Soil not oil
“We’ve been sold a major myth on the grounds that the application of chemicals will improve yield. It’s not true,” she said. “It will kill soil.”
…and from Paraguay…
Uncontrolled expansion of cattle farming in Paraguay has led to “cutting down trees and planting exotic grasses,” says environmentalist Guillermo Gayo. To put a halt to this practice in the southern department of Paraguarí, the foundation he heads has implemented what is known as “permaculture.” FULL
Marcilla Elizabeth Smith:
Food is a more basic source of energy than oil. To prioritize oil and similar energy resources at the expense of food security is like prioritizing agricultural yield at the expense of sunlight. Oh wait, we do that, too =-(
I like the permaculture stuff. I keep looking into it locally, but as soon as someone starts something up, it folds :: sigh :: If you want something done right…
Thinking randomly, I saw where one of the independent (and radical) Seminole nations of Florida (the one’s without the FSU connections, casinos, or even a treaty with the US) has said, “no money, only land” is their official position. This title made me think of it.
Going even more randomly, has anyone seen these seasteading projects? Maybe some of it is run by Libertarian-Capitalists with advanced stages of islomania, but I can’t help but dream sometimes of creating my own biosphere and cutting the cord to the cartel of nation-states.
19 April 2010, 11:42 amJon:
Cattle farming is really the curse of the tropics. It is partly a question of dietary preferences (“solid” food), partly a question of prestige–the Spanish hacendados all raised cattle, partly a question of ignorance, since there’s nothing like cattle on tropical forest soils to initiate erosion and deforestation, and finally, partly a question of money–US consumers want hamburgers and steaks. You can see the result everywhere: Mexico, Costa Rica, all through South America. It should be obvious that forest lands are not suited for cattle, but human beings are blind to the obvious. Most of humanity never ate cows. Even cattle nomads mostly use fermented milk products, and do not depend on daily meat. Of course, there are lands quite suited for grazing, as in Argentina on the Pampas or the grasslands of North America. People should raise chickens and eat them and eggs. Turkeys are good too. Ducks are too cute to eat, however. Just my opinion.
19 April 2010, 4:54 pmStan:
Cattle-farming has eaten forests; and residential development is eating farmland. Here in CR, too, as you say. Paradoxically, the protection of large parks and reserves here have given people tacit permission to play hell with everything else. So much for policy.
Big-Ag will go after small businesses, and already has. The maze of regulations developed to attenuate the dangers of corporate food have, another example of the unintended but inevitable consequences of policy (ALWAYS interpreted and applied by the rulikng class, even if not of its own making), been used to shut down and-or prevent smallholding.
Bountiful Backyards in Durham, NC, is an exception (full disclosure, they are personal friends), but that’s because they are “landscapers.” They build single residency food gardens.
Which is a hint at how the system can be undermined using non-confrontation — what De and I have called recultivating the abandoned (or ignored, or presntly untouchable) voids of the system.
Discrete, private food-making cannot be made illegal, not effectively, because its unenforceable. Going after yard gardens would bring even the tea-partiers over to our side. Exchange does not have to be in the formal marketplace, but the informal one, through rhyzomatic interpersonal networks. These stay off the radar until they are too self-organized to simply wipe out.
One of the long-term trajectories of the current way of doing things is that the system is becoming more unstable – because it consumes its own substrates. Our fear that the powers will become stronger is misplaced. They may become more ruthless and unprincipled, but at the end of the day these too are signs of and reactions to unraveling social hegemony. In this process, as Hurricane Katrina showed in a temporary way, their own capacity to “hold territory” will be diminished; they will employ triage; something will fill the abandoned spaces.
This is where we may find a strategic imperative – to fill spaces – without a strategic template that makes local tactical solutions captive to a strategic agenda.
Make food. And keep your policy battles as local and specific and short as possible. Learn the way of the rabbit. Stay camouflaged and reproduce… a lot.
Biblically, “be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” (:
20 April 2010, 8:37 amm.c.:
As a working buddhist, I should not eat meat, but goats(they eat almost all brush), and bison are preferrable to cattle as far as ecologicical impact, and if free range-fed, better eating healthwise. Ted Turner has a restaurant somewhere that serves bison burgers from his N.M. ranch I believe.
20 April 2010, 12:19 pmJuannie:
If I may be so brazen as to reproduce your ideas in synopsis:
{
Big-Ag will go after small businesses
The maze of regulations …. (have) been used to shut down and-or prevent smallholding.
Bountiful Backyards … build single residency food gardens.
…a hint at how the system can be undermined using non-confrontation — …recultivating the abandoned …voids of the system.
