Noel Vietmeyer was a staff member of the Board of Science and Technology for
International Development of National Research Council. Amongst his many accomplishments
he was the Vetiver Study Director and Scientific Editor of "Vetiver Grass A Thin
Green Line"
Here we are in the closing session of the First International Conference on Vetiver: A
Miracle Grass, winding up four days of discussion and field visits. How can I summarize
the vast flow of information, the good will, the collegiality, the open sharing of
knowledge, the constructive support and the honest, selfless concern for each other that
we have experienced here?
I could mention that people have come from 42 countries to talk about their results with a
plant so plain no one ever notices it in the natural environment. A plant so worthless
that even billions of specimens will not make any millionaires. Yet a plant so priceless
that it can help save the whole planet we live on.
I could read you the rapporteur reports of each of the sessions. I could dig through my
notes and highlight especially outstanding results we have learned from South Asia,
Southeast Asia, Australia, Latin America or Africa. But instead I thought I would tell you
three somewhat personal stories that I think exemplify where we have come from, where we
are headed and what we eventually may accomplish. I am doing this because, to put my view
in one sentence: This conference is a turning point.
Given that notion of a turning point, I believe that this is a moment when we should take
a last look back at our beginnings. We should then turn and face forward and step out
together in the collective, constructive spirit we have experienced here. In that way,
shoulder to shoulder, we can take vetiver out to the world and to its destiny.
In the spirit of a last look back, let me tell you, in a rather light-hearted way, of my
first introduction to the real vetiver. It was in a big formal room at the World Bank
headquarters in Washington, D.C. and it was only a few years ago. That tall ceilinged
chamber was full of officials clad in pinstripe suits and the mindsets of those rulers of
the world, the economists.
I had spent almost 20 years looking for the most promising plants for the tropics. Here at
this distinguished gathering a lone person speaking with that special New Zealand accent,
like mine, was describing the wonders of a plant that the literature said was good only
for smelling. (And you know, of course, that the literature is not to be questioned!)
That day in 1989, John Greenfield showed us slides. Click: the vetiver plant was emerging
unscathed from 43 days under water. Click: it was holding back soil on a 100 degree slope.
Click: it was thriving on acid soil. Click: thriving on alkaline soil. Click: it was on an
impossible roadside in Trinidad. Click: in a field in India with the farmer proudly
holding out his arm to show how much land he hadn't lost.
It was all captivating. I was an instant convert. But I want to tell you that the
pinstripe crowd were not fooled. They knew there are no panaceas, no quick fixes, no short
cuts. They knew there were no miracles, at least not in this millennia. And, of course,
their views were not to be questioned. At the end of his talk, John Greenfield got some
hostile questions, some slightly hostile questions and some totally dismissive questions.
But he got no accolades.
The next day John spoke at the agricultural arm of the great Rockefeller Foundation...that
very same institution that gave the world the Green Revolution and whose leading wheat
specialist in Mexico won the Nobel Prize for his vision and the goodness that he brought
by boosting food production in the 1960s.
The questions John got there were better and the audience showed a tad more understanding
and interest, but again the listeners quickly scuttled back to their offices to get on
with the "real" work of the world. Vetiver, it seemed, could not raise their
enthusiasm either.
I've got to tell you that although John Greenfield couldn't fool them, he had me fooled.
This plant looked like it might really be something. As on the previous day, I went back
to my office as if returning from a revival meeting. This time I felt I had to really do
something about it: So I told my colleague Mark Dafforn to start writing up a proposal.
That would show 'em! (Oh how much better than economists we scientists are.)
Amazingly, one person at the World Bank liked the proposal Mark and I put together. Dick
Grimshaw got several World Bank departments to take up our request for funding an
authentic review of the plant, its safety and science. He literally put the squeeze on the
different people in the Bank who owed him favors. It was like the Godfather taking up a
little collection.
Truly, though, he was successful only because the World Bank was terrified that the
dynamic duo of Greenfield and Grimshaw was going to produce a giant embarrassment with
this funny grass they were pushing. The great National Academy of Sciences (where Mark and
I work) would expose the vetiver scam and let everyone go back to their power lunches in
peace, as in the good old pre-vetiver days.
Mark and I took up out task with gusto. At that time, soil erosion was the global problem
so intractable that is was hardly talked about, at least not in polite society. Too
difficult to solve, too complex to worry about. No one had a ready answer. It would have
to take care of itself. But we could see that in vetiver grass there was suddenly hope for
a practical global intervention. It was natural, cheap, easy to understand, widely
applicable, and seemed suited to the conditions, soils and economic levels of the regions
where the problem was so severe as to be out of control.
