The budding permaculturalist

The Budding Permaculturalist Robert C. Norris

Photo by Shelly Sharon, 2014

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A Brief Introduction to Humanure

“What it does, in fact, is render our current use of the term ‘waste’ obsolete: it shows us that, in a permacultural perspective, we might even say that we do not produce waste at all. We merely displace and transform resources.” ! The course was already into its second day by the time I arrived at the farm. Troy, former marine-turned-ecowarrior and one of the three course facilitators, took me on a whistle-stop tour of the premises that ended with what was clearly, for him, the highlight of the whole experience: the biogas system. We stood reverently before two clay-built slurry tanks as Troy rattled through the inner workings of this marvel of sustainable science with machine-gun efficiency. For an anxious moment I felt I was being briefed for a mission. I told myself I should be taking notes. But as the wonder of what I was witnessing began to sink in, Troy’s earnestness was revealed as barely contained excitement.

The system was fed by human manure from the toilets, and the slurry tanks before us contained its byproduct, premium-grade liquid fertiliser. They were beautifully mys-

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terious. Their unspeakable secrets were concealed in a peaty liquid that reflected surrounding colours and forms with a sepia vividness. The surface was alive with insects and the bubblification of natural gas rising. There it is, I thought: Freud’s dark tide in a nutshell. I was mesmerised.

loop systems that were going to be my daily bread-and-butter for the coming month, it was science fiction. After a lifetime of languages and literature, I simply felt ill-prepared.

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Photo by Rob Norris, 2014

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I was still coming to terms with being there. The journey to Laos had taken a tortuous route through Southeast Asia – Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia, then Laos – and certainly at the outset there had been no notion of attending a Permaculture Design Course in Vang Vieng seven months down the line. I knew practically nothing about permaculture, except what I had read on a bulletin board in Chiang Mai a couple of months earlier: it was sustainable design, alternative economy, ecobuilding; harmony with nature, a new way of relating to others, giving back to the world... I saw it as a new way forward. As for biogas installations and other closed2

One thing I did grasp during my brief tour with Troy, however, was that a biogas system uses manure to generate cooking gas for the kitchen and compost for the garden. It is simple and cheap enough to construct, leaves no smell, and is free to use. It also has the supreme conceptual elegance of providing the missing link in our consumption cycle. What it does, in fact, is render our current use of the term ‘waste’ obsolete: it shows us that, in a permacultural perspective, we might even say that we do not produce waste at all. We merely displace and transform resources.

There are two secrets to constructing a successful biogas system: the volume of the dung and the siting of the installation.

Built mostly underground, the structure harnesses the natural gas produced by the decomposing slurry in an airtight dome called the gasholder. The pressure that builds up inside the chamber pushes the gas into the pipeline linking the installation to the hobs and gaslights in the kitchen, while forcing the slurry through an overflow and out into the slurry tanks,

where it is collected and turned into fertiliser.

tion on a scale that is as massive as it is unassuming.

If the pressure inside the dome is too little, the slurry will simply rise and flood the pipelines, resulting in an unpleasant surprise in the kitchen. If it is too great, there is a risk of explosion. If the installation is too far from the buildings, the pipeline becomes a liability to maintain; if it is too close, there is a risk of damage to the buildings themselves. Too close to a groundwater reservoir, and there could be a risk of contamination; too far from a watersource, and keeping the correct ratio between dung and water becomes too labourintensive. In other words, the first steps are crucial, and it all starts with what for most genteel westerners would already prove a challenge: determining how much dung – animal and human – is produced per day, as this determines the size of the installation. Ever asked your mother to keep her morning glories in a box for you?

Yet even here, in this Northwestern corner of Laos, where biogas systems are relatively widespread, people still object to the idea of using human manure, preferring instead to stick to the more prudish option of pig’s dung. Troy and I were therefore contemplating an anomaly.

The biogas system is an effective way of addressing one of our subtlest and most persistent crimes, namely how to dispose of what comes out of our bodies. It also provides us with a powerful symbol of responsible independence, ecological healing, resilience in the face of radical environmental and historical change. What Troy and I both saw there was potential revolu3

“The gas that we are using in the kitchen to cook our meals comes straight from here,” Troy was saying. “This is the only system in the whole area that uses waste from the toilets.”

