Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:

fascinating but expendable conversation snipped


Top soil can be regenerated. Joel
Salatin is doing it at the rate of 1"/year.
http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0104saveworld.htm

i've read most of what he's published.

he is not building topsoil, he amends it
heavily with organic materials that he brings
in by the truckload. they get run through
the cow barn, the pigs, chickens, before they
get scattered on the fields.
....
Thanks, but why do you say he's not building topsoil. He has picked up
the pace, but this is how soil is built.

he is taking materials from other places.
these materials are what would eventually become
a part of the topsoil in those locations. he's
mining topsoil components from other locations.


http://grist.org/sustainable-farming...e-new-york-tim
es-re-sustainable-meat/
While its true that at Polyface our omnivores (poultry and pigs) do eat
local GMO (genetically modified organism)-free grain in addition to the
forage, the land base required to feed and metabolize the manure is no
different than that needed to sustain the same animals in a confinement
setting. Even if they ate zero pasturage, the land is the same. The only
difference is our animals get sunshine, exercise, fresh pasture salad
bars, fresh air, and a respectful life.

It has been charged that Polyface is a charade because it depends on
grain from industrial farms to maintain soil fertility. First of all, at
Polyface we do not assume that all nutrient movement is
anti-environmental. In fact, one of the biggest reasons for animals in
nature is to move nutrients uphill, against the natural gravitational
flow from high ground to low ground. This is why low lands and valleys
are fertile and the uplands are less so. Animals are the only mechanism
nature has to defy this natural downward flow. Fortunately, predators
make the prey animals want to lounge on high ground (where they can see
their enemies), which insures that manure will concentrate on high
lookout spots rather than in the valleys. Perhaps this is why no
ecosystem exists that is devoid of animals. The fact is that nutrient
movement is inherently nature-healing.

But, it doesnt move very far. And herein lies the difference between
grain used at Polyface and that used by the industry: We care where ours
comes from. Its not just a commodity. It has an origin and an ending,
start to finish, farmer to eater. The closer we can connect the carbon
cycles, the more environmentally normal we will become.
Second, herbivores are the exception to the entire negative nutrient
flow argument because by pruning back the forage to restart the rapid
biomass accumulation photosynthetic engine, the net carbon flow
compensates for anything lost through harvest. Herbivores do not require
tillage or annuals, and that is why all historically deep soils have
been created by them, not by omnivores.
-------
So, the Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic's
system isn't quite closed, but it is creating topsoil (soil with the
highest concentration of organic matter and microorganisms), which other
meat producers don't.



i still give him high marks for what he
does compared to many farmers. he at least
does understand the importance of topsoil.

he loses marks in that he could be using
organic corn for his meat chickens (he
complained that his source had too much
chaff/cob in it, well duh, get a different
supplier or grow your own).

So he is really just attenuating the impact of conventional farming. I
wonder what we would do differently, if we made the decisions. I mean
profit isn't the sole motive, or he'd be running a CAFO.

well, that is the problem with any sustainable
farming effort, that it must work within the broader
society and economics to keep going. his farm has
to make enough money to support him and his wife and
children and the interns that stay there. he can't
afford to not have money for taxes and the other
basics needed that cannot be provided by the farm.

if i were claiming to be a sustainable farmer i'd
be working with a supplier to fix the problem.

returning to my more local issue as one with a
limited amount of land in trying to be as sustainable
as possible i cannot raise both enough veggies in
the current gardens and sell them to raise enough
money to cover the taxes on the land let alone
the other expenses of having this place.

for some people property and other taxes are reasons
behind extractive agricultural practices. if property
isn't taxed then it takes some pressure off people to
exploit it.


....
Corporations are obligated to make a profit for their investors. Any
action that reduces earnings is considered illegal. They may be able to
argue that some actions will avoid legal consequences which in the long
run will increase earnings.
In other words, being a good neighbor costs a corporation too much.

an action which loses money is not illegal
as if it were there would be no corporations
for very long. i think you are confusing
what would be considered corporate malfeasance
and misuse of corporate resources, but even
some of those actions would also not be
considered illegal, just inadvisable...

Under eBay v. Newman, the law is as Franken said: "it is literally
malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to
maximize its profits." Just ask Jim and Craig; no one disputes it's
their company, but they're legally prohibited from taking steps to
preserve the profit-alongside-community-service mission that's served
them well. Maximize profits, or else.

i think that is a case where the company should be
taken private or turned into a non-profit. if their
social aims are broader than being a business then
i think that is a more accurate classification for
them anyways.


The impact of this duty-to-maximize-profits stretches far beyond mere
investments. Under Citizens United, corporations now have the First
Amendment right to influence our fragile democracy however they want,
since they're "people," just like you and me, albeit profit-maximizing
zombies who care not for truth, justice, or the American way.

i still think you have a bit too jaded a view of
corporations. not all are as bad as Monsanto or
whatever the devil of the moment is.


Non-profits are a different animal, except for where earnings are
channeled into the managements pockets as compensation. When non-profits
do try to mitigate a social problem, which reduce corporate profits, the
corporations have more litigation power. Take farm cruelty for example.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/us...y-is-becoming-
the-crime.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

yeah, i saw that one. somehow i suspect when it
gets challenged in court it will get thrown out.
some laws passed are not enforceable when put before
a jury and a judge.

Like The Supremes? Good luck. Clarence Thomas used to be counsel for
Monsanto.

it will be interesting to follow how they
talk about "free speech" in one aspect (campaign
funding) yet have this other limited speech in
another aspect. they might try to justify it
but i think the judges and juries are a bit more
able to see through this. likely it won't ever
see the Supreme Court. too obvious a bonehead
law that deserves a spanking.


...
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.

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


Turns out he does (see above)

i didn't see any mention of charcoal or
biochar in any of his books. he does claim

He doesn't. My error.

it happens.


to sequester carbon in the soil, but it is
more the kind of sequestering that happens
when creating humus. i.e. if he stops
adding composted manures and organic materials
then his topsoil will gradually compress down
as the organic materials rot faster and turn
into humus. if he keeps grazing cattle without
amending then his soil can only grow as fast
as the bedrock will produce nutrients along
with what the rain and dust in the air provide.

this will not be an inch a year. i can
guarantee that.

Just reporting what I read.
http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0104saveworld.htm

ok.


don't get me wrong, he's not stupid and he
takes care of his fields well enough to have
improved them from their previously degraded
state. just that he's doing it along with
using extra organic materials brought in from
outside areas. he also cuts down trees and
chips them to use as bedding material.


sequester some percentage of carbon for a longer
period than the current method he's using. probably
also increase some of the nutrient cycling because
of the higher bacterial count in the soil. depending
upon how he gets the carbon source would make me rate
it better or worse...

I suspect that the benefits of lignified wood comes from the amount
surface area exposed.

i'm not sure what lignified means and can't
look it up at the moment. do you mean pyrolized
instead? lignified to me would mean wood with
added lignin and as far as i know wood already
contains some amount of lignin...

lignified
Botany
make rigid and woody by the deposition of lignin in cell walls.

ok, haha, good to know i wasn't far off in
what i thought lignin was involved in.


if you do mean pyrolized then yes, as it is
pyrolized it creates more surface area. the
temperature and type of feed stock and several
other factors (moisture content, rate of heating,
etc.) also influence how much surface area there
is in the resulting material along with the
percentage of carbon and the amount of leftover
compounds are not released.

Yes, that is what I meant. I doubt, though that Amazonians put such a
fine point on their charcoal.

they may have. hundreds of years experience and
tradition of making terra preta they might have had
a fairly sophisticated knowledge. unfortunately, we
don't have any of their writings. a modern analysis
of the layers at an undisturbed site would be very
interesting.


....food wastage...
very rare i have to feed anything to the wormies
other than trimmings from cooking.

which makes me wonder what a worm thinks of
a piece of chocolate.

Great source of tryptophan! Tryptophan is the amino acid that our brains
use to make serotonin, which is the neurotransmitter that provides us
with our basic feelings of well-being and self-esteem.

it's one of several tree crops that i'd like to
grow and can't because of the climate.


(another snip)

I think this is where corporate greed comes into the picture again. If
we stop consuming, they lose potential profits. Notice how many ads in
the media pitch an image, and say very little about the product? PR
works. Edward Bernais proved it. Lies can become reality.

Noam Chomsky used to write some very
interesting things too, but i haven't
seen anything from him lately. he might
have retired or given up in disgust.
i haven't looked either so i just could
have missed what he's done.

You've just missed what he's done, probably because the corporate press
is afraid of him. Most recently he's been agitating for human rights for
Palestinians. Pretty amazing considering that he was born in 1928.

he's one of my heroes. i wish him many more years
of cranky intellectual poking.


....
...CO2, biochar and pyrolysis...

How much cellulose would you have to char to heat
yourself during winter
with H2?

no, that's a waste as the heat directly from
burning the cellulose would be what you want. not
a loss from another layer of processing. also the
gas given off and condensed if using the cellulose
to produce both heat and charcoal can be stored
and used just like gasoline. no need to turn
anything into H2.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas
Wood gas is a syngas fuel which can be used as a fuel for furnaces,
stoves and vehicles in place of petrol, diesel or other fuels. During
the production process biomass or other carbon-containing materials are
gasified within the oxygen-limited environment of a wood gas generator
to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide. These gases can then be burnt
as a fuel within an oxygen rich environment to produce carbon dioxide,
water and heat.

What is your reference here?

check the wiki under pyrolysis, but i have a list

Wiki: While the exact composition of bio-oil depends on the biomass
source and processing conditions, a typical composition is as follows:
Water 20-28%; Suspended solids and pyrolitic lignin 22-36%;
Hydroxyacetaldehyde 8-12%; Levoglucosan 3-8%; Acetic acid 4-8%; Acetol
3-6%; Cellubiosan 1-2%; Glyoxal 1-2%; Formaldehyde 3-4%; Formic acid
3-6%.

I'll withhold judgement.

bio-oil is a different topic. i'm not going
there as i don't have petrochemical or specific
refinery knowledge in detail (i do know something
about refineries, distillations, catalysts and
such, but that's about it).


....
...HERE...
....
I hope to have early ripening, mid ripening,
and late ripening tomatoes, i.e. a long tomato
season.

good luck! so far this has been the
most normal spring we've had in several
years. we actually got rain yesterday and
a few minutes ago it was raining again.
happiness! that will green up the plants
and wake up the wormies. three dry days
now would be perfect as i could get things
spread and dug in and perhaps even some
planting done.

now it's looking like it will be too wet
for a while longer. days and days of rain.
my water catches have gotten a good workout.


last year for us the Roma tomatoes were ok
for adding to the salsa to give it some more
thickness, but they didn't do much for juice.

That's why they're good for making sauce. You don't have to reduce them
as much.

have you ever tried the viva italia?

No, I grow the Juliet which is similar to the viva italia, but about a
third the size.

smaller works out better for ripening in
uncertain times too as far as i'm concerned.


do you have a favorite tomato?

Probably the "Striped German". A little lower acid than the Brandywine,
but is very perfumed, at least it is when grown here. Whether it is
location, or nature, I don't know. I was reading, when the perfume of it
struck me. I looked up, and my wife was slicing them.



as we put up most of the tomatoes we grow we need
a regular acid tomato.


