13 TIPS FROM OUR ANCESTORS
TO MAKE THE BEST USE OF WATER
By Lola Hierro
(Translation - Kashyapa Yapa)
(cover photo courtesy of: Adripino Jaya, Ayacucho, Peru)
'Go back to
the origins', recommend those who know and study ancestral wisdom, its legacy from
many angles and also its connection with how to find, conserve and protect a
resource so scarce as vital: water. "I have not invented anything new. I
am only giving back what the elders taught me", tells Dr. Kashyapa Yapa, a
Sri Lankan native, living in Ecuador for the last 20 years, which he had spent
in travelling through Latin America to learn from its natives. A civil engineer
with a Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley, he is in Abidjan (Ivory
Coast) to participate in the seventh edition of the Rural Water Supply Network
Forum, which takes place every five years. More than 500 water and sanitation
experts meet here this week with the intention of joining forces to reach the
goal of one of the Sustainable Development Objectives: provide potable water to
the 663 million people who do not yet have it, from now till 2030.
Yapa took part in the forum with an unusual
presentation: it was very humane and he tactfully sidestepped the scientific norms
demanded in a meeting like this. His topic, 'Nurturing water: ancestor
groundwater recharging in the Americas', highlights his commitment to
reevaluate and recover the ancestral water nurturing practices and to promote
them. The audience listens attentively for half an hour during which he
sketches just a summary of his vast experience studying the engineering technologies
of pre-Hispanic civilizations, a theme he develops extensively in his freely
downloadable book 'Prácticas ancestrales
de crianza de agua' (Ancestral water nurturing practices).
During a free
period, Yapa met with Future Planet to share with us some advice that, in his
opinion, two millennia-old American civilizations too would have given us, if we
were to take this opportunity to make the best use of this resource and improve
the agriculture. "In brief, it all means listening carefully to the Earth.
Our heads are full of things and we forget the lessons of our grandparents,
about what they observed", he claims. So, what can we do?
1. Learn
from the past
Our
ancestors put learning about the climate first, because that is what brings us
water. At times it comes late, at other times comes too much... They were experts
in managing risks. They wanted to know what is going on. Despite nothing had
been written down, they learned that the sun returns after the night, and that the
seasons repeat themselves... Having understood the cycles, they tried to
understand the past to learn about the future. Analyzing the climate, we can
foresee weather phenomena and take precautions, or make the best of what little
we have. Foreseeing, also, means understanding the history. We should not limit
observations of these phenomena occurring only within our own lifetime. My
father, grandfather, great-grandfather..., all did this same work in the same area,
with the same type of agriculture... That information, experiences over
hundreds and hundreds of years, has an immense value and helps us.
2. Give
excess rain the merit it deserves
We face two
different phenomena: a lot of rain may fall or a drought may occur. We think
that drought is the worst, but an intense rain is more dangerous because it occurs
suddenly, and could destroy everything if you are not prepared. A drought, on
the other hand, occurs gradually. Our ancestors were more worried about a rain
too intense, because with a drought, you learn little by little and seek a
remedy. Today we have lost that vision. Why did people live in the desert, if
life is difficult there? Because, with so much sun, if the crops come up, they
grow more rapidly and produce more, compared to a rainy area where the high
humidity makes the crops rot... Semi-arid zones have given birth to all the
great civilizations that we know of. Besides, cultivating does not need that much
water, which is an error: the science is only now learning that a plant needs much
less water to feed itself than what we believe.
3. Learn the language of nature
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| Halo Solar - by Stacey Baker-Bruno, Earthsky org |
4. Do not ignore wild plants
Some plants
that we have domesticated, like wild potatoes, give smaller products and have
no taste. We have modified their properties over a long period to be able to
sell them and eat them. The same with the original version of corn,
domesticated in Mexico. The original is hardly comparable because the grains
are very small. Our ancestors have continued to select and modify those plants,
but preserved the original version too, without any genetic change, because from
that you can learn a lot. Potatoes and other tubers, grown around Lake Titicaca,
were domesticated hundreds of years ago, but they never destroy the wild plant
because if they know the behavior of the original plant, they can understand how
the domesticated one will behave. This is very important.