“It’s brilliant,” I said, struggling to contain a sudden groundswell of Swiftian humour.

“Yeah,” Troy replied. “It’s one of the big reasons I wanted to come here, just to see it.”

“The monumental scale of our material achievements is directly proportional to the mountains of waste we dump in places where people have no voice to protest. This is the fundamental algorithm of our civilisational demise. ” From the Latin vastus, the word 'waste' denotes wide open stretches of wild, uncultivated land that escape our control and are inhabited only by our fears. The modern term can refer to the extravagant, careless

expenditure of resources; the emaciation of a physical body starved of nourishment; or the withering of a deprived soul.

Waste is a blind spot in our civilisation. It oends us, and we use it to oend others; either that, or we exploit it to discriminate against those who are forced by birth or circumstance to deal with it. At best, in some contemporary Western societies, it is a byproduct of our activities that we are just now beginning to break down into differentiable units for recycling. But it is in those very same societies that the fatal correlation between the volume of waste an individual can produce and the prosperity and standing he or she enjoys has been forged, and is now being packaged and exported to emerging economies around the world as a new standard of success.

All these meanings, and the webs of negative associations they carry, eectively prevent us from adopting a new approach to thinking about waste and waste management. The failure of our civilisation to look into its blind spot and find there the solutions it needs could prove fatal to us all. Until very recently, material development was seen as the symbol of our success as a civilisation; now, in the face of eco-system collapse, biodiversity loss, massive global population displacement, desertification, melting ice-caps, climate 4

change, we are literally up to our ears in the evidence of our own improvidence, and the link between our activities and the death of our environment is glaringly apparent. The monumental scale of our material achievements is directly proportional to the mountains of waste we dump in places where people have no voice to protest. This is the fundamental algorithm of our civilisational demise. Unless we redirect our technological and organisational resources away from a consumption-driven model of progress towards a socialeconomic system posited on an integrated view of our position in the chain of life, we are facing a would-have-been-preventible disaster. As long as we fail to accept that ethical thinking is not a New Age fancy, and that the choices that shape our day-today existence, even down to how we process our responses to experience, impinge directly on the nature of the world we live in, we are positioning ourselves on the wrong side of history.

In Laos I was taking my first tentative steps on the path towards a more purposeful mode of existence, but even then I was aware, albeit in an uneducated sort of way, of the importance of what I was witnessing. From small beginnings, so the song so aptly called 'Pilgrim' goes, come big endings, and the symbolic, even poetic force of this biogas chamber had the resonance

of a temple gong: by restoring authentic, intrinsic value to something our bodies produce parasympathetically and in such consistent profusion, I felt restored to a longsince forgotten sense of my own humanity as something perfectly integrated with the surrounding world. We live our divorce from what gives us life every time we sit on a flush toilet. How blindingly simple could it be?

It was therefore with fascination that I watched when, later that day, a fellow participant appeared with a bucket of slurry from the biogas tanks. We were building compost heaps, and Troy was telling us about the balance of carbon and nitrogen, and how the marvel of a compost heap is that you can put practically anything into it. It all just turns into soft, rich soil.

A colleague from Melbourne standing next to me was in a speculative mood. “So,” she said, “if someone put their foot in the compost heap and kept it in there long enough, it would turn to soil too?”

Professional to a fault, Troy composed himself before giving his considered reply: “I never tried, but I guess it would.”

He also told us that one thing that can really get your compost heap going is a few measures of liquid fertiliser, and nothing could be better suited for the purpose than 5

humanure slurry from the gasholder. The bucket of precious tan liquid was carefully poured onto the heap. It percolated down through the layers of green and brown cuttings, old baskets, cardboard boxes, a sock, a sadly deceased kitten in a coconut-shell coffin which Troy had carefully laid aside for the purposes of scientific demonstration – all the way down to my sandalled foot, which I had left under the heap in a moment of forgetfulness, perhaps out of unconscious solidarity for the little feline that never made it to adulthood.

From Joseph Jenkins, The Humanure Manual

Click for more images by Andrew MacConnell

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Closing the Cycle

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“The prospective benefits in terms of revenue and employment of shifting to a circular economy which recognises the need to close the cycle are, to quote a 2016 UNU StEP Initiative report, staggering.”

