Respecting Nature
The current crisis is worldwide, and is an interaction of changes. It is bigger than any past human crises. The planet's ecosystem is collapsing.
We have told ourselves that we humans are the only ones awake, conscious, able to have feeling, with souls. Demonizing life forms we want to control, we have written a false history that makes much of the non-human world seem monstrous. We've often done the same with human enemies, demonizing them to make it okay to harm them.
We do not have to master nature. We need to learn how to get along better with our fellow creatures, be they animals, plants, or microbes. We need them and they need us. In cooperation with each other and with the other life forms we could establish a Heaven on Earth.
There is consensus that composting should have a much larger role in our lives. It is a public hygiene measure. It helps grow plants to clean the air. We can grow food with it. It can feed greenhouse operations and be packaged for sale to residents. It can be used to clean pollution.
Thermophilic (hot) composting is larger-scale than the little composters people have in their back yards. Larger, enclosed composting bioreactors can be designed and operated in such a way that they both biodegrade synthetic organic toxics and chelate heavy metals (rendering them less harmful). It can handle a wide variety of organic wastes, from tree cuttings to kitchen scraps to all types of manures to cardboard to paper to grass clippings to paper bags. A well-run medium neighborhood-scale composting system would manufacture a valuable product that feeds the whole community of life with its application. All kinds of composting, including worm composting, suppresses disease by nurturing microbial biological diversity. Hot composting is faster and kills disease also via it's heat. A community would benefit by this diversion of organic waste from the landfill, where it makes greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane (natural gas). We should have been composting the organic sector of our municipal waste a long time ago, not sending it to landfill.
Power is often in the hands of those who are both afraid of change and afraid of others who are different than them. So progress from time to time requires crises - times where the system breaks down in order to re-integrate at a higher level. We are in terrible crisis now, but there will come a day when the whole planet will be just one country, and every resident will be an Earth citizen.
The environmental changes are forcing us to radically re-think our lifestyles. Unless we stop fighting and work together we're going to go extinct. With all the interacting changes, the only successful places on the planet will be those where everyone is on the same page. That is one of the attractive things about Pittsburgh - that we are as a whole maybe more cooperative than many places. But we have much farther to go. We have to drop our prejudices, our fears. And we have to stop participating in international conflict. There is an all-hands-on-deck attitude needed.
The same lesson we are learning internationally we are also learning via our relationship to nature: Fighting doesn't work, you only win in the short run with fighting. Wild plants ("weeds"), insects, birds and other wildlife large and small must be allowed their place in the scheme of things.
We humans have extinguished so much life on Earth that our ability to breathe and eat is even being jeopardized now. The single-cell plants (phytoplankton) - which provide oxygen to the atmosphere as they consume carbon dioxide - in the oceans have been in decline for decades. These microbes are at the base of the food chain and so are absolutely necessary for human food production in the oceans. We can culture algae and other plants for their ecosystem services (such as feeding larger life forms), as well as whatever other use we devise for them - such as production of hydrogen for fuel cells.
Rather than this current anti-life economy - in which useless and destructive products and activities make money just the same as really productive products and services - we need residential, agricultural, horticultural, and industrial nurturing of life. Instead of killing pest insects (manufacturing and selling pesticides), for instance, we can encourage a wide variety of birds and other wildlife that would keep them in check by eating them.
Nature as a whole is incredibly intelligent, unfathomably compassionate, and, in the long run, infinitely more powerful than Earth's currently most dominant species - Man. We disrespect the community of life at our peril.
In the face of so many challenges to life on Earth now, our only power is in working together as one. We'll make Heaven a place on Earth.
We have told ourselves that we humans are the only ones awake, conscious, able to have feeling, with souls. Demonizing life forms we want to control, we have written a false history that makes much of the non-human world seem monstrous. We've often done the same with human enemies, demonizing them to make it okay to harm them.
We do not have to master nature. We need to learn how to get along better with our fellow creatures, be they animals, plants, or microbes. We need them and they need us. In cooperation with each other and with the other life forms we could establish a Heaven on Earth.
There is consensus that composting should have a much larger role in our lives. It is a public hygiene measure. It helps grow plants to clean the air. We can grow food with it. It can feed greenhouse operations and be packaged for sale to residents. It can be used to clean pollution.
Thermophilic (hot) composting is larger-scale than the little composters people have in their back yards. Larger, enclosed composting bioreactors can be designed and operated in such a way that they both biodegrade synthetic organic toxics and chelate heavy metals (rendering them less harmful). It can handle a wide variety of organic wastes, from tree cuttings to kitchen scraps to all types of manures to cardboard to paper to grass clippings to paper bags. A well-run medium neighborhood-scale composting system would manufacture a valuable product that feeds the whole community of life with its application. All kinds of composting, including worm composting, suppresses disease by nurturing microbial biological diversity. Hot composting is faster and kills disease also via it's heat. A community would benefit by this diversion of organic waste from the landfill, where it makes greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane (natural gas). We should have been composting the organic sector of our municipal waste a long time ago, not sending it to landfill.
Power is often in the hands of those who are both afraid of change and afraid of others who are different than them. So progress from time to time requires crises - times where the system breaks down in order to re-integrate at a higher level. We are in terrible crisis now, but there will come a day when the whole planet will be just one country, and every resident will be an Earth citizen.
The environmental changes are forcing us to radically re-think our lifestyles. Unless we stop fighting and work together we're going to go extinct. With all the interacting changes, the only successful places on the planet will be those where everyone is on the same page. That is one of the attractive things about Pittsburgh - that we are as a whole maybe more cooperative than many places. But we have much farther to go. We have to drop our prejudices, our fears. And we have to stop participating in international conflict. There is an all-hands-on-deck attitude needed.
The same lesson we are learning internationally we are also learning via our relationship to nature: Fighting doesn't work, you only win in the short run with fighting. Wild plants ("weeds"), insects, birds and other wildlife large and small must be allowed their place in the scheme of things.
We humans have extinguished so much life on Earth that our ability to breathe and eat is even being jeopardized now. The single-cell plants (phytoplankton) - which provide oxygen to the atmosphere as they consume carbon dioxide - in the oceans have been in decline for decades. These microbes are at the base of the food chain and so are absolutely necessary for human food production in the oceans. We can culture algae and other plants for their ecosystem services (such as feeding larger life forms), as well as whatever other use we devise for them - such as production of hydrogen for fuel cells.
Rather than this current anti-life economy - in which useless and destructive products and activities make money just the same as really productive products and services - we need residential, agricultural, horticultural, and industrial nurturing of life. Instead of killing pest insects (manufacturing and selling pesticides), for instance, we can encourage a wide variety of birds and other wildlife that would keep them in check by eating them.
Nature as a whole is incredibly intelligent, unfathomably compassionate, and, in the long run, infinitely more powerful than Earth's currently most dominant species - Man. We disrespect the community of life at our peril.
In the face of so many challenges to life on Earth now, our only power is in working together as one. We'll make Heaven a place on Earth.
posted by St. Jim the Composter at 5:08 PM
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