Natural Writers

An inspired entrepreneur

Eva Wissenz — 2010-08-11T07:04:39Z

Mr Desai, could you present a bit of your background?
My father was a farmer in Gujarat. I have an elder sister, 10 years older than me and we had 8 brothers and sisters who died very young. From highschool I was impressed by Mahatma Gandhi's books. I understood that in the name of the so-called development industry was going wrong. After becoming an ingeneer I realized it more and more and could not bare it. For example, when they built the capitale of Gujarat, Gandhinagar, I understood that the government was taxing people but building only for government employees and never for the well-being of the poor. Of course, change things is ambitious, you have to start somewhere. Where to start? First, reduce poverty, give them strenght. So I resigned my job and started Tinytech in 1982 after 14 years of struggle in my mind because I had a familly to sustain, at that time I was 40 and today I am 67 years old. The first two years have been difficult, we had little space, all my savings were spend the first year with atiny cement plan but there was no order. Then I started the little oil mill and after another year, the success was there.

What is Tinytech?
I believe in small scale industry and I am sure that entire economy can be done by tiny industry. I subcontract to produce and everything is assembled in my factories. It means that 20 small factories are working with us, completly independen from us, they are not our employees. I purchase the raw material, they produce the pieces and Tinytech assemble. For them it means they have no marketing and they don't sell : they do the work and they get paid. For me, I don't have to invest in machinery, have big places, etc. So investments (and problems) are divided. Today, 10 to 15 persons are working at Tinytech, in offices, 2 factories and a third out of the city. We export our small machines in 85 countries. We are efficient but we want to stay small and I would be happy if others are inspired by all this. Actually, our machines are not patented and I encourage people to copy them. Everytime I do something I ask to myself: “ does it give wealth to the poor? does it reduce wealth for the rich?” and both have to be satisfied. You know big companies can only survive by creating monopoly with the help of government.

Why are your factories called “yoga temple”?
The first one is called “Prayog Mandir” (Temple of advanced yoga) and the second “Udyog Mandir” (Temple of higher yoga). When you practice yoga, you do it for you, for your own benefice, it's a first level of yoga but all activities should be for the benefit of the entire society, not for you so, by our activities poor people should prosper so it is yoga!

What are your experiences with solar energy?
I started the experience about 10 years ago because I tought solar technology could be the main revolution because you see, sun has an equal blessing on entire earth. Sun energy cannot be centralized, no monopoly is possible. I did not have not much knowledge so I contact W. Scheffler and I learn from him. But if Scheffler's solar machine is great and very usefull for large uses, it is very complicated, beyond the reach of common masses. Then I designed a small community cooker There are 300 of these solar cookers already in India and we sell them in 25 countries. But I was thinking that one day somebody would find a way to produce simply and at low cost a more powerfull solar energy... and it seems to be you Eerik with your Solar Fire !

You are involve in many social works and you also wrote books about various subjects like indian constitution, economy, traditionnal sari. What do you think about western and eastern worlds?
I think that Europe became a victim of gigantism. In Europe, and maybe also in North America, many people do understand that something is going wrong qnd try to find a way out of it. India is interesting for European people because here the country is still very decentralized, everything still exists at a small scale. India has a key but unfortunately our government is a slave of the same gigantic model and this is because our leader have all been educated in western countries! So poverty and unemployment are increasing here. The Eastern world has his capability to go on, to create his development, we have to stand here, to improve everything that can be like the position of women for example. We have to learn from the West in our terms and the West has to learn the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi and the beauty of simplicity.

Interview by Eerik & Eva Wissenz - Rajkot - 22 Oct. 2009

Sustainable archive

Eerik Wissenz — 2010-01-27T14:19:21Z

- Ecology

Why we left our farms to come to Copenhagen

Eerik Wissenz — 2009-12-17T20:32:02Z

Speech of Henry Saragih, general coordinator of Via Campesina at the opening session of Klimaforum

Tonight is a very special night for us to get together here for the opening of the assembly of the social movements and civil society at the Klimaforum. We, the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, are coming to Copenhagen from all five corners of the world, leaving our farmland, our animals, our forest, and also our families in the hamlets and villages to join you all.

Why is it so important for us to come this far? There are a number of reasons for that. Firstly, we would like to tell you that climate change is already seriously impacting us. It brings floods, droughts and the outbreak of pests that are all causing harvest failures. I must point out that these harvest failures are something that the farmers did not create. Instead, it is the polluters who caused the emissions who destroy the natural cycles. So, we small scale farmers came here to say that we will not pay for their mistakes. And we are asking the emitters to face up to their responsibilities.