As well as a valuable source of nitrogen for plants, WEEE is a modern incarnation of an old problem: how to dispose of waste, and why? ‘Waste electrical and electronic equipment’ is a designation formulated in 2002 for an EU directive aimed at tackling the vast and intricate problem of disposing of all our gadgets in legitimate ways. An estimated 50 million tonnes of e-waste (of which only 10% were recycled) were produced globally in 2012 alone,1 a figure that is set to grow by 33% by 2018.2 According to a DanWatch documentary, EU figures for 2008 showed that consumers in the EU were generating 8.7 million tonnes of e-waste per year, of which only 2.1 million tonnes were being returned and recycled.3 According to more recent figures, in 2012 China generated 11.1 million tonnes of e-waste, followed by the US with 10 million tonnes.4 If we consider also the pene-

tration rates of computers and mobile phones in the poorer developing countries, such as the very same African nations that are already in the midst of environmental apocalypse due to the indiscriminate dumping of vast quantities of toxic waste, it seems certain that these figures will explode over the coming decade.5 What actually happens to the unaccounted-for waste is difficult to determine. A 2012 United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) report states that in 2009 alone some 220 thousand tonnes of electronic waste were shipped illegally to West Africa.6 EU law prohibits the export of hazardous waste to developing countries, even when it is destined for recycling, but by stating that end-of-life electric and electronic goods are either charitable donations or to be sold second-hand, profiteering individuals and organisations are effectively exploiting a gaping loophole that the legislators have so far been slow to act upon.7 According to the directive, EU countries were expected to recover 45 of every 100 tonnes of electronic goods sold by 2016, rising to 65 by 2019, or 85% of all e-waste generated.8 The directive lists 10 categories of WEEE ranging from large and small household appliances, to IT and telecommunications equipment, consumer equip7

ment, lighting, electrical and electronic devices, toys, leisure and sports equipment, medical devices, monitoring and control devices, and automatic dispensers.9 In 2012, the directive was enhanced in an effort to clamp down on illegal waste trafficking, and solar panels, fluorescent lighting containing mercury, and equipment containing ozone-depleting substances were added to the list.10

For more pictures from Agbogbloshie, see photographic report published in The Guardian in February 2014

Unaccounted-for e-waste typically finds its way into vast dumping grounds such as Agbogbloshie, a former wetland suburb of Accra, Ghana, where it is burned or broken up to retrieve reusable parts and materials.

The open burning of plastics to retrieve valuable materials such as gold, copper, silver, indium, and palladium is a major source of dioxin emissions. One of the group of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) known as the “dirty dozen”, dioxins bio-accumulate in the food-chain, mainly in the fatty tissues of animals, mean-

ing that more than 90% of human exposure to dioxins occurs through food, primarily meat and dairy products. They are known to cause reproductive and developmental problems, damage to the immune system, hormone disruption, and cancer.11 Likewise with other hazardous substances, including heavy metals such as mercury and lead, as well as controversial brominated flame retardants, which are used widely in electronic products, clothing and furniture to reduce the flammability of products, and are held to be the cause of neurobehavioural disorders and endocrine disruption. The natural victims of this process, of course, are the people of the countries where land rights are tenuous, controls are practically absent, and the local inhabitants simply have no say, especially the workers in the dumps, many of whom are children. But the phenomenon is growing exponentially, and if left unchecked, will make victims of us all.

within the US than to ship it to Ghana.12 Hence, despite all the efforts of EU bureaucrats, the port of Lagos in Nigeria still receives something in the region of half a million used computers every month, of which only 25% work.13 E-waste accounts for one million tonnes per year of waste production in the UK alone, and this makes it the fastest growing waste stream in the country.14 In order to tackle the problem, in 2008 the UK Environment Agency joined forces with the Police and Customs and stepped up international cooperation with over 40 countries. An eighteen-month covert operation led to the publication in 2011 of a report by the Environmental Investigation Agency, ‘System Failure: the UK’s harmful trade in electronic waste,’15 that exposed a vast illegal trade network and implicated players from every level of the waste food-chain, from sole traders right up to local councils and central government institutions.