...
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.

You may want to look at
http://www.livinganthropologically.c...lture-as-worst
-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race/
too.

i did, finally, and ran away with my nose plugged
and wishing i had tongs. it seems that Jared gets
the anthropologists upset.


without having a chance yet to look at the
article i still can't agree with the gist of
the title completely. i think there are ways
of doing agriculture that are sustainable.

i'm stuck off-line for a while so i'll have
to get back to this later.

Agriculture created class divisions, concentration of wealth and
inequality, and illness. It's a good read.

i don't see agriculture as a cause of things
as i think that agriculture, cities and specialization
came about all together as groupings of humans
got larger. why they got larger is also a combination
of many factors. one of those might simply be
because it's more fun to hang with more people
than to be alone for most people. loners are a
minority. another reason could have also been
for protection from other groups, i.e. weaponization
when stone tools used to be the greatest risk a
person had to face it wasn't quite the same thing
but then slings, arrows, spears, and armor started
showing up and people banded together as armies
then in order to be safe you needed your homies
at your back. out on the range no longer is as
appealing when you might get run over by an army
and your farm ransacked.

so, no, i don't put the ills of modern society
on agriculture.


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.

It won't be either if it is poisoned with carcinogenic confetti of
plastic.

if we can decrease production of plastics
that become poisonous and replace them with
materials that safely degrade then that would
help a great deal. i'm very much in favor
of taxing and regulating plastics based upon
how much gets recycled and then using that
tax money to fund cleanup efforts to harvest
and recycle what is floating on the seas.

i'm generally all for any type of program
which taxes products and materials based upon
the percent that is recyclable and making the
taxes both inversely and exponentially tied
to the percentage that is recycled. so for
things that are 100% recycled there is no
additional tax, but for items that are not
recycleable the tax is quite large to offset
the unsustainable costs of dealing with it.

that type of policy would immediately
create some jobs for people to work in the
recycling processes, but also i'd have
bounties for picking up trash that get paid
out of fast food and other waste streams that
seem to be showing up as debris along the
road (or in the air).

if only i were king. people would hate
me, but i'd sleep at night knowing the world
had a more sustainable future.

Right on, but the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre was described as nearly
the size of Africa in 2005, and it is only one of several gyres. That's
a lot of plastic.

well then, clearly time to get started on such
a large project.


The plastic, for the most part isn't poisonous, but it is non-polar, and
attracts things like polychlorinated biphenyls, and dioxin.

incineration or refining could change or
destroy those compounds.


....if only i were king...
the energy could be used to desalinate water
or fuel pumps to move sea water into desalination
greenhouses and condenser setups. i'm not sure
what works better. they'd have a lot of free
plastics to recycle into sheeting to make
covers.

Ah, back to procreating are we?

plant propagation or water desalinization
wise. i mean green house covers.


...the oceans, floating trash...

You have my vote for dictator. Pay everyone a living wage. Enough of
this employment of wage slaves.

what if a person doesn't need that much?
isn't a part of the destruction of resources
by a greedy society the problem that people
don't learn moderation? or that they aren't
allowed to adjust their own demands because
the system has a one-size fits all mentality
(super-size me bucko)?

i dislike minimum wage legislation. since
when do i want the government telling me what
my labor is worth? what if i want to work for
less for a charity or non-profit? i don't
need a minimum wage. i need the government
to get out of my way.

right now there are a lot of low skilled jobs
that get done by sub-contractors or individuals
and they are being paid cash. so no taxes are
being collected for social security or medicare
for those workers. they may never be in the
position to become a full time worker.


....polyethylene plastic particles...
Or moved up the food chain by its predator.

it if is a particle it passes through
and gets conglomerated and then would
settle out. if it can't be degraded then
it becomes a substrate (just like mineral
grains or humus or other nearly undigestable
materials).

These are poisonous materials that dissolve in fat. Once in the body,
they persist. They get passed from predator to predator, and
concentrated in the top predator, us.

Best get your fish from down the food chain, not the top.

i don't eat that much fish any longer. i used
to eat sardines a few times a week or canned
tuna. then i discovered sashimi and lost my
taste for canned tuna and the price of sardines
went up too and i found out i'd much rather
grow and put up as much of my own food as possible.
instead of buying fish from thousands of miles away
i'm eating more from foods grown a few feet away.


if it is incorporated in the animal
then at some point it settles out and
gets buried. excreted materials are
usually coated with mucous often also
with other stuff like bacteria and
fungi. i.e. also things that tend
to clump and settle.

In the predator.

where?
In the fat tissues. These are unnatural compounds that have no method of
being metabolized. That's why they are no longer produced.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persist...nd_toxic_subst
ances

yes, i know about those.

i've also heard it being a method of cleaning
up an environment by harvesting the bioaccumulators
of such things and then incinerating them too.
yuck.

this sort of problem is why i'm very much in
favor of testing of all materials in use and
recycling taxes. so we have the means for getting
things cleaned up and taken care of.


i don't recall the alimentary
canal having a permanent resting place.
undigestible stuff goes through. the
original claim is that the stuff doesn't
have any way of being broken down wasn't
it?

Maybe not, but if you eat this stuff, you will lose your ass, so to
speak.

i wouldn't eat parts of plastic knowingly.
i try to avoid buying things packed in plastic.

as for pollution and plastic, you know i'd get
on with cleaning it up no matter how much of it
there is or how long it took. a 3000 sq mile
floating mass is unlikely to be thick so perhaps
it would be 3000 trips of a large tanker? get
100 tankers and that becomes 30 trips. processing
and sorting would be a lot of work. yay for real
jobs.


songbird

In article ,
songbird wrote:

Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:

fascinating but expendable conversation snipped


Top soil can be regenerated. Joel
Salatin is doing it at the rate of 1"/year.
http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0104saveworld.htm

i've read most of what he's published.

he is not building topsoil, he amends it
heavily with organic materials that he brings
in by the truckload. they get run through
the cow barn, the pigs, chickens, before they
get scattered on the fields.
...
Thanks, but why do you say he's not building topsoil. He has picked up
the pace, but this is how soil is built.

he is taking materials from other places.
these materials are what would eventually become
a part of the topsoil in those locations. he's
mining topsoil components from other locations.
Seems like splitting hairs. The claim is that he is conjuring up 1" of
topsoil/year. That's still pretty impressive.

(snipped for brevity)



i still give him high marks for what he
does compared to many farmers. he at least
does understand the importance of topsoil.

he loses marks in that he could be using
organic corn for his meat chickens (he
complained that his source had too much
chaff/cob in it, well duh, get a different
supplier or grow your own).

So he is really just attenuating the impact of conventional farming. I
wonder what we would do differently, if we made the decisions. I mean
profit isn't the sole motive, or he'd be running a CAFO.

well, that is the problem with any sustainable
farming effort, that it must work within the broader
society and economics to keep going. his farm has
to make enough money to support him and his wife and
children and the interns that stay there. he can't
afford to not have money for taxes and the other
basics needed that cannot be provided by the farm.

if i were claiming to be a sustainable farmer i'd
be working with a supplier to fix the problem.

returning to my more local issue as one with a
limited amount of land in trying to be as sustainable
as possible i cannot raise both enough veggies in
the current gardens and sell them to raise enough
money to cover the taxes on the land let alone
the other expenses of having this place.
I have no familiarity with that. What I have is a marginal growing
environment, and I simply try too get more from what I'm given.
Clear plastic over the mulch, and drip irrigation seem to be a good way
to heat the soil and promote earlier harvests, but if you have a cool
summer, there's not much you can do.

for some people property and other taxes are reasons
behind extractive agricultural practices. if property
isn't taxed then it takes some pressure off people to
exploit it.
Duh. Federal land is nearly free, but it is exploited by ranchers, and
mineral extractors.



...
Corporations are obligated to make a profit for their investors. Any
action that reduces earnings is considered illegal. They may be able to
argue that some actions will avoid legal consequences which in the long
run will increase earnings.
In other words, being a good neighbor costs a corporation too much.

an action which loses money is not illegal
as if it were there would be no corporations
for very long. i think you are confusing
what would be considered corporate malfeasance
and misuse of corporate resources, but even
some of those actions would also not be
considered illegal, just inadvisable...

Under eBay v. Newman, the law is as Franken said: "it is literally
malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to
maximize its profits." Just ask Jim and Craig; no one disputes it's
their company, but they're legally prohibited from taking steps to
preserve the profit-alongside-community-service mission that's served
them well. Maximize profits, or else.

i think that is a case where the company should be
taken private or turned into a non-profit. if their
social aims are broader than being a business then
i think that is a more accurate classification for
them anyways.

$$$$$$$$ won't permit.



The impact of this duty-to-maximize-profits stretches far beyond mere
investments. Under Citizens United, corporations now have the First
Amendment right to influence our fragile democracy however they want,
since they're "people," just like you and me, albeit profit-maximizing
zombies who care not for truth, justice, or the American way.

i still think you have a bit too jaded a view of
corporations. not all are as bad as Monsanto or
whatever the devil of the moment is.

See the movie, "The Corporation", it's on DVD. It's also on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw



Non-profits are a different animal, except for where earnings are
channeled into the managements pockets as compensation. When non-profits
do try to mitigate a social problem, which reduce corporate profits, the
corporations have more litigation power. Take farm cruelty for example.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/us...y-is-becoming-
the-crime.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

yeah, i saw that one. somehow i suspect when it
gets challenged in court it will get thrown out.
some laws passed are not enforceable when put before
a jury and a judge.

Like The Supremes? Good luck. Clarence Thomas used to be counsel for
Monsanto.

it will be interesting to follow how they
talk about "free speech" in one aspect (campaign
funding) yet have this other limited speech in
another aspect. they might try to justify it
but i think the judges and juries are a bit more
able to see through this. likely it won't ever
see the Supreme Court. too obvious a bonehead
law that deserves a spanking.
The history of the Supreme court shows it is very susceptible to wealthy
interests. I wish us all good luck.


...
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.

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


Turns out he does (see above)

i didn't see any mention of charcoal or
biochar in any of his books. he does claim

He doesn't. My error.

it happens.
So my wife tells me ;o(



to sequester carbon in the soil, but it is
more the kind of sequestering that happens
when creating humus. i.e. if he stops
adding composted manures and organic materials
then his topsoil will gradually compress down
as the organic materials rot faster and turn
into humus. if he keeps grazing cattle without
amending then his soil can only grow as fast
as the bedrock will produce nutrients along
with what the rain and dust in the air provide.

this will not be an inch a year. i can
guarantee that.

Just reporting what I read.
http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0104saveworld.htm

ok.


don't get me wrong, he's not stupid and he
takes care of his fields well enough to have
improved them from their previously degraded
state. just that he's doing it along with
using extra organic materials brought in from
outside areas. he also cuts down trees and
chips them to use as bedding material.


sequester some percentage of carbon for a longer
period than the current method he's using. probably
also increase some of the nutrient cycling because
of the higher bacterial count in the soil. depending
upon how he gets the carbon source would make me rate
it better or worse...

