OT but a welcome bit of brightness

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it's good to see that, yes, we are capable as a country to make changes which benefit the environment and species we feed upon.

still need to keep at it, but the conclusion section is a good point. compared to many areas/countries the USoA is doing better in spite of corporate greed, governmental corruption, etc.

kudoes to the scientists involved and to those who make it work in spite of all the opposition.

songbird

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songbird
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Seems as if every piece of good news is like a drop of water on a hot rock.

Ilex Squid Overfishing Woes Test Delicate Relationship Between Argentina And The Falklands

. . . hundreds of unlicensed, unregulated fishing vessels that exploit the South Atlantic, pulling out an estimated 300,000 tons of ilex squid a year.

The species, which roams across the maritime boundary between Argentina and the Falkland Islands, is key to a food chain that sustains penguins, seals, birds and whales.

Reply to
Billy

Billy wrote: ...

yeah, international waters are likely to always be troublesome to manage, but eventually we have to as a whole planet come to grips with sustainable practices.

after all, there are no other alternatives. either we change and adjust or we'll be gone.

songbird

Reply to
songbird

Which choice gives the highest profits for the next quarter?

It's going to be a tough row to hoe. Answers are being found, but implementation is slow to non-existent. We all know that CO2 emissions have to be curtailed, but is seems to be blocked by campaign financing, which allows pipelines to be built to pump even more CO2 into the atmosphere, 390 ppm and rising.

Got about half of my garden beds prepped. Even without digging, it wore me out. Good sweat though ;O)

Reply to
Billy

Oh, good grief, a couple of the squash are flowering, and it will be nearly a month before they will go in the ground (maybe earlier). These were outside for about a week now, as the night time temps got into the high 30's, and now low 40's. wonder if that means early squash, mmmmmmm.

Reply to
Billy

Billy wrote: ...

for some state sponsored trawlers on the open seas it's not going to be about profits, but sheer survival. at some point in the future if we don't get a grip on populations and manage the topsoil better.

the book _soil_ by David Montgomery was yesterday's reading list entry and while interesting and containing some points i'd not considered before it was rather gloomy. repeated civilizations collapsing because they mistreated their topsoil.

ironic that Cuba is one of the brightest agricultural spots and that because they were embargoed.

yep, it's going to be an interesting time for the next few hundred years.

i was heartened to see that many people in Michigan voted for a provision to raise renewable requirements for utilities. so it's not like people don't care, but that they still are not a large enough majority to force the changes through. but if each of those people who voted made the change with their electricity provider directly to purchase more green power they could already make the change and not even need a new law to do it. this is an option for people and it already exists.

the counterargument to the pipeline thing is that currently companies are shipping the oil via rail to get around the distribution bottleneck. which isn't very good for things either.

somehow though we gotta get the fossil fuel monkey off our backs or get the technology in place to sequester all the CO2 from burning it plus also set up CO2 sucking plants to reduce the level back to more reasonable levels.

this should already be happening no matter what the laws and governments say. it can be done. there's nothing technically impossible, just gotta do it.

i can still find frozen ground here. the sun was out most of the day and some flowers made progress. maybe by Saturday there will be some blooms.

aren't squash blooms edible? :)

songbird

Reply to
songbird

I have a hard time picturing those who have the "where with all" to put a fishing trawler at sea for months at a time, only seeking survival. The oceans are the commons, that once again are being appropriated to enrich the few.

Cooperative management of the biosphere for the good of all life? You sure you're not a socialist? ;O)

Do you mean, "Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations"

Sounds like Jarod Diamond's book "Collapse".

And they got thinner too! Such a deal. Blockades are international politic's way of telling you to start a garden. Fidel also invested in literacy, and health care.

You are an optimist. Give me "predictable", and "expected" any day. Interesting is the Delphic like, Chinese curse.

Sort of like the last election. No good choices for President from the major parties, just varying degrees of bad ones.

Extraction of tar sands oil requires vast amounts of fresh water, and more gets polluted from spills into water ways, which is reminiscent of mountain top removal in coal mining, and pond dumping at CAFOs. It's called "privatizing the profits, and socializing the costs".

