Olive tree played a
significant role in both cultural and economical aspects in today world, where
most of its background was from the Mediterranean region as it has the right
climate for olive tree to survive on. Many Mediterranean countries used olive
products to be their major income, on the others hands, many others countries
need to import large amount of the olive products because their land are not
suitable for the olive plantation. Even so, according to the research, if the
empty lands in the planet have not been used for agriculture by the end of this
century, the whole mankind will be extinct because of no food.
One of the latter country
with huge amount of empty land and need for olive products is Egypt. Even though
the country is located in the Mediterranean region, but the weather still too
harsh for the olive tree to grow in large quantity as the country has 75% of
land invaded into the hottest Sahara Desert. The only area that used for
plantation and habitation in this country is located along the Nile River and
Mediterranean Sea. Moreover the situation of this country nowadays is not
supporting the olive oil business since the ruling period of the President
Hosni Mubarak as he announced to use the emergency rule and many corruptions
occurred. Resulting many limitation and chaos for the Egyptian citizen such as
high rate of unemployment, fuel and electricity shortage, Muslim protest and
rising cost of food. Contrast to the present day, this country was acknowledged
as one of the prosperous country in ancient time. Olive tree and its products
were considered as the true luxury products, because it only used to serve the
high rank people such as Pharaoh and afterlife. The value of the olive is
important in both physical and symbolic aspects opposite to nowadays that both
the physical and symbolic meaning were lost.
To re-civilize this country, the
physical and symbolic meaning of olive should be brought back with the idea of
creating a prototype olive village in the area of Sahara desert where
everything in the village are revolving around the olive plant as the center of
village. But to make a strong core, additional function should be integrate to
the project and it is a solar power plant, as it can answer to a big currently
problem of Egypt which is energy shortage. Additionally, Olea Europaea, one of
the olive species that has unique quality, as each part of the tree can be used
to make various olive products, but 90% of these olive trees were used for
olive oil production. This complicated olive oil production not only produce
the various type of olive oils, but also the electricity where a waste olive
oil or promace can be turn into biomass which is one of the material that used
in electricity production process and this process can be link to the solar
power plant’s electricity production as they shared similar steps. However, the
electric generator cannot run without a fuel which came from the bio-diesel
that has been distill from olive oil itself mixing with methanol and catalyst.
In conclusion, the energy
generating cycle shows that olive tree plays the major role to run the whole
cycle of this village and also the olive grove arrangement hopes to help slow
down desertification, so this prototype village will be construct from the
suburban area of Egypt outward to Sahara desert for more convenience in
transportation. Above all, the village is still a village, a place for
habitation, that serve as a temporary residential area for the workers and
their families to live their life having olive as their life routine with
non-alienate feeling to what the people used to by using the benefit of the
desert dune structure. Lastly, this village hopes to express the importance of
olive from the way people interact with the plant to the way the plant helps
solving the national issue.
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