Secondly, I would like to share with you some facts about who the emitters of green house gases in agriculture really are: new data that has come out clearly shows that industrial agriculture and the globalized food system are responsible of between 44 and 57% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. This figure can be broken down as follows (i) Agricultural activities are responsible for 11 to 15%, (ii) Land clearing and deforestation cause an additional 15 to 18%, (iii) Food processing, packing and transportation cause 15 to 20%, and (iv) Decomposition of organic waste causes another 3 to 4%. It means that our current food system is a major polluter.

The question we have to answer now is: how do we solve the climate chaos, hunger and assure a better livelihood for farmers, when the agricultural sector itself is contributing more than half of the total emissions? We believe that it is the industrial and agribusiness model of agriculture that is at the root of the problem, because those percentages that I mentioned earlier come from the deforestation and the conversion of natural forests into monoculture plantations, all of which is being carried out by Agribusiness Corporations. Not by familly farmers. Such large emissions of methane by agriculture are also due to the use of urea as a petrochemical fertilizer through the green revolution, very much supported by the World Bank. At the same time, agricultural trade liberalization promoted by free trade agreements (FTA) and by the World Trade Organization (WTO) is contributing to the greenhouse gases emissions due to food processing and food transportation around the world.

If we genuinely want to tackle the climate change crisis, the only way we have to go forward is to stop industrial agriculture. Agribusiness has not only highly contributed to the climate crisis, it has also massacred the small farmers of the world. Millions of farmers , men and women from around the world, have been kicked off their land. Millions of others suffer violence every year because of land conflicts in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Small farmers and landless farmers make up the majority of the more than 1 billion hungry people in the world. And because of free trade, many small farmers commit suicide in South Asia. So putting an end to industrial agriculture is the only way we can go.

Will the current climate negotiations, that are relying on carbon trade mechanisms, bring solutions to climate change? To this we say that carbon trade mechanisms will only serve polluting countries and companies, and bring disaster to small farmers and indigenous peoples in developing countries. The REDD initiative (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) has already kicked off their land many indigenous peoples and small farmers in developing countries. And more and more agricultural land is being converted into tree plantations in order to attract carbon credits.

At COP 13 in Bali 2007, La Via Campesina proposed the landless farmers' and small farmers' solution to climate change, which is: “small scale sustainable farmers are cooling down the earth”. And here, at COP 15, again we bring that proposal, backing it with the figures that prove that it could reduce more than half of the global greenhouse gas emissions. This figure comes from: (I) Recuperating organic matter in the soil would reduce emissions by 20 to 35%. (ii) Reversing the concentration of meat production in factory farms and reintegrating joint animal and crop production would reduce them by 5 to 9% (iii) Putting local markets and fresh food back at the center of the food system would reduce a further 10 to 12%. (iv) Halting land clearing and deforestation would stop 15 to 18% of emissions. In short, by taking agriculture away from the big agribusiness corporations and putting it back into the hands of small farmers, we can reduce half of the global emissions of greenhouse gases. This is what we propose, and we call it Food Sovereignty.

And to achieve that we need social movements to work together and struggle together to put an end to the current false solutions that are today on the table at the climate negotiations. This is a must, otherwise we will face an even bigger tragedy worldwide. We, as social movements, have to bring our own agenda onto the table, because we are the first climate victims and climate refugees and therefore climate justice is in our hands.

At the FAO Food Summit in 1996, governments committed themselves to reduce hunger by half by 2015. The reality is that the number of hungry people has recently increased dramatically. We do not want the same thing to happen with the climate talks and see the emissions increase even further regardless of what the governments negotiate within the UNFCCC.

We invite all the movements present in Copenhagen to join together to bring climate justice to the table. Climate justice will only be achieved through solidarity and social justice.

Copenhagen, 7th December 2009

Secret Mushrooms and their Air Roots

Max — 2009-06-20T17:17:08Z

What do we think we know of Trees ? Only what is obvious to the casual observer ? Or, perhaps we do not even realize to look for what is there ... and if we happen to see a glimpse, we do not recognize what it is ... perhaps it is too mundanely alien to our concepts and world views ?

"Trees are air roots of mycelial entities, mushrooms are the seed pods of the mycelial entities, dropped to the surface from below, dropped from sheltering moist warmth of soil, into the gaseous zone of the planet-side".