Anybody who is conscious must note that we just observed "World Water Day". The fulfilment of basic human needs, our environment, socio-economic development and poverty reduction are all heavily dependent on water. We can't live without it, but we pollute the .375 percent of the fresh water that we have access to.

Adding clean-up costs to those who create CO2 would help, as would the purchase of clean energy by the government.

Since we will soon have 9 billion souls to feed, creating charcoal with solar furnaces for farmlands would help grow crops, and reduce CO2.

Bechtel is probably just waiting for a juicy government contract to get started. All disasters are opportunities, don't you just know.

I always find it odd, that here in California, gardeners can start earlier, but then comes your longer Midwest summer days, and warmer nights, and you leave us (me anyway in the dust). I'll be lucky to have tomatoes by Aug.

My babies!? =:o0

We just had a day of rain. Today is suppose to be nice with a promise of

75F. Sunday is predicted to bring thunder storms with rain through the week, and then it looks like the good times arrive. I need to do some more clean up, and see what the remaining beds are going to need.Every day, we get a little bit more sun coming over the hill.

"Though an old man, I am but a young gardener." - Thomas Jefferson

Reply to
Billy

wherewithal,

the vast trouble with the unpoliced commons is that it is too easily exploited or even if not directly exploited then indirectly exploitable.

once you get overgrazing as being allowed then the crashes happen. be it the oceans or the village commons.

but my comment is aimed at the future when pressure for harvesting foods from the oceans will be severe and it will become more and more important to police national waters to keep others from ruining what we've been trying to restore.

wouldn't the moral side always be that we cannot limit fishing if people are starving? but that is going to have to be what happens if we want to keep our fisheries sustainable. and then the arguments about what is sustainable and how to err on the side of safety. it gets complicated and hard to explain to a hungry soul...

one point in the book that is made (which i do agree with) is that there will always be hungry people because we have this capacity built in to keep on screwing even if the surrounding countryside is going up in smoke. in fact the countryside going up in smoke sometimes sets off rounds of screwing much the way winter storms in the northlands can set off mini-baby-booms...

but back to international waters and fisheries. we as a world have to get agreements and enforcements in place to deal with rogue fleets and overfishing. otherwise it's just not going to be there later as a food source.

the setting of values is a thing of the mind. once you set the value of something and enough other people accept that setting then the capitalist pigs will follow. as you note below. :)

money and capital after all are figments of the imagination, so if you can get enough people convinced that CO2 sequestration has value then some kind of market forces will be created along with that determination of value.

now though, i think that value needs to be set higher and immediately to get the whole process going.

yep, had it right in my hand too. haha...

i'm going to head into the Everglades for my next book. gotta find a good one on the history and such. though i think in the next few hundred years it's going to be threatened with inundation like much of the other low lying areas around the world.

i've wanted to go back and look at his book on germs and steel, so those will be the next books on the list.

it's easy to be thin in a tropical country if you don't get sucked into the air-conditioner trap.

yes, that was the sense of "interesting" that i was using.

if Obama uses the executive power to force CO2 projects i'll kiss his feet. for some reason though i think he'll come up short like he's buckled on some other issues once faced with the choice.

that is true of any natural resource that isn't ultimately recyclable and sustainable. and even those that are can also be treated in the same manner.

tar sands oil is a mess from what i've seen of it, but i think any fossil fuel, even natural gas is simply piling on to the existing problem so the replacement of coal burning by natural gas, while is is better is not a long term solution. there still needs to be smokestack CO2 regulation and reduction for every industrial process and every farmer too needs to be in on building up soil organic materials and keeping erosion as minimal as possible.

i dunno about you, but there have been hundreds of billions spent over the past few decades to upgrade sewage treatment plants and taking care of combined systems (separating the storm run off from the house sewage). a local town has had a great deal of trouble with that problem, we are hoping they finally got a handle on it as the last major storm we had did not overflow into the river. the river though goes into a rather large wetlands and so nature does clean up the water a great deal in that area before it goes out to Lake Huron.

even with all this spending i agree with you that we need to work on water issues more. from things like restoring wetlands and returning rivers to more natural flooding instead of levees. that flooding restores topsoil in flood plains.