I suspect that the benefits of lignified wood comes from the amount
surface area exposed.

i'm not sure what lignified means and can't
look it up at the moment. do you mean pyrolized
instead? lignified to me would mean wood with
added lignin and as far as i know wood already
contains some amount of lignin...

lignified
Botany
make rigid and woody by the deposition of lignin in cell walls.

ok, haha, good to know i wasn't far off in
what i thought lignin was involved in.


if you do mean pyrolized then yes, as it is
pyrolized it creates more surface area. the
temperature and type of feed stock and several
other factors (moisture content, rate of heating,
etc.) also influence how much surface area there
is in the resulting material along with the
percentage of carbon and the amount of leftover
compounds are not released.

Yes, that is what I meant. I doubt, though that Amazonians put such a
fine point on their charcoal.

they may have. hundreds of years experience and
tradition of making terra preta they might have had
a fairly sophisticated knowledge. unfortunately, we
don't have any of their writings. a modern analysis
of the layers at an undisturbed site would be very
interesting.
The grain of the wood and the heat applied to it is also important in
making black powder.



(another snip)

I think this is where corporate greed comes into the picture again. If
we stop consuming, they lose potential profits. Notice how many ads in
the media pitch an image, and say very little about the product? PR
works. Edward Bernais proved it. Lies can become reality.

Noam Chomsky used to write some very
interesting things too, but i haven't
seen anything from him lately. he might
have retired or given up in disgust.
i haven't looked either so i just could
have missed what he's done.

You've just missed what he's done, probably because the corporate press
is afraid of him. Most recently he's been agitating for human rights for
Palestinians. Pretty amazing considering that he was born in 1928.

he's one of my heroes. i wish him many more years
of cranky intellectual poking.

You may enjoy his encounter with William F. Buckley.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbTxLmbCoo4


...
...CO2, biochar and pyrolysis...

How much cellulose would you have to char to heat
yourself during winter
with H2?

no, that's a waste as the heat directly from
burning the cellulose would be what you want. not
a loss from another layer of processing. also the
gas given off and condensed if using the cellulose
to produce both heat and charcoal can be stored
and used just like gasoline. no need to turn
anything into H2.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas
Wood gas is a syngas fuel which can be used as a fuel for furnaces,
stoves and vehicles in place of petrol, diesel or other fuels. During
the production process biomass or other carbon-containing materials are
gasified within the oxygen-limited environment of a wood gas generator
to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide. These gases can then be burnt
as a fuel within an oxygen rich environment to produce carbon dioxide,
water and heat.

What is your reference here?

check the wiki under pyrolysis, but i have a list

Wiki: While the exact composition of bio-oil depends on the biomass
source and processing conditions, a typical composition is as follows:
Water 20-28%; Suspended solids and pyrolitic lignin 22-36%;
Hydroxyacetaldehyde 8-12%; Levoglucosan 3-8%; Acetic acid 4-8%; Acetol
3-6%; Cellubiosan 1-2%; Glyoxal 1-2%; Formaldehyde 3-4%; Formic acid
3-6%.

I'll withhold judgement.

bio-oil is a different topic. i'm not going
there as i don't have petrochemical or specific
refinery knowledge in detail (i do know something
about refineries, distillations, catalysts and
such, but that's about it).


...
...HERE...
...
I hope to have early ripening, mid ripening,
and late ripening tomatoes, i.e. a long tomato
season.

good luck! so far this has been the
most normal spring we've had in several
years. we actually got rain yesterday and
a few minutes ago it was raining again.
happiness! that will green up the plants
and wake up the wormies. three dry days
now would be perfect as i could get things
spread and dug in and perhaps even some
planting done.

now it's looking like it will be too wet
for a while longer. days and days of rain.
my water catches have gotten a good workout.

Our squash are in the ground i.e. 2 Portofinos, 2 Crookneck, and 2
Zucchini Romanescos. There are also some bitter melons, and zucchini
replicante, that aren't ready yet for planting.


last year for us the Roma tomatoes were ok
for adding to the salsa to give it some more
thickness, but they didn't do much for juice.

That's why they're good for making sauce. You don't have to reduce them
as much.

have you ever tried the viva italia?

No, I grow the Juliet which is similar to the viva italia, but about a
third the size.

smaller works out better for ripening in
uncertain times too as far as i'm concerned.

It sets in about 70 days, a prolific plant, and even though it is a
hybrid, it's off spring are very similar to the parents.



do you have a favorite tomato?

Probably the "Striped German". A little lower acid than the Brandywine,
but is very perfumed, at least it is when grown here. Whether it is
location, or nature, I don't know. I was reading, when the perfume of it
struck me. I looked up, and my wife was slicing them.



as we put up most of the tomatoes we grow we need
a regular acid tomato.

I only have about 600 sq. ft. for everything.



...
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.

You may want to look at
http://www.livinganthropologically.c...lture-as-worst
-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race/
too.

i did, finally, and ran away with my nose plugged
and wishing i had tongs. it seems that Jared gets
the anthropologists upset.
While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard
to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got
better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until
recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results
(surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one
example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers
really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several
dozen groups of so called primitive people, like the Kalahari Bushmen,
continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people
have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than
their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each
week to obtaining food is only twelve to nineteen hours for one group of
Bushmen, fourteen hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One
Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by
adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many
mongongo nuts in the world?"
While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and
potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving
hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other
nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during
a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and ninety-three
grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily
allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that
Bushmen, who eat seventy-five or so wild plants, could die of starvation
the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did
during the potato famine of the 1840s.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped
bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions.
Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food
sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild
plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no
kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from
others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, nonproducing elite
set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs
at Mycenae c.1500 B.C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than
commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and
had better teeth (on average, one instead of six cavities or missing
teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A.D. 1000, the elite were
distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a
fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that
agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied
diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few
starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor
nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants--wheat, rice, and
corn--provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species,
yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential
to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops,
farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere
fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded
societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded
societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some
archaeologists think it was crowding, rather than agriculture, that
promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because
crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't
take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly
shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise
of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped
bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions.
Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food
sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild
plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no
kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from
others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, nonproducing elite
set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs
at Mycenae c.1500 B.C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than
commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and
had better teeth (on average, one instead of six cavities or missing
teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A.D. 1000, the elite were
distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a
fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.

Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale
today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous
to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an
elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from
countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between
being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the
Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
(Search for it on the web: mistake_jared_diamond.pdf)


without having a chance yet to look at the
article i still can't agree with the gist of
the title completely. i think there are ways
of doing agriculture that are sustainable.

i'm stuck off-line for a while so i'll have
to get back to this later.

Agriculture created class divisions, concentration of wealth and
inequality, and illness. It's a good read.

i don't see agriculture as a cause of things
as i think that agriculture, cities and specialization
came about all together as groupings of humans
got larger. why they got larger is also a combination
of many factors. one of those might simply be
because it's more fun to hang with more people
than to be alone for most people. loners are a
minority. another reason could have also been
for protection from other groups, i.e. weaponization
when stone tools used to be the greatest risk a
person had to face it wasn't quite the same thing
but then slings, arrows, spears, and armor started
showing up and people banded together as armies
then in order to be safe you needed your homies
at your back. out on the range no longer is as
appealing when you might get run over by an army
and your farm ransacked.

so, no, i don't put the ills of modern society
on agriculture.
Read above.



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.

It won't be either if it is poisoned with carcinogenic confetti of
plastic.

(snip)

if only i were king. people would hate
me, but i'd sleep at night knowing the world
had a more sustainable future.

Right on, but the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre was described as nearly
the size of Africa in 2005, and it is only one of several gyres. That's
a lot of plastic.

well then, clearly time to get started on such
a large project.


The plastic, for the most part isn't poisonous, but it is non-polar, and
attracts things like polychlorinated biphenyls, and dioxin.

incineration or refining could change or
destroy those compounds.


...if only i were king...
the energy could be used to desalinate water
or fuel pumps to move sea water into desalination
greenhouses and condenser setups. i'm not sure
what works better. they'd have a lot of free
plastics to recycle into sheeting to make
covers.

Ah, back to procreating are we?

plant propagation or water desalinization
wise. i mean green house covers.

Awwww. Spoil sport.



...the oceans, floating trash...

You have my vote for dictator. Pay everyone a living wage. Enough of
this employment of wage slaves.

what if a person doesn't need that much?
isn't a part of the destruction of resources
by a greedy society the problem that people
don't learn moderation? or that they aren't
allowed to adjust their own demands because
the system has a one-size fits all mentality
(super-size me bucko)?
You would like B.F. Skinner's book, "Walden II".
People who tended flower beds got one wage. Those who worked in the
sewers got several times more.

i dislike minimum wage legislation. since
when do i want the government telling me what
my labor is worth? what if i want to work for
less for a charity or non-profit? i don't
need a minimum wage. i need the government
to get out of my way.
You would think that since all work deserves respect, that all work
would give at least a living wage.

right now there are a lot of low skilled jobs
that get done by sub-contractors or individuals
and they are being paid cash. so no taxes are
being collected for social security or medicare
for those workers. they may never be in the
position to become a full time worker.


...polyethylene plastic particles...
Or moved up the food chain by its predator.

it if is a particle it passes through
and gets conglomerated and then would
settle out. if it can't be degraded then
it becomes a substrate (just like mineral
grains or humus or other nearly undigestable
materials).

These are poisonous materials that dissolve in fat. Once in the body,
they persist. They get passed from predator to predator, and
concentrated in the top predator, us.

Best get your fish from down the food chain, not the top.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/gene...ing_away_the_p
oison

Packing Away The Poison
Genetic mutation allows Hudson River fish to adapt to PCBs, Dioxins
2/17/2011

Some fish in New York's Hudson River have become "resistant" to
several of the waterway's more toxic pollutants. Instead of getting
sick from dioxins and related compounds including some polychlorinated
biphenyls, Atlantic tomcod harmlessly store these poisons in fat, a
new study finds.

i don't eat that much fish any longer. i used
to eat sardines a few times a week or canned
tuna. then i discovered sashimi and lost my
taste for canned tuna and the price of sardines
went up too and i found out i'd much rather
grow and put up as much of my own food as possible.
instead of buying fish from thousands of miles away
i'm eating more from foods grown a few feet away.


if it is incorporated in the animal
then at some point it settles out and
gets buried. excreted materials are
usually coated with mucous often also
with other stuff like bacteria and
fungi. i.e. also things that tend
to clump and settle.

In the predator.

where?
In the fat tissues. These are unnatural compounds that have no method of
being metabolized. That's why they are no longer produced.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persist...nd_toxic_subst
ances

yes, i know about those.

i've also heard it being a method of cleaning
up an environment by harvesting the bioaccumulators
of such things and then incinerating them too.
yuck.

this sort of problem is why i'm very much in
favor of testing of all materials in use and
recycling taxes. so we have the means for getting
things cleaned up and taken care of.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...mical-controls
April 2010, Scientific American
p. 30
Chemical Controls
Consequently, of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the U.S., only
five have been either restricted or banned. Not 5 percent, five. The
EPA has been able to force health and safety testing for only around
200.


i don't recall the alimentary
canal having a permanent resting place.
undigestible stuff goes through. the
original claim is that the stuff doesn't
have any way of being broken down wasn't
it?

Maybe not, but if you eat this stuff, you will lose your ass, so to
speak.

i wouldn't eat parts of plastic knowingly.
i try to avoid buying things packed in plastic.