No doubt more regulation is needed, but illegal trafficking thrives where regulations are toughest. Disposing of e-waste has become prohibitively expensive as a result, and this in turn has given rise to a flourishing black market that is economically and environmentally toxic. As research carried out by the US Environmental Protection Agency suggests, it costs 10 times more to recycle a CRT (cathode-ray tube) monitor

The scale, complexity and urgency of the problems we face demand innovative solutions, but above all a conceptual shift in our thinking about waste from something we discard as unsavoury, unwelcome, unseemly to something that is a source of new creativity and fertile growth. Joseph Jenkins, author of perhaps one of the most relevant books of recent decades, explores the human nutrient cycle, and the simple

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fact that to break it means to jeopardise our very existence.

There is currently a profound lack of knowledge and understanding about what is referred to as the “human nutrient cycle” and the need to keep the cycle intact. The human nutrient cycle goes like this: a) we grow food, b) we eat it, c) we collect and process the organic residues (faeces, urine, food scraps and agricultural materials) and d) we then return the processed organic material back to the soil, thereby enriching the soil and enabling more food to be grown. This cycle can be repeated, endlessly. This is a process that mimics the cycles of nature and enhances our ability to survive on this planet. When our food and refuse materials are instead discarded as waste, the natural human nutrient cycle is broken, creating problems such as pollution, loss of soil fertility and abuse of our water resources.16 The good news is that our current mistakes are so easily reversible. The technology and financial mechanisms we are capable of deploying in the 21st century are amply sufficient to tackle the waste produced by our current consumption-driven systems. The prospective benefits in terms of revenue and employment of shifting to a circular economy which recognises the need to close the cycle are, to quote a 2016 UNU StEP Initiative report, “staggering”.

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Launched in Bonn, Germany, in 2007, and embedded in the United Nations University Sustainable Cycles Programme, StEP 9

(Solve the E-waste Problem) is an international initiative of manufacturers, recyclers, academics, governments and other organisations resolved to find practical solutions to what is a genuine existential crisis of our species. In their latest published report, StEP estimates that in 2014 alone a total of 42 million tonnes of e-waste, equivalent to EUR 48 billion, was wasted, or lost to the global economy. Of that only 16 percent - 6.5 million tonnes - was formally collected and treated. They write, “this […] offers a wakeup call to the electronics stakeholders participants, ranging from policymakers and consumers to original equipment manufacturers and recyclers.”18 The shift to a circular economy in the EU, where 60 percent of discarded materials currently enter a landfill or an incinerator, according to the researchers at StEP would lead to a 48 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, 83 by 2050, compared to 2012 levels. Coupled with that there would be a 32 percent reduction in dependence on primary material imports by 2030, 53 by 2050. Clearly the circular economy, one in other words driven by a closing-the-cycle principle rather than the dangerous delusion of perpetual consumption-fuelled growth, is already a lot more than a good idea: it is a necessary step.

1 Waste Management World, http://www.waste-management-world.com/ articles/2012/02/african-weee-report-by-the -un-environment-programme-.html

8 The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/global-develo pment/2013/aug/09/africa-europe-digital-el ectronic-waste

2 The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/global-develo pment/2013/dec/14/toxic-ewaste-illegal-du mping-developing-countries

9 Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electri cal_and_Electronic_Equipment_Directive

3 DanWatch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBC-d WgElbI (2008) 4 The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/global-develo pment/2013/dec/14/toxic-ewaste-illegal-du mping-developing-countries 5 A 2012 Waste Management World article states: “… the penetration rate of personal computers in Africa is said to have increased by a factor of 10 in the last decade, while the number of mobile phone subscribers has increased by a factor of 100.” http://www.waste-management-world.com/ articles/2012/02/african-weee-report-by-the -un-environment-programme-.htmlß 6 The Basel Convention, http://www.basel.int/Implementation/Tech nicalAssistance/EWaste/EwasteAfricaProje ct/Publications/tabid/2553/Default.aspx# 7 DanWatch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBC-d WgElbI 10

10 The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/global-develo pment/2013/aug/09/africa-europe-digital-el ectronic-waste 11 World Health Organization, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets /fs225/en/ 12 Waste Management World, http://www.waste-management-world.com/ articles/2011/05/undercover-investigations-i nto-e-waste-smuggling.html 13 DanWatch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBC-d WgElbI 14 Waste Management World, http://www.waste-management-world.com/ articles/2011/05/undercover-investigations-i nto-e-waste-smuggling.html 15 The Environmental Investigation Agency, http://ewasteguide.info/files/EIA_2011_UK .pdf

16 Jenkins, Joseph, The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, 3rd Edition (Joseph Jenkins; Chelsea Green Publishing, 2005), pp.9-12 17 http://www.stepinitiative.org/files/step2014 /Publications/Step_ARs/2015_16/Step_Ann ual_Report_2015_16_ ebook.html#p=8 18 ibid., p. 5

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Close to the Blue Lagoon, Vang Vieng.

