Monday, August 04, 2008 Editorial: Greening Bisdaks
IN AN ocean of green, the bush stands out, with its flamboyant purple leaves and small vivid red flowers.
Catching the eye of a first-time visitor, the plant is identified as a species of Jatropha by Edna Lee, entrepreneur and passionate gardener.
A survivor with a high tolerance for pests and drought, Jatropha is valued in the Philippines and other places with challenging environments.
It is the seeds, though, that make the plant much prized. Containing up to 40 percent oil, the seeds are processed to yield oil that can be used in a standard diesel engine. The biomass residue can power electricity plants.
But Edna is not particularly moved by the biodiesel fuel potentials of Jatropha. She said that the Jatropha bushes thriving in their garden are bird-planted. “Bati ni. Mas maayo mananom ug makaon (it is better to plant for food than for fuel).”
In the Kamagayan Green Zone (KGZ), the garden that Edna helped start and nurture, producing for home consumption, not selling, is a priority.
This principle—along with caring for the earth, caring for people and sharing the surplus—forms the cornerstone of permaculture.
Cebu for Bisdaks
When Edna and older brother Joel came home to Cebu, they ended up doing more than help their widowed mother, Vilma, manage the family business.
Partnering with family friends, Joel, Edna and Vilma formed and registered the nongovernment organization, Cebu Permaculture Initiatives Inc. in 2007.
While working for her masteral degree in Clinical Psychology, Edna was introduced to permaculture as a volunteer constructing eco-houses made of straw bale for immigrant families in New Mexico. Fusing the concepts of “permanent” and “culture,” permaculture is the “study of the design of sustainable or enduring systems that support human society,” according to Bill Mollison, who coined the term and conceptualized the theory with fellow Australian David Holmgreen.
Beginning as an agro-ecological design theory in the 1970s, permaculture became a “lifestyle ethic” when it drew global followers that swapped alternative ideas, trainings, teaching modules, literature and garden designs through websites, Internet forums and international work-for-travel arrangements like WWOOFing.
Convinced that permaculture offered a viable perspective for dealing with an increasingly uncertain future, Joel underwent an intensive two-week design course at the Permaculture Research Institute (PRI) in New South Wales last March 2007. He attended also the 2007 Permaculture Convergence, a national convention that commemorated the movement’s 30th anniversary in Australia.
Joel, Edna and their 15-year-old nephew, Miko, studied for one week at the Cabiokid permaculture farm of Lawton’s former student, Bert Peeters, in Cabiao, Nueva Ecija. After witnessing how a monocropped, pesticide-dependent farm succeeded as an experiment in biodiversity and sustainability, Edna observed that these ideas could be adapted to return “Cebu to the Bisdak (native Cebuanos).”
Greening the red
The Lee family’s faith in a natural and resilient ecosystem is literally growing in front of their eyes in their 1,200-square meter property in Barangay Kamagayan. Surrounded by practitioners of the oldest illicit trades in Cebu’s red-light district, the KGZ was transformed from being the family’s warehouse and parking space into a lizard-shaped garden with a forest belt of indigenous perennials like acacia, organically grown vegetables, herbs and spices, fruit-bearing trees and plants, corn and tilapia. It is also a hangout for birds, butterflies and other insects.
After their first harvest of corn and vegetables last May, which was shared with employees and friends, the Cebu Permaculture Initiatives Inc. is constructing a service area for seed storage, fertility laboratory, worm farm and composting.
The Lees are also planning to convert their late father’s Bacsije, Carcar retirement place into a demo permaculture farm.
According to Joel and Edna, permaculture can be scaled to match any size or resource base of household, garden or farm.
For instance, a family with limited ground area for gardening can convert their rooftop, normally “dead space,” into an urban garden for raising vegetables, herbs and even chickens for their consumption.
Following the renewable energy principle of gray water, households can reuse wash water for flushing. Collecting rain for watering plants, covering soil with shredded coconut husk to reduce evaporation, linking with agencies for technology transfer and free inputs (i.e. Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources for fish fry, Department of Environment and Natural Resources for seedlings)—these are some of the ideas that Joel and Edna want to share with any individual or group that wants to “make Cebu a livable place.”
