The universe is a place so sacred, so profound, that at even the thought of the profane, it vanishes. They reach out, and it is gone.
-Lao Tzu.
SUPERFOOD SUPERFOREST, ALTO UCAYALI DECEMBER 2010.
I never planned to do this food forestry project in Pueblo Nuevo de Caco, Alto Ucayali, in mid December 2010, although I had been contemplating and researching Amazonian forestry, conservation and power foods for some time, and even planned several sites.
Conservation promotion in the region, especially of the majestic old growth trees, could land you with a bullet in the head in these times of economic crisis when the province´s main source of income is from illegally logged Amazonian old growth timber, such as Kinilla and Shihuahuaco, sold to Chinese, South Korean or Japanese buyers with representatives in Pucallpa City, the large port town in the centre of Ucayali Province, 114km North of this Native Shipibo Community on the River Caco.
In fact I had only just returned from another trip to Alto Ucayali where I had helped a passionate young Shipibo named Bima and a photographer from Lima, accompanied by a distinctively piratey looking Belgian ayahuasca drinker named Gaspar, document illegal logging on Shipibo lands. The trunks they had piled up were of stupendous girth; those house sized rainforest giants that transport us to a world of child like amazement at nature´s mighty achievements over time immemorial and prehistoric.
The loggers had thrown away the top half of the trunk and shipped out only the monolithic lower portion, disgracefully wasteful behaviour for a province with a logging problem. Still, whether they made good use of the timber or not, or how much the Pacific Asian buyer paid for it seemedto metter little after the great grandfather trees with all their memories had been unceremoniously plucked from the mother forest without so much as a thank you.
Only the previous week I had seen these old growth trees in a vision on the edge of Lake Yarinacocha, surrounded be rainbow light and with stars in their root systems. Not the first time I had seen this kind of vision, I theorized that the stars must represent the celestial energies that the old trees have sequestered over time, making them a kind of multi centenarian clock or record keeper. There are now credit schemes for carbon capture, but we should also take note of the spiritual aspect of the forests, which becomes our muse when times are ripe. We should ask ourselves what the elimination of these great organisms does to not only the biosphere but to the noosphere, our collective planetary mind energy.
In fact the break between the logging documentation trip and the food forestry trip was not even sufficient for me to return to my shack on the outskirts of the famous San Fransico, a kind of latter day spa town for French, Japanese and other foreigners seeking spiritual healings and openings from the magical dimethyltryptamine brew ayahuasca. As such I had no clean clothes for the trip, so I grabbed a cheap pair of pantaloons and a tanktop from the market as I rounded up the things for the trip – foods, seeds, agricultural tools, compass, oil barrels, and of course our delivery of 3000 small chocolate trees which had been prepared over the last semester by a group of students from the technical college outside Pucallpa.
After a lot of faffing around with the heavy plants in boxes and trucks, we had our whole boat laden with cacao plants until there was almost no room for our crew and the four of us – yours truly, Shipibo permaculturist German, community senior Don Francisco, and the ever eccentric Professor Julio Luis Torrejon of the Fundacion Biodiversidad de Pucallpa.
After the business of loading the boat up in the bustling Puerto Pucallpa, the 18 hour boat trip to the South turned out to be very pleasant, with clear skies and both black and the famous pink Amazonian River Dolphins bidding us welcome to their watery world.
While I got to grips with peeling macambo, cacao´s less well known big brother, the Professor and German bonded over the fact that they both have one testicle larger than the other, a coincidence which prompted German to consult the Professor, an amateur witchdoctor among other things, over which plants he could use to enlarge his virile member.
We scoffed various goodly fruitings aboard our vessel, the Adonay, including the small sweet guineo banana, macambo, papaya and mangoes, an introduction from Asia, gathered from the riverbanks in great quantity.
On our arrival the native community inhabitants turned out in great number to carry the chocolate trees off the boat. Later it turned out to their destination was the other side of the community, and the boxes of chocolate trees were very heavy. We didn´t know what to do, as our boat had already departed, leaving us without a means of moving them downriver.
Then, as luck would have it, the logging outfit from the nextdoor concession (as I said loggin is everywhere in this province) lent us their great big tractor to move the boxes, which if you ask me, with my infantile environmentalist ideals, is a far better use of a tractor than opening logging roads!
We sheltered the trees under a strand of Shapaja palm trees at the entrance to the trail that led to the “purma”, or secondary forest, where we were to plant the chocolate and other plants, which would be saved from clearing by our ecological rather than industrial plantation method.
