Base Camp last spring and my recent trip to the base of Mera Peak in Nepal, and the difference I felt this year when I decided to eliminate sugar and starch from my diet, and last year when I trudged up the Khumbu valley toward Mount Everest trying to rely on the daily and generous provision of Mars bars, Snickers and Bounty bars offered to help us get that "quick boost" of energy that sugar is supposed to supply.
My observation was that without the carbs this year the trek up to 5500 meters was immeasurably easier than last year, even though the route in the Hinku valley, with steeper daily ascents and descents, and nights in cold snow bedecked tents instead of the the relative shelter and warmth of the tea lodges in the Khumbu, was technically more difficult.
Gerlinde and Ralf and John confirmed this observation. Gerlinde said "when you are climbing the highest mountains in the world, pushing your body to the limit, blood sugar swings become your enemy. You quickly face exhaustion. Starches, sugars, carbohydrates, they are the worst thing. When we climb we focus on eating protein. The body turns it into the necessary glucose for the brain and body to work most efficiently but it also keeps muscle from being lost."
Ralf chimed in, "We train and train before we climb and we would go onto the expedition with very strong, big muscles, but we noticed that when we returned we were always thin as a rail, having lost a lot of muscle mass. This is because your body digests itself when you are undergoing intense exercise and it consumes muscle protein before turning to your fat reserves. But by increasing the protein in our diets and eliminating the starches and sugars we find we can keep our muscles."
Gerlinde said, "we start the treks with a diet high in protein and fat and very low in carbohydrates, but we noticed that at high altitude Ralf was getting bad headaches. It turned out that fat requires a lot of oxygen to burn and above 3000 meters the oxygen gets thinner and thinner. By 8000 meters there is almost no oxygen at all and fat in the diet becomes a problem. So while we normally will not worry about the fat content of our diet, we have to eliminate it for the high points of the expedition. But in general the secret is getting rid of as much carbohydrate as possible, and that means no breads and potatoes, and certainly no sugared drinks or candy bars..."
Ah.... candy bars. In years past I packed my backpack with choclate bars -- Bounty bars, with their coconut filling, are among my favorite. I rationalized it by parroting the same lousy advice I had gotten from my Gym teachers in high school, "when you are doing strenuous sports, you need the jolt of energy they provide and it is okay, because you are working out so hard you'll burn it all up anyway..."
Wrong.
Explorers as well as athletes are beginning to understand, through accumulated experience, that the less sugar they dump in their bloodstream, the more steady their energy feels.
Taking it to the Ends of the Earth
This year, from day 1, I gritted my teeth and politely refused the bowl of candybars offered each morning. At the end of the day, after a hard, breathless, bone aching, muscle burning climb, when I lay in my tent, illuminated by my Solar CITIES aluminum tab torch, I would often discover a Snickers bar sitting in the side pocket, surreptitiously popped in there by a caring guide wanting to ensure that I didn't wake up with hunger pangs when the exhaustion let up. Or was it one of my colleagues, trying to test my resolve and lead me into temptation? I would hold the ever more delicious seeming chocolate before me in the dim glow of my aluminum can flashlight and read the label, dreaming of how good it would taste. Sugar, cornsyrup, modified cornstarch, dextrose, sugar, sugar... and though I knew that nobody would ever know or care if I ate it or not, I would put it back in the pack and tell myself "you can do this, if you just hang on, the cravings will surely go away."
Of course I had a precedent. At Harvard in early 1980s, as a Biological Anthropology undergraduate, I had won a prize with a paper I wrote called "Of Man and Meat: Nutritional Imperialism and its effects on aboriginal cultures". Reading classics like Weston Price's "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" and William Dufty's "Sugar Blues" I had decided, since I wanted to spend my year after college at the Harvard Research site at Gunung Palung mountain in Borneo, that I would go on what I called a "hunter-gatherer diet". I vowed at the beginning of my junior year that I would eliminate all "non-nutritional cash crops" from my diet, including not just alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, and sugar, but all refined and processed carbohydrates and oils. I did continue to eat grains, but only "whole grains".
The experiment lasted for 2 years, right through graduation, until I left for the jungle, and I felt better than I ever had in my life. I also invited a girlfriend on the diet who had been plagued by weight problems. At 5 foot 2 inches she dropped from 150 chunky pounds to a svelt 112 while I maintained the 150 pounds appropriate for my 5 foot 9 inch mesomorphic frame. It was 1985 and I had proven to myself the value of what people now call the "Paleolithic Diet".
John Francis confirmed for me that his experience on the Paleo Diet had given him similarly good results, despite the fact that he was on it for a much shorter period of time.
Still, when I was doing that experiment, I was a mere 21 years of age. When everybody else was suddenly getting old enough to drink I was eliminating the excess calories but I was still young enough that it was hard to say whether the unflaggable energy that got me through Harvard and into the deepest rainforests of Indonesia came from this extreme diet or mere youthful vigor.
During the lead up to my last Nepal expedition I had somehow turned 50, and, apart from 2 years as a vegetarian and 7 months as a Vegan, had spent the intervening years eating all manner of junk food (for more than a decade, while working as a teacher in the ghettos of L.A. and as a grad student at UCLA, I practically lived on the Mcdonald's dollar value meals!). I had gone from my college weight of 150 to a hamster cheeked, pot bellied 180. It was getting to be discouraging to look at my reflection--- I kept checking each day to see if the man in the mirror was really me and if he might be induced to change his ways. I needed to find out if the hunter-gatherer diet would really work for those of us on the near side of the midpoint to the century mark.
Summiting the peaks and valleys of the diet roller coaster
Three things encouraged my decision to go radical again.
The first was the announcement that I would be having a baby girl in October. I started thinking about my desire to see her graduate from college, realizing I will be at least 72 when that happens. Another was my fathers ailing health as a man dependent on glucophage pills and a cocktail of medicines to deal with his type 2 diabetes -- I wanted to be able to act as a role model and ally to encourage him to give up the sugar that is killing him so he can live to see my 4 year old son and my new daughter at the very least grow old enough to appreciate his genius, his kindness, and his treasure trove of fun and exciting information about film and circus history -- particularly Disney lore -- which are his fields of expertise. The third was the desire to prove something I had started in Guatemala in the year 2000 when I lived for almost a month on nothing but Maya breadnuts, avocados and lemons from our rainforest research site. I wanted to show that we can live happily and successfully without the agriculture that is currently destroying our planet's complex ecologies.
