Love all life.
GreenWay article for February for
hazelwoodhomepage.com
To: editor@hazelwoodeditor@yahoo.com
======
Respect Earth or Perish
We human beings have managed after all these years to not kill ourselves off completely so far. We have shown restraint. By the time I was born - 1952 - there were already easily enough weapons of mass destruction manufactured to have collapsed the whole ecosystem of which we are a part. But the saner among us, aware of the awesome destructive potentials of our various technologies, have managed to keep us from the brink. The terrible high-tech wars of our time have been the worst in recorded history. And the manufacture and maintenance of the world's militaries has damaged environments, bled social systems, and ultimately collapsed economies. But - as difficult as it is to imagine - these wars and their consequences could have been worse.
Now - these many years later at the dawn of the cybernetic age - we stand dangerously close to yet another world war, this one with even higher-tech weapons. The new weaponry has been developed, as is typical with the military, with the mindset that there is this battle between good and evil, (and we, of course are the good).
But this is a childish attitude, regardless of how advanced our technology is. There are no bad guys out there, separate from us. There are only people, with different points of view, all terribly imperfect and as blind to our ways of looking at things as we are to theirs.
It reminds me of a friend who taught his child (who loved dinosaurs) the value of making peace by telling him about how the dinosaurs had horns and bony armour to fight and protect themselves...and then there were none... If we don't learn to value other peoples and other species, we're doomed to population collapse basically brought about by our inability to work together.
We are already in an extinction period right now, just like the dinosaurs. I'd be willing to bet that if any of our particular species makes it past this present ecosystem collapse and lives to reproduce again, these new people will have a much more profound respect for life.
I've written about growing food, and how we can use healthy soil to deal with the pollutants that settle on a garden. But I'm coming to the conclusion that there's something deeper that's intrinsic. We each, naturally, solve our problems by moving them somewhere else. Well - now that the world is so intimately connected and there is no longer an elsewhere to get rid of problems to - we're being challenged to just not make the bloody problems in the first place.
Don't recycle beverage bottles and cans, for instance; don't make the damn things in the first place.
Duh! Who'da thunk it?
Oh, no, I'm going to hurt the beverage container industry by saying we don't need all those cans and bottles! What will we ever do without them?
Drink water. Or bring your own container and fill it up at the store. That's one of the things got the hippies in trouble. They (we) got sick of all the packaging - and consequent increase in prices - when wholesalers broke up quantities into smaller amounts and then prettied them up with advertisements...inside of packages which are themselves inside of packages...till the product was all additives and packaging and hardly any of the original thing you went to buy. So we started co-ops, working together to buy our rolled oats and walnuts etc. in barrels or whatever and then bringing our own bags or cans or whatever and just paying by the pound for the stuff - much cheaper.
Now that most everyone agrees we on average are going to be having to do with less money to work with, let's (finally) start a food co-op in Hazelwood. This has been a periodically discussed possibility for some years now off and on.
With our last grocery store now apparently going (there were at least three on Second Ave. at one time), isn't it about time to think about stores, individuals and groups working TOGETHER rather than trying to compete for the diminishing number of dollars available? It's not about cutting an ever smaller pie into ever smaller portions, it's about MAKING pies, and making them bigger. We have to start making things again, to service the Earth's dire needs.
There's plenty of carbon dioxide available, for instance; in fact it's a problem. So let's use this waste as food for plants. High-tech greenhouse growers have been using increased CO2 levels to enhance plant growth for some years now. Why not use some of that CO2 in aquarium-like structures, with natural and/or artificial light, to grow biological products like fish or tomato plants or bioplastics or algal biofuel or microbial food?
Assuming we still have a functioning government a couple of years down the line (a big if, in my opinion) there will by that time be incentives for what is called "carbon sequestration" (capturing carbon dioxide rather than emitting it). The waste becomes a resource. We may not be able to make much money for a while, but we can make valuable products which will sooner or later show up in our balance books.