The purma forms a 1km long buffer zone before reaching the primary forest, which is a protective feature that can be replicated in other zones, where productive food forest forms a belt which protects the primary ecosystem in three important ways:
Physically, as a barrier, especially if the productive belt is guarded from the various agro-thieves and illegal loggers which abound in regions such as this.
Occupationally, as the local people are investing their time and effort in this enterprise rather than twiddling their thumber over their nutritionally impoverished plates of ever scarcer fish and boiled starch, thinking the only source of money is timber so they had better focus on extraction, ignoring the incredible biological and nutritional wealth of these forests and their potential contribution to the alleviation of world hunger and economic regeneration, and a source of work in which they could feel uplifted by their contribution to the world, rather than their contribution to a rich Asian´s bed.
Economically, food forestry can be a barrier to cutting the old growth and destroying the homes of thousands of forest species through providing an alternative source of income to the locals. It’s the old cliché of “making forests worth more standing than cut”,
especially if the old growth trees can be specifically protected for their climate functions, spiritual significance, biological wealth, or as a source of seeds to plant more trees from timber, reforestation, species conservation, or even high grade gourmet and medicinal fungi. The involvement of Lush in Pueblo Nuevo de Caco is a new exemplar of this process in Alto Ucayali basin, with its direct protection of old growth Palo Rosa trees from Colombian loggers through their employment as Palo Rosa seed sources (semilleros).
CREDITS, carbon etc, part of this economic alternative.
The macrofauna similarly gain protection when these small communities have their nutritional needs met in an alternative fashion with high quality plant foods, the difficult job of hunting will quickly be abandoned, and other causes of hunting such as the animal skin trade are already drying up.
In Pueblo Nuevo de Caco, their forestry system has already begun such an old growth tree employment process (Ruth´s photos.) with endangered species such as timber tree Ishpingo and the perfume producing Palo Rosa, which is so rare that trips are made by Don Francisco to camp underneath old growth Palo Rosa and collect the seeds.
“Employing” old growth trees in manners such as this ensures the health of each species´ gene pool, and provides a means of monitoring and protecting the milenial old growth from logging into the bargain.
Perhaps rather than risk bullets in the head or badly made knives in the back, a way forward could be found to regeneratively timber farm Amazonia and other tropical timber zones such as Borneo, by protecting the old growth, that irreplaceable element around which the tropical rainforest hangs, and farming its seeds as medium sized trees, which can grow to a reasonable size in less than 100 years.
Indeed an old growth tree may equal 10 medium width trees in its improbable mass, but if it produces hundreds of seeds and therefore children over hundreds of years, conservation will lead to more timber, not less, and yearly seedings would mean harvests can begin after 40 years or less. In the meantime there are more than enough medium sized trees in the Amazonian lands to supply timber in the intermediate period.
Like food forestry, or analogue forestry as the biologists call it with their impenetrable terminology, such old growth timber conservation seed schemes would integrate with the forest and possibly even enrich it. The old growth trees maintain a canopy height and therefore the size of a column of humidity which maintains the correct conditions for rainforest biology and the rain making functions, which here in the largest forest left on earth precipitate the largest freshwater system, the precious Amazon basin.
The environmentalist voice should clarify its demands for ancient forest management and regeneration to these impoverished areas of the world which lack education and awareness of alternatives. Through intelligent strategies enemies can be converted into allies, and the environmentalists can transcend the negativity that on one hand often alienates them from the global community, and on the other hand turns their statements of alarm into fuel for fear based big business and repressive environmental policies.
The international community must set a size limit on tropical timber trees, perhaps even arranging incentives or better prices for the medium sized 50 – 200 year old trunks. There are easily enough of such trees to last until the next generation of seeded trees has matured. They could even be seeded in avenues, mirroring our food forestry, to facilitate harvesting and prevent monoculture blocks which are damaging to biodiversity, especially when they are felled all at once, creating large forest gaps.
To get back to the topic of our Amazonian food forestry expedition, I first visited Pueblo Nuevo de Caco at the beginning of November 2010 at the invitation of Brasilian Ruth and British Ben of Lush, that soap shop back in blighty with the overwhelming scent that causes you to almost faint on entry.
They were going to take samples of the newly planted Palo Rosa perfume tree with a view to future purchase. Palo Rosa tree derivatives were previously a source of business in the region until they became virually extinct in the accessible riverine area around Pucallpa.
