Oregon Direct Action

This is a summary of what I’ve accomplished so far.

What was the goal?

We are currently looking for information, ideally from scholarly or published sources, about reforestation/aquifer recharge initiatives as part of a large sustainable development project, and about public health assessments following rural water improvement projects in Latin America.

What did we find?

On the subject of sustainable development:

• The Watershed Organization Trust is a group working in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, India to provide sustainable development.  Though they don’t seem to do much with aquifer recharge, they do work to increase the quality of the local watershed through reforestation and education.  Here is a link to a detailed paper on their work, and here is a link to their articles page, where they have many more publications on their work.
• The United Nations Division on Sustainable Development published a report of case studies on sustainable development in Africa.
• I found a report for a project in Venezuela that attempted sustainable development through encouraging rural farmers to grow organic coffee in the shade and reforestation initiatives.  Unfortunately, the report is in Spanish so I can’t read it, but I would encourage anyone who can to do so, because it seems like a valuable report.

On the subject of public health assessments, the best papers I’ve found were the following:

• Interventions to improve water quality for preventing diarrhoea: systematic review and meta-analysis - This article examines data from various studies and looks at the effectiveness of various water projects in reducing diarrhoea.
• Reducing Diarrhea Though The Use Of Household-based Ceramic Water Filters: A Randomized, Controlled Trial In Rural Bolivia -  This article describes a study in which half of the households in a rural community in Bolivia receive ceramic water filters.  The result is a marked decrease in the occurrence of diarrhoea.
• Household-based Ceramic Water Filters For The Prevention Of Diarrhea: A Randomized, Controlled Trial Of A Pilot Program In Columbia - A similar study by the same journal that takes place in Columbia instead of Bolivia.

How did we find it?

Google Scholar was my main source for finding information on public health assessments, probably because there are many papers on that subject.  Still, props to Google for creating a resource that allows quality information to be so easily accessible.

For the papers on sustainable development, I had to be a bit more creative.  The first thing I did was call the U of O Libraries and get my account working so I could use U of O’s research tools.  There’s a lot of sources of information there, and U of O does a pretty good (though not the best) job of allowing you to use them easily.  One thing that bothered me was that a lot of resources, such as ScienceDirect, are IP based, so you have to actually be in the library to use them.

Still, I would encourage anyone to look into your university research resources if you’re a student.  Your tuition dollars are paying for some high quality tools.

Those tools found me some decent articles, however, I felt like I really began to tap into a gold mine when I began searching for sustainable development blogs.  These are sites from people like us (after all, this is a sustainable development blog), many of whom have implemented projects and have valuable lessons to share.

What’s next?

The plan now is to find more sustainable development blogs, to post them, and then to comb through the best of them for detailed reports of actual projects.  I also want to find analysis of projects, in terms of lessons learned, problems encountered, and ways they plan to address these problems the next time they go into the field.  Also, as we find blogs, we are finding potential partners who we can contact and work together with.

For the community:

So, to all of you reading this, I have some questions/requests:

• How do you feel about this research summary?  Did I go too in depth or not deep enough? How do you like my format (ie. “what was the goal,” “what did we find” etc.)?
• Is there anything I’ve mentioned here that you’d like to know more about?
• Do you have sources of information and research tools that you would suggest?
• Do you know of blogs/organizations that relate to what we’re working on?