======
hazelwoodhomepage.com
To: editor@hazelwoodeditor@yahoo.com
======
Respect Earth or Perish
We human beings have managed after all these years to not kill ourselves off completely so far. We have shown restraint. By the time I was born - 1952 - there were already easily enough weapons of mass destruction manufactured to have collapsed the whole ecosystem of which we are a part. But the saner among us, aware of the awesome destructive potentials of our various technologies, have managed to keep us from the brink. The terrible high-tech wars of our time have been the worst in recorded history. And the manufacture and maintenance of the world's militaries has damaged environments, bled social systems, and ultimately collapsed economies. But - as difficult as it is to imagine - these wars and their consequences could have been worse.
Now - these many years later at the dawn of the cybernetic age - we stand dangerously close to yet another world war, this one with even higher-tech weapons. The new weaponry has been developed, as is typical with the military, with the mindset that there is this battle between good and evil, (and we, of course are the good).
But this is a childish attitude, regardless of how advanced our technology is. There are no bad guys out there, separate from us. There are only people, with different points of view, all terribly imperfect and as blind to our ways of looking at things as we are to theirs.
It reminds me of a friend who taught his child (who loved dinosaurs) the value of making peace by telling him about how the dinosaurs had horns and bony armour to fight and protect themselves...and then there were none... If we don't learn to value other peoples and other species, we're doomed to population collapse basically brought about by our inability to work together.
We are already in an extinction period right now, just like the dinosaurs. I'd be willing to bet that if any of our particular species makes it past this present ecosystem collapse and lives to reproduce again, these new people will have a much more profound respect for life.
I've written about growing food, and how we can use healthy soil to deal with the pollutants that settle on a garden. But I'm coming to the conclusion that there's something deeper that's intrinsic. We each, naturally, solve our problems by moving them somewhere else. Well - now that the world is so intimately connected and there is no longer an elsewhere to get rid of problems to - we're being challenged to just not make the bloody problems in the first place.
Don't recycle beverage bottles and cans, for instance; don't make the damn things in the first place.
Duh! Who'da thunk it?
Oh, no, I'm going to hurt the beverage container industry by saying we don't need all those cans and bottles! What will we ever do without them?
Drink water. Or bring your own container and fill it up at the store. That's one of the things got the hippies in trouble. They (we) got sick of all the packaging - and consequent increase in prices - when wholesalers broke up quantities into smaller amounts and then prettied them up with advertisements...inside of packages which are themselves inside of packages...till the product was all additives and packaging and hardly any of the original thing you went to buy. So we started co-ops, working together to buy our rolled oats and walnuts etc. in barrels or whatever and then bringing our own bags or cans or whatever and just paying by the pound for the stuff - much cheaper.
Now that most everyone agrees we on average are going to be having to do with less money to work with, let's (finally) start a food co-op in Hazelwood. This has been a periodically discussed possibility for some years now off and on.
With our last grocery store now apparently going (there were at least three on Second Ave. at one time), isn't it about time to think about stores, individuals and groups working TOGETHER rather than trying to compete for the diminishing number of dollars available? It's not about cutting an ever smaller pie into ever smaller portions, it's about MAKING pies, and making them bigger. We have to start making things again, to service the Earth's dire needs.
There's plenty of carbon dioxide available, for instance; in fact it's a problem. So let's use this waste as food for plants. High-tech greenhouse growers have been using increased CO2 levels to enhance plant growth for some years now. Why not use some of that CO2 in aquarium-like structures, with natural and/or artificial light, to grow biological products like fish or tomato plants or bioplastics or algal biofuel or microbial food?
Assuming we still have a functioning government a couple of years down the line (a big if, in my opinion) there will by that time be incentives for what is called "carbon sequestration" (capturing carbon dioxide rather than emitting it). The waste becomes a resource. We may not be able to make much money for a while, but we can make valuable products which will sooner or later show up in our balance books.
======
posted by St. Jim the Composter at 11:55 AM
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