“Sintropia” – I had not heard the word before. In this context it is used as kind of regenerative ecology. They are restoring ecological balance in the Brazilian state of Bahia. The article describes a farm that was ruined and abandoned. There were no streams on the farm and so no water.
This is the link to the article. It is in Portuguese, but you can figure out a lot just by watching.
A Swiss-Brazilian agronomist bought the land to put into practice his ideas on sintropia. This is using natural processes to restore the land while producing valuable agricultural products. After he brought back the forests, water came back too, as springs again became viable.
The title says why I like the idea, “Cultivated forests allow environmental recuperation and the generation of income.” Land that does not produce some profit for the owners will not long be conserved. This does both.
I think of this in the tradition of conservationists like Aldo Leopold working with landowners in Coon Valley, Wisconsin to restore the land and cultivate it.
Living in harmony with nature does not means hands off nature. When we are doing the best, we are using human intelligence to find and harmonize with natural rhythms.
You can use Google translator to get the story and watch the pictures on the video. Especially interesting is that Globo Rural covered this same story in the 1990s, and you can see the great progress made since then.
Sintropia. It is a great word. Unfortunately, the English translation is the ugly “negentropy,” a word that has other meanings too that confuse it. I think that I am going to start using the word sintropia for what I am trying to do on my tree farms and encourage in general.
People will not know what it means, but then I can explain it. I have been looking for a word that combines restoration, regeneration, conservation and intelligent management. I will now add this word to my vocabulary and try to make it more known.