Wednesday, September 23, 2009

no sugar in my lemonade, please

Put people to work in the new economy:

http://cleantech.com/news/4775/cuts-blade-vestas-isle-wight
Vestas Wind Systems is cancelling plans to retool a U.K. factory...citing tough economic market conditions...

Sunday, September 20, 2009

We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth

"...The Earth as a whole, the geat metabolism, has survived because
diverse species...insurance...alternative ways to keep the system going
in the face of change...tiny plankton...ehux...helps maintain the
planetary metabolism..helps maintain the heat balance of the planet..."

~Dianne Dumanoski, from

The End of the Long Summer

Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth

http://diannedumanoski.com

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

the heart of the big picture

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The whole world has to change direction, NOW. If you're not working to heal Earth, you're not working.
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"My heart breaks for city kids with their shields in the form of attitudes,
apathy and disrespect. It's gotta be tough carrying all that armor."
~Juliette Jones
pittsburghfoodforests.blogspot.com

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safeco2.org
"...Earth's biodiversity dropped 30% in 35 years...If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted...CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm..."
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From:

The End of the Long Summer:
Why we must remake our civilization to survive on a volatile Earth

by Dianne Dumanoski 2009

scribd.com/doc/17355895/The-End-of-the-Long-Summer-by-Dianne-Dumanoski-Scribd-Excerpt

"...Accelerating climate change signals a far deeper problem - the growing human burden on ALL of the fundamental planetary processes that together make up a single, self-regulating Earth......"
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Monday, September 14, 2009

Soil, Earth's belly

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The Real Dirt on Farmer John
angelicorganics.com/ao/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=179&Itemid=307
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Saturday, September 12, 2009

Think greenhouses.

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Let's build greenhouses

Unlike many waiting helplessly for the powers-that-be to save them, some of us are in gear and working to make things better, regardless of whether we're being paid. At a time of instability, the thing to do is not to become paralyzed with fear. It's to do what you can - the best you can - whatever you're good at (that's what you enjoy the most). If we panic and stop trying to provide useful goods and services to each other, with the reasoning that it's no use, then we become part of the problem.

I want greenhouses in Hazelwood, and we could be making greenhouses for others. Both of these are moneymakers as long as we have a functioning economy. If the economy fails and we have a depression, we'd still have the greenhouses.

A greenhouse can be used to grow food when you can't afford to buy it. It's a season-extender. Growing plants use carbon dioxide, something we've got way too much of. Greenhouses can lessen our addiction to the corporate bottom lines that has such insane effects as people growing garlic in China to ship all the way here when we could be growing our own.

We can build greenhouses, with or without money.

Don't say "You can't do that" when somebody tells you, for example, that we can do without coal and it's pollution.

Farmer Darrell Frey
http://bioshelter.com
http://sustainabledesign.net
turned chemically ill farmland into paradisical productive ecosystem like it was before we modern humans started messing with it. He pioneered the use of composting indoors to warm his greenhouse, and high co2 levels from composting can help plants grow better.

A greenhouse can be a way to lessen pollution, whether from carbon dioxide or from other pollutants made growing food far away and shipping it here. To the extent we grow our own, we're saving life on Earth from the abrupt climate change that looks to me like it's going to become unbelievably bad.

But how can we do things without money? When inflation went through the roof in pre-WW2 Spain, the cooperative spirit that arose actually had things running MORE efficiently for awhile. Everybody, realizing the common emergency, worked together. People helped each other without the intermediary of a functioning money system. They called it anarchism.

Don't like bad news? Either grow up or move to another planet. We have plenty of bad news here on Earth, and your fear-caused ignorance is part of the cause of it. Here's some bad news for you, and you need to handle it:

The interactions between environmental changes such as global warming is making all systems unstable. An example is the relationship between the greenhouse effect and ozone layer thinning - two trends which are normally considered apart. Ozone layer thinning happens in the upper atmosphere because it's cold up there. Well, the greenhouse effect, because it keeps heat near the surface of the Earth - in the lower atmosphere - is actually making it even colder in the upper atmosphere. So the chemical reactions that thin the ozone layer are speeded up by the colder temperatures there. What a nightmare! We've got to stop almost all burning - coal, gas, oil, biofuel, whatever. And even that won't stop the increased levels of greenhouse gases from for instance carbon dioxide and methane being emitted by formerly frozen areas. Some feedback effects are good, such as increased photosynthesis in some areas of land and sea due to increased co2 availability and warmer temperatures; but the overall loss of stability bodes massive stress for all species. So we must go back to basics and back to the drawing board with doing what we can, high-tech or low, to deal with changes.