Photo by Rob Norris, 2014

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Riverside Elegy

Sengkeo Frichittavong, otherwise known as ‘Bob’, was born in Vientiane but spent most of his childhood and youth in Vang Vieng. With the end in 1975 of yet another pointless war, one which devastated Southeast Asia for generations to come, many Lao families migrated to the West, mostly to Canada. Bob left Vang Vieng for Ontario in 1990 at the age of sixteen.

The town at that time was still very much the cozy backwater it had always been. As Bob recalls in an email: There were lots of huge trees standing more than fifty metres high, spread out everywhere. It was very dark at night because there was no electricity. All the rivers had crystal clear waters that kept a steady level at all times. There were few houses, no buildings taller than my house (which is two stories high), no cars, no banks, no couples on motorbikes, few bicycles. There were only dirt roads, two restaurants, and most of the kids walked to school.

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Twelve years later he returned, and the town had undergone an ugly transformation: When I returned there had been huge changes, and things continue to change rapidly. More and more buildings, hostels, restaurants, travel agencies... the saddest part is no more rainforest to be seen nearby, everything is gone, and the river is madly uncontrolled: when there is no rain, it dries very fast, and once it rains a bit hard, it floods in every direction, erosion occurs and the top soil is simply being washed away by the rain…

Vang Vieng is an old posting station on the road between the capital Vientiane and the UNESCO World Heritage Site at Luang Prabang. From the balcony of our riverside guesthouse it is by rights a Southeast Asian idyll, yet its luscious surroundings and arresting river-views of karst crags with their cat’s cradle of monsoon rainclouds belie a star-crossed reputation. Beyond the front door a sad story of exploitation, by turns mindless and ruthless, unfolds. The view of the street is no different in any other hotspot on the backpacker’s trail through Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent: a ramshackle semi-permanence on crumbling roadsides clashes with the material aspirations of established shop fronts; Ajinomoto, Knorr, Nestlé, Kikkoman, Bri13

tannia, Coca Cola speak the gaudy incorporated cant of the globalised world in mosquito-infested interiors where locals appear long-suffering and tourists ill-atease.

“Hello, sir, you wan’ massage? Come in, sir, very cheap!”

A massage parlour run by ladyboys has separate entrances for men and women, but appears empty throughout the day. At night, ladyboys gather at a table across the street and drink, keeping a watchful eye on the young backpackers congregating in the bars. One lumbering Englishman regales his friends with an oafish account of the previous night’s adventures, a tale of alcohol, drunken exploits, and being seduced by a gorgeous girl who turned out to be a man. He seems uncertain about what he enjoyed, and his oafish bravado is thin ice cracking beneath his feet. The ladyboys await their moment, and when the Toxic Water starts circulating, they move in, offering little packets of drugs. When morning comes, the street has a stupefied feel, and the hard-faced lady at the stall on the corner calls out her wares with brassy belligerence: “Banana pancake, sir! SIR! Banana pancake”

but nowhere like Vang Vieng has the collision between local opportunism and a misplaced sense of freedom in Western youth produced such a lethal alchemy.

Photo by Shelly Sharon, 2014

Only on the road down to the bridge, opposite the Luang Prabang Bakery, do we find a local restaurant run by a timeless woman with a sweet smile and a genuine eye. She takes a shine to Shelly, and for the month that we are there she brings light to an otherwise grey experience. She washes our clothes, serves us mango juice, and keeps Shelly supplied with fresh, unbleached coconuts. When we come to leave, she takes my hand and looks at me squarely.

“Good luck,” she says.

“We will return tomorrow morning to say goodbye,” I say, “before we take the bus.”