Compounds that have a charge separation like water
H+ H+
\ /
O -- are called polar compounds.
H H
Chemicals like ethylene H-C-C-H have no charge separation and are
H H
called non-polar compounds. In chemistry like dissolves like. Water will
mix with vinegar, but not a polar compound like oil. Oil will dissolve
grease. Soap has a polar end, and a non-polar end. The polar end will go
away with water, dragging the oil, or grease with it.

Dioxin, and PCBs are non-polar, and will accumulate, and concentrate
these toxins.


as for pollution and plastic, you know i'd get
on with cleaning it up no matter how much of it
there is or how long it took. a 3000 sq mile
floating mass is unlikely to be thick so perhaps
it would be 3000 trips of a large tanker? get
100 tankers and that becomes 30 trips. processing
and sorting would be a lot of work. yay for real
jobs.


songbird

That's my dictator ;o)

--
Remember Rachel Corrie
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/

Welcome to the New America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg

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

fascinating but expendable conversation snipped


Top soil can be regenerated. Joel
Salatin is doing it at the rate of 1"/year.
http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0104saveworld.htm

i've read most of what he's published.

he is not building topsoil, he amends it
heavily with organic materials that he brings
in by the truckload. they get run through
the cow barn, the pigs, chickens, before they
get scattered on the fields.
...
Thanks, but why do you say he's not building topsoil. He has picked up
the pace, but this is how soil is built.

he is taking materials from other places.
these materials are what would eventually become
a part of the topsoil in those locations. he's
mining topsoil components from other locations.

Seems like splitting hairs. The claim is that he is conjuring up 1" of
topsoil/year. That's still pretty impressive.

it's an important hair to split if you're
talking about sustainable agriculture over
the long term. if it takes materials from
other locations to keep a farm's topsoil
going then it becomes a larger question
about how sustainably those materials are
grown. as it is pretty sure the soils in
that area are already heavily depleted by
tobacco farming it is a critical question
and one i'm surprised you're just ready to
accept as not really important.

i'm not buying the claim as being true.


(snipped for brevity)
....
returning to my more local issue as one with a
limited amount of land in trying to be as sustainable
as possible i cannot raise both enough veggies in
the current gardens and sell them to raise enough
money to cover the taxes on the land let alone
the other expenses of having this place.

I have no familiarity with that. What I have is a marginal growing
environment, and I simply try too get more from what I'm given.
Clear plastic over the mulch, and drip irrigation seem to be a good way
to heat the soil and promote earlier harvests, but if you have a cool
summer, there's not much you can do.

put in some cooler weather plants. peas/peapods
are my favorites here. for arid climates tepary
beans are one possibility, but i'm not sure how
they do with cool weather.


for some people property and other taxes are reasons
behind extractive agricultural practices. if property
isn't taxed then it takes some pressure off people to
exploit it.

Duh. Federal land is nearly free, but it is exploited by ranchers, and
mineral extractors.

well yeah, our country doesn't care about
sustainable practices enough as of yet. in
time it will be forced to.


...
Corporations are obligated to make a profit for their investors. Any
action that reduces earnings is considered illegal. They may be able to
argue that some actions will avoid legal consequences which in the long
run will increase earnings.
In other words, being a good neighbor costs a corporation too much.

an action which loses money is not illegal
as if it were there would be no corporations
for very long. i think you are confusing
what would be considered corporate malfeasance
and misuse of corporate resources, but even
some of those actions would also not be
considered illegal, just inadvisable...

Under eBay v. Newman, the law is as Franken said: "it is literally
malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to
maximize its profits." Just ask Jim and Craig; no one disputes it's
their company, but they're legally prohibited from taking steps to
preserve the profit-alongside-community-service mission that's served
them well. Maximize profits, or else.

i think that is a case where the company should be
taken private or turned into a non-profit. if their
social aims are broader than being a business then
i think that is a more accurate classification for
them anyways.

$$$$$$$$ won't permit.

it happens, companies do go private.


The impact of this duty-to-maximize-profits stretches far beyond mere
investments. Under Citizens United, corporations now have the First
Amendment right to influence our fragile democracy however they want,
since they're "people," just like you and me, albeit profit-maximizing
zombies who care not for truth, justice, or the American way.

i still think you have a bit too jaded a view of
corporations. not all are as bad as Monsanto or
whatever the devil of the moment is.

See the movie, "The Corporation", it's on DVD. It's also on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw

links don't help, i'm not always on-line,
it is like a rock sitting in the conversational
road.


....
...HERE...
...
I hope to have early ripening, mid ripening,
and late ripening tomatoes, i.e. a long tomato
season.

good luck! so far this has been the
most normal spring we've had in several
years. we actually got rain yesterday and
a few minutes ago it was raining again.
happiness! that will green up the plants
and wake up the wormies. three dry days
now would be perfect as i could get things
spread and dug in and perhaps even some
planting done.

now it's looking like it will be too wet
for a while longer. days and days of rain.
my water catches have gotten a good workout.

Our squash are in the ground i.e. 2 Portofinos, 2 Crookneck, and 2
Zucchini Romanescos. There are also some bitter melons, and zucchini
replicante, that aren't ready yet for planting.






as we put up most of the tomatoes we grow we need
a regular acid tomato.

I only have about 600 sq. ft. for everything.

oy!


....
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale
today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous
to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an
elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from
countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between
being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the
Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
(Search for it on the web: mistake_jared_diamond.pdf)

well, i'll say i don't agree with many of
his assumptions and so that won't lead me to
much harmony with his conclusions.


without having a chance yet to look at the
article i still can't agree with the gist of
the title completely. i think there are ways
of doing agriculture that are sustainable.

i'm stuck off-line for a while so i'll have
to get back to this later.

Agriculture created class divisions, concentration of wealth and
inequality, and illness. It's a good read.

i don't see agriculture as a cause of things
as i think that agriculture, cities and specialization
came about all together as groupings of humans
got larger. why they got larger is also a combination
of many factors. one of those might simply be
because it's more fun to hang with more people
than to be alone for most people. loners are a
minority. another reason could have also been
for protection from other groups, i.e. weaponization
when stone tools used to be the greatest risk a
person had to face it wasn't quite the same thing
but then slings, arrows, spears, and armor started
showing up and people banded together as armies
then in order to be safe you needed your homies
at your back. out on the range no longer is as
appealing when you might get run over by an army
and your farm ransacked.

so, no, i don't put the ills of modern society
on agriculture.

Read above.

i did, i don't agree with too many of his
assumptions.


....
...the oceans, floating trash...

You have my vote for dictator. Pay everyone a living wage. Enough of
this employment of wage slaves.

what if a person doesn't need that much?
isn't a part of the destruction of resources
by a greedy society the problem that people
don't learn moderation? or that they aren't
allowed to adjust their own demands because
the system has a one-size fits all mentality
(super-size me bucko)?

You would like B.F. Skinner's book, "Walden II".
People who tended flower beds got one wage. Those who worked in the
sewers got several times more.

no sewers in a compost world.


i dislike minimum wage legislation. since
when do i want the government telling me what
my labor is worth? what if i want to work for
less for a charity or non-profit? i don't
need a minimum wage. i need the government
to get out of my way.

You would think that since all work deserves respect, that all work
would give at least a living wage.

i think a person deserves more respect
in his stated need and desires far above
any formula that some other person at a
distance has come up with.

if i say i can get by on $2/hr who are
you to say i can't?


right now there are a lot of low skilled jobs
that get done by sub-contractors or individuals
and they are being paid cash. so no taxes are
being collected for social security or medicare
for those workers. they may never be in the
position to become a full time worker.


....
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/gene...ing_away_the_p
oison

Packing Away The Poison
Genetic mutation allows Hudson River fish to adapt to PCBs, Dioxins
2/17/2011

Some fish in New York's Hudson River have become "resistant" to
several of the waterway's more toxic pollutants. Instead of getting
sick from dioxins and related compounds including some polychlorinated
biphenyls, Atlantic tomcod harmlessly store these poisons in fat, a
new study finds.

oh, so they're not poisons after all?
no, i'm just making a joke. i much prefer
my food to be dioxin free...


....
Compounds that have a charge separation like water
H+ H+
\ /
O -- are called polar compounds.
H H
Chemicals like ethylene H-C-C-H have no charge separation and are
H H
called non-polar compounds. In chemistry like dissolves like. Water will
mix with vinegar, but not a polar compound like oil. Oil will dissolve
grease. Soap has a polar end, and a non-polar end. The polar end will go
away with water, dragging the oil, or grease with it.

Dioxin, and PCBs are non-polar, and will accumulate, and concentrate
these toxins.

i've had basic chemistry.

i don't see any perpetual mechanism
for larger molecules or particles to
hold together in the face of being
soaked up and settled out or being
degraded by the sun, beaten on the
shore, coated by bacteria, fungi, etc.

how can you conclude these compounds
persist indefinitely if we were to stop
making more of them?


as for pollution and plastic, you know i'd get
on with cleaning it up no matter how much of it
there is or how long it took. a 3000 sq mile
floating mass is unlikely to be thick so perhaps
it would be 3000 trips of a large tanker? get
100 tankers and that becomes 30 trips. processing
and sorting would be a lot of work. yay for real
jobs.

That's my dictator ;o)

non-prophet, no-return, rapture free
range nut, all minions adored, this
week's special includes gluten free
t-shirts, just clip this coupon and
redeem...


songbird

In article ,
songbird wrote:

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

fascinating but expendable conversation snipped


Top soil can be regenerated. Joel
Salatin is doing it at the rate of 1"/year.
http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0104saveworld.htm

i've read most of what he's published.

he is not building topsoil, he amends it
heavily with organic materials that he brings
in by the truckload. they get run through
the cow barn, the pigs, chickens, before they
get scattered on the fields.
...
Thanks, but why do you say he's not building topsoil. He has picked up
the pace, but this is how soil is built.

he is taking materials from other places.
these materials are what would eventually become
a part of the topsoil in those locations. he's
mining topsoil components from other locations.

Seems like splitting hairs. The claim is that he is conjuring up 1" of
topsoil/year. That's still pretty impressive.

it's an important hair to split if you're
talking about sustainable agriculture over
the long term. if it takes materials from
other locations to keep a farm's topsoil
going then it becomes a larger question
about how sustainably those materials are
grown. as it is pretty sure the soils in
that area are already heavily depleted by
tobacco farming it is a critical question
and one i'm surprised you're just ready to
accept as not really important.

Did the bison poop where exactly where they consumed the buffalo grass,
or was it a couple of hundred yards away? I didn't say that Salatin was
making 1" of top soil in a closed system. Like all other news, I get it
second or third hand, through reporters I trust, or from enough
reporters to make it plausible.

" Their system is based on native pastures, without cultivation or new,
³improved² pasture species. The only input has been the feed for the
poultry. This multi-species rotational grazing system builds one inch of
soil a year and returns the family 15 times the income per acre than is
received by neighbouring farms using a set stocking of cattle."
- Andre Leu
President of the Organic Producers Association of Queensland and vice
chair of the Organic Federation of Australia

The above statement, and the praise from Michael Pollan gives me
confidence that the statement is probably true.


i'm not buying the claim as being true.

That's your prerogative.