Our study was overseen by a specially appointed National Academy of Sciences panel,
chaired by Norman Borlaug, the very same Nobel Prize winner I mentioned above. We
evaluated the experiences of some 50 countries and received information from some 200
specialists, but could find no obvious flaw or hazard. In 1993 we published the little
blue book Vetiver Grass; A Thin Green Line Against Erosion. Since then, we've distributed
more than 40,000 free copies, even though all our funds were long ago cut off and there
has been nothing for postage, let alone salaries.
Thinking back on all of this, I can see that we've come a long way from an era of
Greenfield and Grimshaw in solitary confinement to the present. The burden of proof is no
longer on those two G-men. It has shifted, or at least started to shift. Now the primary
burden is falling on the rest of us, and it is not of proof but of massive planting.
It is these days a bit easier to move vetiver forward. The big buzzword today is
"sustainable". Everything, it seems, has got to be sustainable. Millions of
dollars are being spent in arguing what is and what isn't sustainable, but the debaters
are not even considering the solid substance that lies at the heart of sustainability:
soil. If you cannot hold on to soil you cannot hold on to anything. Without stable soil,
"sustainability" is just an empty word that will disappear from everyone's
vocabulary (except maybe from that of the textbook writers, who will inflict it uselessly
on future generations of students).
But sustainability is actually a very valuable concept and an important challenge. And
vetiver is the key to unlocking the heart of sustainability. Vetiver can literally make
sustainability sustainable. Vetiver, you see, can hold soil!
So I say to all the delegates from overseas and to our magnificent hosts and friends here
in Thailand, let us dedicate ourselves to carrying on the accomplishments of the years
since Greenfield and Grimshaw were alone. Let us now turn our gaze, square our shoulders,
peer forward, and march this grass to its greater destiny. Let us, in other words, make
vetiver sustainable.
In this sense of moving forward, I have a second personal story. It relates to a
suggestion that I respectfully want to raise with Dr. Sumet and Dr. Manoon, hosts and
godparents of the conference. I got the idea yesterday on the tour. Probably few of the
newcomers to that beautiful Doi Tung area saw just over the brow of the hill a mechanical
device that was treating the wastes from the building where we had lunch. It looked like a
paddle wheel, lifting and churning the waste waters in a small pond.
That device is called the Chaipattana Aerator and it is actually the idea of His Majesty
the King, and is patented in his name worldwide. To me that machine was intriguing because
just last week in Washington, a senior water scientist from a leading American university
announced that there are no innovations in water technology for non-industrialized
nations. That is what my organization is going to tell the United Nations Habitat II
conference, being held in Turkey in June. But there, yesterday, I could see one innovation
that in a very compact way took care of one of the remaining global public health hazards
of our era: domestic waste water.
Now the other day, Dr. Yoon talked about a "yin" and "yang" and I
wonder if I don't see something like that here in relation to the interests of His
Majesty. In the conference we have so far talked only about planting vetiver in land. But
someone now needs to try planting vetiver in water. After all, the plant originates in
wetlands, and this should work.
So what better than to connect the Chaipattana Aerator to a vetiver-filled pond or to a
series of V-shaped vetiver hedges stepping down a slope. It might work like a yin and yang
with His Majesty's device removing pathogens and releasing the nutrients (mineralizing the
organic wastes) and the vetiver absorbing the phosphate, nitrate and other nutrients
dissolved in the water that emerges from the aerator. The combination would both clean the
water and fertilize the vetiver plants. The result would be safe water and myriad vetiver
tillers for planting out to protect the hillside soils and environment of Thailand.
I hope I'm not being too bold here, but I thought that Dr. Sumet and Dr. Manoon, might
raise the possibility with His Majesty and say that this idea is a gift from the
conference participants(an intellectual gift that we hope will provide a pleasant and
satisfying yin-and-yang connection between two of His Majesty's dearest intellectual
pursuits: the treatment of water and the promotion of vetiver.
And now for my last story, another forward-looking one. This story has to do with the
future and with the "tool" for environmental improvement that we are creating in
vetiver.
You know, we scientists get so tied up in details we often don't see the big picture we
are creating. We need to get to be like the French painter Georges Seurat, who created
beautiful and famous images one dot at a time. With vetiver we can create big pictures out
of myriad dots, too.
I was wondering about this yesterday at the Land Development station (our first stop) and
the Public Welfare station (our second). Think of each vetiver plant the dedicated workers
there are producing as a dot in a global pointillist environmental painting. What image
will they create by the year 2001? Well, beyond all the erosion prevention and public
welfare benefits I see one big image: global cooling.