however, as a whole, the soil organic content and CO2 issue will likely require we rethink sewage and waste handling as a whole. some cities recycle a fair bit. others not much at all. so if we can get recycling as a higher priority and then take that organic material turn it into biochar and bury it then we've got many tons of CO2 emissions avoided longer term as those materials would have decayed.

one thing that i don't see mentioned too often is that all this building we do and all these houses with all this wood. that is CO2 sequestration too of a kind. sure houses burn and get destroyed but each house is a CO2 sink for some time. if even a fraction of that wood ultimately gets turned into biochar and buried then that is a step in the right direction.

yes, that is a part of why i've been reading up on biochar and cleaner stove technologies as many people around the world still use wood and charcoal as stove fuel. if we can get cleaner burning and more efficient stoves into people's daily use then that gradually becomes a way to take some CO2 out of the air. as the stoves are designed to use marginal fuels anyways that can take some pressure off woodlands too.

solar furnaces are not really needed as biochar creates it's own fuel as it is being made. it can be a source of fuel for cars/trucks/industry too. my ideal for a farm combine would be that it could use a portion of what it harvests (stems, stalks, cobs) to create the fuel on the fly and leave a trail of buried biochar behind it as it goes. add to it a chopper, disk, and cover crop planting on the same pass and you've almost got a sustainable industrial agriculture.

i would be surprised if any major company doesn't have some sort of CO2 projects in the works. they just need to be pushed along now to do it. and the heck with how much it costs. when you look at how many trillion dollars of infrastructure will be lost to rising sea levels and bigger storms it's just not a matter of arguing costs. and a lot of good jobs for engineers, foresters, and general laborers too.

our tomatoes won't be ripening until mid-August if we have anything like a normal season. we don't start too early with tomatoes. the end of May is when the warm weather tender plants get set out and planted.

first crocuses flowered today. we walked around the yard/gardens today and checked out the winter damage. the deer did trim some of the cedar trees the past few weeks and some bunny damage too -- nothing extensive enough i'll worry about.

rhubarb and strawberries still in hiding. i'm anxious to see how the transplanted rhubarb came through and if the oldest strawberry patch will produce well after being rearranged a bit last fall. i needed to thin out the june-bearing plants and spread out the ever-bearing plants...

lol! that's about what i say when people tell me i should be selling the wormies.

hope the weekend is grand. i'm always glad to hear of rains out that ways as it does take some pressure off the water supplies and helps the groundwater and crops.

here we are also supposed to see some rain Sunday, but i don't believe it until i see it. the ground is still soggy enough that rain isn't needed, but it will likely help green everything up more quickly.

songbird

Reply to
songbird

Skoal!

Reply to
Billy

Billy wrote: ...

songbird (50+2days old... just a sprout according to some elders i hang with

Reply to
songbird

Similar to what was the guy thinking, when he cut down the last tree on Easter Island? I'd like to think that there was some shadow of a doubt in the back of his skull as he followed his belief of "the true, the good, and the beautiful". In any event, the act was the culmination of their environmental apocalypse, terminating any hope of a recovery.

Everybody knows what has to be done to save the oceans, and feed the hungry, but it will never happen in a Randian "free market", driven by maximum profit. We are told that a government must live within its budget, but who has a "free market" household, where the family members try to extract the maximum profits from each other?

The oceans need to be cleaned up. Mono cultures need to be curtailed in order to feed more. Interplanting leads to higher yields. Real farming needs to be renacted, instead of chemical farming that pollutes drinking water and the the oceans, and leads to soil erosion, requiring more chemicals to maintain yields.

The government could start a large orchard of chestnuts to introduce the ground nut as a replacement for wheat, and/or rice flour. Terra preta should be encouraged to invigorate soils, and sequester CO2. The chemically induced glut of cereal carbohydrate has mad us sick as a society. We really need to increase fruits, and vegetables in our diets. With that in mind financial barriers to education should be dropped, and agriculture, and cooking should become part of any primary, or secondary curriculum.

I would have expected you to be more of a romantic than that. A good orgasm can put that tap back into your toes, but that too comes to a halt, when people get hungry. A friend was in Berlin when the city fell to the Allies in WWII, and she found the romantic sub-plot to the movie "Enemy at the Gates" to be incomprehensible. Her reaction was that no one is romantic, when they are hungry, no one.

