Using her newly learned farming techniques, Mama Agnes' garden needs watering just once a week, instead of twice a day. Photo by Siena Anstis.

Year-round, Mama Agnes feeds a family of six with a comparatively 100 square-metre plot of land. She stands in her backyard garden, an oasis of green in a landscape left yellow and cracked by the hot sun. She points to tomato plants heavy with still-green fruits, sukuma (kale), onions, and spinach.

Mama Agnes is currently in the middle of her own one-woman green revolution: she is adopting new farming practices learned from the nearby Sukuma Farmer Field School (SFFS) in Chikwakwani, a semi-arid region about 50 km inland from the Kenyan coast.

Trained by the school as a “community resource person,” she has spent many weeks practicing new farming techniques in water conservation to then implement at home. She learned how to dig three-foot-deep square pits. She was then taught to layer the bottom of the pit with cut dry grass and cover this with a mix of topsoil and home-made manure.

While a simple modification of local farming practices, it has had a drastic effect. Suddenly, plots only need to be watered once a week, instead of every day, both morning and night. The grass absorbs the water, slowly releasing it over the week as the plants become thirstier. Plots of healthy tomato and kale at the farm school and in Mama Agnes’ garden attest to this miracle.
Since many of the region’s backyard farmers have to walk 40 km to fetch water, this has been the barrier to growing bigger gardens. Mama Agnes, as an ambassador for SFFS, has spread this water-saving practice in her local community. Villagers, who no longer have to buy supplementary food, find themselves a small degree wealthier with enough savings to buy soap and salt.

Founded in the early 1990s, SFFS has helped reform local practices to adapt to a worsening environment. The school, supported by a local non-governmental organization called the Coastal Rural Support Program (CRSP), now boasts 60 members. Based on a “learn by doing” pedagogy and set in a “school without walls,” farmers learn, hands-on, how to change their yields.

While these new practices have made a significant difference, there remains one eternal problem: water. No matter what types of conservation approaches are adopted, there remains a shortage. The school’s dam, afflicted by sedimentation and seepage, is almost empty. How these farmers will survive, as climate change makes semi-arid regions like Chikwakwani into inhabitable landscapes, is anyone’s guess.

In fact, it looks like most will become “climate refugees.” The United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security estimates that by 2010 there will be an estimated 50 million such displaced persons. Since these individuals are not protected under international law, even though environmental and social issues are closely connected (for example, in Darfur, desertification has partially fueled the conflict), they are at the mercy of governments who often have little interest in countering this fatal trend.

But, on that damning note, there do exist some inspirational leaders who are interested in reversing—or attempting to reverse—the path we have taken. Here in Kenya, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement to encourage tree-planting among subsistence farmers who are forced to raze forests for charcoal to use as cooking fuel and heat.

Lauryn Drainie: advocating for small island nations whose voices have been lost in the climate fight

[Editor’s note: Every month, Eco-Chamber profiles an environmental activist from Canada or abroad, called “Eco-Warriors.” These profiles are a collection of stories Emily is working on for a book called The Next Eco-Warriors.]

In a matter of 10 months, she went from eco-nobody to climate justice crusader. Attempting to put island nations back on the map of our climate future. She shows that it’s not just the scientists, politicians and eco-celebs like Al Gore who are making waves.

As a new activist in the ‘eco-warrior’ world, Lauryn Drainie, a 21-year-old Japanese-Canadian, fell into climate justice work unexpectedly. Though she had no in-depth knowledge or background in the climate cause, she was chosen to be a Canadian youth delegate at the Poznan, Poland climate conference last December . What happened there changed her life.

“At the negotiations, I was shocked at the extent to which Small Island Developing States (SIDS) were marginalized,” says Drainie.

It was in Poznan that she realized the problem with the 2°C-degree global temperature rise target that is deemed “acceptable” by many climate experts. That target, while it would help save many inland ecologies, would leave many of the SIDS uninhabitable as the sea level rises. These already marginalized groups are on the brink of literally losing their homelands, their livelihoods, their cultures and languages as climate refugees.

This is what economists call an “opportunity cost.” The opportunity: for us in the well-to-do West to leave some margin of error and gradually reduce our emissions over the next few decades. The cost: up to 130 million people becoming climate refuges in the next 50 years. The scientific consensus, numerous environmental groups and wealthy governments around the world have all decided this is a cost worth paying – but most of those people won’t be affected nearly as quickly as SIDS.

Drainie says this 2°C degree target is mostly deemed acceptable because the SIDS and other developing countries have little clout at these climate talks. In her accounts of Poznan, she discovered that SIDS leaders were provided cheap accommodations with no telephones, TVs or even e-mail access, while the higher-ups were given penthouses with all the amenities. The SIDS were almost literally in the dark, unable to communicate the threat they face.

Lauryn Drainie and other Youth Delegates offers a placard to the Environment Minister of Nepal, while blocking the entrance to the negotiations room. Photo Credit: Robert van Waarden

To make the voiceless heard at the conference, the Youth Coalition, which included Drainie, blocked the doors of the conference house on day five, forcing country representatives to talk with them. In that moment, they negotiated with these representatives to sign on to a Survival Principle in the Post-2012 climate treaty, a principle that safeguards the survival of all countries and all peoples.

Ninety countries signed on and the Youth Coalition received supporters from such prominent individuals as Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. The next morning, they found that the newly released Ministerial Summary Document on Shared Vision had the Survival Principle included. They had single-handedly put the marginalized back at the discussion table.

Today, Drainie is coordinating a climate justice speaking tour across Canada with SIDS community leaders, giving countless speeches herself on the plight of SIDS and is helping put together a book celebrating these vibrant cultures that may be forever lost due to climate change. The fight is still far from being won for SIDS and other marginalized groups, but this newbie eco-warrior is helping climate leaders hear those who need it most urgently.

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine’s resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.