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Travel report, Philippines September 2009
(This article is also available in Norwegian)
Visit to Katunggan Permaculture Art Farm I think I start where the trip ended, with the visit to Katunggan Permaculture Art Farm, situated just outside the town of Carcar approximately 45 km south of Cebu City. Our original plan was for both Espen and me to visit the place the last week end before we left, but due to the typhoon Ketsana, some of the ships had to be canceled and Espen was in the end left with the task of getting on his airplane to Africa to get back to his work as marine chief engineer on time.  Joel Lee is the leader of Cebu Permaculture Initiatives. Katunggan Permaculture Art Farm is operated by Cebu Permaculture Initiatives. Before I went I had the impression from videos I had seen on YouTube that the project was operated by another European in the Philippines. But it was a pleasant surprise to learn that the people behind the project are actually all Filipino.It is always nice to find local initiatives of this kind. The foreigner I thought was behind it, was Belgian Bert Peeters, whom they use as adviser from time to time. That’s why he appears in their videos. Hence, my misunderstanding. Another foreigner they also use as adviser is the American Dave Deppner, well known for having planted more than 50 million trees, and counting, around the world. There is a link list at the end of this article with links to the webpages of these two gentlemen, and more. The chairperson of Cebu Permaculture Initiatives is Joel Lee. Joel has an ice cream business in Cebu City and it is the profit from this business he now invests in permaculture projects. In addition to the place in Carcar, the Initiative also has Elicon Permaculture café in the heart of Cebu City, and the Kamagayan Green Zone, which is an urban garden situated in walking distance from Elicon. We plan to visit both places in Cebu City on a later occation. But as we were not aware of them before the trip, and therefore hadn’t planned to visit them I also ran out of time before I too had to catch my plane out of the Philippines. At the Pemaculture Art Farm in Carcar they are not only farming according to permaculture principles. They are also into permaculture aquaculture, planting a mangrove forest in the sea to provide a habitat for marine life, like crabs and fish. These mangroves are the ones that have given the place its name. Katunggan means mangrove in the local language.  The edge of the mangroves. Unfortunately they have found it necessary to protect the trees behind barbed wire in the sea, to keep people from cutting down the trees for fire wood and goat's food. Sufficient access to water is a very important condition for developing a property so life can thrive there. And a permaculture farm is no exception to the rule. Instead of pumping water up from the ground, a permaculture designer typically asks the question how to stop the water from ending up deep into the ground in the first place. Therefore they have constructed 3 man made ponds on the property, to supply it with water. Later they plan to use solar and wind power to irrigate the rest of the property with water from the ponds. They also plan to combine permaculture with ecotourism and adventure holidays in which the ponds will be used for kayaking, swimming and fishing.  Man made ponds are typical parts of a permaculture project. At Katunggan Permaculture Art Farm, they would like to combine permaculture with ecotourism and adventure holidays. The spider net and the platform you can see on the trees behind the pond are parts of an obstacle course that is part of the adventure holiday concept. The area of the property is 4 hectare. In addition to the ponds and the mangroves, it also contains a permaculture vegetable garden, a mini forest and an area that is being laid our for ecological rice production. The place will act as a training ground for permaculture, combined with being a resort for ecotourism and adventure holidays. They also keep bees on the property. When Joel heard that my education is in electronics, he gave me and the Green Life Innovators community a challenge. Apparently a bee colony makes different sounds reflecting the well being of the bees. Joel suggested to build a device that could analyze the sound and thereby being able to remotely monitor the life in a beehive. This would reduce the bee keepers’ needs for manual inspection, as bees have a nasty habit of welcoming such inspections in their own very special way. I will put out a proposal for how I see such a circuit could be built in principal shortly on our wiki, together with an invitation to the community to take up the challenge.
Those of you who wish to get in touch with Cebu Permaculture Initiatives can proceed in the following manner: Elicon Permaculture Café should be the easiest location to find. It is situated on P. del Rosario Street, right across the main entrance to San Carlos Universitety in Cebu City. In Elicon you can also ask if someone would show you the way to the Kamagayan Green Zone nearby. This is the way to get to Katunggan Permaculture Art Farm in Carcar: 1. Please contact them before you come to agree on a time to visit
2. Take the bus from Cebu South Bus Terminal, direction Carcar and beyond 3. Stay on the bus through the city center of Carcar and to a street crossing called NAPO 4. Exit the bus at NAPO and take a trike (3 wheel motorcycle taxi) down the road that goes to the left at NAPO seen from the direction you traveled to get there. Go to you see a basketball court on the right hand side. Immediately before the basketball court there is a dirt road into the landscape behind the court. Follow this dirt road until you reach a property protected by a barbed wire fence and a big gate. Then you are there.