Passion requires ambiance, good food, good wine, or at least a storage closet, and then it's that ol' "bim-batta-boom", so to speak.

A better target of your wrath may be where all those people came from, chemical nitrogen that produced abundant crops, and ad campaigns to get us to eat "Ding Dongs", and "Ho-Hos". The calories provided by the U.S. food supply increased from 3,200 per capita in 1970 to 3,900 in the late

1990s, an increase of 700 per day. We eat today for the same reasons we go to war, "public relations" (re: propaganda) as practiced by Edward Bernays, "manufactured consent" as Walter Lippman called it.

That's like dealing with the Mexican government, or our own CIA for that matter, to stop drug smuggling. Segments of both groups benefit from these practices.

Then you are going to have to shovel against the tide of "denier" money from the Koch brothers, Exxon, and the rest of the usual suspects.

Welcome to the club ;O)

I still have about a "pound and a half" of the "People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present" by Howard Zinn to read.

As usual, it is also available from your local library, but you would really have to apply yourself to read all 700+ pages in the time allotted by the library. It was published in 2003, and the library copies still have 2 holds on it.

If you like mysteries, you might look for Zoe Ferraris. She has 3 books out. They are also like travelogs to the Arab world, for better or worse.

Just think how much the world would love us if we had spent $3 trillion on water treatment in developing nations, rather than on vanity wars that only enriched war profiteers.

By buried I presume you mean spread on the soils of agricultural regions. If we want to bury CO2, some could be compressed and stored underground. Increasing the fertility of the soils seems like a better choice to me.

The new CO2 being introduced into the atmosphere is from fossil fuels. These are sources that were already sequestered, until we un-sequestered them. We shouldn't get too involved in the normal CO2 --> cellulose by photosynthesis --> CO2 by decomposers.

Without creating more CO2? Solar furnaces offer "zero" CO2 in converting cellulose to charcoal.

You got a cite for this?

Good point.

I plan to have early, mid, and late ripening tomatoes, mostly early. Stupice-55 days, Juliets-60 days, Glacier-65 days, Koralik-70 days, Blondkopfchen-75 days, Marmande-80 days, Stripped German-90 days, Brandywine Sudduth's-90 days. Mostly one of each, but maybe 2 Stupice, and 2 Stripped Germans.

Thanks for reminding me. I need to divide the rhubarb.

I'm hoping to get a descent blueberry harvest, but I did a half-assed job of dropping the pH on them (Spread sulfur on ground, and then covered it with newsprint, and alfalfa, as is my wont.)

Seems like I've known Tom since he was a young whipper-snapper ;OP

Reply to
Billy

Congratulations.

Reply to
Billy

...

just glad to be here. :)

back then, being born premature wasn't as treatable as it is now.

songbird

Reply to
songbird

So, you've always been precocious?

Reply to
Billy

no apology needed, but it's ok anyways. i do understand that with longer posts/conversations it might be a while or never for responses.

usenet is still my favorite medium for many reasons. one is that i can sit on a reply for a while and ponder or rewrite a few times.

[for those who want to just get to the gardening stuff at the end, search for the word HERE :) ]

it may have been a storm, pests or animals which took it out. what i don't quite understand is why they cannot replant now, but i haven't looked to see what is happening there either so perhaps they have started some projects to rebuild the topsoil...

one thing that seems to be ignored for topsoil remediation and reversing erosion is dredging and putting it back where it came from. sure it is work, but we are not short of people needing jobs and if the situation is so bad that we need every square foot of soil to be producing food or carbon sources to trap CO2 then the projects become more important.

ok, yes, contamination and poisons are a problem with much sediment, but that too should be a priority to deal with. if you are using sediments for topsoil and fill as a base for CO2 sequestration then there isn't quite the problem from poisons as compared to if you are using it as a base for a garden or animal fodder. sunshine and time can do a lot to break down a lot of poisons, and bacteria and fungi can do a lot more. so i'm not really discouraged as some might be.

some families are worse, as instead of trying they actually force extraction.

i think you are stuck in the idea that only for-profit corporations exist as active entities in the world. there are non-profit, individual and governmental entities which can make a difference. i see a lot of differences being made from these other entities, but i also see a lot of difference happening in the for-profit companies and individuals.

