Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:

Sorry, if I seemed flippant yesterday with my "skoal!" remark. It was
late, and I wasn't ready to make a coherent response to your post.

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 ]


...
Which choice gives the highest profits for the next quarter?

for some state sponsored trawlers on
the open seas it's not going to be about
profits, but sheer survival.

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.

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...

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.

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.


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?

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.


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.

all agreed with.


The government could start a large orchard of chestnuts to introduce the
ground nut as a replacement for wheat, and/or rice flour.

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


Terra preta
should be encouraged to invigorate soils, and sequester CO2.

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.


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.

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.


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 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.


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...

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.

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.


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.

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


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" ( propaganda) as practiced by Edward
Bernays, "manufactured consent" as Walter Lippman called it.

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.


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.

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.

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).


at some point in the future if we don't get a
grip on populations and manage the
topsoil better.

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

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.

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.
http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-...irtiest-tricks
-played-by-foes-of-clean-energy-reform.html

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.


the book _soil_ by David Montgomery
Do you mean, "Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations"
http://www.amazon.com/Dirt-Civilizat...y/dp/052024870
8/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364575426&sr=1-7&keywords=David+Montgom
ery

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

Welcome to the club ;O)

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...


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.
Sounds like Jarod Diamond's book "Collapse".
http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Socie...vised/dp/01431
17009/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364575795&sr=1-1&keywords=Collapse

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 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.
http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Histor...resent/dp/0060
528427/ref=sr_1_2_title_2_har?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364666 459&sr=1-2&keywo
rds=People%27s+History+of+the+United+States
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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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).


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.

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.

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...


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.
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.

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.

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.

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.


solar furnaces are not really needed as biochar
creates it's own fuel as it is being made.
Without creating more CO2? Solar furnaces offer "zero" CO2 in converting
cellulose to charcoal.

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.


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.

You got a cite for this?

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.


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.

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

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.

Good point.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

that's a lot of tomatoes!

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


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.

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

glad to be of service.


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...

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.)

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?


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



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

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


songbird