Hi, Geoff Lawton here, I'm out in the Saudi Arabian desert
on a nature reserve, there's a beautiful tree planting
around here.
They've had a great success,
but I could see how they can improve things
with earthworks imprinting, swales, gabions
things like that.
That will rehydrate the landscape,
rehabilitate it faster,
go into succession quicker,
and come up into an abundant, life rich,
healthy desert
that will do all kinds of things with
apart from create wildlife reserves.
Let me show you what I can see in the landscape
that we can really do to improve things.
Here is a wonderfully successful
10 year old Planting.
I'll take you through this soon and
it's it's literally like a small deserted Savannah there.
It's a good job, but actually
they haven't taken into consideration
the water flows when it rains and it does rain.
These hard surfaces like this gravel road,
and particularly this tared road runs off.
And just over the road there,
there's a very expensive Planting
with lots and lots of irrigation
from the success of the 10 year old system,
they brought in a team who put in 80,000 trees
on irrigation,
and very few of them actually worked.
Now, I'm here visiting the site,
we're actually collecting seed.
I've just gone from my normal sort of wander,
to have a look at things.
And I just went on a water detective mission,
like I often do, and I've ended up right here.
So here's a speed bump,
and here's quite a bit of water erosion in front of me.
And then I distinctly see the vegetation drops off
where the runoff of the road
stops contributing to the landscape.
So where it starts to run off the road,
we get some vegetation then it gets a little bit lusher,
but the trees haven't worked on their planning.
I can see where the waters accumulate here.
Next to the road, I just move over a little bit.
next to the road.
You can see the trees worked.
And then there were two or three or four patches
to the, through the side of the plantation that worked
And I immediately say, why?
There must be a low spot, something going on.
No, no, no, no it must be trees,
it must be the planing.
It must be the irrigation, it must have
well it could be the irrigation but the whole thing's been
very extensively irrigated well, so you know
So I go for this walk in there and there is something else.
When I get to speed bump, just look at the water pattern
on that speed bump there.
Obviously its been rubbed off by the cars here.
But there is a great print of water pattern there.
Now it might be because I'm a surfer,
it might be because I'm a fisherman.
I think its because I've been looking at
all of those things and permaculture design
for a long time and doing earthworks.
That's water.
Water was sitting up against this on the last good rain.
Now, when I walk down the road
I'm just looking for clues
and this is what you need to do
you need to look for clues you're like a water detective
you're an environmental detective
you're looking for deposition from wind and water
and different growth patterns.
There's a reason that things start to go better.
So as I'm walking along
I start seeing indicators.
actually let's go back over towards the road a minute
Sorry about the wind guys, its just how it is
Look at that,
that's detritus, that's debris in a flood
up against the road sign
You know, and so looking for more evidence, there
There, debris against the bush there.
That's this much debris there,
that's quite a lot of water.
You know, its so flat this land, it is kind of hard to see
which way here is downhill but I know now
downhill is definitely that way.
I thought it was, okay.
Look at this, look at the debris.
Look at the debris on that here,
where's it going?
Towards the trees, towards the trees.
And let's have a look at the plantation here
that hasn't worked.
I don't like to point out things that haven't worked but
come on this is a huge amount of money
has been put into this.
There's actually debris on the fence.
But over there, there's massive amounts of irrigation
Massive amounts of irrigation, 80,000 trees
and I'd say they haven't got 2% success
And yet just across the road, they had that
after 10 years,
It probably picks up, I haven't walked there yet,
but it probably picks up off those hills
and jams up against this road.
Haphazardly, accidentally, we can do this by design
of goodness sake.
You know, the world's falling over
and we've got earth moving equipment
to sensibly do a harmonious design.
Look at the debris here.
It just wraps its way down here
toward the successful trees.
I mean, come on, hello.
It's time to actually wake up a bit here.
You know, we want to revegetate the Earth,
we want to rehabilitate the landscapes.
I mean, nowhere is it more obvious than
when you achieve in deserts because
your baseline is dramatically damaged because
desserts it's so brittle, and easily kept damage.
So, I'm fascinated by this
I'm going to, that's pretty obvious to you guys.
I think I'm going to, lets just switch off a second,
and I'll show you what happens near the
dilapidated education center that's down there.
Because after its soaked here,
the journey continues down in this direction.
So now we're at the other end of the trees.
And in the far distance you can see our signposts,
and our guys are collecting some of the seed from here.
The water pass continues down this way, and
there wasn't any trees planted just here so
it has a bit of a free track across here.
I'm on sort of a gravel base here.
You can see it pulls a little bit here.
One or two trees, not many have survived just
at this point near the building.
But then something really haphazard starts to happen.
There's a track
It kind of works like a quasi slow falling swale.
But check that out, there's a track
It's actually the service track.
Either side there is failed irrigation,
Well, failed tree planting on irrigation
all the way to the fence in the distance hardly a tree.
But then there are these clumps of trees
down the side of this track.
Now, as you walk down this track,
you start to see water patterns,
you start to see the flow of water.
I mean, this is it, you got to get in the flow,
you got to be in the flow,
that means you got to be in the moment,
you got to be experiencing reality
as it actually happens.
And you've got to timescout backwards in flow pattern events
There's a flow pattern event, you've got to time
scout backwards into what created that
it didn't just magically happen.
These are the patterns of creation that we can work with.
So we talk about designing patterns in permiculture.
We're talking about harmonizing with these patterns,
they're patterns of energy expression in media.
Now, I'm walking down a water pattern here,
and there's got to be a reason
Why those trees grew on that side and not on that side?
Well, the slope actually, just hooks over this way.
And how do I know that?
I'm following the patterns,
I'm looking at the patterns,
it doesn't matter that they're really subtle desert patterns
in the harsh landscape.
Everywhere you harmonize with the patterns
when you get in the flow,
and you start to actually harvest that energy into life.
So at this point, right here,
it just starts to hook over sideways a little bit.
And when is in full flow, these trees here, at this point
just this patch here get an extra bit of water.
And that continues to repeat all the way down here.
It's higher on that side.
And its a little bit lower on this side
and its enough that when there's low points
in this track, and you, I'm sure can see
All these little flow patterns
these little ripples going down here.
It's going downhill this way.
All it accidentally did was harvest some road water runoff
There's a flow pattern off to one side,
there's more trees.
And again, it just keeps repeating,
patch of trees after patch of trees
and out there irrigation, massive amounts of irrigation,
extremely expensive irrigation,
irrigation that's really non renewable,
and totally fails in this hot sun over a period of time.
It's failed, it didn't work.
And here natural pattern alignment, by accident,
not by intention actually worked wonderfully well.
And this is what we can do.
This what we can do in all climates,
of course, in dry lands, it's very, very obvious.
You can see it from satellite
if you get a large enough system up and running.
So, there you go people,
time to learn to see the patterns
of life creation, in this world
in this universe, they're all the same.