Eco-program teaches sustainability
Blaine Hubbard - February 21st, 2008Ben Henneke, president of the Clean Air Action Corporation (CAAC) and founder of The International Small Group and Tree Planting program (TIST), spoke to a crowd of 20-30 students and faculty members on Thursday, Feb. 7.
The presentation was organized by the NAU chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), a group sharing many of the same goals with Henneke’s organization.
Henneke, who started out in the coal business and selling ethanol, founded the TIST program in 1999. Since then the program has expanded to 38,000 members in small groups of six to 12 people in Tanzania, India, Uganda and Kenya.
To this day, about $7 million has been invested in the program, $4.3 million going directly to greenhouse gas opportunities.
As a part of TIST, subsistence farmers in Africa and India who participate in the program receive carbon credits for the number of trees they have grown, turning their product into a virtual cash crop.
Participants in the program use global positioning systems to conduct monthly audits of the groves to provide information for global carbon markets.
Henneke said most of the communities in Kenya are strictly subsistence farmers; the only currency they gain is what is grown from the land and, therefore, agriculture is their only means for survival. By teaching good practices and encouraging planting efforts, TIST has led the way for over 3,500 small groups to plant more than three million trees as of the end of 2007.
With a market price of $20 for every 1000 trees, 70 percent of the revenue goes directly into the pockets of the local farmers. Today there are more than 10,000 groves in Kenya to survey every month.
Henneke said while his organization does not supply physical goods, they teach farmers more eco-friendly tactics that will provide a more sustainable livelihood for the community.
“We don’t provide trees, we don’t provide people, we don’t do any of that,” Henneke said. “We teach about it, and they then use their good brains and their hard work to go do this stuff collectively.”
One of the things the program teaches to local subsidence farmers is the necessity of effective agricultural practices to maintain the soil and land for future use.
An example Henneke gave during his presentation was how some farm plots on hillsides in Kenya used to have channels running down hill rather than across it. This caused the little rain water they did get to push all the nutrients out of the grove instead of filling up the channels one-by-one and keeping those nutrients in the top soil.
Jared Travis, president of EWB at NAU, said there is an overlap with what Henneke is doing in Kenya and what EWB is doing in Yua, Ghana. Jared and other EWB members made a trip to Ghana last year and plan on returning at least once a year for a minimum of four more years.
Ben Moan, current vice president and president-elect of EWB, said their first goal in Ghana is drilling wells to provide water in areas where they have no electricity and no running water.
“We are interested in the same thing, reducing emissions and leaving less of a carbon footprint,” Moan said, referring to Henneke’s project.
Moan said the ultimate goal of EWB in Ghana is to have several wells with solar-powered pumps. Because there is no electricity in these areas, and the maintenance is fairly simple and can be done by local residents with little training, solar power is more sustainable than propane-powered pumps.
Moan said solar and wind power are the way of the future because, once in place, the output is virtually infinite. The idea is to design the whole project as simple as possible.
There are about 40 active members with the EWB project in Ghana, with Olivia Kee in charge of the four-person design team.
For more information about Engineering Without Borders, contact Travis at jmt238@nau.edu.