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'Forgotten' water harvesting system transforms 'barren wasteland' into thriving farmland

The half moons even help replenish the water table.

Credit: Andrew Millison/YouTube

Half moons allow water to be retained for agriculture and even replenish the groundwater table.

When the Great Green Wall initiative began in 2007, it was just a vision of a big, beautiful wall of greenery spanning the width of Africa to keep the Sahara Desert from encroaching on the rest of the continent. Despite years of successes and failures, celebration and criticism, we can see the progress being made as an inspiring example of how local and global collaboration can help counter the effects of climate change.

Just a few years ago, the Sahel region at the northern edge of Senegal was a "barren wasteland" where nothing had grown for 40 years. But the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and local villagers teamed up to regreen the area, bringing back agriculture, improving the economy of the people who live there, and preventing the climate migration that desertification ultimately leads to.

How do you hold back the world's largest hot desert?

According to Andrew Millison, a permaculture designer and instructor at Oregon State University, the Sahara desert has expanded by about 10% in the past 100 years. The idea behind the Great Green Wall is to build a barrier of vegetation to stop that expansion, which threatens the ecosystems and economies of the Sahel—the region south of the Sahara that separates the desert from the savanna.

In a video from February of 2024, Millison shared the collaborative nature and progress of one Great Green Wall project in Senegal, including the rejuvenation of 300,000 hectares (about the equivalent of 600,000 football fields) of seemingly unusable land.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

"The process started with the community-based participatory planning," WFP program policy officer Bakalilou Diaby shares in the video. "By the end of this process, it was agreed that one of the major action is the land reclamation or land recovery project."

At first, it took some time to convince the community that the regreening of the degraded landscape was even possible, but after learning about how to improve the land, "the people believe and they are convinced, and they are also committed," says Diaby.

The 'forgotten' half-moon method of harvesting water

One of the keys to this particular regreening project is using long-forgotten techniques for harvesting water. When soil is crusted and sunbaked and hard as cement, rainwater doesn't penetrate and it's impossible for plants to take root. The solution? Half-moon shaped ditches dug in such a way that water flows into them on the straight side with an embankment built on the rounded side to hold the water in. Each half moon is 4 meters in diameter and takes about a day for one person to dig.

Local vegetation domesticated on the Sahel thousands of years ago, such as sorghum and millet, are planted in these half moons, rehabilitating the land and feeding the local community at the same time.

"This is nothing new—we have not invented a technology here," explains Sebastian Muller from the WFP resilience team. "The half moon technology is actually an endogenous technology to the Sahel and has been forgotten over time. We have rescued it from the past."

Not only does capturing water in the half moons help with the immediate need to grow food and contribute to the Great Green Wall, but 10% to 15% of the water will actually soak into the ground to replenish the water table, creating a more sustainable agricultural process.

"That way we actually achieve a balance of water. So we are not depleting the water resources, but we're making sure that we keep enough water in the ground for future generations," says Muller.

Other crops such as okra and tomatoes are grown in horizontal horticulture beds, and between those ditches grow trenches with fruit trees in them.

Engaging indigenous wisdom for sustainable farming

"This is just a very first step in this pilot," adds Muller. "We'll also be using other native species that will be planting in the pits that will drive the rejuvenation of the soil and the protection of the soil as the system starts growing into abundance and producing food and life for the people here."

According to Muller, the "syntropic farming" methods being employed were developed in Brazil and are based on global indigenous practices that mimic the way natural forests grow and thrive. These natural growing dynamics make agriculture more sustainable, continually replenishing the land rather than continually depleting it—truly a testament to global collaboration carried out at the local level with local community support.

"This project was really, really interesting because the World Food Programme wanted to demonstrate how you could take the most devastated areas and turn them back into resilient, food-producing locations," says Millison. "And they specifically placed their project on a very degraded landscape that had been taken down to bare, compacted earth."

If this desertified "wasteland" can be rejuvenated so successfully, it provides hope for recovering other land that many people might write off as useless or barren. As climate change continues to alter the Earth's landscape—literally—we'll need to keep working together both locally and globally to find solutions like the Great Green Wall and support their implementation.

You can learn more about successful permaculture practices on Andrew Millison's YouTube channel.

This article originally appeared in January.

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She fell in love with endangered porpoises at age 7. Now, she's on a mission to save the ocean.

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When Rachel Heimke was seven, she realized what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. Little did she know a $40,000 BigFuture Scholarship would help her pursue her dreams.

Heimke and her parents were living an unconventional lifestyle, to say the least. The summer after she completed first grade, she and her parents boarded a sailboat and sailed from their hometown in Alaska down the Pacific Coast. The family would spend the next two years traveling on the water, passing Mexico and then sailing across the world to Australia before returning home. It was on the sailboat, watching whales and dolphins breach the water under their boat, that Heimke realized her life’s purpose.

