Commodity Ecology

Sunday, June 3, 2007

INTRODUCTION: Two Institutions Required in Every Watershed: Commodity Ecology and Civic Democratic Institutions

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Introduction: Two Institutions Required in Every Watershed: Commodity Ecology and Civic Democratic Institutions. Read that link for an explanation. And this one about maintaining biodiveristy and the bioregional state.

No where is required to entirely reinvent the wheel. Related intimately to the book Toward A Bioregional State (2005), this PARALLEL blog will be a clearinghouse of interesting technologies and materials showing that the wider window of known possibilities that can be utilized, instead of reinvented, for institutionalizing sustainability materially, in a particular watershed.

Unlike most blogs, it will be associated with a permanent number of 71 updated threads--one for each of the human commodity choices, as follows:

1. textiles
2. dyes/colorants (murex, cochineal, synthetic chemicals, derived organic coal based chemicals)
3. building materials/tool construction
4. metals
5. garbage/garbage disposal
6. soils/dirt
7. drugs/medicines
8. infant food
9. animal based food
10. vegetable based food
11. mycelium based food (mushrooms)
12. insect based food
13. transport
14. pollinators (introduced bees where none exist; or in some cases required hand pollination, in vanilla for instance; ultrasound/birdsong pollinators)
15. fertilizers
16. herbicides/pesticides
17. mineral food (typically only one: salt, sometimes earth/clays/dirt)
18. preservatives (salt, smoke, sun-dry/dehydrate, chemical, sugared, vacuum sealed, pickled, dry freeze, etc.)
19. communication/transmission technology (voice/sound, paper, mud brick cuneiform, silk rolls, papyrus, digital computers, pony express, telephone/telegraph, smoke signals from fires, semaphore, electrified metals/conductors, electromagnets, etc.)
20. condiments/flavorings
21. scents/incenses/fragrances
22. purifiers/cleansers/concentrators (soap, water, membrane sieves, clays, diatomaceous earth, ultrasound, gas diffusion/heat, etc.)
23. protectants (paint, plastic, electroplate, glass, bulletproof glass, etc.)
24. retardants (asbestos, inflammable materials, deoxygenators, glass, etc.)
25. insulators (wool, ice, straw, fiberglass, rags, vacuums, solid glass, plastic, stones/marble, etc.)
26. abrasives (diamond dust, carborundrum, sandpaper, etc.)
27. lubricants
28. elastics (rubber, synthetic rubber)
29. coolants (ice, caves, chemicals, oils)
30. ambient heat (chemicals, caves, oil, hot springs, tallow, wood fires, antifreeze)
31. light/artificial light (sunlight, chemicals, oil (whale or abiotic), tallow, electricity/blubs, fire)
32. potable liquids (water, wine, sake, beer, cider, milk, tea, coffee, koumiss, etc.)
33. war materiels
34. energy (oil, solar, wood, nuclear, hydro/waterpower, charcoal, horse power, human labor, AC electricity, DC electricity, tides, zero-point technology, water based electrolysis engines, electromagnetic dynamos, etc.)
35. catalysts/mordants
36. energy storage (batteries, computer memory (a peculiar property of silicon only discovered in the 1950s), cynanobacteria (being linked as silicon substitutes in experiments) etc.)
37. aesthetics (brought into consumption simply because of perceived beauty, spirituality, and/or symbolism/ideology interests instead of a ‘material functionality’ prominent in many other consumptive positional categories)
38. musical instruments
39. toiletries
40. conductors
41. nonconductors
42. superconductors
43. semiconductors
44. environmental-proof/waterproof/airtight materials
45. adhesives
46. solvents
47. industrial tools/machine tools materials
48. tunneling/drilling materials
49. humans themselves as a ‘designed commodity’ (i.e., materials for those of eugenic bent, gene knowledge, etc.; or replaceable human parts whether transplants or cyborg machine substitutes like dialysis machines, artificial hearts, or artificial kidneys, etc.)
50. sense extensions (different from simply communications technology, actually going into human sensory areas that humans are ill equipped to do without aids of some sort)
51. calculation (human minds, abacus, computer, copper, silicon, superconductors, cynanobacteria, etc.)
52. software (from Jacquard’s loom to programmable Chinese textile machinery from the Later Han, etc.)
53. hardware
54. timekeeping (archaeoastronomy, moons, garden/plant clocks, calendars, mechanical clocks, water clocks, chronometers, Foucault pendulums, cesium atomic clock, etc.)
55. spacekeeping (string, plumb line, geodetic pyramid, compass azimuths, compasses)
56. climate manipulation (seeding, etc.)
57. money (state-financial decisions about money and exchange are equally a commodity and infrastructural issue influenced by the materiality of the commodity in question and politics of choice; local currency strategies, rice, metals/coins/bullion, paper, checks, digital transfers, stones, shells, salt, cider, cigarettes, etc.])
58. remediation (zeolite, recycling filtration, etc.; various types of water and soil cleansing technologies dependent upon physical characteristics of the materials utilized, learning options, etc.)
59. dentistry
60. stimulants
61. hallucinogens
62. intoxicants
63. narcotics
64. hypnotics
65. psychedelics/entheogens
66. anesthetics
67. chemically inert materials.
68. poisons/antidotes/purgatives
69. surgical tools
70. experimental models
71. antiseptics

