GAIA Talks

30/10/2023

A spontaneous storytelling circle with Mirabelle’s Forest Garden at Merit Blended Learning Academy where we were looking around for more spaces to plant trees and edible shrubs.
More kids showed up while I was sharing the story with one of the small ones that was too young to go to school when we first played with the story at this school in early 2019.
“ We want to hear the story too”,they said, and reminded me how great is to catch their little open hearts young with a green love for gardening and the earth.

MBLA is in Roma, Kalundu area. A great school whose director Ms Candy Marilyn Morrell is open to green minds and heart:)

11/10/2023

And while many people would like to recycle in Lusaka but they excuse themselves that there are no options, voila.... Separation at Source exists as a business since 2018.

They work with businesses and schools to seprate trash in recyclables and they do the collection for a fee from which they substract a value offered on recyclable materials (yep, one needs to pay for garbage not burn it in the back yard. How can that be ok in a capital?).

The French school does this from 2019.
Schools cam.be a great entry point for childfen to educate their parents on this,and even bring their recyclables there.

Mr Misolo Sakala from Separation at Source guiding us bow to separate what we have correctly.
Call him up for becoming the next green at heart business or school:)

+260 95 5026827

It is also the first company we hear of that recycles soft wrapping plastic.

Great news!!!

Recycling is really everybody s responsibility

09/05/2023

Back on the wild /cherry tomatoes, pest resistant varieties. Why is the market valuing obsessively the tomatoes that are big, hybrids of all sorts needing chemical spraying once a week?

This one is a self seeded tomato found in the Great grandmother's old plot, in our new Mirabelle's Forest Garden set up in Solo people tribal land off from Chongwe.

The place has been left in ruins by people many years ago but this plant stayed and continued to multiply year after year.

Cause that s how nature works and thinks. And it does not need so much help from chemical companies unless people think they Re smarter to go against it.

Why continue self inflicted poisoning with varieties of tomatoes that can only survive and produce with tons of chemicals sprayed on them?

our 8 year old Mirabelle would say something along the lines of... Cognitive dissonance.

You know what is bad for you but you still eat it, buy it, support it.

How about thinking things through better?

Putting our two pennies into education.

09/05/2023

How soon can malnutrition be history in this country?

Yep, our Pigeon peas planted 5 months ago start growing and producing already! And If you see a worm, that s 100% indication it's an organic crop (and worms have to eat something too, right?)

Now, why is this Pigeon pea amazing in our forest garden?

* it is edible, nutritious and easy to grow

* it is perennial - plant one time, harvest for about 5 years from one little shrub

* it fixes nitrogen and this is vital for all the plants around that we ll have in our designed eco-system.

* it helps to improve the soil for other crops.
It can be planted in mixed plots or around plots with plants that need nutrients that Pigeon pea helps to fix.

Why don't we see it everywhere?

Edible landscaping in Zambia.

P. S. Mirabelle's Forest Garden started to shape up in the last rainy season 40 km from Chongwe, 80 km from Lusaka, Zambia. This little and brave fairy tale character waits for green hearted friends.

And yes, her question is:

Just how many more plants can everyone easily know and grow so malnutrition becomes history soon?

13/02/2023

Growing your own clean food as revolutionary.
And so much critical thinking and constructive action involved to solve one of the major challenges we re facing as humanity.
This inspiring film is free to watch online for 2 more days.

https://grow.foodrevolution.org

Can we feed the world without destroying it?! Rosario Dawson’s award-winning film The Need To GROW shows the SOLUTIONS — and the real stories of the game-changing innovators behind them.

23/01/2023

Wild tomatoes are easier to grow organically in Zambia, wet season on.
Wild is great! More resilient plants,needing no pesticides. Just heard from a commercial farmer that is spraying tomatoes twice a week in this season, every single week.

We ll be gathering seeds to share!

06/01/2023

For the Wild is an amazing podcast standing for the values we do. Focused on land-based protection, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth and consumerism.

Beautiful Green Heart tribe is growing!

For The Wild is a progressive media organization and nonprofit that emerged in 2014 from a deep sense of discomfort with the status quo and the yearning to both find what existed outside of dominant culture and consumer conditioning. For The Wild’s founder felt called to take a vow of commitment t...

05/01/2023

And this is how we could turn rubbish into gold. Sorting through garbage to find meaning,to be a piece of the green puzzle that gets put together by people with green hearts that care for the big Gaia heart that puts up with us, spoiled children that we are.

05/01/2023

The aftermath of the holidays looks like a war declaration for the environment. Who else cares? Zambia too has all the privilege of development and availability of goods, with none of the options of garbage management and minimum recycling developed elsewhere.

Recycling can be a small step but in terms of awareness it is a huge one. Cause we start paying attention to what we use, how wasteful we are, how spoiled by money and careless about the bigger picture. We only have one planet,garbage stays here.

There is no garbage bin that is innocent. They all go to landfills just behind privileged neighbourhoods -where they are not "seen" but by the poorest people who scout through them for anything useful.

Just like the gold we could scout in our own awareness when we start caring a lit bit more than about the small "me" and what "i" care to consume and dump without a second thought.

30/12/2022

Beautiful creation from another Green Heart Tribe global member:o) A waste free Christmas song to be sung on the 12 days of Christmas tune

29/12/2022

A cool new place in Lusaka for new body and physical challenges. What a great alternative to too much screen time for kids, right?

Thank you Pa Mitengo: Climbing & Calisthenics for setting this up!