This could be paradise. Mother Earth lies brown and soft under my feet, golden light shines through the leaves. Leaning against an old cork oak, I look into a little valley; the air is shimmering in the heat of a summer afternoon. The branches above give home to birds and beetles, and ferns are moving softly in the breeze.
This could be paradise. But in fact, it is not. The green of the little valley before me is created by rock roses – pioneer plants on devastated soils throughout the Mediterranean. Through their monotonous surface here and there the corpses of corks oak arise like sunken ships in a sandy bay. The opposite side of the valley is already clear, no oaks, no grass, not even rock roses – only grayish eucalyptus on top.
The cork oaks of southern Portugal are dying, and still no government and no university has found a formula to stop it. Even the proud tree at my back shows the unavoidable signs of the coming death: brown stains in the bark from fungi. Old farmers here say that the tree is crying.
And I am crying as well. It is not only about the century-old traditional culture that shaped the look of the Alentejo that is coming to a close. Desert is also developing right before our eyes. Southern Europe is turning into a second Sahel Zone.
I wonder why nobody runs shouting through the towns, ringing a bell, sounding the alarm: Watch out, wake up – our land, our mother is dying! What will we eat tomorrow ?
The Sahara is coming north. Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece all suffer under increasing summer droughts, forests are burning, and in Portugal every twenty minutes a farmer gives up his farm. More than 80% of the population lives in big cities and on the coast; 80% of the food is imported; and the “delicious garden,” the fertile land of the Moors in the Middle Ages, is turning into dust.
“Who cares?” city people may say . “We get our food from the supermarket.”
An incident in June of this year showed how weak this argument is and how thin the layers of peace and richness in Europe might be. A strike of fuel truck drivers hit Portugal. On the second day the first gas stations had run out of gas; on the third day the first supermarkets had empty shelves; and then two people working to block some fuel trucks trying to break the strike were run over deliberately.
If this kind of thing should happen more in the future, we have to ask: What will we eat? Where will our water come from? Our electricity? How will we survive? When the last fuel has been used, these questions will not be answered by global systems, but in our neighborhoods, our communities, and through our relationship to the land we live on.
How can we save the cork oaks? Pancho, a nature walker and ecologist in Tamera, gives a surprisingly sober answer. “By healing the water balance. Water is the only sustainable solution for the trees.”
Tamera, a research center and peace university, works on peace – not only between people but with nature as well. On three-hundred-fifty acres, the ecologists of Tamera develop local solutions for global problems.
“Droughts are not a natural law,” Sepp Holzer states. This Austrian mountain farmer is one of the ecological advisors of Tamera. “They are the consequence of deforestation, monocultures, and overgrazing. After decades of wrong treatment, it´s not small steps that are needed, but bigger steps of correction.”
Sepp takes us on a tour through the growing water landscape of Tamera. In the middle of the Alentejo, where the summer has turned everything brown, where meadows are as dry as straw, we have entered a different world. Fresh green shoots are sprouting on the terraces. Fruit trees, berry bushes, and reeds are growing. The densely-growing leaves on the terraces are edible plants such as radishes, cabbage, turnips, lettuce, and old varieties of cereals which all grow here abundantly – not in straight lines and rows, but as mother nature would have sown them herself. As visitors we are allowed to eat from this abundance. This first impression of the new Tamera water landscape is convincing – and tasty.
The first lake of Tamera was started last August. It is part of a comprehensive concept for the retention and saving of the winter rain, for renaturation of the landscape, for reforestation with mixed cultures, and for food cultivation. The winter rain filled the lake; now in the hot summer season, the lake supplies the surroundings with water. 
“Water is information. Water is life. Water is capital,” Sepp Holzer states. The lake is indeed a elaborated system of self purification and regulation of different temperatures. The flatter shorelines serve to clean the lake, and to grow tropical plants. Natural marble stones are standing on the shore and in some shallow parts of the lake, they are useful giants working like a tiled fireplace. At night they radiate the heat to their surroundings.
Deeper zones of the lake create the differences in temperature leading to water movements which carry oxygen into the lake and help the fish thrive and prosper.
“Edible landscapes” is a term which makes the mouths water of some participants on the walk. In many places the mixed plant cultures which were sown last year are already growing. As much as possible original species are grown – plants which will later sow their own seeds. Sepp Holzer : “In nature it is the same as with human beings: community is better than solitude.”
100,000 tons of soil were removed for the construction of this first water retention basin. The design of the lake incorporates a gently rising dam with an overflow and an outlet discharge structure that regulates the water level and makes the population of water plants and fish controllable.
Beyond its task of ecological regeneration, the water landscape can become an important economic factor. The ecologists of Tamera think that future communities will produce their own food and take care of nature. Together with the solar energy systems which are developed in Tamera, this “lakescape” is a model for decentralized sustainability in times when the supermarkets can´t take care of us any more.
Maybe this could be paradise after all.
sent by
Peter Koll
Tamera Team