My computer's dictionary lists "Make the most efficient use of
non-renewable resources and on-farm resources and integrate, where
appropriate, natural biological cycles and controls", as one of the
attributes of sustainable agriculture.


(snipped for brevity)
...
returning to my more local issue as one with a
limited amount of land in trying to be as sustainable
as possible i cannot raise both enough veggies in
the current gardens and sell them to raise enough
money to cover the taxes on the land let alone
the other expenses of having this place.

I have no familiarity with that. What I have is a marginal growing
environment, and I simply try too get more from what I'm given.
Clear plastic over the mulch, and drip irrigation seem to be a good way
to heat the soil and promote earlier harvests, but if you have a cool
summer, there's not much you can do.

put in some cooler weather plants. peas/peapods
are my favorites here. for arid climates tepary
beans are one possibility, but i'm not sure how
they do with cool weather.
Doesn't help if you want to grow sweet corn, or melons. If all the stars
line up, we can grow these things, but we have had cool summers for
nearly a decade now, i.e. only 1 - 3 days of temps over 100F, whereas in
the bad ol' days we'd get 6 - 12 100F days.


for some people property and other taxes are reasons
behind extractive agricultural practices. if property
isn't taxed then it takes some pressure off people to
exploit it.

Duh. Federal land is nearly free, but it is exploited by ranchers, and
mineral extractors.

well yeah, our country doesn't care about
sustainable practices enough as of yet. in
time it will be forced to.

Too bad the government can't make federal land available for for
sustainable agriculture.



...
Corporations are obligated to make a profit for their investors. Any
action that reduces earnings is considered illegal. They may be able
to
argue that some actions will avoid legal consequences which in the
long
run will increase earnings.
In other words, being a good neighbor costs a corporation too much.

an action which loses money is not illegal
as if it were there would be no corporations
for very long. i think you are confusing
what would be considered corporate malfeasance
and misuse of corporate resources, but even
some of those actions would also not be
considered illegal, just inadvisable...

Under eBay v. Newman, the law is as Franken said: "it is literally
malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to
maximize its profits." Just ask Jim and Craig; no one disputes it's
their company, but they're legally prohibited from taking steps to
preserve the profit-alongside-community-service mission that's served
them well. Maximize profits, or else.

i think that is a case where the company should be
taken private or turned into a non-profit. if their
social aims are broader than being a business then
i think that is a more accurate classification for
them anyways.

$$$$$$$$ won't permit.

it happens, companies do go private.
They go private so that they won't have to show their books to the
public.



The impact of this duty-to-maximize-profits stretches far beyond mere
investments. Under Citizens United, corporations now have the First
Amendment right to influence our fragile democracy however they want,
since they're "people," just like you and me, albeit profit-maximizing
zombies who care not for truth, justice, or the American way.

i still think you have a bit too jaded a view of
corporations. not all are as bad as Monsanto or
whatever the devil of the moment is.

See the movie, "The Corporation", it's on DVD. It's also on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw

links don't help, i'm not always on-line,
it is like a rock sitting in the conversational
road.

Wierd, I'm using Firefox, and it goes right to it, as does Safari, and
E.I.


...
...HERE...
...
I hope to have early ripening, mid ripening,
and late ripening tomatoes, i.e. a long tomato
season.

good luck! so far this has been the
most normal spring we've had in several
years. we actually got rain yesterday and
a few minutes ago it was raining again.
happiness! that will green up the plants
and wake up the wormies. three dry days
now would be perfect as i could get things
spread and dug in and perhaps even some
planting done.

now it's looking like it will be too wet
for a while longer. days and days of rain.
my water catches have gotten a good workout.

Our squash are in the ground i.e. 2 Portofinos, 2 Crookneck, and 2
Zucchini Romanescos. There are also some bitter melons, and zucchini
replicante, that aren't ready yet for planting.






as we put up most of the tomatoes we grow we need
a regular acid tomato.

I only have about 600 sq. ft. for everything.

oy!

Oy, indeed.


...
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale
today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous
to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an
elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from
countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between
being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the
Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
(Search for it on the web: mistake_jared_diamond.pdf)

well, i'll say i don't agree with many of
his assumptions and so that won't lead me to
much harmony with his conclusions.

Wouldn't want to amplify on that would you? You disagree with what
assumptions?


without having a chance yet to look at the
article i still can't agree with the gist of
the title completely. i think there are ways
of doing agriculture that are sustainable.

i'm stuck off-line for a while so i'll have
to get back to this later.

Agriculture created class divisions, concentration of wealth and
inequality, and illness. It's a good read.

i don't see agriculture as a cause of things
as i think that agriculture, cities and specialization
came about all together as groupings of humans
got larger. why they got larger is also a combination
of many factors. one of those might simply be
because it's more fun to hang with more people
than to be alone for most people. loners are a
minority. another reason could have also been
for protection from other groups, i.e. weaponization
when stone tools used to be the greatest risk a
person had to face it wasn't quite the same thing
but then slings, arrows, spears, and armor started
showing up and people banded together as armies
then in order to be safe you needed your homies
at your back. out on the range no longer is as
appealing when you might get run over by an army
and your farm ransacked.

so, no, i don't put the ills of modern society
on agriculture.

Read above.

i did, i don't agree with too many of his
assumptions.

What, that a division between the people who did the actual work, and
the planners didn't lead to a stratification of society? The word
civilization comes from the Latin civitas, meaning city or city-state.

You saw his argument on hunter/gatherers superior health?


...
...the oceans, floating trash...

You have my vote for dictator. Pay everyone a living wage. Enough of
this employment of wage slaves.

what if a person doesn't need that much?
isn't a part of the destruction of resources
by a greedy society the problem that people
don't learn moderation? or that they aren't
allowed to adjust their own demands because
the system has a one-size fits all mentality
(super-size me bucko)?

You would like B.F. Skinner's book, "Walden II".
People who tended flower beds got one wage. Those who worked in the
sewers got several times more.

no sewers in a compost world.
The point was that wages were tied to the desirability of the job. The
more desirable it was, the less it paid. The less desirable it was, the
more it paid. This isn't the only algorithm to arrive a reasonable wage.
The one we have now is individual greed and exploitation of the society
where they are.


i dislike minimum wage legislation. since
when do i want the government telling me what
my labor is worth? what if i want to work for
less for a charity or non-profit? i don't
need a minimum wage. i need the government
to get out of my way.

You would think that since all work deserves respect, that all work
would give at least a living wage.

i think a person deserves more respect
in his stated need and desires far above
any formula that some other person at a
distance has come up with.

if i say i can get by on $2/hr who are
you to say i can't?

If I say you can get by on $2/day, who are you to argue?



right now there are a lot of low skilled jobs
that get done by sub-contractors or individuals
and they are being paid cash. so no taxes are
being collected for social security or medicare
for those workers. they may never be in the
position to become a full time worker.


...
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/gene...ing_away_the_p
oison

Packing Away The Poison
Genetic mutation allows Hudson River fish to adapt to PCBs, Dioxins
2/17/2011

Some fish in New York's Hudson River have become "resistant" to
several of the waterway's more toxic pollutants. Instead of getting
sick from dioxins and related compounds including some polychlorinated
biphenyls, Atlantic tomcod harmlessly store these poisons in fat, a
new study finds.

oh, so they're not poisons after all?
no, i'm just making a joke. i much prefer
my food to be dioxin free...

?? Yeah, sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't.


...
Compounds that have a charge separation like water
H+ H+
\ /
O -- are called polar compounds.
H H
Chemicals like ethylene H-C-C-H have no charge separation and are
H H
called non-polar compounds. In chemistry like dissolves like. Water will
mix with vinegar, but not a polar compound like oil. Oil will dissolve
grease. Soap has a polar end, and a non-polar end. The polar end will go
away with water, dragging the oil, or grease with it.

Dioxin, and PCBs are non-polar, and will accumulate, and concentrate
these toxins.

i've had basic chemistry.

i don't see any perpetual mechanism
for larger molecules or particles to
hold together in the face of being
soaked up and settled out or being
degraded by the sun, beaten on the
shore, coated by bacteria, fungi, etc.

As was pointed out, they are incorporated into the food chain, or they
can settle out like mercury, only to be methylated and introduced into
the food chain (or web, if you will).

how can you conclude these compounds
persist indefinitely if we were to stop
making more of them?

Not indefinitely, maybe only 100,000 years, but not indefinitely, unless
they are incorporated into sedimentary rock.


as for pollution and plastic, you know i'd get
on with cleaning it up no matter how much of it
there is or how long it took. a 3000 sq mile
floating mass is unlikely to be thick so perhaps
it would be 3000 trips of a large tanker? get
100 tankers and that becomes 30 trips. processing
and sorting would be a lot of work. yay for real
jobs.

That's my dictator ;o)

non-prophet, no-return, rapture free
range nut, all minions adored, this
week's special includes gluten free
t-shirts, just clip this coupon and
redeem...


songbird

Two for the price of one?

The revolution will not be right back
after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.
-------

So what's it to be, Hinayana, or Mahayana?

--
Remember Rachel Corrie
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/

Welcome to the New America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg

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

fascinating but expendable conversation snipped


Top soil can be regenerated. Joel
Salatin is doing it at the rate of 1"/year.
http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0104saveworld.htm

i've read most of what he's published.

he is not building topsoil, he amends it
heavily with organic materials that he brings
in by the truckload. they get run through
the cow barn, the pigs, chickens, before they
get scattered on the fields.
...
Thanks, but why do you say he's not building topsoil. He has picked up
the pace, but this is how soil is built.

he is taking materials from other places.
these materials are what would eventually become
a part of the topsoil in those locations. he's
mining topsoil components from other locations.

Seems like splitting hairs. The claim is that he is conjuring up 1" of
topsoil/year. That's still pretty impressive.

it's an important hair to split if you're
talking about sustainable agriculture over
the long term. if it takes materials from
other locations to keep a farm's topsoil
going then it becomes a larger question
about how sustainably those materials are
grown. as it is pretty sure the soils in
that area are already heavily depleted by
tobacco farming it is a critical question
and one i'm surprised you're just ready to
accept as not really important.

Did the bison poop where exactly where they consumed the buffalo grass,
or was it a couple of hundred yards away? I didn't say that Salatin was
making 1" of top soil in a closed system. Like all other news, I get it
second or third hand, through reporters I trust, or from enough
reporters to make it plausible.

" Their system is based on native pastures, without cultivation or new,
³improved² pasture species. The only input has been the feed for the
poultry. This multi-species rotational grazing system builds one inch of
soil a year and returns the family 15 times the income per acre than is
received by neighbouring farms using a set stocking of cattle."
- Andre Leu
President of the Organic Producers Association of Queensland and vice
chair of the Organic Federation of Australia

The above statement, and the praise from Michael Pollan gives me
confidence that the statement is probably true.

the above statement is wrong. "The only input"
is incorrect.


i'm not buying the claim as being true.

That's your prerogative.

i'm still king...


My computer's dictionary lists "Make the most efficient use of
non-renewable resources and on-farm resources and integrate, where
appropriate, natural biological cycles and controls", as one of the
attributes of sustainable agriculture.

i have stated multiple times that i consider
Salatin's efforts as _more_ sustainable than
most conventional agriculture. other than that
i couldn't say how sustainable or how it impacts
the surrounding area. mostly i think it is ok.
i'd rather live near his farm than many others.