I had a precedent that gave me courage: my UCLA colleague Angel Orozco, a Guatemalan friend with whom I had formed an NGO to promote agroforestry at the end of the 1990s and with whom I had lived at the Los Angeles Eco-village, had embarked on the hunter gatherer diet during the years I was overseas and hadn't seen him. I remembered him as a heavy, round faced, large framed man; he was always my "big friend Angel". When I finally got together with him to deliver a speech about my work with biogas as one solution to deforestation, I had to be reintroduced to him. He sat smiling at me through my entire speech while I wondered, "why isn't my friend Angel here at my talk? He said he would be..."
At the end of my talk this tall, thin, muscular, thin faced and handsome man who had been smiling shook my hand and said, "I am Angel. I'm so glad you didn't recognize me". The transformation was astonishing. He said, "I didn't go on any weight loss program or take any pills, I just did what we had discussed years ago in the rain forests of my homeland -- I adopted a strict hunter gatherer diet. But to do so, I abandoned all vestiges of food from agricultural economies -- no sugar, no corn, no wheat, no rice, no oats, no barley.. "
"Sounds like you're avoiding all the grasses" I told him, impressed.
The problem with the Poaceae
On our long bus rides from Mexico City to the Peten Rainforests of his homeland, Angel and I used to discuss archeologist Dennis Puleston's idea that the Maya couldn't have based their lowland civilization on corn because of its destructive impact the grass we call "maize" has on tropical soils. We used to reflect that in general the planting of agricultural grasses is among the most destructive practices we humans have been engaged in for the past millenia. My Master's Thesis focused on "tree cereals" that, through agroforestry, could replace the "weed cereals" that society depends on.
Working in horticulture at the Los Angeles Zoo for 4 years I had come to regard human reliance on the family Graminae/Poaceae as one of the biggest mistakes our species ever made.
Think about it -- there are approximately 463 plant families on the face of the earth (experts estimates vary slightly but all are close to this number). But the lion's share of the plants upon which civilization has come to depend belong to only one of them: the grass family. This includes sugar cane, wheat, rice, corn (maize), oats, barley, sorghum, and millet. When you look at our supermarket shelves almost every product is a product of the top 4 -- wheat, rice, corn and sugar. Corn syrup and sugar make up the bulk of the beverage section. And vast areas of the landscape are being transformed to a monocrop monocot factory to feed our hunger for these few members of this one family. The devastation grass family cultivation and processing has on entire cultures was recently brought home to me while working with Maasai leader Kakenya Nataiya in Kenya, where the entire Maasai way of life is threatened by the transformation of the traditional grazing lands into sugar cane plantations. Where once there were thousands of species interacting with the Maasai and their cattle, what some people naively called a "grassland savannah" is now become a true grassland -- home ot only one species of plant, the grass called Saccharum officinarum in the Poaceae.
(The video above shows the headmistress of Kakenya Ntaiya's Center for Excellence Dream School for Maasai Girls describing the impact the sugar cane industry is having on her culture and the future of the children)
It would be as if the Rockefellers or the Kennedy's made up 3/4 of the world's population. When one family comes to dominate culture and commerce in an age of diminishing biodiversity, the prospects for maintaining a healthy ecosystem become nil to nothing.
So the quest to maintain a healthy body suddenly became linked to the more vital quest to maintain a healthy planet for our children and grand-children.
As a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, dedicated to preserving our environment, and reasonably expected to walk our talk the decision became natural. I decided to adopt a new and very rigorous diet to complement the one I was on back at Harvard before my first Borneo expedition. It would be a diet I would maintain not just when out exploring, but every day, at home and in the field. It would be a diet that, through its complete dismissal of our "daily bread", would complement my desire to eschew the "non-nutritional cash crops" that destroy health and local economies. It would be a diet that I will continue for the rest of my life to model for my son and daughter as they grow to appreciate their role in this marvelous and fragile blue planet three rocks from the sun. It is a diet that served me very very well on my last expedition with Alton Byers and Chris Rainier and Anrita Sherpa to explore "last mile technology" in some of the remotest places on earth. It is a diet I have decided to bring home, out of the cold and into my own kitchen. I have decided from now on that I will...
KEEP OFF THE GRASS.
As with most explorations, we'll have to wait and see what we discover...
Stay tuned!
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Looking Toward Zootopia
By T.H. Culhane, Ph.D.
Walking with a throng of students toward the engineering
department at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the morning, as we pass
a construction site, we are confronted
by two imposingly large buck deer with impressive antlers who have decided
to nonchalantly cross the street with
us. It is hard to say where they came
from, or where they are going – the city is ringed by mountains but we are
nowhere near a so-called “natural” area;
still the residents of this campus environment don’t seem alarmed. They
take it in stride, as if it is a perfectly natural occurrence to share the road
with large wild mammals on the way to class.
During the evening, as we drop a
local friend off in her residential area,
mere minutes from the city center,
we pass an entire family of deer methodically walking along the
sidewalk in search of tasty flower plantings
lining people’s driveways. Our friend,
noting our surprise, comments, “we’re so
used to such urban wildlife here that we have almost stopped noticing. A lot of people figure, “it used to belong to
them anyway, before our subdivisions
encroached on their territory, so we
might as well learn to live together.”
In a progressive area like Boulder, where people come from
all over the world to study environmental
science, it would almost seem as
though a “zootopia” where humans and wildlife coexist peacefully within an
urban landscape is possible. Our
friend’s son tells us they routinely host raccoons, possums, skunks and other ostensibly wild
critters in their backyards – occasionally they will even see a puma mountain lion or even a bear
pass through. The animals don’t seem to mind
the presence of human beings when they aren’t harassed and if anything they
seem to find the gardens and garbage cans of human residents an easy and
reliable food supply, perhaps even more convenient than foraging in the
wild. And many creatures seem to
appreciate our built environment for the
easy shelter it provides against temperature
extremes and inclement weather,
to say nothing of the prodigious amounts of heat our buildings pump
out.
This is not only true for the native wildlife that
urbanization is normally displacing.
