https://reasonstobecheerful.world/turning-waste-into-charcoal-in-uganda/
"It’s mid-morning in Uganda’s Mabira rainforest. Godliver Businge stands
outside her home, full of good spirit and ready to get to work. Around her, a
gathering of women steadily forms, creating a circle around an outdoor stove,
as the sweet aromas of barbecue rise into the tree canopy. At first glance,
this is a familiar scene — women preparing a meal for their families and
community. Yet, within this seemingly routine gathering, a quiet revolution is
taking shape.
Each woman here is participating in a training course, learning to craft and
cook with charcoal briquettes made from organic waste — part of a grassroots
conservation effort aimed at protecting Uganda’s last standing forests.
Uganda’s Mabira Forest spans 74,000 acres of forests, hilltops and verdant
stream valleys. In the forest, wide-eyed, gray-cheeked mangabey monkeys hang
from the branches, while flocks of tit-hylia songbirds flit through the leaves
and violet-winged butterflies perch on flowering plants. The Mabira forest is
one of the only places in the world to host these rare species of monkeys,
birds, and butterflies. The survival of these species, however, depends on the
survival of Mabira itself.
The richly biodiverse Mabira reserve is the largest remaining block of
semi-evergreen rainforest in the Victoria Basin. It is also home to settled
human enclaves that depend on the forest.
Today, the prevalence of deforestation threatens the forest’s longevity, along
with the communities, human and otherwise, living in or around it. “One of the
biggest rainforests in Africa — the Mabira Forest — is now a forest just by the
roadside,” says Businge, the Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA) Uganda program lead
and a co-founder of the Uganda Women’s Water Initiative (UWWI). “But if you go
behind it, the forest has been cut down.” (WEA is a project of Earth Island
Institute, which also publishes the
Journal.)"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