(snipped for brevity)
...
returning to my more local issue as one with a
limited amount of land in trying to be as sustainable
as possible i cannot raise both enough veggies in
the current gardens and sell them to raise enough
money to cover the taxes on the land let alone
the other expenses of having this place.

I have no familiarity with that. What I have is a marginal growing
environment, and I simply try too get more from what I'm given.
Clear plastic over the mulch, and drip irrigation seem to be a good way
to heat the soil and promote earlier harvests, but if you have a cool
summer, there's not much you can do.

put in some cooler weather plants. peas/peapods
are my favorites here. for arid climates tepary
beans are one possibility, but i'm not sure how
they do with cool weather.

Doesn't help if you want to grow sweet corn, or melons. If all the stars
line up, we can grow these things, but we have had cool summers for
nearly a decade now, i.e. only 1 - 3 days of temps over 100F, whereas in
the bad ol' days we'd get 6 - 12 100F days.

good luck!

have you ever tried the smaller baby corn
plants? i'm not a corn guru. around here
all corn that isn't well protected is raccoon
food.


for some people property and other taxes are reasons
behind extractive agricultural practices. if property
isn't taxed then it takes some pressure off people to
exploit it.

Duh. Federal land is nearly free, but it is exploited by ranchers, and
mineral extractors.

well yeah, our country doesn't care about
sustainable practices enough as of yet. in
time it will be forced to.

Too bad the government can't make federal land available for for
sustainable agriculture.

i'm not sure what land you are talking about
but most land i'm aware of that the government
owns is either in cities, military, nuclear
testing, or sparse rangeland that should not
be used for any soil disturbing agriculture.

for a longer term project i'd want ownership.
out west in arid places i'd also require water
rights. it doesn't make any sense to do long
term projects if you can't harvest rain water
to hold back and use and if you aren't sure how
long you'll be there. that is what makes most
property taxes so nasty. it's almost impossible
to do a longer term project that doesn't turn
into yet another exploitive system.


....
it happens, companies do go private.

They go private so that they won't have to show their books to the
public.

you can think that, but i'm sure in many
cases that is wrong.

if you really have such a negative opinion
of so many others how do you manage to drive
down the road or buy food at the store or do
much of anything other than huddle in a cave
waiting for the boogeyman?


....


as we put up most of the tomatoes we grow we need
a regular acid tomato.

I only have about 600 sq. ft. for everything.

oy!

Oy, indeed.

good luck!


...
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale
today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous
to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an
elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from
countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between
being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the
Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
(Search for it on the web: mistake_jared_diamond.pdf)

well, i'll say i don't agree with many of
his assumptions and so that won't lead me to
much harmony with his conclusions.

Wouldn't want to amplify on that would you? You disagree with what
assumptions?

that agriculture was the cause of class divisions.
that he's making valid comparisons between cultures
on the whole. that he's doing much other than picking
what suits the conclusions he's already made.


....
i did, i don't agree with too many of his
assumptions.

What, that a division between the people who did the actual work, and
the planners didn't lead to a stratification of society?

i'll repeat myself. all groups stratify.
period. full stop. end of statement. function
of the species/brain. we group, divide up,
regroup, etc. constantly. even the most rigid
of the religious societies fragment and divide
once the charismatic leader dies or something
happens which sets enough people off into another
direction. it's just what we do.

any group of people of more than one person
has a class system, rankings, etc. they may be
unspoken and there are likely many different
ones in operation.


The word
civilization comes from the Latin civitas, meaning city or city-state.

You saw his argument on hunter/gatherers superior health?

and i don't agree, he's sweeping a lot of
things under the rug.

read any modern text on microbiology and
parasitology. read any collection of actual
studies by anthropologists of many different
groups. there are no utopian societies in
the past. all have their challenges and
troubles.

having read 1491, etc. recently how can you
accept this comparison as being right? if you
took a group from a European area in 1490s and
compared that to a group from the Amazon area
at that time you'd find the Amazons decimated
by diseases.

....rest snipped, gotta get out for a walk before
the rains come...


songbird

In article ,
songbird wrote:

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

fascinating but expendable conversation snipped


Top soil can be regenerated. Joel
Salatin is doing it at the rate of 1"/year.
http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0104saveworld.htm

i've read most of what he's published.

he is not building topsoil, he amends it
heavily with organic materials that he brings
in by the truckload. they get run through
the cow barn, the pigs, chickens, before they
get scattered on the fields.
...
Thanks, but why do you say he's not building topsoil. He has picked
up
the pace, but this is how soil is built.

he is taking materials from other places.
these materials are what would eventually become
a part of the topsoil in those locations. he's
mining topsoil components from other locations.

Seems like splitting hairs. The claim is that he is conjuring up 1" of
topsoil/year. That's still pretty impressive.

it's an important hair to split if you're
talking about sustainable agriculture over
the long term. if it takes materials from
other locations to keep a farm's topsoil
going then it becomes a larger question
about how sustainably those materials are
grown. as it is pretty sure the soils in
that area are already heavily depleted by
tobacco farming it is a critical question
and one i'm surprised you're just ready to
accept as not really important.

Did the bison poop where exactly where they consumed the buffalo grass,
or was it a couple of hundred yards away? I didn't say that Salatin was
making 1" of top soil in a closed system. Like all other news, I get it
second or third hand, through reporters I trust, or from enough
reporters to make it plausible.

" Their system is based on native pastures, without cultivation or new,
³improved² pasture species. The only input has been the feed for the
poultry. This multi-species rotational grazing system builds one inch of
soil a year and returns the family 15 times the income per acre than is
received by neighbouring farms using a set stocking of cattle."
- Andre Leu
President of the Organic Producers Association of Queensland and vice
chair of the Organic Federation of Australia

The above statement, and the praise from Michael Pollan gives me
confidence that the statement is probably true.

the above statement is wrong. "The only input"
is incorrect.
Would you amplify that response? What other inputs?


i'm not buying the claim as being true.

That's your prerogative.
What is the source of your doubt? Who claims otherwise?

i'm still king...
Just let me adjust the "Sword of Damcles" for you.



My computer's dictionary lists "Make the most efficient use of
non-renewable resources and on-farm resources and integrate, where
appropriate, natural biological cycles and controls", as one of the
attributes of sustainable agriculture.

i have stated multiple times that i consider
Salatin's efforts as _more_ sustainable than
most conventional agriculture. other than that
i couldn't say how sustainable or how it impacts
the surrounding area. mostly i think it is ok.
i'd rather live near his farm than many others.

Not to put too fine a point on it, your arguments sound as if they are based on faith.


(snipped for brevity)
...
returning to my more local issue as one with a
limited amount of land in trying to be as sustainable
as possible i cannot raise both enough veggies in
the current gardens and sell them to raise enough
money to cover the taxes on the land let alone
the other expenses of having this place.

I have no familiarity with that. What I have is a marginal growing
environment, and I simply try too get more from what I'm given.
Clear plastic over the mulch, and drip irrigation seem to be a good way
to heat the soil and promote earlier harvests, but if you have a cool
summer, there's not much you can do.

put in some cooler weather plants. peas/peapods
are my favorites here. for arid climates tepary
beans are one possibility, but i'm not sure how
they do with cool weather.

Doesn't help if you want to grow sweet corn, or melons. If all the stars
line up, we can grow these things, but we have had cool summers for
nearly a decade now, i.e. only 1 - 3 days of temps over 100F, whereas in
the bad ol' days we'd get 6 - 12 100F days.

good luck!

have you ever tried the smaller baby corn
plants? i'm not a corn guru. around here
all corn that isn't well protected is raccoon
food.

One year I had a really good stand of dent corn, but the sweet corn just
petered out.
Yeah, I've tried the 60 day wonder corn, but still no go. I'll probably try
the "Golden Bantum" corn again.

I figure I can let rocky the rascally raccoon have a portion of what I grow,
after all, he and his kin were here first.


for some people property and other taxes are reasons
behind extractive agricultural practices. if property
isn't taxed then it takes some pressure off people to
exploit it.

Duh. Federal land is nearly free, but it is exploited by ranchers, and
mineral extractors.

well yeah, our country doesn't care about
sustainable practices enough as of yet. in
time it will be forced to.

Too bad the government can't make federal land available for for
sustainable agriculture.

i'm not sure what land you are talking about
but most land i'm aware of that the government
owns is either in cities, military, nuclear
testing, or sparse rangeland that should not
be used for any soil disturbing agriculture.
How about mountain top removal, or strip mining, or just plain
ol' mining? Military bases are being closed. They would be one place
to develope. Agriculture can take place without plows. Any land that
is leased, should have a remediation plan.

for a longer term project i'd want ownership.
Of public lands?

out west in arid places i'd also require water
rights. it doesn't make any sense to do long
term projects if you can't harvest rain water
to hold back and use and if you aren't sure how
long you'll be there.
What about downstream users?

that is what makes most
property taxes so nasty. it's almost impossible
to do a longer term project that doesn't turn
into yet another exploitive system.
Exploitive systems-R-us. The business model is "privatize the profits",
and "socalize the costs" be if foul air, diry water, or sick employees.



...
it happens, companies do go private.

They go private so that they won't have to show their books to the
public.

you can think that, but i'm sure in many
cases that is wrong.
Since the dot-com bubble of 1999, more public companies go private each
year, according to financial sources like "Business Week" and CNN.
Reasons for changing the business structure of major corporations vary
from company to company. However, a general trend seems to be because
private companies are subject to less regulatory oversight.

if you really have such a negative opinion
of so many others how do you manage to drive
down the road or buy food at the store or do
much of anything other than huddle in a cave
waiting for the boogeyman?
You mean Koch Industries, Bechtel, Cargill, Publix, Pilot Corp., one of
the members of the Big Four accounting firms, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu,
Hearst Corporation, S. C. Johnson, and Mars which are among the largest
privately held companies in the United States? Oh, ja, you betcha.

You're a regular Pollyanna, aren't you?



...


as we put up most of the tomatoes we grow we need
a regular acid tomato.

I only have about 600 sq. ft. for everything.

oy!

Oy, indeed.

good luck!
Luck doesn't have much to do with it. It's just tinkering to maximize
what I've got. It's a small garden, but it has given me a great education.



...
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale
today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous
to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an
elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from
countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between
being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the
Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
(Search for it on the web: mistake_jared_diamond.pdf)

well, i'll say i don't agree with many of
his assumptions and so that won't lead me to
much harmony with his conclusions.

Wouldn't want to amplify on that would you? You disagree with what
assumptions?

that agriculture was the cause of class divisions.
that he's making valid comparisons between cultures
on the whole. that he's doing much other than picking
what suits the conclusions he's already made.

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that
agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied
diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few
starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor
nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants--wheat, rice, and
corn--provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species,
yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential
to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops,
farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere
fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded
societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded
societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some
archaeologists think it was crowding, rather than agriculture, that
promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because
crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't
take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly
shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise
of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped
bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-
gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food
sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild
plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no
kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from
others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, nonproducing elite
set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs
at Mycenae c.1500 B.C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than
commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and
had better teeth (on average, one instead of six cavities or missing
teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A.D. 1000, the elite were
distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a
fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.