What we think of as trees from our habitat's viewpoint, what we think of as the main part of trees, is barely even conscious that there is the mycelial mass covering the root branches within the soil-sphere ... the underground foliage of moistures and nutrients: the other half of the living Tree that is out of our sights, out of our minds...

There they move around underground in the soil-sphere of the ground, of powdered rock and organic remains of expired critters of yesteryear and millenia ago ... in different timescales somewhat .... sensing around in soil-space with their filaments and connections ... and perhaps, just perhaps, the gaseous zone of air that we and our familiar entities inhabit is a mostly scary, exposed, too bright, zone for them ... just their "air-root beings"...

... And we and their other mysterious symbiotes dwell here in the gaseous zone.... ?

Perhaps the area of moisture — as the moisture areas of soil move with years and decades — feels to mycelial beings something like fresh wind feels to trees ?

What is the mass of mycelia of tree-mycelia entity, compared to the mass of the foliage of tree-mycelia entity ? What about the life inter-reaction functions? What are their proportional sizes ? How can they even be measured, except in cut up disjointed numeric data from here and there ... "Mycelia of Boleate-Birch entity, in soil type X, holds Y% of moisture per cubic yard..." but hat about nutrients ? Nutrient transformations ? Symbiote flows that such moisture and nutrients can invite, encourage, and prosperously inhabit in such niches of the Fractal Habitat Being, Living Holy Planet-side Mold layer we call ecosystem and Creation... and ourselves ? What if conditions change ? Wind increases, air moisture dips slightly, temperature rises a bit ? Is this all too complicated for Quarterly thinking to even acknowledge existing ?

MaxT

What Mediterranean Solar Plan for the Poor?

Eva Wissenz — 2009-02-27T18:39:32Z

First published onwww.solarfire.org and BioContact

For the MSP to be developed in the optimum way and in the interests of all it's participants, a diffusion of Micro Solar Concentration technology seems indispensable.

The long term benefits of the Mediterranean Solar Plan (MSP) are clear and indisputable for all the countries of the Union for the Mediterranean. As the plan exists currently, the countries concerned are Souther Europe, North Africa, and a part of Middle East, as well as the Sahara and Sahel zones, of which the bordering countries are particularly touched by accelerating deforestation and desertification.

The short term, direct benefits of the production of electricity will not be visible for citizens who are poor or unequipped in electrical appliances. If parts of the participating populations, already touched by ongoing diverse economic and ecological crisis, find themselves excluded from a project that centers around the sun (a universal and free energy source if ever one existed), those responsible for the Mediterranean Solar Plan may find lack of commitment, a crisis of identity, and a distancing between the participants that risks putting the efficiency of the plan in peril.

It is thus necessary at all cost to avoid the establishment of a logic where those of little means are left on the side. For this we recommend that the MSP make those with little access or use of electricity visible and realistic partners. This can most easily be accomplished with Micro Solar Concentrating Power, that is to say small scale solar concentration for direct uses.

MicroCSP permits:

the decrease in deforestation
the decontamination of water
cooking
the development of local and sustainable economic activities

Small solar concentrators with a power of 1 to 3 KW already exist in the Mediterranean zone, but their diffusion remains small and hampered largely because it is often organized by small associative projects with few development, communication, or follow up means.

For a massive communication with the public on solar energy to occur, we recommend that a small portion of the MSP budget is dedicated to the creation of Solar Centers devoted to MicroSCP.

These centers, ideally present over all the countries involved in the MSP, would have as first task to assemble all the existing MicroSCP technologies, which are largely available on the Internet with indisputable qualities. It is noteworthy that most MicroSCP technologies have free and simple designs, can be constructed from basic materials, can be understood quickly and intuitively, and have a wide range of uses; however, they have unfortunately never been thoroughly compared nor studied in the long term.

In a first time, such a comparative/performance study over a wide range of environments would allow the creation of a necessary database to validate existing technologies and develop new ones. Such a database would have the immediate effect of answering question such as: Which technology is adapted to which environments, natural, economic and cultural? Which technologies are best for what uses? What is the cost-benefit of a given technology for a given situation? What are the performances? What are the obstacles?

This would then permit a diffusion of the most appropriate technologies for the locally identified needs. At the same time instructors, researchers and technicians would be concretely trained in solar technology, permitting a basis for the necessary diffusion of knowledge and skills to build and maintain the MicroCSP devices on the ground.