[larger image]

Some people already working on this are those like William McDonough--working in a few 'cradle to cradle' materials. Clipped from the parallel book blog post on this topic:

We've seen the dystopian plan of the "World Bank's world". Here's William McDonough's version of a "cradle to cradle" world and of urbanization without wastes--where urbanization is intimately fitted to a particular landscape. We might even say urbanization fitted to support the ethnosphere durability that Wade Davis speaks of in his talk above. In McDonough's world, wastes become useful items back into the city with the aim for durability of "all time." Just so you avoid thinking this is some "pie in the sky" plan, he shows you some schematics of the already agreed upon plans to build twelve cities in China in a "commodity ecology" sustainable fashion.'

(McDonough hired by Chinese Government to build cities based on Cradle to Cradle, starting 2012)

When built as a model to us all, China once more may justify the title of Middle Kingdom, core of the world. This talk is only twenty minutes as well, though represents a lifetime of work in which many other similar ecological design projects are mentioned.

TEDTalks: William McDonough
20 min 11 sec

"Architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account "All children, all species, for all time." A tireless proponent of absolute sustainability (with a deadpan sense of humor), he explains his philosophy of "cradle to cradle" design, which bridge the needs of ecology and economics. He also shares some of his most inspiring work, including the world's largest green roof (at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan), and the entire sustainable cities he's designing in China."

However, to be more systematic with a larger view, commodity ecology requires integrating each of the 71 above in particular watersheds.

This blog will aid in creating a scalable model for use anywhere in the world based on interactions myself or others post It will obviously be based on noticing different climactic, material, and interactive requirements in different watersheds worldwide (i.e., even ones that are desert, for instance).

A great deal of the history of the world can be said to be 'bad material choices'. This may be for a variety of 'purposes', though two main purposes can be detailed. First, there is only the short term interest involved in commodity choices, which tends to yield externalities that destroy the biodiversity of particular areas.

Second, more nefarious is the history of intentionally forcing people to consume certain items and reducing their choices in the category--to gain political and economic power over citizens and consumers.

So let's ponder the project of an ideal watershed commodity ecology that will maximize human commodity choice, remove political clientelism, remove environmental degradation, and preserve local biodiversity. Though the ideal watershed would be a varied solution, the project of making any of them sustainable and closed loop involves pondering the social dynamics of different commodity productions, wastes, and local material and biota availability.

Janine Benyus's short talk may inspire how to learn ideas from natural interactions for commodity ecology interactions: what life with its "3.8 billion years of field testing" might teach in terms of human design. This is known as "biomimicry."

This might mean a biologist sits that the design table, or the engineers go out into the natural world to learn ideas. Benyus's short talk opening with the story on the resistant engineers is instructive, how they learned to apply an IDEA from an organism instead of simply utilizing materials and organisms. Benyus says of life: "3.8 billion years of field testing....These are solutions solved in context, and these are...conscious emulation of life's process...taking the design principles and learning something from it."

