Land resource scientist passes his passion for sustainable development on to his children
BY ANDREW VOWLES
Maybe you can't get blood from a stone, but you can grow crops from rocks. Just ask Prof. Peter van Straaten, Land Resource Science, who has made a career out of encouraging smallholder farmers — initially in East Africa but recently in developing countries in Asia and South America — to look to geological resources in growing more food and developing local economies.
Anyone seeking evidence of van Straaten's powers of persuasion need only look closer to home, where he's instilled the sentiment behind his “rocks for crops” thesis into his two grown sons. Taking time out from his job with a local biofilter company to return to his alma mater for a visit to “Papa's” office in the Richards Building, Jos, 25, says: “My dad's work has influenced my thinking in a lot of ways.” His brother, Oliver, 27, who works in Sri Lanka for the World Agroforestry Centre, would probably say the same.
Two years ago, Jos completed a degree in water resources engineering at U of G. He works for Waterloo Biofilter Systems, a company based in his hometown Rockwood that designs and builds on-site waste-water treatment systems. He's particularly interested in water conservation and resource-efficient housing, something he traces directly back to the water shortages and intermittent electrical power that were a part of his first few years spent growing up in Tanzania.
Because the country received only about 500 millimetres of rainfall each year, and running water was available for only short periods each day, the van Straatens learned to rely on rainwater catchment systems, including a rooftop drum for storing water.
“You do gain an appreciation for the value of water,” says Jos, who draws a straight line between Canada's cheap water and Canadians' ranking as the world's second-largest users of water per capita. No profligacy amid plenty for Jos: While living in British Columbia after his undergraduate degree, he saved shower water for reuse as “grey water.” Back home now in Rockwood, he has installed two barrels at his parents' house to catch rainwater from the roof for use in the garden.
Jos is now considering pursuing a master's degree in ecological engineering in New Zealand, a step to tackling water and waste-water problems on a larger scale. More than one billion people around the world lack adequate or safe water supplies, he says, and twice as many lack proper sanitation. Referring to the basic need for clean water, he says: “I think that's the broader problem to tackle.”
At least some of that ethos rubbed off during a conference he attended on ecological sanitation — in Germany, coincidentally enough, where Peter grew up and began to formulate ideas that would lead to his own career in sustainable development.
Jos's brother has gone even further afield but, in a sense, has hewn even more closely to his father's path. After studying forestry and GIS applications at Lakehead University, Oliver went to the Netherlands to do master's work on remote sensing. That project took him to East Africa to the same part of Uganda where Peter had completed his own PhD thesis. Peter was astonished to learn his son would be retracing his footsteps so closely. “I said, ‘Budongo Forest, that can't be true; I have mapped the Budongo Forest.'”
Indeed, some 30 years after Peter had surveyed the geology of the area, his son had returned to map its vegetation.
In a way, the Budongo coincidence captures the idea that has sustained Peter's own career-long thesis: If you're going to grow something — from forests to agricultural crops — you need to start on the ground, with the rocks and minerals that will ultimately nourish your crop. His ideas about using rock-based fertilizers in sustainable agriculture and development, which he began developing in Africa a generation ago, continue to attract attention there and in more far-flung parts of the world. To explain the agricultural use of minerals, Peter points to a display he's mounted in the foyer of the Richards Building under the suitably alliterative heading “Prosperous With Phosphorus.”
Phosphorus is a limiting plant nutrient for agricultural production and food security in many developing countries. Unlike nitrogen — another key nutrient that comes from organic sources — phosphorus comes from rocks and minerals. Rather than rely on costly imported chemical fertilizers, says Peter, the idea is to make it easy for subsistence farmers to use local phosphate rock resources: rocks for crops.
That's the title of a book he published in 2002, in which he discusses his ideas about replenishing soil fertility using phosphate rocks in almost 50 sub-Saharan countries. “That triggered a lot of interest,” he says.
Indeed, it continues to draw interest. Just this year, Peter had a call from someone in Zimbabwe, where he'd completed a project three years before. Not only are hundreds of farmers still using local phosphate resources to supplement manure, but they're also seeking help in producing and selling the product.
“They have surveyed farmers and have applied to the government for local funding,” says Peter, who sees this as a telling example of sustainable development in action.