The search for other local organizations We also spent some time while we were there, searching for other local initiatives, whom we might seek friendship and cooperation with. We found one that is called Global Legal Action On Climate Change (please see the link list at the end of the article) that is founded and operated by Filipinos. One of the founders is involved in an initiative named School of The Seas, which happens to be situated on Bantayan Island, where we are based. We got in touch with him on the net through the web site of Global Legal Action On Climate Change. He told us that we were welcome to drop in on the School of The Seas anytime. So, I went to see them twice, but unfortunately I did not find any people there, neither the first, nor the second time I dropped by. I did, however, stroll the place. It seems to me that they too are doing some permaculture design, although in a smaller scale than the place we visited in Carcar. On the area, I found what I believe to be 2 small man made ponds. They also had a pedal driven compost shredder, made up of the shredder itself combined with an old bicycle. Anyway, we plan to visit them again on a later occasion, when there is “somebody home”. If any of our readers know of other Filipino organizations that we should try to get in touch with, tips are welcome. Air pollution is a big problem in the Philippines The trip this time also marks the beginning of a pretty ambitious plan for the future. We would like do make a serious contribution to combat the air pollution problem in the Philippines. The air in the Philippines is really, really dirty. If you scratch yourself on bare skin that has been outdoors for half a day or so, you are destined to have black dirt under your finger nails immediately. The problem is so huge, that when you look at it you would hardly know where to begin. The main cause is exhaust from cars, motorcycles and boats. They don’t seem to have any restrictions on the emissions from internal combustion engines in the Philippines. To try to start dealing with the problem in this end, would be a too formidable task, though. We would “break our necks” in the attempt if we tried to start there.  On Bantayan Island, where we are based, most people have an outdoor fireplace, like this one where they do the cooking. Hence, cooking over an open fire does not constitute the same health hazard as in the cities, where lack of space often makes it necessary to cook over an open fire indoors. But I would not describe cooking in such an outdoor fireplace as healthy either, just take a look at the layer of soot inside. Another problem is that they have this habit of burning their garbage on an open fire, even inside the cities. This fills the air with a certain ever present bad smell. You notice it as soon as you leave the airport after arriving. I am pretty sure that if I was blind folded and taken on air trips around to the different countries I have visited, I would be able to tell just from the smell of the air when I had arrived in the Philippines. Of course, after being exposed to this air for a couple of hours you don’t notice any more. The sense of smell works like that. We could have started our work here, teaching greener way of waste treatment, and some day we will take up on this issue, but this time we chose to start with something else, namely smoke pollution from cooking over an open fire. Cooking over an open fire, even indoors, constitutes a major health hazard in many developing countries, not just in the Philippines. Each year the smoke from these fires cause many, many cases of respiratory disorders, even death around the world. As we saw when we visited the farm in Carcar people are also, given the chance, cutting down the mangroves that could be put to better use there instead, to use them for fire wood. That is why they have had to put up barbed wire to protect the mangroves. So, methods that would greatly reduce the need for firewood would be highly desirable. One such method is to burn the wood in a so called rocket stove, which burns it cleaner, with less smoke and more efficiently, so that it does not require so much fire wood. We will look into the rocket stove on future trips as the alternative for days with bad weather, which we experiences a lot of during this trip, I might add. But this time we focused on the nice weather solution, solar cooking. Solar cooking  CooKit, a panel solar cooker in card board and aluminium foil. We used this as template for our first prototype, but eventually reached the conclusion that the entire design was not suitable for the conditions at our location. Cooking with the heat from the sun is an obvious choice in a country where there is a lot of sunshine. A typical solar cooker utilizes one or more of the following principles to work: 1. Solar concentrator. using reflectors you can concentrate the energy radiated from the sun into a larger area into a smaller one. You can even use lenses for this purpose. 