5. Choose better
where to plant
6. Promote more rainwater collection
7. Make use of the shallow groundwater
8. The value of tectonic plates
Even for
hydrogeologists, who are experts of groundwater, finding where it exists, whether
it is of good quality and of sufficient quantity to cover all the needs is not
an easy task. How did our ancestors managed to satisfy the demands of the
population? Nazca is a region with very active tectonic movements, those that
break the Earth surface. We call these breaks geologic faults. Those movements
decrease the soil density, or loosen-up the soil. Water travels easily along the
faults, and it will quickly enter a gallery, the kind we talked about before. Thus
came up the hypothesis: that Nazca lines indicate where geologic faults exist. Though
not that hard to check, it is still not scientifically accepted. Our ancestors
did not have hydrogeology degrees, but they knew how to use the resources. We
should look for geologic faults because there could exist water we can tap into,
but working carefully, because the roofs may collapse as well.
9. Let's
make Pachagramas (earth calendars)
In Bolivia,
the government accepted that its meteorological institute does not have the ability
to provide high quality forecasts for agriculture. They have very little
historic weather data. And, the number of degrees that the temperature will
rise, or the millimeters of rain that will not fall mean nothing to the
farmers. This is the difference between foreseeing climate for agriculture and weather
forecasting for institutions. Because of that, the government of Evo Morales began
to value Yapuchiris, the expert farmers. A pilot project near Titicaca has
given these farmers computers to record their forecasts for agricultural
campaigns and to monitor them later. They are called Pachagramas or earth
calendars. They record whether the forecast of a frost, for example, gave
correct results or not. Gathering all this information weekly, just imagine: in
four or five years there will be a huge database of proven information. We can
keep discarding the predictions that do not work, and adapt those that do to
find patterns and trends.
10. Take agriculture to water, not the opposite
11. Breastfeeding the Earth
When it
rains on steeply sloping terrain, a gully (a flow path carved into the slope) carries
a lot of water, but very soon, it runs dry. To use that water better, our
ancestors blocked the gully and built another, less-steep channel to move that
water to a flatter area, thus reducing its velocity. This water infiltrates the
soil and goes down. So, surface water is turned into groundwater. Water
reappears thousand meters below in the form of springs. How did they know that a
spring will appear there? Many trials are behind such efforts, which are not
guaranteed hundred percent, neither are they resolved in one day. That water may
take one, two or three months to reappear. An NGO from Peru, CONDESAN, is
carrying out an investigation in Huamantanga, sending out dyes along with
channeled water. That is how we realized it takes that long. They calculate
that about 40% of that water can be recovered. The technique is called mamanteo,
because you 'breastfeed' the Earth with water.
12. Store
water within the soil, not on the surface
The soil is
the world's largest reservoir for water. It charges us nothing, nor causes any
disaster if you know how to work with it. Why do not we take advantage of it?
If you collect water on the surface, wanting to keep it for several months, a
part is going to evaporate. And, it costs a lot. If you keep water under the ground,
it comes out with no hurry. Terraces facilitate one way to store water in soil.
You feed water to the first level of crops; the excess filters-in and feeds the
next. Occurs no wastage of water, no erosion either. In Machu Picchu, after 500
years, we hardly see any erosion. They skillfully stored water with good
drainage.
13. Ask for
permission
In indigenous communities, all nature-related activities
are combined with elaborate rituals and ceremonies. It is important to respect
that vision: that we are not alone in this world; you do not change the nature
just because you want it that way. All of us are in this together: the water, the
animals and the man... You have to request permission. Once I asked, "Why
do we do so many rituals to make a terrace wall?" "Under that stone
you picked up to make the wall, the wind goddess was resting", I was told.
The moving wind meets the stone and rests for a while underneath. If you pick
it up, you are disturbing her. The same with our relatives. As there were no
cemeteries before, the dead were buried in the fields. So, seek permission from
your grandparents who are resting there. This is the way to understand how they
work.
Kashyapa A.S. Yapa
17th January 2017, Sierra Leone.
kyapa@yahoo.com
If you would like to start a discussion on this theme, please write to me.
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