all agreed with.

not sure if chestnut flour can replace flour in baking, but i don't object to reforestation and sustainable agriculture.

in some areas it is fine, but it is not a universal answer. remember that albedo plays a role in climate. if we covered the earth with dark materials soaking up the sun's radiation we'd bake. so it cannot be used in areas that are left bare for long periods of time. once an area is put into perennial or permaculture then it's a great thing to have.

not just carbohydrates but also animal protein could be reduced. the other aspect is that carbohydrates are much better if they are complex and not so refined.

the past 40 years have really been a mess when it comes to diet and nutrition recommendations from the scientists. it's not that they've intentionally gone wrong, they just didn't know... the longer term view that i like to keep in mind is to "eat real foods" i.e. those that don't have a long list of ingredients on the package.

which reminds me to yell about all the stupid stickers on fruits and vegetables now. like i want more plastic on my food, yeesh.

i think we are in a period of transition when it comes to education. in the longer term i think much of what currently exists as formal schools will be removed and more people will self-learn as needed. much of what i was forced to learn in college was wasted time and money.

oh sure, beyond a point hunger is going to shut down reproduction as starvation shuts down menstruation when it is that severe. i don't know of any place in the first world that has suffered such starvation outside of periods of war. do you?

and i don't discount the benefits of a good sex life. just that we need to make sure in lands that are marginally able to support people that they don't keep having more children than the land can support.

unfortunately in many poor areas it's not a matter of passion but of rape, failed birth control, ignorance, societal breakdown or ...

i have a book called _Fat Chance_ on request, but it will be a while yet before i get to reading it. sounds pretty interesting and likely speaks of a lot of these things.

but think of this, without abortion being an option in the USoA how many more million people there would be. i think someone said about 30 million abortions.

so it's not just about that much food being available, but the lack of effective birth control or the lack of women to even control their lives in many cultures. really when you look at much of the radical fundamentalists what they most hate about western society is the changes it brings to how women are treated.

the drug issue is much wider than i want to tackle in this post, but much of the current policy towards illegal drug use i consider to be a waste of money (along with the prisons, wasted police efforts, etc).

i'm off-line at the moment to take a look at that, but i'm sure it's going to be a fun read.

i know that big oil isn't going down without a fight. they have a huge interest in keeping the status quo. they are however going to have to change. we simply cannot afford not to change.

we've always got some kind of riff on forgetfullness going on here even if both of us are still mostly here (haha), much earthy humor gets flung about too.

yet i make no pretense about being able to remember everything. in fact i try to pack my head so full of stuff as often as possible that it might come leaking out my ears. as of yet, only potatoes and carrots seem to grow there. i must be reading them wrong. the directions on the shredder...

i've read close to 50,000 pages the past few months and that doesn't count the on-line blogs, corporate annual reports, usenet, e-mails, news articles, news papers, etc.

a good read of 700 pages is usually one or two days. i'll put it on the list to pick up eventually, but i suspect much of it i have read before in one form or another.

right now i'm trying to work through all the references in books that i've read recently that strike me as interesting.

the really sad thing is that many links given in printed material no longer work even only a few years past when the book was published. stuff gets moved around on web-sites or the person leaves the university and their docs are gone, etc.

i have read plenty of those the past few years. i'll add her name to the list too for a more quiet time next winter. i'm trying now to get back to more serious reading.

...snip... ...yes, i did actually finally trim something...

if we did it making sewage and water treatment plants as they are currently done then i'd consider that a fairly bad use of the money also.

we really need to stop using water as the means of moving human (and animal wastes) around. it's stupid. we have all these chemicals going into the water that have strange effects and it is so embedded into everyone's habits that they just dump stuff and "it goes away and gets dealt with by someone else" that it makes me sick. and more and more it just might be really making others sick too.

it is that kind of mentality that needs to be changed. we have to think of entire waste streams. that thinking doesn't happen if someone gets a free pass to dump (be it CO2, pig poop or even plant stalks).

spread on the surface isn't always the right answer. agricultural use in areas not already dark soil types that would decrease albedo. which for a warm planet is likely not a good thing. for areas of permiculture or perennial agriculture where the soil is not exposed to the sun directly then it could be spread without too much bad effect.