If we consider a twenty-four hour clock on which one hour represents
100,000 years of real past time. It the history of the human race began
at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We
lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day,from midnight
through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p.m., we adopted
agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of
famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will
we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind
agriculture's glittering facade and that have so far eluded us?


...
i did, i don't agree with too many of his
assumptions.

What, that a division between the people who did the actual work, and
the planners didn't lead to a stratification of society?

i'll repeat myself. all groups stratify.
period. full stop. end of statement.
And your example of that in a hunter/gatherer group would be . . . ?
It used to be, if you didn't like your neighbors, or the local strong
man, you walked away. The food was there for the taking anyway.

function
of the species/brain. we group, divide up,
regroup, etc. constantly. even the most rigid
of the religious societies fragment and divide
once the charismatic leader dies or something
happens which sets enough people off into another
direction. it's just what we do.

any group of people of more than one person
has a class system, rankings, etc. they may be
unspoken and there are likely many different
ones in operation.


The word
civilization comes from the Latin civitas, meaning city or city-state.

You saw his argument on hunter/gatherers superior health?

and i don't agree, he's sweeping a lot of
things under the rug.
Such as?


read any modern text on microbiology and
parasitology. read any collection of actual
studies by anthropologists of many different
groups. there are no utopian societies in
the past. all have their challenges and
troubles.
Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University
of Massachusetts show these early Indian farmers paid a price for their
new-found livelihood. Compared to the huntergatherers who preceded them,
the farmers had a nearly fifty percent increase in enamel defects
indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency
anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a
threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general,
and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably
reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in
the preagricultural community was about twenty-six years," says
Armelagos, "but in the postagricultural community it was nineteen years.
So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were
seriously affecting their ability to survive."

[T]he mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in
crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other
crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease.

Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale
today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous
to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an
elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from
countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between
being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the
Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?


having read 1491, etc. recently how can you
accept this comparison as being right? if you
took a group from a European area in 1490s and
compared that to a group from the Amazon area
at that time you'd find the Amazons decimated
by diseases.
Brought from Europe. Neither groupe was hunter/gatherers. The
Amazonians tended huge orchards, which is where most of the terra
preta was found.


...rest snipped, gotta get out for a walk before
the rains come...


songbird

And I have ivy that needs pulling, plants that need water, and lettuce,
and flowers to plant.
If I have time, maybe I'll start a new tray of seeds for germination.

Just have to have it done by 6:30 PM, which is when I plop in front of
the TV, margarita in
hand, to watch the news, on Deutsche Welle. Simple tariyaki chicken
dinner tonight. Ten minutes to prep, and then cooks for an hour, and
serve. Not sure whether I'll make a salad, or steam a couple of
artichokes (they're huge). Chives from the garden for the baked potato.

ˆ la table!

--
Remember Rachel Corrie
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/

Welcome to the New America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg

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

....conversation about Joel Salatin's methods...

Seems like splitting hairs. The claim is that he is conjuring up 1" of
topsoil/year. That's still pretty impressive.

it's an important hair to split if you're
talking about sustainable agriculture over
the long term. if it takes materials from
other locations to keep a farm's topsoil
going then it becomes a larger question
about how sustainably those materials are
grown. as it is pretty sure the soils in
that area are already heavily depleted by
tobacco farming it is a critical question
and one i'm surprised you're just ready to
accept as not really important.

Did the bison poop where exactly where they consumed the buffalo grass,
or was it a couple of hundred yards away? I didn't say that Salatin was
making 1" of top soil in a closed system. Like all other news, I get it
second or third hand, through reporters I trust, or from enough
reporters to make it plausible.

" Their system is based on native pastures, without cultivation or new,
³improved² pasture species. The only input has been the feed for the
poultry. This multi-species rotational grazing system builds one inch of
soil a year and returns the family 15 times the income per acre than is
received by neighbouring farms using a set stocking of cattle."
- Andre Leu
President of the Organic Producers Association of Queensland and vice
chair of the Organic Federation of Australia

The above statement, and the praise from Michael Pollan gives me
confidence that the statement is probably true.

the above statement is wrong. "The only input"
is incorrect.

Would you amplify that response? What other inputs?

from the books of his that i have read he brings
in corn, wood chips, sawdust, chickens, pigs, turkeys,
and _any_ other organic material he can get for cheap,
in one case he got a truckload of sweet potatoes. i
think he no longer brings in cows as his herd breeds
well enough on it's own [which is great as far as i'm
concerned -- in his _Salad Bar Beef_ book he describes
how he went through and culled out the disease prone
cows and selected for certain characteristics. an
interesting topic in it's own right.]

he also has to bring in other materials for the
packaging and sales, fencing for the fields, fuel for
the tractors, saws, chipper, mower, baler.

his pigs and cows he has butchered off-site so he
looses out on the offal from those for composting.

i don't know what he does for the turkeys or rabbits.
i'm assuming they butcher their own rabbits.

the chicken butchering process is described in several
of the books so that is known to be done on site. the
innards from the chickens gets composted.


i'm not buying the claim as being true.

That's your prerogative.

What is the source of your doubt? Who claims otherwise?

reading his books where he describes his practices.
you seem to be as you keep quoting the same point
over and over again even though it has been refuted
by his own words in his own books.


i'm still king...

Just let me adjust the "Sword of Damcles" for you.

it's the dictator who says who sits where.

as i recline (as a proper state fitting to an
heir of the Roman empire) i'd be more worried
about Procrustean adjustments...


My computer's dictionary lists "Make the most efficient use of
non-renewable resources and on-farm resources and integrate, where
appropriate, natural biological cycles and controls", as one of the
attributes of sustainable agriculture.

i have stated multiple times that i consider
Salatin's efforts as _more_ sustainable than
most conventional agriculture. other than that
i couldn't say how sustainable or how it impacts
the surrounding area. mostly i think it is ok.
i'd rather live near his farm than many others.

Not to put too fine a point on it, your arguments
sound as if they are based on faith.

faith in my reading abilities and recall of what
i have read.


....your local garden...
Doesn't help if you want to grow sweet corn, or melons. If all the stars
line up, we can grow these things, but we have had cool summers for
nearly a decade now, i.e. only 1 - 3 days of temps over 100F, whereas in
the bad ol' days we'd get 6 - 12 100F days.

good luck!

have you ever tried the smaller baby corn
plants? i'm not a corn guru. around here
all corn that isn't well protected is raccoon
food.

One year I had a really good stand of dent corn, but the sweet corn just
petered out.
Yeah, I've tried the 60 day wonder corn, but still no go. I'll probably try
the "Golden Bantum" corn again.

I figure I can let rocky the rascally raccoon have a portion of what I grow,
after all, he and his kin were here first.

the problem around here is that they don't take
only a few ears and leave the rest alone, they'll
raid the entire garden clean.


....
Too bad the government can't make federal land available for for
sustainable agriculture.

i'm not sure what land you are talking about
but most land i'm aware of that the government
owns is either in cities, military, nuclear
testing, or sparse rangeland that should not
be used for any soil disturbing agriculture.

How about mountain top removal, or strip mining, or just plain
ol' mining? Military bases are being closed. They would be one place
to develope. Agriculture can take place without plows. Any land that
is leased, should have a remediation plan.

for any new projects there are things required
nowadays (called Environmental Impact Studies). i
doubt there are any new mines going in without a
remediation plan also being in place. for the
older mines i don't know what they have set up for
the longer term.


for a longer term project i'd want ownership.
Of public lands?

out west in arid places i'd also require water
rights. it doesn't make any sense to do long
term projects if you can't harvest rain water
to hold back and use and if you aren't sure how
long you'll be there.

What about downstream users?

i've not studied western water rights as i
don't live out that ways (but it is becoming
a topic of interest because a relative has
some land out there and they are asking me
questions and we're talking about their site).


that is what makes most
property taxes so nasty. it's almost impossible
to do a longer term project that doesn't turn
into yet another exploitive system.

Exploitive systems-R-us. The business model is "privatize the profits",
and "socalize the costs" be if foul air, diry water, or sick employees.

there's more than one business model.
i keep thinking you have no actual experience
in small businesses, non-profits or
governmental organizations. it seems you
are only bent upon larger corporations and
even some of those are decent and do what
they can to help out.

recently there was a list of companies
and organizations published that purchase
clean energy credits to offset their energy
use. is that something you see a company
doing if they had no interest in being
socially responsible?


....
it happens, companies do go private.

They go private so that they won't have to show their books to the
public.

you can think that, but i'm sure in many
cases that is wrong.

Since the dot-com bubble of 1999, more public companies go private each
year, according to financial sources like "Business Week" and CNN.
Reasons for changing the business structure of major corporations vary
from company to company. However, a general trend seems to be because
private companies are subject to less regulatory oversight.

statistics would be interesting to back this up.
more and more companies could be going private just
because there are more and more companies overall.
many have been created since so many people lost
work and had to start their own things up from
scratch. so that base number could be quite
relevant to the discussion of how many are going
private...


if you really have such a negative opinion
of so many others how do you manage to drive
down the road or buy food at the store or do
much of anything other than huddle in a cave
waiting for the boogeyman?

You mean Koch Industries, Bechtel, Cargill, Publix, Pilot Corp., one of
the members of the Big Four accounting firms, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu,
Hearst Corporation, S. C. Johnson, and Mars which are among the largest
privately held companies in the United States? Oh, ja, you betcha.

You're a regular Pollyanna, aren't you?

no, but i'm aware of the over-all trends in
the society and it is towards cleaner and
sustainable ways of doing things. more and
more people will keep applying pressure even
upon companies that aren't as socially
responsible as others because competitively
over the long haul a company that doesn't
pay attention to the wants of the customers
isn't going to do as well as the rest that do.


...
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale
today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous
to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an
elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from
countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between
being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the
Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
(Search for it on the web: mistake_jared_diamond.pdf)

well, i'll say i don't agree with many of
his assumptions and so that won't lead me to
much harmony with his conclusions.

Wouldn't want to amplify on that would you? You disagree with what
assumptions?

that agriculture was the cause of class divisions.
that he's making valid comparisons between cultures
on the whole. that he's doing much other than picking
what suits the conclusions he's already made.

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that
agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied
diet,

a prime example of my point. there are many
hunter-gatherer societies that do not live off
a varied diet.


while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few
starchy crops.

plenty of hunter-gatherers were/are in the
same situation.


The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor
nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants--wheat, rice, and
corn--provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species,
yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential
to life.)

reads like begging the question to me.


Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops,
farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed.

if you were an idiot farmer then yeah.
there were likely idiot hunter-gatherers
who starved too.


Finally, the mere
fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded
societies,

the mere fact is that it is likely that
there were people clumping together for
reasons other than agriculture long before
agriculture came along.


many of which then carried on trade with other crowded
societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some
archaeologists think it was crowding, rather than agriculture, that
promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument,

the whole thing is a chicken-and-egg argument...


because
crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't
take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly
shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise
of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped
bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions.

this is the point in dispute isn't it? i claim
that class divisions existed in groups long before
agriculture.


