Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Long-time Ohio farmer Gene Logsdon says human and animal waste, including that from pets, is our greatest and most misunderstood natural resource. He points out that we spend billions to throw it away, and billions more to manufacture synthetic fertilizers.
(Radio interview and book excerpt)
Perhaps the most dramatic example of how oil and water don’t mix can be found in the middle of the planet’s great oceans and seas in the form of litter gyres, rotating currents laden with countless bits of floating debris, mainly plastic and Styrofoam, all of which were pushed to the middle of these great bodies of water by the currents that circle them.
We use more and more plastics every year. Much of it ends up in the oceans and eventually in the continent-sized North Pacific Subtropical Gyre – or one of the other four world ocean gyres. Plastics is over time broken down into smaller and smaller pieces that work their way further and further down the marine food chain. The long-term effects are unknown and there are similarities with our carefree use of fossil fuels 50 and 100 years ago.
The current tragic events in Japan bring an extra poignancy to this, the final excerpt from Chapter 3 of Richard Heinberg’s new book The End of Growth.
– The unusual uses of urine
– NYT on Peak Coffee: Heat Damages Colombia Coffee, Raising Prices
– Decline of Honey Bees Now a Global Phenomenon, says UN
– US farmers fear the return of the Dust Bowl
– The world food crisis” the squeeze on purchasing power
Ohio, the home of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and site of the world’s largest oil-producing provinces in the late 19th century, is again at the center of the action in domestic fossil fuel production as a controversial drilling technique, known as fracking, is draining Ohio’s remaining oil and gas reserves. With global oil production peaking and the number of new large oil finds dwindling, is increased domestic production in Ohio and other states through fracking a vital contribution to our energy security, or a fate to be fought?
In a world where tap water is catching fire near hydrofracking sites from Colorado to New York State, natural gas drillers say it’s not their fault. And when the provocative documentary GASLAND got an Oscar nod in January, the drillers were livid. But whether you believe the film is inspired expose or a putrid pile of propaganda, it may be a villain who doesn’t even make an appearance in the story — resource depletion — that winds up bursting today’s gas bubble.
“Peak oil has arrived,” says economist Paul Krugman in one of his columns late last month—a watershed moment, since it makes him one of the most widely read people to have uttered such words.
We may ultimately find that shale gas is nothing but an energy sink. It will provide net energy for a while to those who are living now while burdening future generations with huge cleanup costs that, in terms of energy, may equal or exceed the energy gain we are currently receiving from this supposedly “clean” energy source.
– New Yorker features fermentation writer Sandor Katz: “Nature’s Spoils”
– A Hidden Cost of Farming (cow manure and phosphorus)
– Finally, A Practical Guide to Dealing With… Manure (Book Review)
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt once noted that “civilized people ought to know how to dispose of the sewage in some other way than putting it into the drinking water”.
-Brenda Palms Barber, The Promised Land (audio interview)
-Fowl energy: Chicken poo lights Gloucestershire town
-Bio-Agriculture – a Solution to Climate Change
