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OT but a welcome bit of brightness
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 |
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