2. Black thermal mass, typically a black pot. A black surface absorbs the energy of the sun light more than any other surface. Therefore we typically place a black pot in the solar concentrators focal point. 3. Green house effect. A green house works in the following way. The energy in the sun light that is in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, that is light that we can see, goes through a transparent material. But the radiated heat, in the infrared part of the spectrum does not pass through the wall of the green house, so it is trapped inside and gives an increase in temperature. The cooker in the picture uses an ordinary cooking bag as green house. Solar cookers come in many shapes, and they are not exactly difficult to make, but we had given ourselves an additional requirement that made it all a lot more challenging. We wished to develop a concept that would make it possible to produce a solar cooker solely from locally available materials and within the limitations given by the economy of the local population. If you click around the Internet, visiting others that are involved in similar projects, you will see that almost all of them presuppose that the production of such devices one way or another should be paid for by money from richer countries. It seems like it is almost a reflex among westerners, every time they come across a situation where there appears to be a shortage of resources somewhere, that the solution is to bring in resources from somewhere else. You might not get past the point that you have to finance research and development of a concept that way. But when it comes to the production, be it on a large scale or for personal use, we seek to find a solution that does not necessitate someone else, on the opposite side of the world, paying for it. There are many reasons behind this point of view. First of all, reallocation of resources does not really constitute a long term sustainable solution and therefore we should try to minimize it to situations where we want to achieve some kind of transition. We should not make everyday production, after the principles have been made known, dependent upon donations from elsewhere. This is also about empowering people. If we put people in a situation where we expect them to start using some simple technology, as this, and at the same time put them in a situation where they become dependent upon others to pay for it, we would be doing the exact opposite of empowering them. Cheaper than “4T” 4T is the abbreviation of a rule of thumb that we have named: “Tverback’s triple Tanduay theorem.” This rule of thumb was coined by GLI’s deputy chairman, Espen Tverback, hence the first t. It goes like this. “The willingness among most of the the islanders when it comes to paying for a new household item has a limit. This limit is approximately the price of three bottles of Tanduay rum. ” Or to put it another way. At the point where you have just enough money to get good friends together for a small party, this tends to become more important than acquiring some new things. The 4T-sentence says nothing about the ability to pay for a new item. This ability is also not very high in general, but not as low as the willingness. Now, three bottles of Tanduay cost approximately 75 pesos, which is roughly 1,5 US$ at the moment. So, it goes without saying that in order to come up with a concept people would be willing to build for materials paid for by their own money, you do need to keep a tight budget. I’ll elaborate some more about some of the typical differences between Filipino and Western points of view later in this article. Made a prototype…then the sun stopped shining Compared to the CooKit, developed by Solar Cookers International, that we had found on the net and used as template for our first prototype there was one feature that we decided to abandon right from the start. The CooKit is made out of card board. This might work fine in a hot and dry climate. But the Philippines has an extremely high humidity of its air. I remember the first time I arrived there and got outside of Mactan International Airport outside of Cebu City, one August afternoon in the year 2002. Then I asked myself: “What is this thing that I am trying to breathe, is it soup?” Thus, we assumed that any card board construction would disintegrate after a short while in the humid air. One of the arguments put forth by the creators of CooKit is that it can be folded and easily transported, but this is really not a big point to our intended users, as most of them usually don’t move around very much. The only situation where the ability to fold it into a smaller shape for transportation is really if it is supposed to be made in one place and brought to another place for use. But, as mentioned before, it is really our goal to develop a concept that can be produced locally. So, for our first prototype, we decided to make one out of rigid segments made from thin plywood and attached together with fishing line.
