how do we encourage students to learn this activity" NOT BY TEACHING TEACHERS. Teachers are overwhelmed and might not have time to shaow students how to make websites.
instead, let's teach a few students in each school and let those students share the idea with other students.
This idea of sharing and seeing what happens occured in Africa. here's a GOOD NEWS story.
"We moved the vision of the Great Green Wall from one that was impractical to one that was practical," says Mohamed Bakarr, the lead environmental specialist for Global Environment Facility, the organization that examines the environmental benefit of World Bank projects. "It is not necessarily a physical wall, but rather a mosaic of land use practices that ultimately will meet the expectations of a wall. It has been transformed into a metaphorical thing."
The Sahel spans 3,360 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean, a belt stretching across the southern edge of the Sahara. Rainfall is low, from four to 24 inches per year, and droughts are frequent. Climate change means greater extremes of rainfall as the population skyrockets in the region, one of the poorest in the world. Food security is an urgent concern. By 2050, the population could leap to 340 million, up from 30 million in 1950 and 135 million today.
Reij, now based in Amsterdam, began working in the Sahel when the soil literally was blowing away during dust storms. After years away, Reij returned to Niger and Burkina Faso in the summer of 2004. He was stunned by what he saw, green where there had been nothing but tan, denuded land. He quickly secured funding for the first of several studies looking at farming in villages throughout Burkina Faso and Niger.
For help, he called on another veteran of Africa, Gray Tappan, a geographer with the U.S. Geological Survey's West Africa Land Use and Land Cover Trends Project. Flying over villages and then driving from one to the other, Tappan says they were “charmed” by what they saw. On the ground, they couldn’t see villages from a distance because there was too much vegetation.
Over two years traveling through Burkina Faso and Niger, they uncovered a remarkable metamorphosis. Hundreds of thousands of farmers had embraced ingenious modifications of traditional agriculture practices, transforming large swaths into productive land, improving food and fuel production for about 3 million people.
"This regreening went on under our radar, everyone's radar, because we weren't using detailed enough satellite imagery. We were looking at general land use patterns, but we couldn't see the trees," Tappan says. "When we began to do aerial photography and field surveys, then we realized, boy, there is something very, very special going on here. These landscapes are really being transformed."
image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/08/4f/084f5f05-d4a0-49b7-a82e-29e534978671/galma_1_crop.jpg__800x450_q85_crop_upscale.jpg
Innovative farmers in Burkina Faso had adapted years earlier by necessity. They built zai, a grid of deep planting pits across rock-hard plots of land that enhanced water infiltration and retention during dry periods. They built stone barriers around fields to contain runoff and increase infiltration from rain.
In Niger, Reij and Tappan discovered what has become a central part of the new Great Green Wall campaign: farmer-managed natural regeneration, a middle ground between clearing the land and letting it go wild.
Farmers in the Sahel had learned from French colonists to clear land for agriculture and keep crops separate from trees. Under French colonial law and new laws that countries adopted after independence, any trees on a farmer's property belonged to the government. Farmers who cut down a tree for fuel would be threatened with jail. The idea was to preserve forests; it had the opposite effect.
"This was a terrific negative incentive to have a tree," Garrity says, during an interview from his Nairobi office. "For years and years, tree populations were declining."
But over decades without the shelter of trees, the topsoil dried up and blew away. Rainfall ran off instead of soaking into cropland. When Reij arrived in Africa, crop yields were less than 400 pounds per acre (compared to 5,600 pounds per acre in the United States) and water levels in wells were dropping by three feet per year.
In the early 1980s, as village populations increased and land productivity decreased, Reij says farmers turned to a low-cost way of growing trees and shrubs, using root stock in their cleared fields. The trees provided fuel, fodder for livestock, food, and soil improvement.
When Tappan compared aerial images he took in 2004 with those from as far back as 1950, he was blown away. Huge swaths once tan were green. Niger’s Zinder Valley had 50 times more trees than it did in 1975.
To figure out how the practice became widespread, Reij and Tappan did a bit of cultural archaeology. They learned it had originated with Tony Rinaudo, an Australian with Serving in Mission, a religious nonprofit. Rinaudo, working with local farmers, had helped the farmers identify useful species of trees in the stumps in their fields, protect them, and then prune them to promote growth. Farmers grew other crops around the trees.
Rinaudo returned to Australia in 1999, unaware of the extensive effect of his work (Reij would not meet him until 2006 when they began working on regreening initiatives). By the time Reij and Tappan took their first trip across part of Niger, farmer regeneration had been shared, from farmer to farmer, for about three decades. "We were mesmerized by what we were seeing," Tappan says of that first trip. "It was stunning to see the amount of work in terms of soil and water conservation, water harvesting practices as well as natural regeneration of trees."
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/great-green-wall-stop-desertification-not-so-much-180960171/#GJv2fu8w1eSv2QoD.99
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