About a year ago, the renowned international agricultural research institute called CIAT
in Cali, Colombia published the fact that two deep-rooted African grasses were growing so
widely and so prolifically in the savannas of South America that "they may remove as
much as 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide" (a greenhouse gas) from the atmosphere
yearly.
One of these grasses is Andropogon guyanus, a close brother to vetiver. CIAT researchers
say it stores as much as 53 tons of carbon dioxide as organic matter per hectare per year.
This effect, they say, was not noticed earlier because the extensive roots of these
grasses deposit [the organic matter] as deep as a meter in the savanna soil.
Imagine that .... a grass that deposits and stores organic matter 1 meter deep in the
soil. I think I'll send Mr. Koon Chai to Colombia to show them what a real grass can do!
His vetivers, you'll recall from yesterdays trip, go down as much as 5.6 meters.
Now in high school I was once 23rd out of 24 students in the math class so you cannot
trust my arithmetic, but here is what I calculated at 4 AM this morning, based on a
comparison with the CIAT figures. If a hectare of deep-rooted grass absorbs 53 tons of
carbon dioxide, a square meter will absorb about 5 kg of this greenhouse gas during a year
of growth. And if a vetiver plant in a fully functioning vetiver hedge covers, say, a
square meter, then each vetiver plant will annually absorb 5 kg of the gas that supposedly
is heating up the world. (All this is based on roots just 1 m deep, like those in South
America, not over 5 m as we saw at Doi Tung yesterday.)
Now, with the Chiang Rai Land Development Station producing new vetiver plants at the rate
of 100 million a year, that means that it alone will be providing 500 million kg or
500,000 tons of "atmospheric cooling" benefit. By CIAT calculations, that's as
much CO2 as emitted by 100,000 gas-guzzling cars each driven 20,000 km.
According to the CIAT paper (which has been published in the peer-reviewed journal called
Nature, and is presumably reasonably reliable), the annual global increase in atmospheric
CO2 is about 20 billion tons. Thus, the vetiver plants to be produced in that one station
in Chiang Rai Province this year will (when they're growing vigorously as full-sized
plants) be reducing the CO2 surplus by 500,000/20 billion tons. In other words, the annual
output of that single station will absorb what amounts to one forty-thousandth of the
world's CO2 surplus.
And yesterday we were told that by the year 2001 the Land Development Station will have
produced over 1 billion vetiver plants. When growing vigorously those will reduce the
global surplus by 5 million tons or one four-thousandth of the world's CO2 surplus.
My old math teacher would caution you about relying on any figures of mine, and I admit he
is probably right. Nonetheless, the general scope of my observation seems correct. When
all of Thailand's vetiver plants are counted, and especially when vetiver's great root
depth is taken into account, this country is making a measurable contribution to improving
the atmosphere that everyone in the world relies on for life.
This, I suspect is a new angle on vetiver that will intrigue His Majesty, who as the
visitors here may be unaware, is a keen and contributing scientist. And there is more than
theoretical interest in such global-cooling figures. For example, they could be the means
for getting rich industries and even rich nations to pay for growing vetiver. What better
that the polluters balance their excess CO2 emissions by establishing grass hedges in the
most erosion prone, hunger prone and forest-depleted regions of the earth (the tropics).
These gas-absorbing hedges will hold their stored carbon for perhaps decades and benefit
the lives of millions all the while.
This emergence of the story of vetiver's ability to gobble greenhouse gases and turn them
into underground solids is a measure of how I see this conference going down in history.
For one thing, we have in the last four days brought to light more of the special features
of this fascinating species, which is letting us into its secrets only slowly and very
reluctantly.
For another, we have launched vetiver in directions (such as water engineering and
pollution treatment) that were only vague shadows in out minds before last Sunday. In
these few days we have, in a sense, started the process of giving our knowledge to a
bigger, broader, more powerful constituency: hydrologists, engineers, pollution
specialists and many others. As of today, they may have never heard of vetiver, but thanks
to this conference they eventually will test this grass, perhaps come to rely on it in
their work, and maybe achieve major successes in their fields.
Additionally, in connecting Chiang Rai's vetiver plantings with the greenhouse effect, I
am honoring the immense amount of work and dedication as well as the intellectual and
visionary leadership of Thailand. Your accomplishments have been great. To have launched a
project involving a little-known plant to an extent that anyone can even speculate on
levels of global cooling excites our admiration. You may have set in train something not
just for your own country and time, but for the world and for the ages.
There are going to be many accolades in the minutes, months and years to come but I would
like to personally acknowledge my admiration to all of you here in Thailand, and of course
to His Majesty the King, who is indeed showing all of us the way. We are just scientists,
with little influence, and it is magnificently heartening to have a person of His
Majesty's stature interested, involved and standing beside us as a colleague and true
friend of vetiver.