Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A popular idea at the moment to address climate change is biochar – essentially taking organic materials, charring them, and burying them in the soil…Now, the biofuel story has given me a bit of a horror of ideas that sound cool to environmentalists, are fine on a small scale, but are a disaster when scaled up by industrial society. So I wanted to do a few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations of the limits of this approach.
-Green fuels cause more harm than fossil fuels, according to report
-Chemists create biofuel from plant waste
-Seeking a More ‘Poplar’ Biofuel
…Most of us know in our bones that a sea change is coming in agriculture. But the biggest driver of that change is not going to come from the issues that I’ve mentioned so far. The biggest driver is going to be the increasing cost and decreasing availability of fossil fuels, especially oil. Because agriculture is so dependent on oil, the entire system is extremely vulnerable to oil depletion—and to oil price spikes. The situation brewing on the horizon regarding oil compels us to begin rethinking how we grow our food, and even how we eat.
-A March Round-up of What’s Happening out in the World of Transition
-Transition on ‘One Planet’ on BBC World Service
-Transition Sunshine Coast delivers EDAP
-“Genuine resilience results from expanding the human footprint”. Discuss
-Fury as EU approves GM potato
-France blasts GM crop approvals by EU agency
-Are GMOs the ‘financial innovations’ of agriculture?
-GM and farming technology ‘key to fighting climate change’
Going organic is proving to be a good investment for small and medium-sized farmers—and they are receiving some government protection against Big Agriculture as well.
KMO welcomes Albert K. Bates back to the program to talk about the themes of his forthcoming book, The Biochar Solution. Could a form of homebrewed carbon sequestration provide a stopgap measure that could buy us time to implement effective atmospheric remediation? Should biochar be considered a form of geo-engineering? How do we prevent carbon credits from becoming the new credit default swaps? All this and music by Zarathrutra.
The cattle breeds from the past will be the breeds preferred tomorrow.
-A Future for Agriculture, A Future for Haiti
-Towards a more sustainable livestock sector
-Red Menace: Stop the Ug99 Fungus Before Its Spores Bring Starvation
-Is There Enough Food Out There For Nine Billion People?
-Growing Your Own Wheat
-Number of farms in state grows, report finds
What I have said may provoke anxiety, and is certainly an immense undertaking, but ultimately we have no choice so let’s not whine and delay. Let’s take it on as a great adventure, a thrilling challenge. Our success or failure is going to hinge on our attitude. We need to take control of the circumstances and become active participants in transition.
Weeds are why most of us left the farm. After you have walked up and down endless rows of soybeans hoeing sourdock and pigweed in 90 degree heat, it is not too hard to decide to join the army or even get a job in Washington DC.
Farmers are invisible people, and middle-class city dwellers choose to pretend that the long lines of trucks bringing food into the city at dawn every day have nothing to do with the white-collar world. Perhaps it is a mark of the civilized person to believe that the essentials of food, clothing, and shelter have no relevance to daily life. Yet if the farmers stopped sending food into the great vacuum of the metropolis, the great maw of urbanity, the city would soon start to crumble, as Britain discovered in the year 2000 [5]. The next question, then, is: Where does all this food come from?