Exotics also seem to find immigration to the city appealing. In the city of Chicago, when I was a child in the 1960s, a flock of
tropical green parrots escaped from captivity
near lake Michigan and started breeding in the trees near my apartment
in Hyde Park Boulevard . Taking
advantage of the famous “heat island
effect” of cities, the parrots survived the harsh winters by nesting in large
ducts releasing waste heat from the
subway system. In the spring they
ventured back out to the trees in the parks by the lake. During a recent summer I went back to one of
the parks I used to see them in as a child and sure enough they and their
descendents were there, screeching and
squawking from their nests as though they were
in a tropical rainforest.
That non-human animals would find cities habitable should
come as no surprise; regardless of how well adapted they are to whatever piece of
“nature” surrounds them , most organisms prefer to be sheltered from
weather extremes and from the
elements and prefer to have food,
water and nesting materials around them
in abundance. Human beings have pooled
these resources in our own urban and suburban habitats, and other animals and
plants recognize this. If there is a
compatibility problem between cities and
wildlife, it is usually because we humans resent the presence of non-humans and
deliberately try to exclude or exterminate
them. But we have to rethink this
strategy in the 21st century.
The rapid rate of biodiversity loss is arguably the most
pressing issue facing humanity today.
While we can probably engineer our way out of most of our resource
bottlenecks and health crises given time and political will, Wilson and
McArthur’s theories of island geography and our understanding of genetic drift
and inbreeding depression suggest that many of the earth’s animal and plant
species are at such critically low population densities that they can almost be
considered “living fossils”. The mantra
“extinction is forever” has a haunting finality to it and while the history of
planet Earth shows that even without
human pressure on natural ecosystems, climate change and habitat
modification over time will make species extinctions inevitable, what differs today from previous “natural”
extinction events is the rate of species disappearance, with gene loss and ecosystem degradation
occurring at such a rapid pace that co-evolutionary systems can no longer
operate adaptively. It isn’t just
specifics groups of organisms following the dinosaurs into oblivion, it is the
unraveling of entire ecologies. The
result is what Harvard professor E.O. Wilson has called our entry into the
“Eremozoic Era” – the great “age of loneliness”.
Although most of the habitat destruction leading to
extinctions can be credited to the agriculture and forestry industries, the
built environment itself, due to the exponential expansion of
urbanization, is often considered a
major antagonist to the preservation of biodiverse ecologies. There is no question that urban demand for
resources has always been a primary driver of
the landscape transformations threatening natural ecologies (the
city-countryside relationship, with rising urban populations requiring a substantial “ecological footprint” to
maintain themselves, is well understood)
but in recent years urban sprawl itself has a emerged as a major force in
habitat loss.
Yet while the city as currently conceived poses a threat to wildlife we are also seeing
the emergence of a new paradigm in urban form as wildlife itself seeks to
reclaim its place in landscapes that we modify.
If anything, the agricultural lands and mining lands that feed the city
their resources may be the most hostile places for wild and animals and plants
to try to coexist. Thousands of hectares
of herbicide and pesticide laden monocropping are completely hostile to robust
food-chains and complex ecologies, and are for the most part devoid of trees
which are among the few organisms in terrestrial ecosystems that can provide
the multidimensionality that permits overlapping and non-competitive niche spaces conducive to biodiversity. But, as a Mayan friend pointed out when
flying from his rainforest research station in Guatemala to Los Angeles, “I
looked out the window of the airplane as I crossed the United States, and all I
could see was the yellow and brown of farmlands until we flew over your cities.
Then I noticed the green. Besides the
few patches of wilderness parks and forest plantations, your cities are some of
the last places where there is a lot of visible tree cover. “ From a migratory bird’s perspective, cities and their suburbs are havens not only
of diverse vegetation, woody and
herbaceous, but water features as well. They appear as islands in a sea of cropland
uniformity and barren-ness.
Some animals have taken well to the presence of resources
and shelter in the cities. Richard Hoath
at the American University of Cairo noted that the Egyptian weasel, Mustela subpalmata, which used to occupy a much larger part of
the Nile Valley, was in serious decline
in agricultural areas, but that in Egypt’s major city of 20 million
people, this normally nocturnal species
“can be seen in the day” though it is “most frequently encountered at night
dashing across streets and disappearing beneath a parked car.” The idea that the ubiquitous presence of
parked cars might be seen by some animals as a defense shelter against
predation may strike one as odd, but
most animals don’t have an automatic aversion to “artificial” environments and
look at the world through fairly utilitarian rather than symbolic eyes.
This does not imply that human beings can simply build
anthropocentric habitats and hope that other species will adapt; our structures
and plantings can have a profound effect on “natural” and “artificial”
selection processes. A case in point is
the current displacement in England of native red squirrels by “invasive” North
American Grey Squirrels. The former, now
on the IUCN red list, is susceptible to
a parapox virus that the latter carries but doesn’t get, and is also dependent on pine forests and
pine cones which are also in decline in urban areas. Red squirrels also can’t
easily digest acorns. The grey, on the other hand, does well in oak dominated areas and on the
kind of broad-leafed trees that dominate many residential and parkland plantings. So it is no wonder that one is ubiquitous and
the other rare.
One way to ensure a more favorable mix of squirrel species
(and other wildlife) is simply for
planners, architects and gardeners to use the landscape palette to attract and
retain specific wildlife rather than merely conform to popular horticultural
trends. In fact, the National Wildlife
Federation’s “Backyard Wildlife Program” encourages urban and suburban
residents to “Turn Your Yard Into a Haven for Wildlife!” They give certificates to people who do
exactly that, saying, “By providing
food, water, cover and places for wildlife to raise their young, your garden
can join the nearly 150,000 Certified Wildlife Habitat™ sites across the
country.”
We might consider that if much of our planet’s wildlife is
doing poorly in human habitat it may simply be because of paucity in the
predominant palette of vegetation,
which tends to be so very poor in
diversity that it favors only a very small number of organisms, particularly
those few that co-evolved with the
particular plants our unimaginative
gardens over-emphasize. Landscape
architects, lacking training in ecological sciences, tend to view plants as mere ornamental
decorations, forgetting that ecologies depend on intricate symbiotic and
commensal relationships that took
millions of years to develop.
When much of the smaller wildlife disappears from human
modified habitats it usually has much less to do with these non-human’s fear of
human “encroachment” or even direct conflict with people, but more with a
drastic reduction in the supporting vegetation and associated food chains.
