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Volcanoes and climate: How will the eruption in Tonga affect our gardens?

February 8, 2022

Volcanoes and climate: How will the eruption in Tonga affect our gardens?

If you have watched the news at all in the last two weeks, you know that there was a huge underwater volcanic eruption near Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean on January 15, 2022, that spewed ash and gases into the atmosphere. It blew with such force that the sound of the eruption was heard in Alaska thousands of miles away and the atmospheric pressure wave it set off has traveled around the earth as many as ten times according to satellite and ground-based sensors. With such a large signal, you might wonder what impact the eruption could have on our weather and climate for the next year. In this post, we will explore how volcanoes in general can affect the climate around the world and whether the Tonga eruption is likely to change our gardens’ climate this year.

Flowers growing under the volcano. Source: cogdogblog, Commons Wikimedia

What do volcanic eruptions emit into the atmosphere?

When volcanoes erupt they put out both ash and gases. The ash is made of tiny particles of rocky material from solidified lava and sometimes pieces of the volcano destroyed by the eruption. These particles are carried downwind in a direction determined by the winds at the heights to which the ash can rise. In a long eruption, the plume of ash can blow in a different direction each day, covering the ground when it falls back to earth. Usually ash does not rise very high in the atmosphere because it is quite heavy and so most of it falls out in just a few days.

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Fumbling Toward Independence

January 21, 2016

Fumbling Toward Independence

Foggy road

Some blogs focus on single-word subjects like knitting or superheroes. This one wanders a bit; one week I might write about our neighbors here in rural Ireland, the next about our garden, then about old black-and-white movies or reading with my daughter. All of it, though, deals with our attempts to discover an older and better way of living, and learn the values and skills that were normal before everything became cheap, fast and easily discarded.

Thus, I study the past to see what worked better. Our elderly neighbors grew up without electricity, cars or mass media, and I see how different their village culture was from our own frantic and lonely society. I read diaries and letters from a century of two ago, and see a complexity of thought and language that gives college students trouble today. The writers — in colonial America, Victorian Britain or 20th-century Ireland — might have been farmers, but they often grew up reading the same classics as their forebears — Hesiod and Sophocles, Livy and Marcus Aurelius, Aquinas and Dante. Now I’m reading these works one by one, and teaching what bits I can to my daughter. For that matter, I’m learning how to genuinely read again, and not just scan text on a screen.

We try to learn the ways people used to provide for their own basic needs rather than relying entirely on companies and governments, so we built a chicken coop, got bees, grow a garden, and learned to forage wild plants and mushrooms. We have make our own pickles, sauerkraut, beer, bread, wine and jam, and have taken courses in tree grafting, oven building, black-smithing, wood carving, and so on. We fail a lot, but we have fun learning.

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The Gardens of Plenty

June 2, 2015

The Gardens of Plenty

Editor’s Note: In France, Gardens of Plenty help provide not just vegetables but training and job skills. Yardfarms can be developed not just in backyards but in community spaces around towns and cities, helping to train others to not just make a living but to make their communities more sustainable, more food secure, more resilient.

Jardin Cocagne. Photo (CC): PHOTO CLUB de St Hilarion
Jardin Cocagne. Photo (CC): PHOTO CLUB de St Hilarion

In the Jardins de Cocagne gardens the jobless and homeless find self-confidence and support in creating a future.

How can people in difficult circumstances build autonomous lives? The answer might be found in the Jardins de Cocagne: by cultivating vegetables. Initiated in 1991 by Jean-Guy Henckel, the project has now taken root in several French regions. These gardens, whose name translates into the “Gardens of Plenty”, take in men and women in precarious living situations, such as welfare recipients, the long-term unemployed, or the homeless. Hired under a government-supported employment contract, they grow organic produce, which is then sold to subscribers by the basket. For up to two years, the gardeners work 24 hours a week for minimum wage under the guidance of professional vegetable farmers and social workers. “The objective here is not to exploit people out of commercial interest,” Henckel explains. “We are conflict mediators, because we manage to unite three feuding sisters: Society, Business, and Ecology. The Jardins de Cocagne must be economically viable, yet without turning a blind eye to human beings in their existential need, and without harming the planet.”

Networking and expanding

In order to consolidate its activities, the Cocagne network is currently building a donor fund consisting of tax-exempt private as well as corporate and public donations. Following the concept from the earth into the basket, the new Planète Sésame restaurants are now defining the motto as from the basket onto the plate. The restaurants are operated by people in reintegration programs and supplied with produce from the gardens. New projects are being launched, such as the Fleurs de Cocagne gardens that specialize in flower production. The latest Cocagne branch is located in “Europe’s Silicon Valley” on the Saclay plateau, right next to the technological research center Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, the business college École des Hautes Études Commerciales, and the Centrale, AgroParisTech, Polytechnique—an ambitious project featuring a farm, a restaurant, a hostel, and an 18-hectare organic vegetable garden.

 

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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