The Great Soil Builders of Our Planet

I would like to direct the class focus to the magic mushroom section of Part 1 of our reading. The fungal technologies used to regenerate life in our ecosystem are outstanding. I found this to be the most interesting part of the book so far. The section I am referring to is the remediation project that used oyster mushrooms to extract the diesel fuel spill near Bellingham, Washington. What really blew my mind was that laboratory tests found virtually no toxic oil residue in either the soil or the mushrooms, the result of enzymes and acids that the fungi release that break down such molecular complexes. If this can happen over a six week time period, what other ways can we actively decontaminate our polluted earth? Can we apply spore mass to any polluted location? What is the extent of using this technology? What are some examples of contaminated locations that might be likely testing locations for fungal technologies? Land fills? Water treatment? Mountain top removal sites? Toxic waste dumps? And, are there companies that capitalize on this technology by buying cheap contaminated useless land, and covering it with oyster mushrooms. Only to then sell the land for ten time more than you originally bought it for, along with selling your mushrooms to a local food store. Weird, but possible I think................Brendan O'Connor

Just a Thought

I just finished reading the introduction and part one of our book "Natures Operating Instructions", and it gave me something to think about for sure. The combining of the biologists and the engineers is an idea that should be looked into more and more in the future. Even now, when you look around at the machinery some engineer has designed, you can see nature in it, whether or not that is intentional is up in the air. But something as simple as a flipper you put on your foot to go diving with, I'm pretty sure no person can coin that design as theirs. It was taken from the natural design of the fin on a fish, or the foot of a water fowl. So when one looks around at nature, its necessary to think about why the processes and designs around them are there. This goes back to the Darwin theory of evolution, things evolved to adapt to their environments, or they perished. So, just as a thought, maybe we as humans could do the same thing. Learn to adapt to what we have for resources. Now, I'm not saying that we can compare ourselves to other animals in nature, because we cant, not by any stretch. But what we can do is think about where our place is in the world, what our niche is as a species, and not just as individuals. That is a very broad generalization, I know, but its an idea non the less. And maybe it will never completely come true, but goals are important for success. You shoot for one big goal by making small ones along the way, and you work with what you have, not what you wish you did. Just a thought.

Random Thoughts

I believe we, as a culture, can learn a lot from something as simple and small as the hummingbird.  As the hummingbird migrates its' way south, it stops intermediately to fuel up on nectar.  Throughout the 2000 miles of migration a year, not only does it use nectar as energy, it also pollinates the flowers to promise nectar for the following years' great migration.  This will not only take care of the hummingbirds and their offspring.  This will provide the bees and insects with a more plentiful energy source.  

I work at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and they are very conscious of their own social responsibility.  Not only do we give grants every year to the farmers we get our coffee beans from so they can keep their operation going, we also pay them a fair market value for their product.  We learned that six months out of the year, the farmers and their families have to cut back on the amount of food they eat so they can keep their business running.  Because of GMCR the farmers and their families now eat full meals every day.  Green Mountain understands that we cannot just take their coffee beans for a low price and expect them to work full days without food and hope they have the same quality and quantity of product the next year.

Like Nature's Operation Instructions says, we are apart of nature, not apart from it.  We need to understand that just because there are a lot of us humans, it does not mean that we are necessarily indestructible, and that we ARE connected to and effected by nature.  I believe we need to realize that the byproduct, or waste, from creating energy is starting to have a real and visible effect on our world.  

Instead of carelessly spending money on the luxury or horse power of your vehicle, focus on miles per gallon (oil dependency?), where it was built, the kind of chemicals used.  Our culture is very materialistic.  Some people base their feeling of "self-worth" on what they own or what they can show off.  I do believe the green movement is coming, and hopefully with time, what is cool and isn't cool will change.  We need to shift our perception of "cool" from bigger and faster to energy efficient and  the production of less waste.   

    

Costs and Sevices of Cars

I enjoyed our class discussion today, talking about something with which we all have some familiarity, cars. Our exercise included an analysis of the services that cars provide for us as well as the the costs associated with the widespread use of cars. I think that this is an important time to be thinking of these two sides of automobiles as we as a nation are poised to spend billions of dollars from the future to pay for our obsession with these vehicles. As we search for sustainable solutions to transportation, I think it would be prudent to seek to reduce all the costs associated with cars, rather than just focusing on addressing a couple of the big, more obvious problems. At this point in time we have the opportunity to tackle all of the interrelated issues centered around a car society. We do ourselves a disservice if we throw a huge amount of money at one aspect of the problem, while leaving the other high costs of automobiles to be addressed by future generations and future solutions. Here is our list of services and costs of cars in our culture:

