Empowering Climate Heroes

Combining environmental education with urban greening efforts, we inspire the next generation and create dense, carbon-capturing forests in our cities to combat climate change

surveys by Mattingly's team have shown they were sedentary people living off oasis agriculture. They constructed a sophisticated irrigation system that allowed them to grow wheat, barley, sorghum, date palms, and olives. Underground canals—called foggaras—tapped into groundwater and directed it to fields without loss to evaporation. Six hundred miles of these canals can still be detected. The system worked well for hundreds of years. And then the "fossil" water, stored up in wet times, started to give out, and the civilization collapsed.

(...)Mattingly says he likes archaeology because "it has lessons for today." Fifteen hundred years after the fall of the Garamantes, the Libyan government is now building the Great Man-Made River, a series of huge aqueducts to mine ancient underground water reserves below the Sahara and use them to make the desert bloom. The water being pumped was deposited tens of thousands of years ago, in much wetter times. Already the water table is declining because of the pumping. The project has an estimated life span of only 50 to 100 years, a blink of the eye in this region.

 

 

The site is located in the Al Jawfa area in western Jordan, Shouneh Janobieh (i.e., South Shouneh), in the Dead Sea Valley just 10km north of the Dead Sea and 6 km east of the Jordanian-Palestinian border, directly east of the West Bank. The local population is made up of traditional Bedouin tribes and long-term refugees stemming from displacement of local populations from within Palestine. The project site is typical of the area – a marginal arid-land low-income settlement. 

Our Project site demonstrates energy-efficient appropriate housing with natural cooling systems and a plant nursery attachment, solar electricity, solar hot water, biological waste water treatment recycling, dry compost toilets, rainwater harvesting earthworks and diverse interactive plant, animal and tree systems for local food production and processing. The demonstration house functions as a classroom and administration office for the project and local Permaculture group. We also have a on site cafe and ecolodge that will help to contribute to the funding of the project whilst housing and catering for guests that can learn a great deal by visiting the project