But she has seen enough of backpackers to know better, and her memory has accompanied us ever since. Everywhere we have been on the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia we have found more or less successful experiments in globalisation, 14

When in 1998 a local mulberry farmer bought in some tractor-wheel inner-tubes for his Western volunteers to relax on in the river, he thought he was providing them with a spot of innocent fun. It was a fateful moment. The idea caught on, the word spread; more young travellers turned up, and the locals saw an opportunity to make some hard cash fast. They set up a business cooperative to run the tubing industry that, at its peak, came to comprise 1500 households. Alcohol and drugs soon followed, and with them prostitution.

Drawn by the dramatic landscapes and the opportunities for dangerous thrills, young men and women started arriving in droves; bars, restaurants, and guesthouses sprang up in haphazard profusion. Along the banks of the Nam Song especially, land was cleared for development, forests were cut, erosion set in; the delicate traditional balance of hunting, fishing, and rice cultivation was undermined. And in the maelstrom of sex, drugs, alcohol, and reckless adventure that supplanted it, young people started dying. And they died in such numbers that the local population began to shun the river where for countless generations they had bathed and fished. In their

animist-Buddhist worldview, the river had filled with evil spirits and bad karma. The verified fatalities of young foreigners in 2011 alone reached, according to some estimates, 27. The actual number of deaths is higher if we include those killed by overdose or bad batches of drugs, but the figure is unknown. Drug-related deaths were referred directly to Vientiane, and then hushed.

In August 2013, concerned about the bad press Vang Vieng was receiving, the authorities stepped in. They closed many of the riverside bars where the foreigners congregated, and dismantled the jerrybuilt playground where so many of them met an untimely end. That the move has been bad for business is beyond doubt, but to what extent it constitutes a genuine attempt at making life safer and more enjoyable for visitors is debatable. Backpackers no longer flock to Vang Vieng, and the recent influx of Chinese and Korean tourists has generally created a demand for higher standards. But the town still caters primarily to the backpacker, the tubing still goes on, and the same old DVDs of ‘Friends’ and ‘A Family Guy’ on looped payback still fill dingy bars and restaurants with their inane noise.

Whether because of the crackdown or the rains, the town now has a deadened feel. A 15

hand-written sign on one of the tubing establishments up the road from our guesthouse informs tourists that there will be no tubing because the river is too dangerous. One is tempted to read a newfound sense of responsibility and customer-care in the decision to suspend one of the town’s more lucrative operations out of concern for safety. But kayaking, the sign goes on to tell us, is available, please be safe and have fun. I wonder whether experience, training, helmets, lifejackets, and emergency back-up - especially now with the Nam Song in full spate - are still optional. A couple of weeks into our stay, news emerges of a Chinese tourist dying while kayaking on the river. He was a boy of seven.

Interviewed in 2012 by Abigail Haworth for the Guardian newspaper, Bob suggested that the many vested interests in the town’s river-bar scene made it difficult to imagine the drastic change that Vang Vieng so desperately needs happening any time soon. Two years on, Bob’s message remains unaltered. It is another dark twist in the town’s ongoing tale of woe, as we have occasion to witness when the local authorities pick up a friend with a bag of weed in his pocket. It is a well-rehearsed operation: the young westerner purchases a sachet of marijuana on the street; the dealer tips off a plainclothes policeman - they are every-

where - and within a matter of minutes the hapless traveller has his passport confiscated and is hauled off for ‘questioning’.

The aim of the exercise is to extort anything between USD 600 and 2000 for the restitution of the passport. In Laos, it is sufficient to buy a plot of land.

We are driving in Bob’s truck to pick up an old fridge from Chris Perkins, the owner of one of Vang Vieng’s more popular guesthouses, Pan’s Place. Because it is sealed and insulated, an old fridge is a good place to store seeds, and it will be placed in the nursery we are making out of an enclosure where they used to incinerate rubbish.

Bob is an energetic man, naturally optimistic and full of ideas. But the story of his native town weighs heavily on him: “They closed some of the places down here,” he tells me. “But nothing much has changed. Too much corruption.”