Services
Transportation
Trade of goods
Privacy/Independence
Flexibility/Convenience
Enjoyment/Leisure
Shelter/controlled climate
Access to Employment
Jobs
Status
Storage
Community

Costs
Purchase cost
Upkeep costs: repair/maint./insurance/registration
Festering Cyst of Pollution: carbon emissions, particulate pollution, toxic chemicals
Accident danger
Enforcement of laws
Road rage
Road and infrastructure upkeep
Learning curve/technological obsolescence
Negative status symbol
Oil dependency
Fuel costs
Manufacturing pollution/energy use
Heat production/inefficiency
Community degradation
Noise pollution

Our current sexy car technologies at the car shows demonstrate proposals that address only a couple of the costs, oil dependency and some of the pollution factors. They don't work to resolve any of the other costs associated with cars. If we are going to pay immense amounts of money to address the energy costs, wouldn't it also be a good ideas to roll some of the other costs into that spending at well?

Systems

We have built a system that is modeled on efficiency. For the average person, the rules are simple. Buy More. The economic system is modeled on, and depends on it. The industrial systems are built on the idea that if it can be produced faster and for less money, people will buy more. The priority has been and remains efficient production for increased profit.

We are trying to build a new system that is more environmentally friendly on the foundations of a system that is inherently not. Industry has been built on the idea that cheaper is better, green products and materials are expensive, as they are not produced with the brute force method that our current cash crops are. This idea of profit being the number one priority would need to be moved down the priority list, which is difficult in a country where the American Dream is coming from nothing into something, or more aptly coming from nothing into millions.

There are few who would give up the “mistakes” of our industrial past to rebuild their production systems and make a greener, but more expensive and time consuming product. Beyond that, who wants to see their hard work and effort being “labeled” as a mistake? As I said last class, the green revolution has been marketed as a band-aid to the mistakes of the industrial revolution, rather than a goal of innovation, a race to the moon. There are currently, few economic incentives to developing green products and manufacturing practices. Nothing to give manufacturers, who have built their empires on the efficiency cradle-to-grave model, to re-develop their practices and join the green race.

Even if we did become a green planet, as the author stated, our population couldn’t be greenly supported in a mono-culture of consumerism. I do not mean to sound pessimistic at the prospects of going green. I simply mean to insist that we are creatures of habit, comfortable with what we have, what we want, and how we get it. I would like to see the catalyst that pushes us to change because the threats of climate change and environmental disaster have not.

Efficiency

In response to the last post, while I do agree that our livestock may be contributing to the green house gas problem, I don't believe that it is one of the major contributors. I for one love meat and I don't fully understand how eating meat is considered non sustainable. I think there are many other more critical battles to be fought than "Eat less meat". For example, Humanity's addiction to fossil fuel is no secret, and the damage that is done by thee burning of these fuels is no secret either. However I'm shocked to find out how many people still think that global warming is a myth. At least one student in pretty much every one of my classes considers it "a myth started by the liberals in order to push a needless environmentalist agenda through the government in order to satisfy their lobbyists".

Now most politicians make me sick to my stomach as well, but there is now substantial scientific evidence to support the hypothesis of global warming and it's causes. CO2 and other emissions seem to be the biggest contributors to Global Warming. So how do we cut down our emissions without crippling our way of life. The obvious answer is to use less fossil fuels. This is a good option, but to the middle and lower class it isn't really an option. They have to get to work, they have to buy the cheapest groceries, and they have to keep their families warm. So then how do we help them to reduce their emissions as well? Do we depend on the upper class to help? In a perfect world perhaps that would work, but in a perfect world we wouldn't have the problem in the first place.

The answer I believe is to improve the efficiency in our energy systems. If Bucky Fuller can invent a car that can transport 11 people at a time with a ford model-T engine that gets 30 to 40 mpg you cannot expect us to believe that improving our current vehicles efficiency can't be done, even without the additions of bio fuels and hybrid technologies, it's time for engine technology to get back to basics then they can play around with their gimmicks. This should have been the Auto industries focus from the beginning they should have been competing with each other to produce a car with higher mpg's than the other guy. People would be spending less $ on fuel using less fuel itself and therefore be putting out less emissions.

They efficiency problem isn't limited to engine technology either. There is a lot of electricity just plain lost in the power grid due to unintentional resistance in the grid. This is something that could be fixed fairly easily simply by upgrading power lines, transformers and housing wires. The other simple thing that can be done is for people to unplug their appliances when their not in use. Even appliances that are not on are still pulling power from the grid. This could cut peoples power bills significantly and cut down on emission from power plants that have to burn more fuel to make up for the grid loss.

Thoughts about the book etc.