i keep seeing studies mentioned of how much carbon the soil can hold. these studies are blatantly wrong. they are assuming that the carbon is only mixed into the top layers and left to rot. what they do not measure is how much carbon can be stored in trenches down deeper. so they miss the fact that the soil can hold many times the carbon they state. CO2 pumped under ground is not a real solution. you think FL would last very long if they pump CO2 into the ground there? limestone and carbonic acid... sink hole heaven...

if we have excess CO2 going into the air then we have to remove it no matter how that removal gets done.

we've already gone over limits we should not have so we must now remove extra CO2 each year not just limit what we've already put into the atmosphere.

that we can do it via trees and biochar use is only one way, but we'll likely need other methods too for drawing down the extra CO2 already up there.

we have to do this. the changes going on right now are already shifting the CO2 levels just by feedback (thawing the permafrost). so not only we have to start removing extra we also have to remove the extra that is being caused by the feedback going on.

it's not something that gets done by shutting down extra CO2 production alone. not now. we've already tipped the scale and the slide is starting. to stop the slide we gotta put some mojo into it.

suppose the gases given off during making biochar are combustable or even yet another greenhouse gas? last i knew wood gives off fuel enough to power a car.

cite for what aspect? that wood contains compounds which when released by biochar can fuel a vehicle? that's already a well known thing. Mother Earth News had an article a few issues ago on a wood fuel driven truck. wood gas could have been the gas we used if cheap oil hadn't been found.

the combine process would be fun to work on. but like i've said up above, biochar is an albedo killer.

i think they are points to raise when talking to governmental officials. especially the points about how much it will cost to keep FL, Washington DC, LA and many other cities above flood stage or protected by levees. Hurricane Sandy shook some branches, but we gotta keep on shaking the tree or they'll think that they can go back to doing nothing.

when you consider the feedback from expanding water as it warms and how we've already primed the pump to increase water temperatures (less ice at the north pole for longer periods of time, melting permafrost, etc.). well i just don't see how anyone in government today can keep a straight face and say we don't have a huge infrastructure budget coming up already and that's just if we stop what we've done now. that doesn't even get to the point of the fact that we're still making it worse! arg!

...HERE...

that's a lot of tomatoes!

which do you like the best or the least? do you put them up or freeze them?

glad to be of service. :)

are they flowering or past flowering?

that may not work quickly, but it should make a difference longer term. to change things quickly is likely to cause a bit of shock to a plant anyways. so i'd prefer a more gradual method. how much did you put down?

...

now you're making me think of Grandpa on _the Munsters_ or Uncle Fester of the Addams family...

songbird

Reply to
songbird

If you're still on dial-up, you'll just have to wait and let this 8 minute and 39 sec fragment (V) of "A Farm for the Future" load on your hard drive. At about 2 min. 20 sec. they start going on about replacing grains with nuts.

It is really, a very good series (five parts).

If that's no good for you, then we'll just have to swap email addresses, and I'll mail it to you.

It's time for my beauty sleep. I shall return.

Reply to
Billy

i read your thread, i totally agreed to you.

Reply to
thomaspoul

No, they used the trees as rollers, to move massive carved, stone heads from quarries to the coast, where they would be placed looking out to sea.

The island was deforested but a few trees survived. When Europeans finally arrived they noticed some trees that were about some 10' tall.

Jarod Diamond does an analysis in his book, "Downfall" on page 181 for the reasons of the lack of fertility of Easter Island's soil (low rain fall, cooler climate than in other parts of Polynesian, lack of micronutrients that come from volcanic ash, and continental dust). Once cut, Easter Island's forest wasn't coming back anytime soon.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition by Jared Diamond

(At a library near you.)

No need to disturb the buried poisons. Top soil can be regenerated. Joel Salatin is doing it at the rate of 1"/year.

You're going to have to explain that to me, unless you mean parents that force their kids into prostitution.

Would you care to share the sunshine? Who, what, when, and where?

Again, "A Farm for a Future", [a BBC documentary on the precient global farming and food crisis, filmed in the UK. Featuring Martin Crawford (Agroforestry Research Trust), Fordhall Farm, Richard Heinberg and others. Topics covered are the influence of oil on the food production, peak-oil, food security, carbon emissions, sustainability and permaculture.] is very worthwhile. It comes in 5 parts. Parts 1 & 2 set up the problem, and parts 3 - 5 offer solutions.