But change, as we know, occurs even when there is no hope left. A different breed of tourist has been sighted, not only from the wealthier Asian countries, but also from Europe. New restaurants, bakeries, and coffee shops on the street leading down to the bridge have a clean, finished feel. The food is better, and the flat-screen cacophony of sitcoms and cartoons has been replaced by music. Adventure-tour operators are begin16

ning to report that travellers no longer come just for the tubing and partying: they ask for rock-climbing, buggying, mountainbiking, caving; they hire cars and motorbikes just to see the area; they simply enjoy their stay, and leave with good memories, a healthy conscience, their reputations (and bodies) intact.

And then there is Bob himself.

Sae Lao Farm, Nathon, Lao PDR. Photo by Rob Norris

Nathon is a small community of rice fields, orchards and jungle on the other side of the river from Vang Vieng. It is here that Bob launched his pioneering project to promote a culture of sustainability in a town seriously degraded by modern consumer economics.

To Bob it was clear from the outset that the educational, economic and social needs of the local people were as much a part of the problem as the environmental disaster brought about by a generation of unbridled misadventure capitalism. The

two key ideas underpinning the project are, firstly, that sustainability must include sustainable technologies, education, job training, opportunities, and community involvement; secondly, that the best methods for creating lasting change are to lead through example and improve the lives of community members through sustainable development projects.

Today the farm serves as a community centre offering local people free daily English classes and courses in IT and accountancy skills aimed at equipping locals with the knowledge they need in order to set up their own businesses. Scholarships are offered to help the more ambitious into higher education and to support them through their studies. Employment is provided to local staff, and women in particular are recognised as key-players in engendering a cultural shift towards a more modern, sensitive, and affirming social model that will bring much needed wealth into the area and heal the damage of the past two decades. Revenue is generated by the farm-to-table organic restaurant, international courses, the sale of produce and donations.

The farm aims to become a close-looped project, meaning that it will achieve 100% self-reliance within a system that, once set in motion, will be entirely self17

perpetuating. This is to be achieved with an organic vegetable garden run according to permaculture principles, drinking and waste-water systems designed to eliminate costs and waste, crop rotation in the paddy fields, with peanuts being planted when the rice-harvesting is over to ensure the replenishment of nitrogen in the soil and an ongoing income from the production of high-quality, 100% organic peanut butter to be sold in the restaurant and the local shops. There are also plans for a mushroom farm.

And, of course, the biogas system. In the early stages of the project, the biogas system was Bob’s pride and joy. Built with the help of the Laos Biogas Pilot Project, a joint initiative of the Netherlands Development Organisation (SNV), the Laos Department of Livestock and Fishery and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the biogas system was installed at Sae Lao to make full use of animal and human waste, eliminating the need to buy cooking fuel and producing a practically endless supply of high-grade fertiliser.

Bob’s aim is complete self-reliance, which also means involving more and more local people in the project and providing them with the training that will allow them to enhance their living standards without destroying their natural habitats.

“Do you think it’ll catch on here, Bob?” I ask finally, as we bump along the track towards the farm.

The monsoon turns the road to clay mud.

Bob assures me that the locals regularly fill the potholes with wagon-loads of gravel, but driving remains treacherous. It is the planting season, and the flooded fields match the sky’s moods: the sombre clouds, the sequin glint of sunlight, the plash and dance of falling raindrops.

dry dormant vigil. I watch the farmers now in their time-honoured routines, and guess their desire for more money, better work, drier homes, air-conditioning, a car, a new road, no more mud in the yard. Can Bob pull it off ?

An irregular patchwork of fields on either side of the road rolls out to the feet of sharp, sudden hills. This is Indochina’s seasonal magic: the hard blank earth opens up like a window as if onto hidden heavens below, and we glide on a pellucid surface like water insects with nothing but the tensile strength of a meniscus between us and freefall. I feel the vertigo of something unfamiliar, lasting memories of early light or twilight hours behind the wide windows of a bus, watching the light rise and fade over ancient scenes and landscapes. Lines of dark figures in conical hats strung out across the mirror’s surface, knee-deep, carefully placing the miraculous green shoots of rice in the mud. And still, even after they have passed, that magic merger of heaven and earth continues, until the day when the rice matures, the harvest is done, and the earth is restored once more to its 18

“They still think I’m crazy,” he said. “But I don’t care. Once they see what we can do, things will change.”

And for the moment, his determination seems to be paying off.

Photo by Shelly Sharon, Vang Vieng, 2014