Andhra Pradesh and other great solutions stories resources
"List of all webpages sent to Frankie from Gerry Marten concerning EcoTipping Points and success stories of sustainable development around the world. The email from him is copied below the list.
http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/india-pest-managemen...
http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/india-pest-managemen...
http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/video/india/index.html
http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/thailand-watershed-f...
http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/thailand-watershed-f...
http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/video/thailand/index.htmlhttp://ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/mexico-oaxaca-community-...
www.ecoinflexiones.org
http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/china
http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/china/apo-island.html
http://ecotippingpoints.org/resources/presentation-food-resilience/prese...
http://gerrymarten.com/traditional-agriculture/tableofcontents.html
http://gerrymarten.com/publicatons/west-Java.html
http://gerrymarten.com/human-ecology/tableofcontents.html
Hi Frances,
Great to hear from you! We did an update report on Non-Pesticide Management (NPM) a few years ago. It’s at http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/india-pest-managemen... on the same webpage that you listed in your message to me. Our most recent update, just a few months ago, is Ted Swagerty’s report at http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/india-pest-managemen.... Ted talked to leaders of the key nonprofit organizations promoting NPM and visited some villages to talk to people there. While our video at http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/video/india/index.html says that NPM was in more than 3,000 villages by 2008, NPM is now in 11,600 villages, according to the director of the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty, the lead organization for NPM dissemination. The head of another organization says it’s more than 14,000 villages. Anyway, Ted’s report offers details about how they organize NPM dissemination.
You may be particularly interested in the interaction of NPM with Bt cotton, which swept the region at the same time NPM was spreading. In general, NPM farmers felt no ideological purity to avoid GMOs, so they also adopted Bt cotton. Many farmers would now like to get away from Bt cotton because of seed supply problems the past few years, but my NPM colleagues in India tell me there is virtually no non-Bt cotton seed to be found these days.
If you’re thinking about cases, I urge you to keep in mind:
· Our “Agroforestry and community forest management” story from Thailand (http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/thailand-watershed-f...). This page includes a lot of information about the community organizing that got it started (done by a former student of mine), as well as details about their agriculture such as the farmer design principles for their agroforestry/polyculture (http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/thailand-watershed-f...). The 15-minute video at http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/video/thailand/index.html is pretty dramatic.
· Our story about farmers in the Mixteca Region of Mexico rescuing their land from deforestation/desertification is also spectacular (http://ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/mexico-oaxaca-community-...).
I’d like to mention a few other things about the EcoTipping Points Project, just in case something strikes a chord:
· The EcoTipping Points website and videos have been in Spanish for several years (www.ecoinflexiones.org). Now we’re translating the website into Chinese. You can see the Chinese homepage at http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/china and our flagship Apo Island story (including the video in Chinese) at http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/china/apo-island.html. We’re now preparing a Chinese version of the NPM video.
· The main EcoTipping Points Project activity during the past year has been collaboration with the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) on North American Food Resilience. You may recall that I talked with you about this on the telephone in January of last year. The AESS food resilience working group did three 90-minute sessions on this theme at last year’s AESS conference. A downloadable file at http://ecotippingpoints.org/resources/presentation-food-resilience/prese... provides a complete record of those sessions, including PowerPoint presentations and every word of the oral presentations and discussion. I particularly recommend looking at the first presentation: “An overview of American food resilience.” There will be three more food resilience sessions at this year’s AESS conference in June, and a special issue of the AESS journal later this year will provide twenty-five articles that examine the food system from a variety of perspectives that touch on our bottom line of vulnerabilities and resilience in food supply. I’ve attached a list of abstracts for those articles. If you have any feedback about this or know of any other key players who might be able to help us frame this complex and high-stakes issue, I’d be grateful to know about it.
· The EcoTipping Points Project has just embarked on developing EcoTipping Points video games. I’m starting to work with a game designer in Pittsburgh who was recommended by Games for Change. I don’t know where this is going to lead, but I figure it’s worth a shot. Again, if you know of any game developers with whom I might talk, I’d like to know about them.
· Finally, the EcoTipping Points Project may embark on trying to get some money for activities that we haven’t been able to afford so far. Until now, everything on the Project website, and our activities as facilitators for users of our “How Success Works” educational materials, has been low-hanging fruit that we’ve plucked with no institutional budget and no grants. The key has been collaborators who contributed their time. We’ve kept operating expenses low, and I’ve put in a few dollars from time to time as needed. A strategy of “just doing it” instead of wasting time trying to get money has paid off, but things like game development and expanding the scale of our technical support to educational use of EcoTipping Points materials could require stepping up the budget. Again, please let me know if you think of any people who might be able to help us. It could be someone good at fund raising, who could help us to do it. Or maybe a private or institutional donor who would appreciate the Project and want to help step up the scale.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with my book Traditional Agriculture in Southeast Asia, which is available in its entirety online (http://gerrymarten.com/traditional-agriculture/tableofcontents.html). An example of something that might interest you is the description of Javanese agriculture in Chapters 6 and 14, and how it provides so much food with so little land. An article at http://gerrymarten.com/publicatons/west-Java.html covers some of the same ground about details of garden structure and what it means for specific amino acids, vitamins, and minerals.
Anyway, everyone is welcome to copy anything from the EcoTipping Points website, or the Traditional Agriculture book or my Human Ecology book online (http://gerrymarten.com/human-ecology/tableofcontents.html), for any use as long as the source is acknowledged.
All the best,
Gerry