Again the part on perennial nuts replacing annual grains is found in part V at about 2:20 minutes.

But anything that grows will have a better chance with terra preta. What could Joel Salatin do with charcoal in his soil?

You can only eat so much. The more fiber that goes into your diet, the less carbs, and fat go in.

That's what Michael Pollan says.

See below.

Well, commodifying education is a mistake, if you care about community. If primary, and secondary schools would teach critical thinking, instead of the rote memorization that is "No Child's Behind Left", they would be a better place. Present provocative ideas to them, but then let them study what they want. Even planning a business model for gramming out an oz. of hash, and its distribution (worst case scenerio) will lead to the realization that there is 28.35g/oz. The metric system will lead to history, agriculture, music, and science. History, music, and science will lead to the rest of the studies of mankind. I'm not suggesting that everybody should start their own cartel, just that all roads lead up the mountain. The same could be said for a kid who wants to design clothes. It's all good. You will still need a teacher to make suggestions, and critics. If they decide that they want to be doctors or engineers, they will have the research skills to seem them through the classes, and tests required for a license in those professions.

I was responding to your statement, "we have this capacity built in to keep on screwing even if the surrounding countryside is going up in smoke." Procreation is difficult when you are hungry, and expecting the roof to fall in at any minute.

Traditionally, where subsistence farming has been a way of life, children are the family's work force, and often children die from disease, so you create replacements.

Let's not start blaming the victims.

And how many more of us would there be without contraception?

I'd call them reactionary fundamentalists. I don't think anyone wants an abortion, BUT that is the woman's call. If a person can't control their own body, what are they allowed to control? If the wacko Christian right really want to get into it, why don't they try to save all the non-menstrual eggs left in the ovaries, and match them up with all the single s**en that they can find? At the least, they could try to set up a support system for poor mothers, and their off spring. As it is, the people who condemn abortion are the same who will call for capital punishment. I wish they'd make up their minds. Is life sacred, or not?

Agreed, but for another time.

You might find

and

interesting. <

Was a time when a person could be the world expert on several subjects, but no more. Now we learn more and more about less and less. Information overload, I think. People can't keep track of everything they need to know. There isn't enough time. So we end up with politicians who say, who do you believe, your President, or your own lying eyes?

I try to save what I think is really important, either on my hard drive, or in the books in my study.

A fat lot of good that'll do ;O)

Yup, infinite world mentality in a finite world.

The charcoal needs to be where the roots are, and plowing the soil isn't good for it. The charcoal will be covered by the crops, and the non-harvested part of the crop would cover the charcoal after that. If you want to increase the albedo, we could all paint our roofs white.

You're advocating burying compost (organic material)? Charcoal effectively takes it out of the carbon cycle, and makes agricultural land more fertile.

CO2 pumped under ground is an option that has best talked about, but, personally, I don't like it. Charcoal is so much more simple.

Hey, I'm the choir, remember?

What are you using to heat this future charcoal to create the H2, and CO? How much cellulose would you have to char to heat yourself during winter with H2? I just think that if we can seriously cut the amount of CO2 that we're putting into the atmosphere, and encourage reforestation, and the production of charcoal, we have a chance of turning this barge around. Otherwise, when the methane hydrate that lines the Atlantic seashore goes of goes off, the tide will roll in to Raliegh, N.C., and Harrisburg, PA. Of course this will aversely affect the profits of some major corporations, but so will having New York go under water.

Uh, now you've lost me, monoculture, discing the soil? More food come from interplanting.

Your going to create CO2 to make H2, and CO? Wheat may be dry when it is harvested, but I can't think of any other crop that is. I bury my charcoal under mulch.

= methane which is 20 times more efficient at trapping solar radiation than CO2 is. The scary part is the water vapor, which also traps heat, but also drives storms like Sandy, and Katrina when it releases heat when it shifts from vapor to liquid.

Arg, indeed!