As in the adage “for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for
want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the battle was lost” a
cascade of unfortunate ecological events can occur when a single type of
vegetation is removed that once hosted a wide range of interdependent
microbes, fungi, insects, arthropods and vertebrates . In subtropical and tropical areas, urban
plantings tend to favor the “Mediterranean Zone 5” vegetation, and thus these degraded habitats select for
those organisms that co-evolved in that region, often with devastating
consequences on native wildlife. Some
studies have shown that vacant lots, left to grow over with weeds, contain a
much higher biodiversity than urban parks where manicured trees and lawns are
unable to support more than a very few species of wildlife. From this
perspective we should be “naturalizing” our parks with a wide range of habitat
types (such as Prospect Park in Brooklyn is seeking to do) to attract and
maintain as many different animal/plant assemblages as possible. Right now our parks are the furthest thing
from being modern arks.
There is a lot of concern about the introduction of
“non-native” and “invasive” species into wild habitats; we often neglect to
consider that our urban plantings are almost all made up of an “easy to grow
and maintain” assemblage of trees, shrubs, ferns, flowers and grasses that were
selected from around the world based purely on their market and aesthetic
values. They usually require heavy
maintenance and inordinate inputs of
fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides to stay alive. There has also been severe landscape
modification to establish fast growing timber and firewood producing mono-crops
of trees which now make up the major species over vast areas; the preponderance
of Eucalyptus trees all over the world,
trees which originally come from Australia, but which are now are the dominant life form
in parks and highway, street and residential plantings in regions as diverse as
Iraq, California, Rwanda and Spain, offer very little in the way of food or
shelter to non-Australian wildlife.
Curiously, nobody has taken seriously our proposals to allow Koalas,
which are endangered in Australia, and exclusively eat Eucalyptus leaves, to freely breed in city parks outside
Australia (even the Los Angeles Zoo, which is filled with and surrounded by
Eucalyptus forests, still gives their few Koala’s contraceptives to keep them from breeding and employs human laborers to cut Eucalyptus
branches to feed the rare marsupials).
Similarly, despite Panda Bears, which eat only bamboo and are on the
verge of extinction in China where their bamboo forests are being cut down for
agriculture and urbanization , we don’t see initiatives to give them a chance
to breed in other regions of the world where bamboo serves as one of the chief
ornamental plantings. We decry their
disappearance in the “wild” without considering that the plants they depend on
for survival actually exist all over the world thanks to urbanization.
Usually when there are struggles between humans and non-humans in the built
environment they involve society’s
intolerance of these larger animals
rather than their intolerance of us.
Creatures such as mice and rats, squirrels and sparrows, ducks and ubiquitous pigeons, even raccoons , skunks, badgers and coyotes
have found ways to co-exist and even thrive in our cities. But so-called “charismatic megafauna” – the
pandas and koalas that serve as the poster children of the conservation
movement, the “lions and tigers and
bears – oh my!” sung about on the yellow brick road to the Wizard’s paradise of Oz, the elephants which populate Paris in the
children’s book “Babar”, the chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas which end up
taking over the world in “Planet of the Apes” and all the civilized , well-dressed talking animals of the Disney
cartoons – these are the creatures most endangered through our rampant urbanization of planet
Earth.
In fantasy we hold out to our children the elusive hope of
living in harmony with some of the animals whose size approaches or exceeds ours, but our
general fear of possibly dangerous or conflictual encounters with most of the
“undomesticated” creatures of the Earth keeps most of them out of designated
“human habitat”.
Frequent trips that I
make to pet stores around the world reveal
a growing affection for smaller “exotic” or “un-domesticated animals” as
part of the accepted species assemblage
living with us in urban settings (I owned two iguanas, several quail, rabbits
and hares, guinea pigs, cockatiels and parakeets when I lived in Los
Angeles), but only rarely do I meet
people, like Birute Galdikas, who lives with scores of orangutans and gibbons
in her home in Indonesia, or Daphne Sheldrick, who runs and orphanage for
elephants near Nairobi, or the couple
that kept two wolves as watch-dogs in the avant garde video store they owned in the Los
Feliz neighborhood, or the nature-show television host in the
Hollywood hills who showed me the large alligator he kept in his swimming pool,
or legendary Hollywood Musical Producer George Sidney who told me about keeping
an elephant for years in his back yard in Beverly Hills. People who are pushing the envelope of cohabitation by substituting llamas and
yearlings and ostriches and emus for the usual house trained dog,and cat, or backyard cow or chicken, are fare too rare
at this time of incipient mass extinctions.
The recent police slaughter of a menagerie of 49 “exotic animals” (among them endangered
Bengal Tigers) set free in a suburban neighborhood by a private owner in Ohio,
killed because law enforcement personnel were too afraid of them to think
rationally or didn’t know how to dart,
net and re-capture animals that
were doubtless more frightened than they, shows that society doesn’t consider
large animals worthy of caring attention when they transgress certain
boundaries. It seems we’d rather let them follow the dinosaurs into oblivion
that rethink the human-nature relationship.
Yet almost every city boasts a rather large collection of
charismatic megafauna, and has for hundreds of years. A well run Zoo is considered one of the
hallmarks of a great city. Most city planners, in fact, consider a city
incomplete if it doesn’t have a zoological park (sometimes several) where
families can introduce their children to the other animals with which we
co-evolved. The larger and least domesticated creatures are the biggest draw.
And where cities couldn’t afford to house these animals,
circuses filled the gap, and served and still serve the vital function of
carting big charismatic megafauna from town to town so humans detached from
“nature” could contemplate their relationship with these other large residents of our common
spaceship earth. Both institutions also
offer the chance for co-evolutionary relationships to continue to occur,
challenging both humans and non-humans to reconceive their relationships.
But Zoos and Circuses both evolved from Judeo-Christian and
Islamic traditions affirming man’s “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over
the fowl of the air, and over the cattle,
and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon
the earth”. And they owe their physical and psychological profiles to ideas
based on “Bentham’s Panopticon”:
factories, schools, hospitals, insane asylums and poor houses. Wild animals have been forced to stand-in for
“criminals”, the insane”, “the feared feminine” and “the despised other” and
for forces that fill people with anxiety and confusion. So neither of these institutions has been
able to solve the conundrum of how we can evolve a society that permits the harmonious
coexistence of “all creatures great and
small”.