Among the most recent incarnations of his rocks-for-crops concept is a project he's now leading to provide multimedia learning materials over the web to partner universities in East Africa. The material on the use of rock phosphates for sustainable agriculture will be provided as components of courses in soil and minerals at universities in Zambia, Tanzania and Uganda. In partnership with Prof. Helen Hambly Odame, who studies rural radio in the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development, he will provide the information to extension workers and non-governmental organizations. The project is being funded by the Commonwealth of Learning.
Another recent partner on that project is graduate student Heidi Braun, who's interested in the social and educational side of sharing rocks for crops through African universities and NGOs. Braun, who completed her undergraduate degree at Guelph in international development, had been working in Kenya on a contract with Canadian Crossroads International when she decided to return to U of G for her graduate degree.
“Working with Peter van Straaten is pretty exciting,” says the Kitchener native, referring to his dynamism and charisma. Recalling his undergraduate agrogeology course that she took on a whim, she says Peter embodies “the human side of international development. That brought the subject alive for me.”
Two years ago, Peter helped open the first agrogeology centre in Asia, at a partner university in Java. He travelled to Brazil this fall to co-chair the first international workshop on rocks for crops. He hopes to transplant the ideas developed in Africa to help farmers in South America use local phosphate fertilizers to increase productivity and reduce poverty. Just a few weeks earlier, he had visited China to investigate water quality, environmental health and geology on a tropical island in Hainan Province. Between trips, he's writing a textbook on agrogeology, due for publication in early 2005.
Scratch the surface of an agrogeologist and you find a rockhound underneath. Studding the tops of cabinets and shelves in his office are pieces of rocks and minerals that form a kind of travelogue of his pursuits abroad during the past 40 years. One fist-sized nugget that winks like gold in his hand brings to mind the “hair-raising experience” he had in Uganda during Idi Amin's rule in the early 1970s. At the time, Indian workers were being thrown out of the country if they were caught or suspected of smuggling gold. During a visit to a mine, Peter had picked up the innocuous lump — not gold at all but copper sulphide. Perhaps obeying a sixth sense, he'd tucked it into a sleeping bag. Sure enough, a soldier armed with an assault rifle accosted him on the train to Kampala, demanding to know what he was carrying. That occasion demanded a bit of quick talking on Peter's part.
Other chunks on the cabinet range from apatite — his favourite mineral because of its widespread use in making fertilizers — to volcanic obsidian from Ethiopia. On another table rests a portion of an elephant's jaw he picked up while completing graduate work in Uganda. That was the beginning of his career-long love for East Africa. He was studying in Germany when his adviser asked him about a skill rather more basic than anything he'd learned from a geology lecture: Could he drive a truck? With characteristic aplomb, Peter replied: “I will learn.”
He spent the next two months chauffeuring his professor around Kenya and Uganda and mapping and conducting structural geology, an experience that launched his career. After that initial trip to Uganda, Peter was asked to return in 1972, and it was an invitation he couldn't turn down. “It's like a fever,” he says of what became an African obsession.
In 1974, he moved to Tanzania to work for the United Nations Development Program and the UN Economic Commission for Africa. And it was there that both his sons were born.
When Peter's contract ended in 1984, the family returned to Canada. Initially, he'd been asked about going to Yemen, but he and his wife, Ellen — whom he'd met while visiting Iceland — decided they needed to find a permanent home for the boys' sake. While in Africa, Ellen had worked in Tanzanian schools; she now works in community mental health in Guelph.
Not that they've ever truly left Africa behind.
“There's something about Africa in our blood,” says Jos, who was born two weeks after the family was forced to flee their home because of bombing during the Ugandan-Tanzanian war.
Peter's work normally takes him back to East Africa twice a year. Several years ago, the entire family returned for a visit that included a nearly 6,000-metre trek up Mt. Kilimanjaro. That was a pinnacle of a different sort for Peter, who calls the climb “almost a lifetime achievement.”
This summer, the family marked “Papa's” 60th birthday with another — perhaps slightly less strenuous — adventure: a fly-in canoeing trip to Temagami. Oliver couldn't get back to Canada for the trip, says Jos, but he “did join us in spirit and posted the photos for the world on his website.”
Reflecting on their parallel paths, Jos says: “Growing up in Africa offered many opportunities to experience the awesome geography, abundant wildlife and friendly, open people working close to the land. My father's passion for exploration and lust for life was — and still is — contagious. His drive and enthusiasm to find sustainable solutions, make connections and make a difference are values I wish to follow in my life. We can do this together.”
