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Somalia as a whole is undergiong an environmental catastrophe.

The biggest culprit is charcoal.
Charcoal is bieng made from what little trees there are left in somalia and some of it is even bieng exported..

http://reframecollection.org/films/film?Id=1161

an idea on how to stop this practice..

charcoal from bamboo
http://www.bamboogarden.com/Timber%20Bamboos.htm

some species can grow well in a drought environment like somalia and grow to full hieght in 2 months..
imagine cutting them down every 2 months..
You can get far more charcoal from them and they can also be used for buildings, used in concrete reinforcement and even furniture.

As far as somalis go we only understand visual demonstrations.

You go back and build the first Bamboo farm and in no time at all you will see Bamboo farms everywhere.

Bamboos do require good source of water

Thats my dream walahi,

Experiment with underutilized crops, such as hemp ,teff, fonio, quinoa, moringa,amaranth even black yed peas.
build a house with hempcrete reinforced with bamboo,
maybe even try to run tractor, generator on biodiesel and alcohol...

basically my dream is to change the somali diet from imported rice and pasta to something locally grown.

we can all dream cant we..

oh and steam engines... ima big fan of steam engines...

Any effing idiot found cutting trees for charcoal purposes in the north should be publicly executed imho

then what will they cook with?

you need to provide alternatives before you go about banning things.

Knowing somalis, I bet they would much rather grow Qat than hemp or Bamboo. Although Bamboo only grows in certain climates e.g. East asian forests.

gurey25 wrote:oh and steam engines... ima big fan of steam engines...

I too dream of the day somaliland can have fully funtioning trains to transport goods from the port and also people from west to east (even through mountainous regions where travel is difficult). I saw a documentary on the trains of india and how the british used them to deliver goods all over the vast country.

BTW, I agree on your point about somalis using up to much charcoal, If you introduce an alternative it would catch on quick, although I don't think you could convince them of giving up their rice.

abdi.ismail wrote:Knowing somalis, I bet they would much rather grow Qat than hemp or Bamboo. Although Bamboo only grows in certain climates e.g. East asian forests.

Oh how i hate qad its nearly useless, has no nutrietional benfits, takes too much water and nutrients from the soil and so need allot of fertilizer.

it has one use though, it energized sperm cells and increases thier mobility as well as thier growth...
its somesort of natural fertillity drug....


The only way i can think of stopping qad consumption is by attacking supply ...
find some fungus or insect that likes it and then spread it throughout ethiopia and kenya...

if it gets to yemen, the yemenis might go crazy and invade saudia or something so there could be some consequences.

abdi.ismail wrote:Knowing somalis, I bet they would much rather grow Qat than hemp or Bamboo. Although Bamboo only grows in certain climates e.g. East asian forests.

there are vairieties of bamboo that do well in drought conditions...

gurey25 wrote:

abdi.ismail wrote:Knowing somalis, I bet they would much rather grow Qat than hemp or Bamboo. Although Bamboo only grows in certain climates e.g. East asian forests.

Oh how i hate qad its nearly useless, has no nutrietional benfits, takes too much water and nutrients from the soil and so need allot of fertilizer.

it has one use though, it energized sperm cells and increases thier mobility as well as thier growth...
its somesort of natural fertillity drug....


The only way i can think of stopping qad consumption is by attacking supply ...
find some fungus or insect that likes it and then spread it throughout ethiopia and kenya...

if it gets to yemen, the yemenis might go crazy and invade saudia or something so there could be some consequences.

You mean virility, only women are fertile.

I'm actually quite interested in the "Hempcrete" idea. Concrete back home is soo expensive, it would be a much cheaper and eco-friendly alternative. How would you get a hold of this stuff?

look it up dude..
there are allot of cheaper alternatives but hempcrete is the coolest..

there is

1. compressed earth block
2. rammed earth
3. earth bag (really kool)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthbag_construction
4 good old fashioned mud brick..

What about adobe?

abdi.ismail wrote:What about adobe?

thats a form of mud brick..

any of these will do for somalia...
unless you are building sky scrapers anything upto a 3 storey building can be built this way..

gurey25 wrote:

abdi.ismail wrote:What about adobe?

thats a form of mud brick..

any of these will do for somalia...
unless you are building sky scrapers anything upto a 3 storey building can be built this way..

I prefer Beautiful low-rise cities like Paris. High-rise and skyscrpers is for countries that don't have a lot of land or where land is expensive. Seriously though, building material is the least of our problems if somalis are building shit like this;





Hargeisa needs a College of Modern Architecture.

To buil soemthing like this;