Hunter-
gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food
sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild
plants and animals they obtain each day.

this is a very limited view of hunter-gathering
societies, which happens to ignore some groups
which do store food (because they live places
where it stays cold enough to freeze meat) or the
herders who have large stores of food on the hoof.
it also ignores the many groups which lived in
northern climates which required them to have
food stores for the winter or they'd die. so
clearly there is a bias in his writings, observations
and comments which exclude peoples who clearly
survived just fine for thousands of years without
agriculture who also had class divisions in their
groups.


Therefore, there can be no
kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from
others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, nonproducing elite
set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs
at Mycenae c.1500 B.C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than
commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and
had better teeth (on average, one instead of six cavities or missing
teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A.D. 1000, the elite were
distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a
fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.

perhaps to be an elite you had to be healthier
to begin with? perhaps there are other reasons
for the elite being healthier? like they had
personal servants who kept things clean? that
could make a difference in disease rates apart
from nutrition...

i don't find his arguments well thought out
and too much of the conclusion is biased by
his preconceptions.


If we consider a twenty-four hour clock on which one hour represents
100,000 years of real past time. It the history of the human race began
at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We
lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day,from midnight
through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p.m., we adopted
agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of
famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will
we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind
agriculture's glittering facade and that have so far eluded us?

i'd suggest finding a better approach, but
shoddy thinking isn't too likely going to help
much at all.


...
i did, i don't agree with too many of his
assumptions.

What, that a division between the people who did the actual work, and
the planners didn't lead to a stratification of society?

i'll repeat myself. all groups stratify.
period. full stop. end of statement.

And your example of that in a hunter/gatherer group would be . . . ?

strong and smart person is likely at
the top of the heap. most likely that
person will even be more on top if they
are considered good looking or have
charisma, if they have many children
or many wives or husbands.

children, elders, injured, chronically
sick, mothers, fathers, those who know
the plants and animals well.

there are many different types of
layering going on, one person may be
at the bottom of the heap in one aspect
but near the top in another.


It used to be, if you didn't like your neighbors, or the local strong
man, you walked away. The food was there for the taking anyway.

i think that's not very likely. families
stick together even in the face of some
rather rotten behaviors and situations.
many many stories of police getting called
into a domestic dispute to help break it up
only to find that both parties start in on
the police officer. there's a good reason
why police hate domestic trouble calls...


function
of the species/brain. we group, divide up,
regroup, etc. constantly. even the most rigid
of the religious societies fragment and divide
once the charismatic leader dies or something
happens which sets enough people off into another
direction. it's just what we do.

any group of people of more than one person
has a class system, rankings, etc. they may be
unspoken and there are likely many different
ones in operation.


The word
civilization comes from the Latin civitas, meaning city or city-state.

You saw his argument on hunter/gatherers superior health?

and i don't agree, he's sweeping a lot of
things under the rug.

Such as?

all the stuff i wrote above.


read any modern text on microbiology and
parasitology. read any collection of actual
studies by anthropologists of many different
groups. there are no utopian societies in
the past. all have their challenges and
troubles.

Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University
of Massachusetts show these early Indian farmers paid a price for their
new-found livelihood. Compared to the huntergatherers who preceded them,
the farmers had a nearly fifty percent increase in enamel defects
indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency
anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a
threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general,
and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably
reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in
the preagricultural community was about twenty-six years," says
Armelagos, "but in the postagricultural community it was nineteen years.
So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were
seriously affecting their ability to survive."

i'd look into that study further because i'd
want to know how they actually did the comparison
between the two societies.


[T]he mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in
crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other
crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease.

repetition of the conclusion does not make
an argument any stronger. the "mere fact" is
in dispute.


Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale
today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous
to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering.

sure does. there's not many places left to hunt and
gather from. monocrop farming is likely to continue
to remove wild spaces and kill off diversity. so...
if you really want to make the most difference put
your money into nature conservation efforts in
various places (to protect diversity), read up on
native plants and how to give them a good home,
add more food plants for critters to your property
and keep the water from getting polluted that
runs through your area.


But Americans are an
elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from
countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between
being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the
Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?

i've already made the choice to be a peasant
farmer in the US. why would i want to go to
either of those places? i'll be green and
save the transportation cost.


having read 1491, etc. recently how can you
accept this comparison as being right? if you
took a group from a European area in 1490s and
compared that to a group from the Amazon area
at that time you'd find the Amazons decimated
by diseases.

Brought from Europe. Neither groupe was hunter/gatherers. The
Amazonians tended huge orchards, which is where most of the terra
preta was found.

so that is a comparison between two groups
of agriculturalists. one built topsoil and
the other destroyed it. what were the differences
that brought this about?

wouldn't the existance of both terra preta
and agriculture based upon thousands of years
be a counter-example to his claims? from
what i have read of digs done in that area
i'm not hearing anything that tells me that
was a society divided by deep stratification
or that those people suffered from malnutrition
and diseases. so i think this is a more
interesting and fruitful thing to look into
or think about.

as for the rest of the above agricultural
tragedy line of arguments.

too many holes in assumptions and comparisons
being made. selective biases in picking groups
to compare, etc. i just don't know how you can
consider his arguments very strong. looking into
the one study mentioned might be on the list of
topics for the future, but otherwise i think i'll
let you have the last words.


songbird

In article ,
songbird wrote:

See the movie, "The Corporation", it's on DVD. It's also on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw

links don't help, i'm not always on-line,
it is like a rock sitting in the conversational
road.

Sorry, I miss conscrewed what you said. Get the DVD.

--
Remember Rachel Corrie
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/

Welcome to the New America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg

Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:

See the movie, "The Corporation", it's on DVD. It's also on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw

links don't help, i'm not always on-line,
it is like a rock sitting in the conversational
road.

Sorry, I miss conscrewed what you said. Get the DVD.

can you write a summary for the link so i know
what you're talking about or referencing?

most of the longer messages and replies are
written when i'm offline so i'm not usually going
to follow a link or look at video.


songbird

In article ,
songbird wrote:

Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:

See the movie, "The Corporation", it's on DVD. It's also on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw

links don't help, i'm not always on-line,
it is like a rock sitting in the conversational
road.

Sorry, I miss conscrewed what you said. Get the DVD.

can you write a summary for the link so i know
what you're talking about or referencing?
???????? Oh, OK.

"The Corporation" is on YouTube in 23 installments.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFA50FBC214A6CE87

It is the same as the DVD.

I think you'd be better off with the DVD, all things considered.

The Corporation
2003 NR 145 minutes

Filmmakers Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott explore the genesis of the
American corporation, its global economic supremacy and its psychopathic
leanings, with social critics like Noam Chomsky and Milton Friedman
lending insight in this documentary.

Cast:
Mikela J. Mikael, Noam Chomsky, Milton Friedman, Michael Moore

Director:
Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott

Genres:
Documentary, Social & Cultural Documentaries, Political Documentaries

This movie is:
Cerebral, Controversial

Format:
DVD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_%28film%29
The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by
University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan, and directed by
Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary examines the modern-day
corporation, considering its legal status as a class of person and
evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a
psychiatrist might evaluate an ordinary person. This is explored through
specific examples. Bakan wrote the book, The Corporation: The
Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, during the filming of the
documentary.

Film critics gave the film generally favorable reviews. The review
aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 91% of critics gave the film
positive reviews, based on 104 reviews.[3] Metacritic reported the film
had an average score of 73 out of 100, based on 28 reviews.

http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Cor...id=975545367_0
_0&strackid=6395b8cdbaf6f550_0_srl&trkid=222336

MEMBER REVIEW
This is a wonderfully edited documentary about the effects that
corporations have on society. It's highly informative without being
boring. The first point that should be made is that everyone should see
this film because the topics in it effect all of us. It doesn't matter
what your political, economic, or religious status is- if you live on
this planet, you will be directly effected by corporations for your
entire life. Far from being the benevolent providers of goods and
services that make our lives worth living, corporations are by
definition voracious predators who must continually feed their appetite
for more. This movie is not necessarily anti-corporate. It's pretty
objective and presents the truth straight from the CEO's mouth. The
single most important thing that you walk away from this film with is
the understanding of why things are the way they are in America and
other capitalist societies. Most people don't think about these topics
very often, but when you start to put the puzzle pieces together, you
realize that our way of life can't possibly be sustained. This raises
important questions about what we are going to do about it. Further, the
movie gives you a pretty good understanding of the laws governing
corporations. These laws basically force companies to continually grow,
whether or not it is sustainable. To most people, the idea that a
company has to continually grow larger seems to make sense. But what if
that company harvests resources that belong to all people and are in
extremely short supply? You know, things like air, water, trees...the
stuff that the creator gave to all mankind. You will be watching nature
get pillaged to benefit the few until society awakens from it's haze of
denial. This film is the start of that awakening.

Voila, the concise summary.


most of the longer messages and replies are
written when i'm offline so i'm not usually going
to follow a link or look at video.




songbird

--
Remember Rachel Corrie
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/

Welcome to the New America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg

Billy wrote:

....summary please...
"The Corporation" is on YouTube in 23 installments.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFA50FBC214A6CE87

It is the same as the DVD.

I think you'd be better off with the DVD, all things considered.

...

thanks, i'll put it on the list for next
winter. it's a far tangent from what i'm
getting into this spring and summer.

Mark Achbar has some interesting movie
credits, _Manufacturing Consent_ and another
about water, both are also likely to be
interesting.


songbird

In article ,
songbird wrote:

i don't eat that much fish any longer. i used
to eat sardines a few times a week or canned
tuna. then i discovered sashimi and lost my
taste for canned tuna and the price of sardines
went up too and i found out i'd much rather
grow and put up as much of my own food as possible.
instead of buying fish from thousands of miles away
i'm eating more from foods grown a few feet away.

Depending on local laws (they are verboten as possible invasives if they
escaped in some places) you might look at tilapia. They do well in
small-ish container aquaculture systems, breed like rabbits (the
invasive if escaped argument is not void - don't let them escape) are
omnivorous and grow fast. Or check with your ag extension people to see
what they suggest and/or what's legal in your state. Hybrid
aquaculture/hydoponic arrangements seem to work as well.

Be sure to eat one before you commit to raising any, but fairly decent
flavor (to most people who eat fish) is part of their appeal.

Trout are fine if you have the conditions, but few people do, and
providing them with happy circumstances artificially is expensive.

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by
Please don't feed the trolls. Killfile and ignore them so they will go away.

Ecnerwal wrote:
....
Depending on local laws (they are verboten as possible invasives if they
escaped in some places) you might look at tilapia. They do well in
small-ish container aquaculture systems, breed like rabbits (the
invasive if escaped argument is not void - don't let them escape) are
omnivorous and grow fast. Or check with your ag extension people to see
what they suggest and/or what's legal in your state. Hybrid
aquaculture/hydoponic arrangements seem to work as well.

Be sure to eat one before you commit to raising any, but fairly decent
flavor (to most people who eat fish) is part of their appeal.

Trout are fine if you have the conditions, but few people do, and
providing them with happy circumstances artificially is expensive.

i'll pass, thanks, i'm not that much into
aquaculture and even if i were this isn't a
site well suited for it.

i'm much happier not having to deal with
most of the farm animals. worms are good
enough for me. i like that they don't need
a huge amount of care. it fits well with
my keep it simple approach to gardening.


songbird