Janine Benyus shares nature's designs
Length: 23:24

"With 3.8 billion years of research and development on its side, nature has already solved problems that human designers and engineers still struggle with. In this inspiring talk, Janine Benyus provides fascinating examples of biomimicry -- the way humans mimic nature in the products we build and the systems we implement. And because the champion adapters in the natural world are, by definition, those that can survive without destroying the environment that sustains them, biomimicry can contribute to the long-term health of our planet."

From her described "heat, beat, and treat" of most current human commodity production (with 96% wastes and only 4% product on average), to an integrated 100% of products without wastes, since "life doesn't really deal with 'things', things divorced from their system." HER lucid points in the talk describe TWELVE PROBLEMATIC ASPECTS OF HUMAN DESIGNS in turning massive waste streams into metabolically sound arrangements--that we are dealing with right now.

THREE POINTS ON COMMODITY PRODUCTION AND BIODIVERSITY PROTECTION--IN COMMODITY ECOLOGY

1. Ideally, another strand here is that it deals with institutionalizing biodiversity in human uses, instead of leaving them out of the social human loop (like in utilizing native bees for pollination, for example). Once they have a social use, there is a systemic human desire to innately preserve them and their ecological interrelations. When the local biodiversity is integrated in commodity production, then humans take over--for their own self-interest and politics--the protection and representation of voiceless plants and animals that is in sync with them.

2. As a corollary, when they are integrated, areas of plants/animals/environments of local biodiversity that are left out of integration are less likely to suffer degradation if there is a closed loop of human commodity production that runs in a parallel track, to to speak, without 'leaks' of externalities that poison the area.

3. This blog may additionally be of use in rekindling such ecologically sound commodity relations in 'emergency recovery efforts' after natural or human disasters to aid in the organization of sustainability in destroyed and/or polluted communities and ecologies, to start out on a footing already thought of in terms of interactions.

Post away!

Note Bene: Ideally, this is a beta test for how to archive such information. Ideally, one would post one example only once, and then have a drop down list of all the numbers you could 'check' to make it appear in different sorted streams of the 71 commodity choices simultaneously--instead of having to post multiple instances of the same thing on each thread. This may require a design solution closer to a separate website with a database attachment (perhaps designed through Dreamweaver Ultradev).

Give me an email (or just post to this thread) if you know of something readymade, or if you want to be in on the website design issue.

One nice solution to direct posting over the internet is the self-categorization motif inbuilt into the left column of Portland Indymedia. There you can post once, though it allows the post to be instantly self-categorized in multiple ways, so it creates separate slowly amalgamating lists of many different self-categorized posts appearing in multiple places, though with only one post required.

- I've got another idea about users of the website capable of ranking such items for how well they like it,

- or how they could set up separate watershed filters on the idea it if is specifically to integrate a particular locality's biodiversity.

- or how particular watersheds could have open ended debates on what are their priority issues for solutions and/or integrations.

- and people could be notified by email when someone updates a particular thread they are watching, etc.

1. Textiles

2. Dyes/colorants

(murex, cochineal, synthetic chemicals, derived organic coal based chemicals)

3. Building materials/Tool construction

Soup's on. You'll be eating it, and your children will be eating it--and all species will be eating it--unless you find a novel recipe.

Drowning in Plastic
Every bit of plastic ever made is still with us—and it's wreaking havoc on the ocean.
Jun 14, 2007
By Kera Abraham

picture:
(L) Washed Up: An albatross gazes at a sea of trash on the Midway Atoll.
(C) Jarring: Captain Moore holds a sample of plastic-contaminated seawater from the North Pacific Gyre.
(R) Sick to the Stomach: The carcass of an albatross that died with a gut full of plastic trash rots of the beach. —Cynthia Vanderlip / Algalita Marine Research Foundation; (c) Matt Cramer / Algalita Marine Research Foundation

LIFE ON EARTH depends on little specks floating in the ocean. Tiny plankton convert sunlight to energy to form the base of the marine food chain, sustaining all seafaring creatures, from anchovies to whales and the land-based animals that eat them.

But increasingly, researchers are peering through their microscopes at the specks in seawater samples and finding miniscule bits of poisonous garbage instead of life-sustaining mini-critters.

It's plastic— broken by sunlight and water into itty bitty pieces, but still intact. And now scientists are discovering the implications of one troubling attribute of petroleum-based plastic, known since its invention, but ignored under the assumption that technology would eventually resolve it: Every plastic product that has ever been manufactured still exists.

