What do a seaside resort and 12,000 metric tons of orange peels have in common?
They both are successful "greening of the desert" projects, The photo above is what an area in the southern end of the Sinai peninsula looked like (as you would expect) before tour guide Maged el Said decided to open a resort by the Gulf of Aqaba in 1994. But he saw an opportunity to do much more, making the land around productive and green again. So began, in 2007, the Habiba Organic Farm, where a good deal of food is produced in an improving environment with the help of permaculture volunteers, guests and the locals. As in many other areas around the world, increasing desertification had so disrupted the water cycle that normal years were rare; it was becoming a case of no rain at all or destructive floods. And today:
The intense coastal tourism development of Spain's Mediterranean coast -- miles of concrete buildings and roads, the marshlands eliminated -- has had the same effect of drought inland. Another unexpected result was the redirection of the usual rains from the sea to the northeast, bringing flooding to Germany. The need for green has been demonstrated in Scotland, where they were looking at increasingly wet winters and warmer, drier summers (i.e., too much or not enough moisture). With significant reforestation, the water cycle is being brought to a more normal balance.
In 1998, a seemingly odd experiment was conducted in Costa Rica to re-green some acres of rocky semiarid land in a national park. Some people from the University of Pennsylvania asked the Del Oro fruit company, which was building a new orange juice plant, if they would agree to deposit a thousand truckloads of orange peels and pulp on it rather than building a waste processing plant. The project hardly lasted a year before a rival company shut it down through the courts; the land sat forgotten for 15 years. But some magic happened. Upon returning to see if there was any positive change over that time, the researchers saw an almost 200% increase in biomass, fertile soil instead of hardpan and erosion as well as 24 species of trees where there were eight before.
Costa Rica has a benign climate, unlike the Sinai, and what works in one environment probably will not in a very different one. A bold group called The Weather Makers is developing a plan to re-green the northern end of Sinai by dredging a silted-up lake, depositing that soil on the surrounding desert, and channeling water in from the Mediterranean. Obviously more costly than orange peels or a slowly expanding farm, that will require Egyptian government approval as well as sources of equipment and capital. Today the region is militarized, food insecure and nonproductive -- let's hope they give it a try. There sure isn't much to lose.