The centers will naturally communicate their work and knowledge in solar energy throughout industry and society, which also prepares the way for larger SCP electric installations of the MSP in the urban and rural areas of each country.

Such a direct and tangible public awareness from the ground up, from the small to the large, would also help vanquish the cultural obstacles so far experienced by many small MicroCSP projects.

To succeed, here is a proposed working plan : 1. Launch as soon as possible a feasibility study and collection of figures in partnership with diverse institutional, ONG's, associations, and actors in MicroSCP, within the concerned countries (an investigation our association proposes to coordinate).
2. Produce a document presenting a budget and the conditions necessary for the construction of such Solar Centers, which would minimally include a work shop, a terrain, basic materials (steal, aluminum, glass, mirrors), measurement instruments, computers and Internet, and technicians and researchers.
3. Submit a proposal for the launch of pilot centers where it seems most appropriate, for example in Spain, Greece, Lebanon, Morocco, each center tied to a university laboratory, along with a website and Internet database for the communication, gathering and diffusion of the collected data.
4. Integrate the results obtained by the centers in currently existing humanitarian and development programs, develop private sector partnerships, as well as micro credit programs driven by the new economic possibilities of MicroCSP.
5. Multiply the centers, and develop a second generation of MicroCSP, including small scale electricity production and other applications.

Changing energy systems is a slow social and economic process. It is essential not only to transfer the technical and theoretical knowledge to all relevant parties, such as universities, technical training centers, associations etc. but communicate effectively with the public. Solar concentration is simple and there is no reason every member of society cannot understand the principles and proper use of solar device.

To summarize, the advantages of a massive diffusion of MicroSCP would be :

the reduction of deforestation
the reduction of water related illnesses
the creation of new economic activities (roasting, bread baking, pottery, ceramics, produce preservation, or anything requiring high quality heat.)
the creation of jobs in the sustainable economy
a popular, simple and effective communication tool to represent renewable technology
reduction of the load and dependence on electrical grid
contribution to a stable energy system

A large diffusion of Micro Concentrating Solar Power in all the countries of the Mediterranean Solar Plan would be at once an strong humanitarian and economic action as well as concretely prepare a real public awareness to the solar production of electricity on a large scale.

Eerik Wissenz
December 2008

The Science Myth

Eerik Wissenz — 2009-02-26T14:41:09Z

Scientific progress is the main justification of the optimistic world view since it is really the only positive thing that can be said about the state of the world and humanity today. There is the position that the quality of life of people is on the whole higher today than in the past, and that this will continue, but the idea is often met with contradictory information and arguments, and so a need to defend one's position through research and thought is necessary, as well as the philosophic debate about how quality of life can be measured - altogether a disagreeable affair. No one, however, disputes that there has been and continues to be significant scientific progress. And so the argument goes that in the long run this scientific progress will solve all of our problems and propel humanity into some kind of fantasy world. What, if any, environmental or social capital that may have been expended in this scientific gain is reckoned to be worth it.

Unfortunately, the twentieth and most likely the twenty first century will not be known to future generations as the age of scientific progress. Rather, it will be known as the age of genetic degradation. The extinction rate of the world is a thousand times higher than normal. It is estimated that dozens of species go extinct every day. Moreover, from pollution and other stressors even humankind's genes have been undermined along with those of many other creatures.

We can never get back the genetic information we destroy. The benefit of having a faster computer today rather than tomorrow can be calculated, the value of whole species of plants, insects, bacteria, and animals to the biosphere and ourselves cannot. The rapid modern scientific progress will only benefit a small portion of a few generations, a mere second in the history of humanity, whereas retaining and promoting bio-diversity benefits all subsequent generations.

An analogy is a man that finishes building a shed an hour early at the cost of his hand. For the rest of his life he'll wish he had his hand back. The extra hour of shed is soon forgotten. So it will be for any generation that remembers our time.

At best, future generations will wonder of what beautiful flowers we destroyed, what useful insects and bacteria we squashed, what elegant birds we killed, what majestic trees we cut down, what whole branches of chemistry we will we never have knowledge of. They will wonder with frustration in their hearts and despise us. At worst the environment and humanity will fall on hard times and some of the organisms we have driven to extinction - which today a tough love attitude may not think twice about - are the very organisms the ecosystem would need to adapt to the new parameters, and humanity drives itself to extinction. Perhaps life will go on, but is this latter scenario really what we want to work towards?