I had been planning Amazonian food forestry ecosystems and working with some of the world´s finest native cacao all year, and when the Lush group learned that the community was about to clearcut a large area for hybridized cacao plantations I was asked to give a talk to the community with the two local permaculturists Limber and German. It was the sort of talk that well organized linear brains could have spent a long time preparing for, but we spoke well and the community opted to try my cacao forestry design instead of the proposed clearcut hybridized government plantation, and in the process save the secondary purma forest, that it might one day return to full growth in continuum with the primary ecosystem
On our return in mid December I could not resist bringing a few extra superfood species to liven up the food forest. I took the high quality oily chocolatey ungurahui fruit, two big buckets of the stuff, cousin of the freakishly fashionable acai. Acai grows wild here but the season is only just starting, but I taught them to make a nursery for growing more baby acai palms in my absence when the seeds became available later this month.
I also took the brain regenerating Tahitian miracle fruit Noni, Asia´s finest bean the Mung, the omnipresent papaya and pineapples, cacao´s big brother Macambo, and the fine vines mucuna, passionfruit and the marvelous sacha inchi or incan peanut, bearer of the finest omega oils in existence.
The purma was worked from a north south access trail. Using a compass and tape measure the team marked off avenues every 5m which were then machete-cut into the forest in an east west orientation, so that the sun´s daily arc would pass along the avenue with its thinned undergrowth and understory and permit maximum filtered light to reach the food plants.
Cacao plants were dug into the thick fertile forest soil, which would have rapidly eroded in a clearcut or slash and burn plantation scenario, at 5 metre intervals along the east-west forest avenues, with a generous helping of fertile river sediments brought in bucket and wheelbarrow loads by the group of Shipibo men. In some avenues we intercalated the cacao plants with macambo, cormiñon and ungurahui seeds, but most of the other species´ seeds we installed in nurseries so the young plants could be transplanted to the avenues toward the other end of the rainy season. The nurseries were simply larger areas of forest floor opened up while leaving young trees standing so that they would mature and regenerate the ecosystem. The areas planted with mung bean would not need transplanting as they could grow to maturity where they were. The vegetation was hacked up and arranged into lines of mulch and seed holes were opened with a sharpened treepole. All good ancient permaculture techniques! The men could replicate this process extremely quickly, and it was possible to imagine how this ecological technique could fill huge areas quickly with a larger team and produce vast quantities of sustenance. Using pre petroleum, or post petroleum, techniques, rice farming is said to produce the largest energy return for work input, about 8 times the calorific input. I started wondering if our Amazon permaculture might score even higher.
Throughout the work we saw many different tree colours and morphologies, and were glad we could save these trees from felling before they became truly worthy Amazonian proportions, along with the many reptiles, birds and small mammals that skittered across our newly opened avenues. The men really enjoyed the work and laughed and joked throughout the enjoyable process, which I was told is how the Shipibo like to work! In particular German said he enjoyed working with me as I worked to maintain a happy energy and not steely serious and imperious like some foreign scientists and permaculturists he has worked with, who are permeated with a sense of impending doom which does not always translate well to locals the immediate concerns of whom do not extend far into the future or far outside their own modest needs.
I was particularly rewarded by the confirmation of my theory that this kind of ecological food forestry can not only be ecological but also humanitarian in that the men said they loved working under the canopy with its “frescura”; the combination of sun shielding dappled shade and the many light refreshing breezes that result from the uneven solar heating of the undercanopy. I wondered how many plantation farmers in the tropics would benefit not only from the more varied and nutritious diet and greater economic return from such superfood superforests, but also from the much more agreeable fresh and shaded working conditions as opposed to working the bare eroding face of the ground under relentless heat and skin damaging and sight blinding ultraviolet tropical and equatorial sunlight.
I learned a lot for the future on this trip, and it was very helpful to see some of my food forest designs come to fruition at last. The selection was, when you consider the marvels the Amazon is capable of, extremely limited, but still far better than most of these small communities produce, not realizing their natural inheritance after years of conditioning by missionaries into a money rather than biology and energy orientated reality. In particular I will be planting more fruits in the future. The community already had one of the holy Lucuma fruit trees and I advised them to make a nursery of its seeds in the way we had worked together in this first session. Here is a Peruvian article with some attractive photography of some of these amazonic fruits!
selvamix.blogspot.com
*DIET exp
….Separate articles, Tony Wright theories and the double blasphemy diet!