There are models for successful coexistence of large domestic animals in the urban
context. Every time I go to visit my friends in the informal
“garbage recycling” community of Cairo’s Zabaleen people I marvel at the
presence of pigs living on the ground floor of apartment buildings, cows
residing in second floor bedrooms, goats, sheep and donkeys walking up and down
the staircases, and ducks, chickens and rabbits populating the roof, each
providing a vital urban ecology function and helping these poorest of the poor
eke a living out of the refuse of the rest of the city. The urban pigs transform the organic waste of
Cairo’s millions into valuable meat, hide, bone and fertilizer (and in some
cases biogas) while the urban goats and sheep and cows transform marginal
vegetation along the roadside and
railroad tracks into milk and cheese.
We see this pattern in many
marginalized communities around the world – I’ve even been to the homes of
Mexican immigrants in American cities who kept livestock in homes and grew
nopal cactus, corn, chayote and other
agricultural plants instead of front lawns because they felt the grass
and other ornamental plants that dominate our cities were a “waste of space”;
one student of mine even kept a bull in the back yard in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Urban Eco-Village where I lived for three years tended their
permaculture garden with a “chicken tractor”.
Meanwhile, in Indian and Indonesian cities we’ve
marveled as not only “sacred cows” walk the streets, but
domesticated elephants, whose large size, intelligence and strong trunks enable
them to do a lot of important
construction work. We’ve seen sacred
Hanuman monkeys (Grey langurs) and other primates leap from urban porches to telephone poles
and tightrope walk the high tension wires to the next apartment complex where
people put out offerings of food to these furry relatives of ours, treating
them little different than we treat squirrels in the West (with the caveat that they do protect their homes with barred
windows to prevent these curious cousins from stealing or breaking
things.) By understanding the needs and
specific behavioral ecologies of many
“not-quite domesticated” animals humans find they can develop fairly
close relationships with them, relationships that could one day lead to
co-evolutionary relationships that can border on symbiosis rather than
predation or parasitism.
In fact, in the late 1800’s, the Australian
Acclimatization society championed the
idea that all animals and plants should be brought into “domestication” so that
they and their human partners could
enjoy the mutual benefits each might confer on the other. At that time there was a sense among many that
dogs and cats and farm animals were merely “early adopters” in an world where
animals “chose domestication” as much as we chose them to be domesticated, and where , as humans fulfill their biblical
command to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth”, we get closer and
closer to fulfilling the biblical prophecy in Isaiah: 6 where “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and
the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and
the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”
Nowadays, in permacultural and “industrial ecology” and
“urban ecology” circles, we are beginning to popularize a similar idea of
harmony among humans and non-humans, learning to see the mutualistic functional
relationships we can create if we start valuing the “ecosystem services” and
“environmental services” that non-humans contribute to our urban well
being. From “Effective Microbe” Bukashi
compost, biogas, and fermented foodstuff techniques, that honor the role of
“probiotic” micro-organisms in maintaining our
health and that of our soils, to the use of Zebra mussels, snails and a
“schmutzdecke” assemblage of aquatic organisms to create living machines to
purify our water, to cities employing
ungulates to keep highway and power line strips free from weeds and putting
endangered manatees to work clearing
navigable waterways from water
hyacinth and other river and canal choking aquatic plants, we see more and more places recognizing the
contribution animals can make to make cities more livable for both us and them.
The city isn’t the problem, our mentality is. From a bird’s eye view, and from that of many
other animals and plants, the city hasn’t really taken any land away from
nature, in fact it has merely raised it up, and in so doing it has created even more dimensions for niche space and
livable habitat. The Caixa Forum Museum
in Madrid, for example, sports a 24 meter high vertical garden
along its south facing wall that hosts a prodigious number of insects,
amphibians, reptiles and birds, fed by a gravity led stream of rain water.
Where the pre-urban landscape in Madrid once offered only
the ecological footprint defined by the two dimensional area of what is now the
roof of this building, now it offers many times the surface area in three
dimensions for living beings. And this
would be true of all our buildings, if only we would learn to see them that
way, and invite our non-human relatives to work with us instead of fighting so
hard against them.
Because of the complex surfaces it provides, the myriad
opportunities for shelter and the pooling of water and food and resources and
energy that characterize the urban environment, the city may very well turn out
to be the best place to build our arks to save what is left of biodiversity.
If we learn to see the environments we have built and occupy through the eyes of
other organisms that don’t divide the world into facile categories like
“Civilization” and “Nature” we might be able to help the non-human passengers
with whom we share planet Earth to survive. And we might be able to call this
kind of new urban form “Zootopia”. I,
for one, am looking forward to it.
Dr. T.H. Culhane lived at the Los Angeles Eco-Village while attending graduate school at UCLA and worked with colleagues there to create one of the first urban permaculture experiments in a dense built environment in a low income neighborhood. Culhane's entire apartment was off the grid for 3 years, had its own home built composting toilet and recycled much of its greywater. The eco-village itself had nutritious gardens instead of lawns and kept earthworms, rabbits and chickens, using a chicken tractor for weeding and pest control. It was frequently visited by opposums and racoons and many species of birds, lizards and amphibians. The buildings themselves sit along what was once a riparian streambed that Chumash Indians used as prime hunting ground. Currently the Eco-Village is working with the Bresee Center which has partially restored the stream. |
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Taking up the Energy Challenge in Maasai Mara
A proposal by National
Geographic Emerging Explorers Dr. T.H. Culhane and Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya
"Fool on the hill" or "Fuel on the
Hill"? As our Maasai colleagues at Kakenya's Dream - the Academy for Girls
load the region's first food waste to cooking fuel biodigestor with cow dung
for the bacterial starter culture, a 3000 TCD sugar cane processing factory is
rapidly being built on the hill. The million dollar question:"can we turn
the factory into a positive thing -- an infinite source of clean free fuel for
a biogas future -- or will it become a source of polluting wastes?" Proper
investment and capacity building will be the deciding factor. Stay tuned...
|
An ominous threat looms on the hill
overlooking the Kakenya Center for Excellence in Maasai Mara. It towers over
this hope inspiring school where nearly
100 Maasai girls are learning as fast as they can how to integrate into the
modern world without losing their Independence and cultural heritage.
