On Thursday we continued the water conflicts arch and focued on the issue of water privatization as well as the struggle to make water a public good. To provide knowledge and an activist perspective on these matters Dorothea Härlin, a members of the Berliner Wassertisch, joined us.
The afternoon will be free time.
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We started the wednesday-session with an introduction to the role-play simulation-game “Who is the owner of the water” that gave us the possibility to join a typical “water-conflict”.
After the lunch break an open space was opened up that provided room for non-formal educational approaches of the participants .
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From 4 p.m. our doors are open to welcome the participants from Albania, Finland, Germany, Italy, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Tunesia
After a delicious “welcome dinner” we will try to get to know each other and introduce everybody to the guest house.
We used a variation of this Bingo-game as a get-to-know-each-other method.
On Tuesday, as a part of glocal education, we attended the International Garden Exhibition (IGA) in Berlin Marzahn-Hellersdorf for a variety of non-fromal educational activities.
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When entering IGA we were greeted by a representative of weltacker. She explained the concept underlying the weltacker:
It is an area of 2000m² which is exactly as much land as every living human should be able to get his_her food from when dividing the amount of land which is used for agriculture by the number of humans living at present. The average european is using up to 4000m² of land for their food, according to some calculations. The aim of weltacker is to draw attention to this fact through educational programs and meals that were grown on just theses 2000m². If you are interested in the project, you may visit their website and consider supporting them: https://www.2000m2.eu/
One of the practices the weltacker team tries to visualize the land used in agriculture is the following: The group is given a rope and will then try to lay it down in such a way, that the enclosed area equals the area necessary for a specific meal, let’s say a pizza. We had some really interesting insights and got a feeling for just how much land is used in agriculture.
This part of the weltacker is basically the sollution to the answers raised beforehand. Here the visitors can find out how much land is used for a specific meal and which plants are needed for it. The pizza plot obviously grows some wheat, tomatoes and depending on your topic some vegetables, too.
Here we see the roots of an agriculturally used plant. It is quite impressive how far down the roots reach. You can really see how much plants value water. And the mechanisms used to transport the groudwater through the plant to be used in the leaves during photsynthesis is fascinating.
Towards the end of our visit we had the oportunity to calculate the land- and waterfootprint of different meals. We found out how much water is used to produce a Hamburger compared to the waterusage of a Veggieburger. And of course we had to calculate the waterfootprint of a Schnitzel. You can find the worksheets we were using here: https://obuk-ev.org/watertraining/2017/11/22/weltacker-the-global-field/
All in all our visit to the weltacker was a really interesting and informative part of our training program.
On Sunday we put emphasis on the local arch of the training, which is about exploring water & sustainability in Berlin in our small interest-groups of the previous day. The main event was an action research in town.
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