After reading the book and getting a feel for the material i have come up with a few interesting thoughts that i would like to share. I have noticed in my dealings with people, the only way they do something is if it makes sense to them. To some people global warming and the degradation of the planet seems as if its not happening. So if we come up with some sort of widely accepted theory or hypothesis about past events in which sparked complete global meltdown maybe people will start to listen. I know this may seem a little outside of the box but, hear me out. There is one important things in common between the dinosaurs and us they were, and we are both multi cellular organisms that have inhabited this planet. we both create waste in the form of CO2 greenhouse causing gas. If livestock contributes to most of the greenhouse gasses today one can only imagine the amount created by dinosaurs. I believe that the process of the dinosaurs making greenhouse gasses warmed the environment up, melting the glaciers, putting more fresh water into the ocean, making a more tropical environment because it rained more creating more food for the dinosaurs making the environment worse. Then so much freshwater went into the ocean it shifted the current going up to Europe turning our planet into an ice ball making the ice age, which in turn caused mass extinction of a species. This is a prime example of a positive feedback chain and everything matches up to our current status. I'm not saying this is true by any means it is just a hypothesis. If something like this became a widely accepted theory maybe people would start to listen more and learn from history.

I have just finished Tom Wessels The Myth of Progress and it has left me thinking about my own personal relationship with the earth. Am I doing enough? What can I do that would have the most positive impact for the environment as a whole? I feel that the key to finding a solution is education. It’s important for everyone to become more aware and educated about their own environment. By becoming more connected with your local environment and community, you appreciate more of what is around you in your everyday life. Knowing what animals and plants live in your surroundings allow you to see them as an interconnected part of your own life. Becoming more aware of what is happening in the environment around you makes you more cautious of the results of your actions. I think it is a lot easier to not think about the consequences of ones decisions and actions when one is uneducated about their impact. When you don’t know where something goes when you are done with, it makes it easier to not think or care about it. I think people are more likely to make positive decisions in terms of environmental issues when it hits closer to home. The more connected and educated you are, the more of a sense of pride in your surroundings you will have. If more people were aware and educated about the consequences of their actions they would be less likely to make decisions that have a negative effect on the environment. In this country a lot of people take for granted how easy we have it and how many resources it takes to sustain the American lifestyle. It made me think of a conversation I had with my cousin a couple of years ago. I had finished a can of coke and asked him where he kept his recycling. He told me that he didn’t recycle. He went on to say “we have been ripping apart this earth with machine guns for years and now we want to put a band aid on it to try and fix it, it too late to save the earth.” I thought to myself, is he right, is it really to late? I now know that he was wrong, it is not too late. The earth is a very resilient living system that can recover from our mistakes if we do something about it now. I feel that it is up to us to take what we learn and do our part to educate those that either don’t know or don’t believe. We can be the ones that lead a bifurcation of the existing paradigm towards a sustainable future. Wessel’s book states that “as species become more specialized, their efficient use of energy increases”, this is never more clear than in what is present today. We have the technology and knowledge to be an efficient, self sustainable species but do we have the drive, and are we willing to make personal sacrifices as a society to do so? We shall see.

Blog Number One

Unfortunately, I don't get paid until the Monday this assignment is due, so I won't have the books quite yet. I thought it might be good, however, to consider the significance of this class and the subject matter that goes with it. Obviously, there is concern over the fact that the planet has been diagnosed as having a terminal illness. The people of Earth have been informed that we are on a path which will eventually make it impossible, one way or another, for the planet to support human life. The matter of how long this will take and what form the crisis will manifest itself as (polar ice caps melting, damage done due to increased toxicity in the air, etc;), on the other hand, is up for debate.

The cause of this illness does not originate from one distinct source. Partially due to general overpoulation, human lust for world dominance, and human "advancements" in technology, there is one variable that is consistent throughout all forms of the equation: people. Mankind is causing the very same damage to the Earth that is killing it. We are doing this, and have been for centuries, not because we want to, but because we have developed habits and lifestyle practices that have a negative impact on our home. The first step to addiction is admitting there is a problem.

Before we can actually take steps toward solving the issue at hand, we need to stop indulging in fantasies that allow us to think we can continue on blindly without repercussion. Indulgence is our vice, and we allow it to guide our decisions. This allowance is not only causing environmental damage, but it is impacting our species negatively in a social aspect, as well. After all, why are there some people with hundreds of bedrooms at their disposal, while others wander the cold streets in February? If we can come up with solutions to what is clearly our most immediate concern (the environmental crisis), we may find that, consequently, our less apocalyptic issues will come closer to solution, as well. This can't happen without analysis, discussion, education, and what will be initially considered as sacrifice.

With that being said, we find ourselves in a classroom. Here, we have the resources, mental and otherwise, to analyze, discuss, and educate each other on what sacrifices need to be made, and equally, what sacrifices don't need to be made. If the first step to recovery is admittance of a problem, those of us in this classroom are working on step number two.