The threat to a sustainable future for these
girls, who are going in one generation from a millenia old tradition of nomadic
cow herding to finding their place in a post-modern sedentary agricultural and
service economy, comes in the form of a massive sugar processing factory, one
of the first of its kind to be built in this remote area.
Started in the fall of 2010, the factory,
which now operates night and day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, was
completed and operational by the fall of 2011. Now the pressure is on -- the hungry crushers and boilers of the
massive industry demand constant and continual input of sugar cane feedstock, driving the
Maasai inexorably from self-sufficiency to full participation in the cash crop economy and
putting an incredible strain on their environment.
Already, huge and expensive colorful banners
patterned after the Kenyan national flag with big photographs of sugar cane
fields grace every roadside intersection and declare in several languages “Grow
more cane, get more cash!” enticing the people to give up cow herding and
grazing and even give up growing subsistence crops and nutritional cash crops
like Maize and beans and rice and Sukumawiki (a type of kale containing vital
nutrients) in order to participate in what is being touted as a “development
boon” for the Maasai Mara, one of the last strongholds of wildlife and
traditional nomadic people.
The Masai community is worried, in fact, that the growing of
the cane will lead to greater deforestation and soil exhaustion and loss of
biodiversity. And at the other end, at full capacity the use of the cane by the factory is
expected to generate 40 tons of solid waste every hour of every day, with possible impacts on the river flowing by the plant, while the burning of fuel
to drive the machinery and steam boilers is can create air pollution
problems.
So is everything rotten in the state of Maasai
Mara?
Not necessarily!
Solar CITIES co-founder and National
Geographic Emerging Explorer Dr. T.H. Culhane,
with relatives of fellow National Geographic Emerging Explorer Dr. Kakenya
Ntaiya and the village chief of Enosaeen,
spent several hours over a two day period touring the factory and
meeting with factory owner Mr. Shah and his chief engineer Rajesh Kumar.
The Solar CITIES team told Mr. Shah that they
were on a Blackstone Innovation Challenge Grant to build the first ARTI India
style food waste fueled biogas digestor at Kakenya’s Dream School, using an
Insinkerator given as a gift from Emerson Electronics to grind up the school’s
kitchen waste and turn it into a clean and inexhaustible fuel and source of
fertilizer, not only to help stop deforestation and lung disease, but to create
chances for reforestation.
Shah, who is originally from India, said
without hesitation “in fact, not only am I very familiar with the promise of
biogas, but I know Dr. Anand Karve, who invented the ARTI system, very well. I
would love to help support this initiative as I would like my sugar cane
factory to be a driver of sustainability for the region, not a problem for the
community. In fact, I can commit to you
now that if you can get your biogas initiative going, I will supply any family
or farm or school or business that is doing biogas with all the bagasse
feedstock they want for free, bailed and ready for pick up in 200 kg to 500 kg
bundles. Bagasse, as you know, as a
sugar cane processing residue, is one of the best sources of biogas in the
world. But because there are currently
no biogas facilities in the area it is a waste product for us. But we can make this a win-win.”
Shah told us that he conceived of the sugar
project in Maasai land in 2006 and invested 30 million dollars in it, hoping to
make it a center for social and economic growth in Africa along the Indian
model.
“When I started this project there were no
roads here. I wanted to make something, remarkable, incredible, a factory that
would change the local community for the better. I will have 400 to 450 direct employees and
indirectly 50,000 families will be taken care of. Between 15 and 25,000 small scale farmers
will be producing for the factory and within 5 years they will have good
money. I am trying to be a strong pillar
for good growth. I have sponsored 20
windows in the local girl’s school, put roofing sheets on another school,
donated 5,000 bricks to the Kilgoris Girls school, and given 3500 liter water
tanks, footballs, trophies and even 3 sewing machines to the Orphan School
Widows."
“ I am happy now to give the bagasse fuel for
biogas,” he told us, “ -- you can tell all the schools; and I will make my
factory workshop, tools and staff available free of charge for building and
assembly of the biogas digestors. And we
can purchase the materials at bulk factory prices. What you have to do is get the local community
trained and committed to a biogas future and raise the money for the materials
themselves and for the labor. And you have to organize and coordinate the
creation of this village scale biogas initiative -- I am not in the biogas
business and will be far too busy running the sugar factory. But I see a way
for us all to meet our goals here. I want to cooperate.”
We discussed the issue of cash crop production
causing infertility of the land and the cycle of farmers becoming ever more
dependent on artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Mr. Shah said, “of course all the nutrients
that sugar cane takes out of the land can all be returned to the land once the
sugar is processed, and this is where your biogas initiative comes in. We already plan to give the molasses fraction
back to the farmers as animal feed to put many of the nutrients back, but a lot
of what the cane takes out is in the bagasse residue. The farmers know they have to let the land
lie fallow every three years or so to regain fertility; certainly if you have a
biogas initiative going and we give the farmers the bagasse and they ferment it
for gas, the fertilizer that they get from it will be the perfect way to get
the nutrients back to the land. Biogas fertilizer
is better than compost and easier to manage and distribute. It is in liquid
form and readily soluble for uptake by plant roots without causing field
souring and without blocking sunlight like solid compost. It is formed rapidly and loses no nitrogen. It creates a closed cycle.”
Shah smiled, saying “So biogas could really be the missing piece in making the
factory sustainable for the community, returning what it takes from the land
back to the farmers in a cost effective way with minimal labor. In addition your biogas systems will take
pressure off of the forests that maintain the fertility and prevent erosion of
the hillsides by stopping people from cutting down trees for firewood and
charcoal. So it would have benefits long
into the future. I have already
committed, as a social entrepreneur, to planting one million trees around the
community -- I’ve started already around the factory and Kakenya’s school --
trees which I will not harvest for 20 years.
We should be eligible for carbon credit. With biogas protecting the
trees from cutting and providing fertilizer for reforestation we should be in
very good shape.”
