Dec. 82/Jan. 83 RAIN Page 6 Green Oe'serts: Green Deserts is a small group based in Britain which has for the last eight years been trying to help people in arid lands work out ways of growing their own food, fuel, and fodder while actively enriching the earth of the Earth. The methods which seem to be emerging center on the reintegration of agriculture, forestry, and animal husbandry into a unified and ecologically-balanced system in which wastes are recycled and natural energies and appropriate technologies are employed. Ofcourse, these ideas are not really new to RAIN readers . . . But what is unusual is that here is one group which is actually putting the theories to practice and sending research, photo-documentation, educational and agro-forestry teams out on field projects into difficult desert countries. Over the years we've done tree planting in Abu Dhabi, Jordan, Tunisia, and are now working on a long-tenn project to reclaim and conserve prime cropland along the Nile and Atbara rivers in northern Sudan, in co-operation with the Sudan Government and the Sudan Council of Churches. Last year, a major expedition was mounted by Green Deserts in which 12 people, six Land Rovers, and literally tons of spare parts were dispatched overland from East Anglia across Europe and down through the Egyptian Sahara to Sudan. The Land Rovers and remaining parts were sold in order to raise enough money to get the projects started. The official British Overseas Development Administration was then convinced to provide matching funds for field expenses to keep things going. Green Deserts' work in the Sudan centers on three separate but related projects: 1) The improvement of small farms and agro-forestry experimentation within the areas protected by shelterbelts of trees; 2) The introduction of various leguminous tree crops in the unprotected outlying areas to provide additional animal forage and cooking fuel for drought-stricken pastoral nomads; and 3) The setting up of a mobile village agricultural exension service using an entertaining puppet show combined with traditional dancing, singing and story telling to complement courses in tree planting techniques. So far we've had an especially good response from the villagers first visited by the mobile extension unit, and early results from the desert tree planting trials with the herdsmen are encouraging. Green Deserts is also active in Britain, building public awareness through seminars and audio/visual presentations on a number of environmental topics. Much of the source material for this comes from our own Visual Information Service (VIS), an on-going project to provide planet-wide photo-documentation of the world's deserts and deforested areas and the reclamation efforts underway. Some financial support for our activities is coming from a growing network of members, and a few small businesses run by our core group in rural Suffolk. Most of our funding, however, is raised during a three day festival known as The Rougham Tree Fair which the Green Deserts group has been organizing every year since 1978. As the most widely attended event of its kind in Europe, the Tree Fair has become famous for bringing a wide variety of musical groups, theatre troupes, and fringe performers of every kind together with one of the finest informal exhibitions of local traditional craftsmanship (weaving, pottery, wood-carvng, etc.) to be found anywhere. Beneath all this runs a strong undercurrent of environmental awareness, surfacing in the fonn of discussions, films, ANs, and demonstrations on organic farming, A.T., ecology and of course, trees. Culturally speaking, the Tree Fair is an important, though casual confluence where the mainstream society can safely splash about in some warm New Age waters without feeling threatened by the rising tide of transformation that is flowing from the future. While the important issues of nuclear power, disannament and hunger have been flooding public consciousness, concern for some even more essential basics like
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