“I was really obsessed with these little porpoises called Vaquitta, who only live in one tiny area of water off the coast of Mexico,” she recalled. “When I learned about them as a kid, there were only 22 left in the wild. Now, there are only ten.” Despite her interest, Heimke was never able to actually see any Vaquitta on her trip, both because of their inherent shyness and because they were so critically endangered due to detrimental fishing policies in the area. “That was my wakeup call,” she says. “I’ll probably never be able to see this porpoise, and I don’t want that to be true of other species.”

Now a young woman of 23, Heimke is realizing her childhood dream of ocean conservation by recently graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in ocean sciences and enrolling in a grad program in Canada to study science communication. Heimke is well on her way to achieving her childhood dream—but she acknowledges that none of this would have been possible without her ocean adventures as a child, the support of her parents, and significant financial support.

At 18, when Heimke was deciding where to study ocean sciences, she stumbled upon an opportunity from BigFuture, College Board's free college and career planning site. The opportunity was the BigFuture Scholarship, which provided students the chance to win a $40,000 scholarship by completing six action items on the website. Heimke was intrigued, since she didn’t need to provide an essay, her GPA, or any test scores to enter. Her eligibility was also not tied to citizenship status or family income, so she decided to give it a shot.

“One of the action items was just going on the BigFuture site and creating a list of colleges I was interested in,” said Heimke. Another item required her to apply for financial aid through FAFSA—something Heimke was planning to do anyway. Every completed action item gave students more chances to win the scholarship, so Heimke completed all six action items quickly.

Months later, Heimke’s parents ushered her over to a call over Zoom, where she met a BigFuture representative who had some surprising news: She was one of 25 students who had won the $40,000 BigFuture college scholarship. Each year she would receive $10,000 in scholarship funding, which would cover her entire tuition bill for all four years of schooling.

“That experience taught me that it’s really important to not give up on your goals and just go for opportunities,” said Heimke. “I never thought I would win anything, but I’ve learned it's worth applying anyway. Even a small scholarship of $1,000 can pay your rent for a month,” she said. “And If you write an essay that takes an hour and you win $5,000, that’s probably the most money per hour you’ll ever make in your life.”

The tuition money made it possible for her to attend college, and for her to apply to graduate school immediately afterward without any financial burdens.

“Now that I’m in graduate school and paying for rent and a phone bill and graduate school tuition, it’s truly a blessing to not have student loan debt on top of that,” Heimke said. Because of the BigFuture scholarship, Heimke doesn’t need to pay for her graduate program either—she’s able to fund her education with the money her parents saved by not having to pay for her undergraduate degree.

One of the biggest blessings, Heimke said, was not needing to delay graduate school to work or find extra funds. With climate change worsening, entering the workforce becomes increasingly important over time.

“I’m not sure exactly what I’ll do with my degrees, but I hope to have a lot of different jobs that ultimately will work toward saving our ocean,” she said.

As a child, witnessing marine life up close and personal was life-changing. Heimke’s goal is for future generations to have that experience, as she did.

To learn more and get started, visit bigfuture.org/scholarships.

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Researchers dumped tons of coffee waste into a forest. This is what it looks like now.

30 dump truck loads and two years later, the forest looks totally different.

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One of the biggest problems with coffee production is that it generates an incredible amount of waste. Once coffee beans are separated from cherries, about 45% of the entire biomass is discarded. So for every pound of roasted coffee we enjoy, an equivalent amount of coffee pulp is discarded into massive landfills across the globe. That means that approximately 10 million tons of coffee pulp is discarded into the environment every year.

When disposed of improperly, the waste can cause serious damage soil and water sources.

However, a new study published in the British Ecological Society journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence has found that coffee pulp isn't just a nuisance to be discarded. It can have an incredibly positive impact on regrowing deforested areas of the planet.

via British Ecological Society

In 2018, researchers from ETH-Zurich and the University of Hawaii spread 30 dump trucks worth of coffee pulp over a roughly 100' x 130' area of degraded land in Costa Rica. The experiment took place on a former coffee farm that underwent rapid deforestation in the 1950s.

The coffee pulp was spread three-feet thick over the entire area.

Another plot of land near the coffee pulp dump was left alone to act as a control for the experiment.

"The results were dramatic." Dr. Rebecca Cole, lead author of the study, said. "The area treated with a thick layer of coffee pulp turned into a small forest in only two years while the control plot remained dominated by non-native pasture grasses."