I asked Engineer Kumar about the air pollution
and water pollution from the factory. He
said, “First of all, our factory will be almost entirely powered by the burning
of the bagasse, so we are using a biofuel with no net carbon pollution. To keep
smoke and particulates down we will be installing a series of electrostatic air
filters. But in effect the plant will be
non-polluting; it certainly won’t put out any greenhouse gases. We won’t need any fossil fuels at all. But the best thing is that if we can get the
proper investment funding and government incentives we can move on to phase II
of our planning. In this phase we can
become a net clean energy producer -- you see we will have a 3000 TCD Sugar
Factory that is capable of producing sugar, alcohol fuel and power through
co-generation in addition to supplying the bagasse for a domestic biogas
program. We can eventually provide
liquid fuels for transportation like Brazil does, and electricity, just from
our wastes. Our boilers will be
producing steam that, through the co-generation turbines, could produce 20
MegaWatts of Power. The factory, running at full capacity, only needs between 3
and 6 MegaWatts, giving us a surplus of 14 MW of clean green power to sell. We
could thus supply stable and clean electric power 24/7 to the entire region,
not just the village of Enosaeen. And as you know, electricity is a big problem
here. We’ve talked to the MP, Gideon
Konchella, and he likes the idea, but we do need to get more investment and
help to get to that level. Coupled with a good biogas program there is no
reason this factory couldn’t provide a model for Industrial Ecology, making the
Maasai one of the first people to create a sustainable business and development
model for rural Africa.”
With this vision in mind, it is clear that
there is great potential here. The fear
of the Maasai leaders and teachers though, is that the technical expertise is
not yet in place and the investment commitments are not there. They fear that the factory will be driven by
economic necessity and a shortage of skilled labor to import non-Maasai workers
from the urban areas to fill the technical jobs, bringing all sorts of social
disruptions and diseases. They fear that in the years before funding comes in
for phase II their area will be polluted and the soil will be exhausted and
their lives as some of Africa’s last independent peoples will be transformed
until they become mere wage slaves on cash crop plantations.
Solar CITIES and the Kakenya’s Dream School
leadership also met with the MP and all agreed that for the transformations
that the sugar factory is bringing to their community to bend toward the
positive rather than towards disaster, we all need to coordinate and move fast
to build skill and knowledge capacity and to get waste-to-energy through
domestic and farm biogas solutions in place even as the factory begins
production.
When I arrived in the village, the chief
shared with me a copy of “The Organic Farmer in Kenya” , a magazine that talked
about the need for biogas to solve Africa’s energy and waste problems. “We have been thinking about this for some
time now, but we need support” he told us.
When we had finished the region’s first small
biogas system at Kakenya’s school, connected it to the Insinkerator in the
school cafeteria and demonstrated it’s potential to the chief and the MP and the village
council, there was an air of excitement and hope lifting our spirits. The MP and the Chief looked up from the
biogas system we had built together to the sugar cane factory being built on
the hill. “We now have a plan.” said the
chief with a smile. "There will be no more worries about waste or
pollution or loss of fertility or soil erosion or deforestation if we can get
this biogas initiative going. We truly
can make the first Maasai industrial ecology system, and it will be our way to
show the world how our people, who have been independent for centuries, can now
teach others how to develop without losing their culture, their health or
dignity.”
In this spirit, we ask that those of you
reading this can help support this most urgent, and yet promising, of Great
Energy Challenges!
Culhane demonstrates the use of the Insinkerator, one of 10 donated to the project around the world by Emerson Electronics, to prepare food wastes for biogas.
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Proposal Details:
1. Provide project background;
Solar CITIES e.V., established in Germany as a
registered NGO and operating on home scale renewable energy projects since
2007, primarily in the slums and informal areas of Cairo Egypt, has been building modified ARTI India style
food-waste-to-clean-fuel biogas systems since January of 2009.
Now we are in full cooperation with fellow
National Geographic Emerging Explorer Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya, and are devoting our
attention to solving the energy and waste and health problems in the Maasai
Mara region because of the urgency of the problem.
We have
currently built more than 50 household and community scale biogas systems,
ranging from 1 cubic meter to 8 cubic meters,
in the following countries:
Urban areas of Cairo Egypt: 8 systems; Rural
areas of Egypt: 6 systems; Suburban Germany: 5 Systems; With NG Explorer Dereck Joubert and Great
Plains Conservation Eco-Lodge at Ol UrDonyo Waas conservation region with
Maasai: 5 systems; Town of Kigoma,
Tanzania and village of MKalinzi near Gombe Chimpanzee reserve with NG Emerging
Explorer Grace Gobbo and Jane Goodall Institute: 4 systems. AbeokutaWildlif, Nigeria with Naijatomo
Holistic Waste Management and former President Obasanjo’s Green Economy team: 4 systems; with Jouberts and Great Plains
conservation Eco-Lodges Selinda, Zarafa and Base Camp, Botswana: 4
systems. Mukuru Slum School Nairobi and
Kakenya’s Dream School, Maasai Mara: 2 systems.
Palestinian Wildlife Society, Al Najah University and East Jerusalem
High School: 3 Systems; Arava Institute of the Environment, Israel in
Cooperation with NG Emerging Explorer Beverly Goodman: 2 systems; South Central
Los Angeles, Latino community, Santa Rosa California Latino Community: 2
systems. Seattle Washington Green Initiative:
1 system; Cordova High School, Alaska on 1st Blackstone Challenge Grant with NG
Emerging Explorer Katey Walter: 7 systems.
We specialize in capacity building and
construction of biogas systems that utilize low cost readily available local
materials and knowledge. Our work also includes instruction in construction of
local solar hot water systems and human powered treadle pump systems; these
systems also help improve the amount of gas and energy savings that the biogas
systems produce (the bacteria need to be kept at mammalian body temperature for
best results and the water has to be pumped in many cases).
Biogas is an energy rich byproduct of the
anaerobic decomposition of organic matter by bacteria. Sharing many
characteristics with natural gas, it can be burned to produce heat, light, and
electrical energy. It’s composed of 60% methane and 40% CO2. Biogas is a clean,
renewable, and carbon neutral form of energy.
Producing Biogas is a fairly straightforward
process: Organic waste is collected in the community, loaded into an
Insinkerator unit installed in a kitchen (or other area), and then ground into
liquid form. This raw material is piped (using gravity) from the sink into a
sealed tank called a digester (or bioreactor) where it is broken down by
naturally occurring anaerobic bacteria. In the absence of oxygen these bacteria
consume the organic matter to multiply and produce biogas and rich fertilizer
as a by-product. The biogas rises and collects in the upper section of the
digester. It is then piped directly back into the homes to be burned as fuel.