Discrete, private food-making cannot be made illegal, not effectively, because its unenforceable. …Exchange does not have to be in the formal marketplace, but the informal one, through rhyzomatic interpersonal networks. These stay off the radar until they are too self-organized to simply wipe out.
…their own capacity to “hold territory” will be diminished; they will employ triage; something will fill the abandoned spaces.
This is where we may find a strategic imperative – to fill spaces -
Make food. And keep your policy battles as local and specific and short as possible. Learn the way of the rabbit. Stay camouflaged and reproduce… a lot.
Biblically, “be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” (:
}
This is exactly what I have been asking for when I ask: “…isn’t there more we can do?” and “aren’t there more ideas for those who aren’t able to make those moves? Am I out of line requesting a more solution oriented approach here? ” and when I state “I want to read your ideas here and start my participation.”
Like the good scholar/teacher you are, you don’t just answer my questions directly but force me to find them in the nuances of the course material.
Thank you. There are indeed ideas here that I can start to practically implement. I’ll keep looking for more.
John
P.S.
20 April 2010, 6:01 pmI’ve tried to implement formatting code on previous posts but haven’t been able to get it to work.
Do you have any reference on to how to create formatting here when I post?
frank:
Interesting post. Make food-absolutely. But is reproducing as much as possible a rational/sensible idea these days? It seems as if the planet’s resources are wearing thin as it is. Maybe it’ll all turn out alright, if the offspring are raised right, and didn’t turn out to be petroleum-sucking, wasteful bastards like the rest of us.
23 April 2010, 12:57 amcabdriver:
“Discrete, private food-making cannot be made illegal, not effectively, because its unenforceable. …Exchange does not have to be in the formal marketplace, but the informal one, through rhyzomatic interpersonal networks. These stay off the radar until they are too self-organized to simply wipe out.”
That’s the course that I much prefer as a legalization regime for the medicinal plant cannabis: rather than having it exploited as a commodity profit machine/revenue generator, it should be grown naturally, small-scale, in the sunlight, and exchanged for free.
The combination of cannabis commercialization as a “legalized”, “regulated”, taxable commodity with licenses granted only to a handful of commercial interests WHILE continuing to outlaw the small-scale cultivation of small plots for personal use and informal non-profit transfer would NOT be a step forward for freedom, autonomy, or even for the responsible integration of the practice of cannabis use into American society.
A tangential issue. But an important one, especially for those of us in places like California, where the question of cannabis drug law reform looms large.
As far as the small-scale food garden issue: I think fava beans, a trailing vine crop, make for one of the best vegetable protein sources, with the most return of food value in a small garden plot, in the locales where they can be grown (including greenhouse environments).
23 April 2010, 3:25 amMichael Anderson:
And for those who aren’t of the farming disposition—-preserve! Get together, and learn to dry, can, freeze, and store, and, support your local real food folks as much as possible. This creates reserves for when things go wrong, as in a short harvest—or if DoD starts policing your home garden as a security threat (sorry, that news article from Stars and Stripes still pisses me off!).
23 April 2010, 1:45 pmm.c.:
This oil-rig of the coast of Louisiana which caught fire and sank with the loss of 11 workers: How much oil leaked & will continue to leak from the underwater pipes? How about the Chinese coal carrier ship a couple weeks ago that tore a 2 mile hole in the Great Barrier Reef causing the ship to leak fuel oil in a nature preserve.
The world must be mad or something rather close to it.
23 April 2010, 1:49 pmm.c.:
Dylan Ratigan had an expert on yesterday who said that Brasil & Norway are two countries that require ocean oil rigs to have an
30 April 2010, 11:42 amAcoustic-Activated Well Head Emergency Cut-Off Valve on the ocean floor(in this case, 5,000 ft.) You don’t have to send a submersible in case of rough weather and the like. They cost 1/2 million dollars though. It maybe wouldn’t have prevented the explosion, but may have prevented the rig from burning for 2 days and sinking and the following massive leakage.
Michael Anderson:
I found this particularly lucid—from Krugman @ NYT, first 2 sentences of his column on the gulf oil spill:
“It took futuristic technology to achieve one of the worst ecological disasters on record. Without such technology, after all, BP couldn’t have drilled the Deepwater Horizon well in the first place.”
Techno-fixes, anyone?
3 May 2010, 1:11 pmDeAnander:
Crosspost from ET, where it got no discussion:
[footnotes in original: too lazy to reproduce the html, in a rush to get back to work]
One last note: that text about “methods remaining unchanged” is generally taken by Western industrial do-gooders (and snake oil salesmen, and it’s sometimes hard to tell the two apart!) as a sign of *failure*, when it might be taken as a sign of excellent, refined adaptation to the local biome and climate. Sometimes people do things the way they do things because that is what several centuries or millennia have taught them actually works.