In just two years, the area treated with coffee pulp had an 80% canopy cover, compared to just 20% of the control area. So, the coffee-pulp-treated area grew four times more rapidly. Like a jolt of caffeine, it reinvigorated biological activity in the area.

The canopy was also four times taller than that of the control.

Before and after images of the forest

The forest experienced a radical, positive change

via British Ecological Society

The coffee-treated area also eliminated an invasive species of grass that took over the land and prevented forest succession. Its elimination allowed for other native species to take over and recolonize the area.

"This case study suggests that agricultural by-products can be used to speed up forest recovery on degraded tropical lands. In situations where processing these by-products incurs a cost to agricultural industries, using them for restoration to meet global reforestation objectives can represent a 'win-win' scenario," Dr. Cole said.

If the results are repeatable it's a win-win for coffee drinkers and the environment.

Researchers believe that coffee treatments can be a cost-effective way to reforest degraded land. They may also work to reverse the effects of climate change by supporting the growth of forests across the globe.

The 2016 Paris Agreement made reforestation an important part of the fight against climate change. The agreement incentivizes developing countries to reduce deforestation and forest degradation, promote forest conservation and sustainable management, and enhance forest carbon stocks in developing countries.

"We hope our study is a jumping off point for other researchers and industries to take a look at how they might make their production more efficient by creating links to the global restoration movement," Dr. Cole said.


This article originally appeared three years ago.

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24-year-old garbage collector asks if he should be 'embarrassed' by his job

The responses show how much our attitudes are changing about blue collar work.

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For better or worse, many of us derive a good amount of our self-worth from our jobs.

After all, depressingly, we spend most of our waking lives working! It makes sense that we'd want to find some meaning in it.

Just ask any kid what they want to be when they grow up and you'll hear about prestigious or heroic professions like doctor, firefighter, actor, or, just maybe, famous TikToker.

But how about garbage collector?

Probably not one of the top choices.

A 24-year-old garbage man recently took to Reddit with a conundrum: He likes the work and the pay, but he can't help but feel embarrassed telling people what he does for a living.

black trash bin with green leaves Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

"I’m a 24yr old guy ... I’ve been a garbage man for the past 2 years and I feel a sense of embarrassment doing it," OP wrote.

"It’s a solid job, great benefits and I currently make $24 an hour. I could see myself doing this job for a long time. However whenever someone asks me what I do for work I feel embarrassed. Should I feel this way?"

There's definitely a stigma around a lot of blue collar work, especially "dirty" work like, well, anything to do with sanitation.

The comments were overwhelmingly positive, but not all in the way you might expect.

The extremely clear sentiment at the very top of the thread was this:

Garbage collectors are essential works, and OP should be extremely proud of both his employment and of his service to his community.

"You shouldn't be ashamed of having an honest job," said u/nottoomanysalad

"Garbage men are far more valuable than most jobs out there and I'll die on this hill. If I were running a country the people I'd hire immediately after a proper cabinet were sanitation workers," wrote u/Reddit-Lurker-

"Dude, I work for a health insurance company that makes it's profit by denying people life saving care. I'm ashamed of my job. You have nothing to be embarrassed about, you do honest work that benefits your community. I would love to tell people I worked in sanitation," said u/beefymennonite.

A few commenters playfully teased the original poster, too:

"not sure why you'd be embarrassed about being an Excess Material Logistics Manager," wrote u/Correct-Sometimes

a garbage man standing next to a pile of trash Photo by Nathan Cima on Unsplash

Others brought up a really good point: If any job could be future proof, garbage collector might be the one.

"The good thing is your job won't be off shored. The over 60,000 people in tech who got laid off in tech this year wish their former jobs could not be off shored," wrote u/DougWong1980.

TechCrunch has the number of tech layoffs in 2024 at more like 130,000 — yikes.

Engineers and programmers quickly chimed in to say that, yes, finding and holding a "cool" job in tech is a nightmare these days.

Finding steady, stable, non-office work that you enjoy and that pays enough, even if it's "embarrassing"? That's the smart move these days.

Big-picture-wise, the tide is turning on so-called blue collar jobs. More and more young people are choosing trade schools or going right into the work force over spending six figures on a college education.

Being a plumber or electrician, for example, can be incredibly lucrative, and those trades won't be outsourced or given over to ChatGPT any time soon.

Working in sanitation isn't so different. It's stable, essential work — and it's harder to land a job there than you might think, especially in big cities where openings can get seriously competitive.

Indeed pegs the average garbage collector salary at about $52,000 per year.

That's not big money, but again, it's reliable, comes with government benefits, and won't have you answering emails at midnight on a Saturday.

Younger generations are looking for something different out of their careers. Hopefully one day soon we won't even have to ask whether being a garbage collector should be embarrassing — we'll all know that the answer is a resounding No.

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