Simultaneously, the digester produces a nutrient rich liquid fertilizer which
is used to replenish the earth that the sugar cane and other plants are grown
in.
Organic waste of any type can be fed to the
digester to produce biogas and fertilizer: bagasse from the factory, manure,
human excreta, fruit and vegetable waste, etc.
2. Include basic diagrams or any visual documents that
supplement understanding of the project (if needed);
The Kakenya Center For Excellence and Solar CITIES
biogas team pose in front of the completed biogas system next to the school
kitchen below the sugar cane factory.
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3. Discuss project benefactors;
The project benefactors will be an ever
widening circle of family, friends and community members growing around the 150 immediate people who were
beneficiaries from our pilot project - the students and staff of Kakenya’s
Center for Excellence in the Maasai village of Enosaeen, Kenya. This visionary school acts as the epicenter
of our initiative.
With proper funding we would start by
conducting training workshops and building digestors in every school, church
and social center in the community (there are more than 20 in the immediate
area) including the chief’s compound and the local vegetable market and
carpentry center where currently organic wastes are burned, creating a major
health hazard to the community.
Once we have built about 20 smaller digestors
to accomodate all the organic wastes from the immediate community and have
built enough expertise, the next phase would be to employ the community to
build a large scale digestor on property near to the sugar cane factory to
accomodate the bagasse and processing wastes of the factory. The gas from this larger digestor would be cleaned
and compressed for use throughout the village and for generating electricity
and co-generating hot water, following the German model. The fertilizer would
be used for reforestation and soil amendment.
4. Provide a description and significance of the results
expected, including--relevant quantitative details, such as output;
Within the first phase of the project, during
which 20 small scale digestors will be built in the schools, churches, family
farms and local markets, a culture of waste-to-biogas expertise would be
created that would build confidence and interest in the technology and foster
local expertise. The initial phase would
take approximately 2 months, with a new digestor being commissioned every two
to three days (with accelerating returns as expertise is gained, simultaneous
training and building is possible, as trainees become trainers of trainers; the
timeline could end up much shorter).
The second phase of the project would involve
coordination with the local sugar cane factory and would result in the building
of a much larger pilot community digestor for use with the sugar cane factory
wastes. This phase would involve capacity building of the local Maasai
community in greater technical skills such as project design, sheet metal work,
riveting, industrial plumbing and ergonomic loading and unloading. As a result
of this training and the construction of the larger scale community digestor (approximately
30 cubic meters) the local Maasai would come away with more of the skills
needed to fully participate in a green economy and industrial ecology future
for their homeland so that there is a lessened need for external skilled labor
and so that they can plan their own future.
The specific type of biogas digestor which
will be used is the Puxin digestor. This
particular digestor will be highly efficacous as it it simple to construct, consisting
of molds in which concrete is poured, forming the different parts of the
digestor. The level of expertise
required to construct this system will be an effective bridge between phases
one and three; it will introduce the Maasai to the construction techniques and
ideas behind a more complicated biogas generation system, while building upon
the basic skills and knowledge gained in phase one. Furthermore, the digestor itself is easy to
maintain, and has a long service life (on the order of 30 years). This will allow the Maasai to maintain the
system themselves, enhancing sustainability, and continuing to increase their
familiarity with sustainable energy sources.
The Massai’s ability to use this digestor to effectively convert the
waste from the sugar cane factory (bagasse) in to an energy source (biogas)
will quickly create ties and foster a cooperative relationship between them and
the sugar cane plant. These ties will be
increasingly important as the Massai begin to enter the third phase of the
project.
These are the Puxin molds for the 6 and 10 m3 biogas systems that cost between 5,000 and 6,000 dollars (shipping costs about $1500) . |
In the third phase of the project, the
experiences gained from phases one and two will be leveraged to help the sugar
cane factory and other relevant industries become clean electricity and biofuel
co-generators so that the region could develop a clean tech model of economic
importance. Full stake holder participation in this more ambitious phase is the
outcome of starting at the household, farm and local market scale, then moving
up to the community scale before connecting the local community to the larger
industrial and international efforts.
An image of the 100m3 Puxin digestor molds that we will build at the Sugar Cane factory to handle all of its waste and keep it from polluting the watershed and air in the village. |
A schematic from Puxin showing how the system is set up. |
5. Include a general budget, which lists funding needed and
funding received.
So far we have put $1400 dollars into the
building of the first demonstration biogas system at Kakenya’s Center for
Excellence. The cost of the 3 tanks
(5000 liters, 2300 liters and 1800 liters) to accomodate the schools food
wastes was 75,000 shillings (approximately 750 Euro), while plumbing supplies,
tractor rental for cow dung, labor and
material transport costs consumed another 25,000 shillings (about 250 Euros).
Additional systems of similar size would be in the range of 1000 to 1200
dollars each (reduced from 1400 because of the ability to buy in bulk at
wholesale and rent tractors and trucks only once to move the supplies for many
systems).
The Insinkerator Evolution 200 feedstock
grinding units , valued at $420 dollars for a 220 volt unit (such as we have
installed in two locations in Cairo, 2
in Nigeria, two in Botswana, 2 in Kenya and 1 in Nepal, were donations to the
biogas effort from Emerson Electronics.
Even with a wholesale reduction that Emerson has suggested they would
help us with, with customs and shipping for this project we estimate a cost of
about $500 per unit, making the cost of each biogas installation about $1500.
Materials:
It is thus estimated that the construction of
20 small systems would consume about 34,000
dollars.
A community system of 100 cubic meters would
cost approximately 50,000 dollars in materials and labor.
Supervisors/Trainers
Airfare and per diem compensation for the Solar CITIES coordinator/trainer husband and
wife team for a period of 4 months (2 months for the initial small systems and
2 months for the large community system) would come to approximately 4000
dollars for airfare (two trips for two people
at 1000 dollars per ticket, with a break in between), and 250 dollars
for the couple per work day x 20 days per month x 4 months = 20,000 dollars for
compensation, plus 1000 dollars over the four months budgeted for food and
lodging in the village and incidentals (visas,
medicine, phone and internet expenses) = approximately 25,000 dollars.
Compensation for 8 local community craftspeople/engineers
working on the project would add another 10,000 dollars to the budget.
Thus the whole project could be run for
approximately 115,000 dollars. For just
the initial capacity building phase, a budget of 60,000 dollars would be
feasible.
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