3 May 2010, 3:23 pmStan:
A perfect explanation of one reason why people who are serious about peacemaking have to get serious about food.
4 May 2010, 3:27 amm.c.:
Researchers have found a beaver dam/lake in northern Canada(google it) that is large enough to be seen from outer space. An estimated 100 beavers live in the colony. Maybe we could ask them to fix the oil well. Halliburton can’t seem to be able to do the job.
7 May 2010, 5:34 pmm.c.:
Canada for one, requires a relief well be drilled simultaneously as the main well so in case of a blowout, the high pressure can be controlled from the relief location and the oil collected.
28 May 2010, 12:03 pmThe oil companies filling out the inspection reports in pencil & some dolt from MMS tracing over it in pen. Maybe the world is actually run by the most idiotic of Idiots.
m.c.:
BP is judge-shopping. Scuttlebutt on Rachel Maddow’s show is that it’s a fed district judge in Houston, Lynn Hughes.
30 May 2010, 3:05 pmm.c.:
Norway also requires a simultaneous relief well be drilled as the production well.
MSNBC this morning had on a munchkin from Columbia Univ. touting the idea of exploding a small nuclear device about halfway between the sea floor & the top of the oil resevoir to seal off the drill pipe and glassify the rock. Hypothetically, I’m not against as a last resort if pouring cement down one of the relief wells fails but 1) Is there enough distance(~2-2 1/2 miles between sea floor & top of reservoir) to prevent radiation contamination? 2) What are the chances the heat of the explosion could ignite the reservoir? 3) Is the rock structure strong enough and stable enough so it doesn’t collapse or fissure?
15 June 2010, 11:53 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
I wish more people were asking these questions. I have tried asking these questions on forums, to people I know, to geologists, to members of the “Oil Spill Academic Task Force”. My conclusion is that nobody has the confidence to say. There are reports of fissures already. If the nuke works, Obama (and whoever else is perceived as responsible) will be “heroes”. If it fails, it could fail catastrophically. Imagine the bed of the Gulf cracking up: the less dense oil would floats to the top as the denser water flows beneath it. The heat within the Earth turns 50 Billion gallons of water into steam which raises the waters of the Gulf so violently that a tsunami takes out coastal areas 50-200 miles inland. When the water subsides, Florida re-emerges, but everything on the peninsula has been scraped to a mass of mud strewn with debris and corpses.
My partner and I live in Orlando, so I have a *real* concern that someone is going to decide to just try the nuke option without saying anything, so that if it doesn’t work, BP can be blamed or perhaps there will be an unfortunately-timed “earthquake” reported to be the cause.
But FWIW, I think the first two concerns are far less likely. 1) Most radiation contamination is the result of fallout. Fallout is radioactive debris that becomes aerosolized due to the small size of the particles and then carried by the blast only to rain down later, be inhaled, etc. Surrounded by water, radioactive particles should be mostly trapped and settle to the sea floor, not carried by the winds. 2) The heat effects of a nuclear detonation do not have the range of the blast effects. Think of the old video of buildings being blown to pieces by the old above-ground tests in New Mexico: they were blown to bits, but not burned. This effect should be even more pronounced under water which is an even stronger medium for kinetic energy, and much weaker medium for transferring heat energy.
16 June 2010, 10:14 amDeAnander:
Kinetic effects are imho not to be shrugged at. You can kill thousands of fish in a wide radius by detonating a conventional mine below surface. I would ask: how much sea life will be killed by a detonation of this force at this depth (remember we understand as yet very little about the deep ocean floor), and how does that compare with the kill from the uncontrolled oil volcano? In other words, BP has already made things worse by their attempts to intervene (cutting off the bent pipe); would the cure (a small nuke) be worse than the disease?
It still staggers me that the public discussion continues to be framed in the language of money and finance. As if the ability of the ocean and shoreline to sustain life were measurable in dollar units. This seems to be the central lunacy, the mental illness of which all the rest is a symptom…
16 June 2010, 11:51 amm.c.:
A little more on lawfare. Jamie Gorelick is now on BP’s legal team. She was on the 9/11 Commission & formerly Clinton admin. DoD & DoJ bigwig.
17 June 2010, 11:41 amm.c.:
Judge Martin Feldman who just lifted the Gulf Oil drilling moratorium, is an old friend & tennis partner of Antonin Scalia someone on MSNBC mentioned last week on Keith O. or Rachel Maddow’s Show.
27 June 2010, 3:45 pmm.c.:
They couldn’t find ONE federal district judge in New Orleans who doesn’t own oil & oil service corp. stocks or other conflicts of interest?
29 June 2010, 11:36 am