Eyes eats them! It's only about 10 vines in the soil, and 2 in containers. If I was going to put them up I would be planting romas, or San Marzanos. Between salads, sandwiches, and gazpacho there won't be any left over, especially now that I know that I can use green tomatoes in making salsa verde for enchiladas.

Oh, and thanks again. I gotta tie a string on my finger or something.

They are just flowering.

Next time I think I'll use my dibble, and pour the sulfur into the holes.

Addams Family is probably close to the truth.

Anyway, I woke up this morning with my brown colored glasses on, and I though I'd give you my view of ocean health.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

(Available at a library near you.)

p 152 - 59 There is a Texas-sized span of ocean between Long Beach, California, and Honolulu, sometimes known as the horse latitudes. It is rarely plied by sailors because of a perennial, slowly rotating high-pressure vortex of hot equatorial air that inhales wind and never gives it back. Beneath it, the water describes lazy, clockwise whorls toward a depression at the center.

Its correct name is the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, though oceanographers have another label for it: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch where nearly everything that blows into the water from half the Pacific Rim eventually ends up, spiraling slowly toward a widening horror of industrial excretion. Covered with floating refuse, it is a fright of cups, bottle caps, tangles of fish netting and monofilament line, bits of polystyrene packaging, six-pack rings, spent balloons, filmy scraps of sandwich wrap, and limp plastic bags that defied counting.

The world's merchant fleet alone shamelessly tossing around 639,000 plastic containers every day. But that amounts to mere polymer crumbs in the ocean compared to what was pouring from the shore.

The real reason that the world's landfills aren't overflowing with plastic, he found, was because most of it ends up in an Ocean-Fill. Eighty percent of mid-ocean flotsam in the North Pacific gyre, was originally discarded on land.

There is a half a pound of debris on the surface for every 100 square meters in the 1,000-mile crossing of the gyre some 3 million tons of plastic. That's more plastic by weight than plankton on the ocean's surface, six times as much.

In India alone, 5,000 processing plants were producing plastic bags. Kenya was churning out 4,000 tons of bags a month, with no potential for recycling.

As for the little pellets known as nurdles, 5.5 quadrillion?about 250 billion pounds?were manufactured annually. They are found everywhere. These plastic resin bits can be seen trapped inside the transparent bodies of jellyfish and salps, the ocean's most prolific and widely distributed filter-feeders.

All this plastic had appeared in barely more than 50 years. Would its chemical constituents or additives?for instance, colorants such as metallic copper?concentrate as they ascended the food chain, and alter evolution?

Tokyo University geochemist Hideshige Takada reported that in the sea, nurdles and other plastic fragments acted both as magnets and as sponges for resilient poisons like DDT and PCBs.

The use of aggressively toxic polychlorinated biphenyls?PCBs?to make plastics more pliable had been banned since 1970; among other hazards, PCBs were known to promote hormonal havoc such as hermaphroditic fish and polar bears. Like time-release capsules, pre-1970 plastic flotsam will gradually leak PCBs into the ocean for centuries. But, as Takada also discovered, free-floating toxins from all kinds of sources?copy paper, automobile grease, coolant fluids, old fluorescent tubes, and infamous discharges by General Electric and Monsanto plants directly into streams and rivers?readily stick to the surfaces of free-floating plastic.

The gyrating Pacific dump is 10 million square miles?nearly the size of Africa, and it wasn't the only one: the planet has six other major tropical oceanic gyres, all of them swirling with ugly debris.

Everyone has seen polyethylene and other plastics turn yellow and brittle and start to flake in sunlight. Often, plastics are treated with additives to make them more UV-resistant; other additives can make them more UV-sensitive.

There are two problems. For one, plastic takes much longer to photodegrade in water. The other hitch is that even though a ghost fishnet made from photodegradable plastic might disintegrate before it drowns any dolphins, its chemical nature will not change for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

Polyethylene is not biodegraded in any practical time scale. There is no mechanism in the marine environment to biodegrade that long a molecule." Even if photodegradable nets helped marine mammals live, their powdery residue remains in the sea, where the filter feeders will find it.

G'day

Reply to
Billy

...

more likely impatient. "Let me out!"

*plop*

songbird

Reply to
songbird

yes, i'm still on dial-up, yet i bookmark things for downloading if they are worth it.

songbird

Reply to
songbird

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