So my strategy is to do what I can to grow food. If I see some clear material available I want it for "greenhousing." A polyethylene tarp over my teeny garden (about thirty by thirty foot) would protect from some of the wild weather we all have in store. I could maybe grow some food nearly year round. A farmer's work is never done. You can compost year-round. Anyone involved with REAL farming knows that if you intend to get the most out of your land, you never put it "to bed for the winter." Let nature do that. When it's too cold to grow, you have to stop growing. I always get a kick out of people who shut down their gardens and even pull up their tomato plant as early as September, regardless of the weather and regardless of whether the plants are still producing. Duh, did you notice reality wasn't working the way your mind expected it to? Sorry to be rude, but I've had it up to here with people spreading can'ts around. Oh, you can't compost meat products for the garden, you can't use manure in the city, you can't grow enough food to make it worthwhile, you can't fight city hall, you can't make a car that doesn't run on gasoline, solar power isn't feasible this far north, there's not enough wind around here for cheap wind power, geothermal isn't viable in this area, and on and on and et cetera. Oh, and they say it takes months for waste biomass to compost. Au contraire! It depends on the situation. They say some pollutants persist in a soil for years - another false assumption. Given the proper circumstances, such as a bioreactor with the right circumstances - the right amount of water, the right temp, the right amount of oxygen, mixing, the right species of microbe - biomass and the pollutants in it can degrade in days rather than years.

The fact is we could have Heaven on Earth instead of what we have, because we're too busy competing to remember the most easy, natural thing - love.
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Sunday, September 06, 2009

We need the good bugs.

From

International Union of Soil Sciences
iuss.org

...The roots of most plants are colonized by symbiotic fungi to form mycorrhiza, which play a critical role in the capture of nutrients from the soil and therefore in plant nutrition...

gittin the right bugz

http://loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=09-P13-00036&segmentID=6
...one of the hardest things...to recognize is the idiocy of flush toilets...a lot of water...spread disease...require a huge amount of energy. Here in California a fifth of the energy in the state goes towards treating and lifting and moving and warming water...adopt their approach to water...give it the kind of value that they do...composting toilets..turn our human waste into an asset...the lesson from the Bushmen...
~James Workman
Heart of Dryness:
How the last Bushmen can help us endure the coming age of permanent drought
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http://loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=09-P13-00036&segmentID=7
west nile virus...through exposure, birds and humans may be developing a natural immunity...

Friday, September 04, 2009

The Garden was a Farm

From:

A Reenchanted World:
The quest for a new kinship with Nature

jameswilliamgibson.com
page 252

...Moreover, enchantment gives mythic resonance to the great difficulties facing grand-scale environmental restoration...In Genesis, for example...God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to "cultivate and care for it"...

"By Love our Souls are married and solder'd to the creatures and it is our Duty like God to be united to them all."

~Thomas Traherne

Thursday, September 03, 2009

Oy, another G20 event

From
avaaz.org/en

...more than 100,000 Avaaz members...consider signing up to host a local climate wake-up call event on the 21st. These will be quick, politically powerful, and a lot of fun. Our goal is to organise thousands of wake-up events (or "flashmobs") in public places all over the world...stop climate catastrophe and unleash a new green economy this year...

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

It's not just about global warming.

It's not just about global warming: causes and effects connect everything. Warming and ozone depletion are interacting.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=40042&src=eoa-nnews

...Ozone depletion...cools the stratosphere...the Antarctic stratosphere has cooled...changes the dynamics between the stratosphere and lower layers of the atmosphere and strengthens Antarctica's already fierce winds...
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4/1/2004
http://thenation.com/doc/20040419/graeber
...Some police officials have become notorious among activists for their Gothic imaginations. Timoney, the former Philadelphia police chief who took over Miami's department before last fall's protests, is fond of peppering his press conferences with stories of activists caught planning to release poisonous snakes and reptiles among the citizenry, officers hospitalized because of acid attacks and activists assaulting his troops with a variety of bodily fluids. Such charges invariably make splashy headlines at the time, only to be later exposed as false or fade away for lack of evidence. Timoney has also become notorious for brutal tactics: In Miami his men opened fire on activists with an array of wooden, rubber and plastic bullets, tazer guns, concussion grenades and a variety of chemical weapons.Despite calls from groups ranging from the United Steelworkers to Amnesty International for an investigation, Timoney continues to be hired as a security consultant for major protests and appears on television frequently as an expert on protest movements.

Probably one of the police's purposes is simply to rally the troops. As commanders discovered in Seattle, police often feel a little uncomfortable about orders to conduct a baton charge against a group of unarmed 16-year-old girls. A deeper reason, though, may have been a perceived need to address a crisis in public perception. To the frustration of high-level officials who were finding their meetings regularly ruined by acts of civil disobedience, the American public largely refused to see the global justice movement as a menace to society. True, the media tried to create hysteria over a few broken windows, but to surprisingly little effect. The question then became, What would it take to cast protesters in the role of the villain? The answer appears to have been a calculated campaign of symbolic warfare: Remove the images of colorful floats and puppets; replace them with images of bombs and hydrochloric acid. And if it has worked--which seems to be the case, considering the public's relative indifference to police destruction of protest art and banners in Philadelphia, or to the extraordinary pre-emptive violence in Miami--it is because on matters of public security, it rarely occurs to most Americans that so many of the officials charged with protecting them could be intentionally, systematically lying.
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