Logistics, the major problem The major problem building anything out in the province in the Philippines is to have everything you need readily available locally. For a small panel cooker, like the CooKit, having some parts to implement the green house mechanism, seems to be imperative, since the area of the reflector itself is quite small. It turned out that this parts were the ones most difficult to get hold of. It is suggested that the CooKit should use cooking bags to implement the green house. The nearest place for us to get hold of those was the nearest big city, Cebu City, 4 hours travel by boat and bus away. There is also the possibility of placing a transparent bowl upside down over the pot to trap the heat inside. But to get hold of one of those we would also need to travel to Cebu City. “Back too square one”, new design Eventually we reached the conclusion that we go back to the drawing board and focus on a whole different design than the panel cooker altogether. We think we should better try to avoid utilizing the green house mechanism entirely, as this turned out to be the mechanism where finding parts needed for its implementation was most difficult. Not all solar cooker designs utilize the green house effect, and the typical way to compensate for the lack of it is to increase the area of the reflector. The materials we used for our panel cooker prototype, plywood, aluminium foild, fishing line and contact glue also made the device almost 4 times as expensive as the limit suggested by the 4T-rule, which also makes it necessary to rethink the design radically. Now, we think that a parabolic reflector made out of knitted bamboo, might be a better idea. As the reflecting material we still think about aluminium foil. Compared to some of the other components the foil was not so costly and it was locally available. So, even if aluminium, from an environmental point of view, is a product with a rather high embedded energy, we can not think of any better and cheaper alternative for the time being. If some of you readers know of a better alternative, we would love to hear from you. Now comes the glue. Contact glue, which we used for the prototype, was way too expensive for the tight budget goal we had set. So there we have to think about something completely different. Preferably glue made out of natural materials. After I came back to Norway, my father told me than when he was younger, before so many things were made out of oil, there was something called fish glue. Called so, because it was made out of fish waste. As fishing is very important in the Philippines, this might be a way to go. Again, tips from our readers are welcome. Living in the Philippines As I mentioned earlier the average Filipino tends to prioritize a little differently from the typical westerner, when it comes to spending money on something that gives a short term rather than a long term reward. Filipinos just likes to live more for the moment, for better or worse, I might add, that we typically do. Which is also perfectly understandable. When you are the product of the culture of generations that never needed to prepare themselves for a cold season, you can allow yourself not to worry too much about the future without facing unpleasant consequences as a result. Life also follows a much slower pace there than in western countries. Which is something to keep in mind for all westerners planning to achieve something there, whatever that something may be. If you make a project plan following a schedule anything even remotely close to what you are used to back home, expect to miss your own deadlines big time. Also, be aware that because of the unfamiliar climate, the heat and the humidity, you yourself will tend to slow down and not be as efficient as you are used to. Interruptions to take part in social activities, to a much greater extent than back home, should also been taken into account. That is if you don’t choose to live, as some foreigners do, in a “protected bubble,” in a parallel society, away from the locals. Which, of course, is not an option for anyone who is there to do some practical environmental work, as we are. The Philippines was an American colony from 1898 to 1846. Because of this, English is still the official second language in the Philippines. All signs and most other written material is in English and English is widely understood and spoken by the population. So, most people who visit the country and speak English will do just fine. No need to learn any of the local languages. We, however plan to learn it now, after we started GLI. Espen, who has been to the Philippines far longer than I have, already speaks some. I, myself, only understand roughly 100 words or so. In GLI we have, however observed that we need to be able to communicate more with the people that have hands on experience solving practical problems locally. And most of those guys have very limited English skills.  I have to admit that it is a slightly shocking experience to wake up in the morning staring directly into a face like this on the wall next to the bed. But these small guys really live in a symbiotic relationship with man. Our houses provide shelter for them and in return they help us keep the number of annoying insects in the house down. The photo gives no indication of their actual size, but their bodies are roughly as thick as a pencil and they get around 10 cm long in total, tail and all. Stable Internet access outside of any of the big cities has always been something I have been missing in the past. Now, finally it seems like we have a satisfactory solution in the shape of something called Smart Bro, mobile broadband. It is a neat little modem in a USB dongle, that we use to connect to the Internet. But once again, we were reminded of one of the biggest collective errors of the human race. When the market chose Microsoft as the world’s de facto supplier of operating system. Mobile broadband is supposed to be “always on”. That is it isn’t really always on, it just uses the radio channels in the mobile network on demand. But this fact should be transparent to the users, and it should look like you were continuously connected. But, of course Windows Vista did not handle this correctly, as one has come to expect from Microsoft. Every time the modem had not been communicating over the radio for a while, we lost the IP connection in Windows, even if the modem reported to be connected. So, we tried a little trick to have a little data traffic going on in the background all the time, running ping in a command window in the background, and that solved the problem. After I started to work as a self employed in the beginning of the year 2008, I have thrown every piece of Microsoft software out of my laptop and out of my life. Everything except the operating system itself. I still run Windows Vista on my laptop. The sole reason that I have not thrown windows in the garbage with the rest is that I still encounter some hardware now and then that I need to use, but where the manufacturer has not made a Linux driver. The Smart Bro modem, that I just mentioned was one example of such a “no Linux driver yet”-device. But one day, ONE day, I will travel the world without Bill Gates-ware as companion. That is a dream of mine.
The road ahead Green Life Innovators was founded on October 1st 2008. We could celebrate our one year anniversary the very same day as I visited Carcar. We have an ambitious vision and that is that our webpages will become to open source green tech what sourceforge is to open source software. Regarding the projects in the Philippines, we will continue those. Espen will go back and forth between his work as a marine chief engineer and the Philippines until the summer of 2010. I will try to return as soon as I can, but exactly when that will happen depends on how much sponsor support we can get for GLI in the near future. We are right now inviting companies working with environmentally friendly technology in our home country, Norway, in particular to support us. Of course, sponsors from other countries are also more than welcome We also hope that as many as possible will join GLI, and take part in the great collective brain storm for which our pages are meant to act as tools. It does not cost anything to become a member. And it is easy. Just sign up for a username and password on our main page and you are in. And if you found this article interesting, which we assume you did, if you have read this far, please take some time sharing it with your friends. A little further down this page you can find a tool that helps you share it on many different social media as well as through email. Please help us reach out to more people with our vision, by spending a couple of minutes of your time sharing it. Thank you, in advance, and thanks for reading. Links Wow Bantayan, a page about Bantayan Island Katunggan Permaculture Art Farm, Carcar Kamagayan Green Zone, Cebu City Elicon Permaculture Café, Cebu City The Cebu Permaculture Initiatives på YouTube Global Legal Action on Climate Change Videos Bill Mollison, permaculture, del 1, del 2, del 3 Bert Peeters’ Cabiokid Foundation Dave Deppner’s Trees for the future Rocket stove videos on YouTube CIA World factbook : Philippines Map powered by MapPress Further reading:
5 comments to Travel report, Philippines September 2009 |
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Green Life Innovators’ chairman Vidar Kristiansen and deputy chairman Espen Tverback recently spent 3 weeks in the Philippines. This trip marks the start of GLI’s activities in this country. In this article Vidar shares the experiences from the trip with our readers.
hi Vidar!
finally i have gone thorough your reportage of your latest trip to the philippines. i am glad that you had the chance to visit KPAF or the Katunggan Permaculture Adventure ( recently we changed it from Art to Adventure) Farm. thank you for sharing with your GLI community the simple solutions that we are trying to put into practice to realize our organizations triple goals: self reliance (vs. consumerism), sustainability(partnership with nature) and cooperation (instead of competition/fostering the alternative economy/community).
We hope to be able to team up with your organization in various ways, especially in the areas of renewable energy sources, alternative ways of doing the things we need to do: heating, cooking, pumping, turning, transportation, etc.
Cheers! More power to GLI!
Joel Lee
@Joel
Thank you for leaving a greeting to GLI, Joel. As a reply to the points your raised in your comment, I would like to reply and greet you, everyone in the Philippines and everyone else in the world with one of the most popular songs ever in the Philippines made by one of the local bands.
The chorus goes like this, quote:
“So I sing this song to all of my age
for these are the questions
we’ve got to face
for in this cycle that we call life
we are the ones who are next in line”
unquote
Given the big challenges ahead of us, we, the generations that live today, are very much next in line, indeed.
Sorry to hear that your trip didn’t achieve as much as you hoped.
Maybe the Filipinos have the right idea about how best to use sunlight for cooking. Let plants absorb the light and produce combustible material. Burn this wherever and whenever you want to cook your food. Obviously, improvements can be made over the way they do it now, but the basic idea may be the best.
Some sort of stove in which wood can be burned, producing minimal air pollution, would be useful. And some way of recycling the ashes to fertilize the ground would make the process more environment-friendly. Are there any local plants that fix nitrogen from the air? If so, they should be used.
Best wishes.
David
@David Williams
Let’s just say that we have both been to the Philippines before. And if there is one thing we have learned about this country, it is that everything tends to take more time than you plan for.
At least that is what they have a habit of doing. And old habits are hard to break, as we know. It is also a fact that many people who don’t have much of an income earn a few pesos from preparing firewood for others. If everyone turned to solar cookers, it would probably have a negative impact on these people.
Yes, we have been thinking in line of making so called rocket stoves. As you can see from our travel report, the weather is not always nice there, so even if people start using solar cookers on days of sunshine, you still need a backup-solution for cloudy days.
The question is of course what local materials to produce the rocket stoves from. When I visited Carcar, I saw that there they had a lot of clay in the ground. I don’t know if we have clay on the island we stay on at all. On that island you typically have a 10-20 cm thin layer of top soil, before you come down to the volcanic rock in the ground.
Maybe we could use the rock itself as building material. After all, once that rock was molten lava, so in its solid state it might be able to withstand a lot of heat without cracking. Any thoughts on this matter?
Maybe it is. I’ll have to ask Joel about that.
Regards
Vidar
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