Only 50 years since we began mass-producing it, our plastic waste has built up into a poisonous mountain we have never really learned how to deal with. It makes up 10 percent of California's garbage, is toxic to burn and hard to recycle.

Out in the Pacific Ocean a vortex of trash swirls and grows, forming a garbage dump twice the size of Texas. ...

rest of article

And a video:

Alphabet Soup - A Trip to the Eastern Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Gyre
12 min 49 sec

A Canadian filmmaker travels to the north Pacific Ocean to discover a world of unknown plastic pollution.

For an alternative, find out what the more durable wastes are and ingenious solutions can be found. Note the particular way the recycled products structurally are in sync with many different stages of use and conservation of material throughout this eco-modernization home:

Dennis Weaver's Earthship
27 min 5 sec

"Dennis Weaver, the US retired actor, here builds himself a mansion made almost entirely from....old tyres and dirt. This is eco-modernisation, proving once and for all that eco-friendly design and construction/building does not have to smell or look funny. In fact, it is cheaper, quicker, easier and safer to construct such an 'earthship' than any conventional construction technique! This is eco-rationality in action. Prepare to be amazed."

Several interesting examples:

1. The recycled tires bulge structurally when packed with 300 pounds of packed dirt apiece, and, as if they were really designed for this, they serendipitously lock themselves into place against each other in the tire wall in that way.

2. Use of aluminum cans as filler in other places conserves concrete, making a cheap building matrix just like identical bricks would when stacked. Moreover, the cans' open end

3. serves as an inexpensive support and attachment point for the final adobe layer on the outside--almost as if they were intended for that purpose.

4. The dirt-filled tires in the wall core additionally have a form of coolant when it absorbs more heat from a hot room; and only in the winter, the reverse happens: the lower sun will come through and hit the walls in that season, warm these walls, and serve as a heat storage through the colder nights.

5. Most building materials are entirely free in this house--thus making it possible for building homes for the very poor with these techniques that can have a very modern, clean finish to them when complete.

Or use straw bales, with have some additional benefits of putting in forms of infrastructure quickly like electrical and plumbing. For instance:

Straw Bale Building Methods
5 min 29 sec

"Straw Bale Building is the ultimate in rustic, self-build and ecological building technology. Simple, cheap and effective, straw bale is super-efficient in retaining heat and super-stable thus doing away with the need to build complex supporting frames. The plastering that you can choose means you can make straw bale look rustic or modern depending on your preference!"

1. Doesn't burn either. Harder to burn than regular timber frame due to compaction "like a telephone book", says the video.

Straw Bale Construction DVD from StrawBale.com
3 min 52 sec

The several steps are detailed here (less than four minute summary). A lot of the myths about this are addressed here: Straw Bale Building - Debunking the Myths StrawBale.com. Straw bale homes are three times the fire resistant of a common home, etc. and more. Water isolation and showers discussed here.

4. Metals

(just another building material, though so different in the social creation implications--wastes and toxicities--that it requires its own section; mining, recycling, stream panning) Since most metals are created via very toxic "heat, beat, and treat" processes, this list will additionally highlight particular substitutes that are non-metal for sometimes what were considered very specialized "metal required" uses whether because of the properties of conduction or the properties of strength. Actually, both these issues make metals quite old fashioned solutions to such things. See 'conductors' and 'building materials' sections for more insights.

Or just create metals through 'old fashioned alchemy'--one of the little known effects of cold fusion technologies is its strange, and still theoretically unexplainable generation of different metal atoms where none existed before.

Once 'cold fusion alchemy' is perfected, perhaps any metal could simply be (slowly, atom by atom) made literally from this chemistry based water reaction where the metals were missing before.

Heavy Watergate: The War Against Cold Fusion [part 1 of 5]
10:54 min

6. Soils/Dirt/Hydroponics

Living soil is the basis of food security and thus sustainability. The basis of good, living soil is the mycelium that helps generate the humic acids.

See this short video about the multi-billion year old history of where we got our living soil. The lesson is to learn how living soil is made, long before there were humans, then, we create that process though with ourselves within that process in the commodity ecology arrangements locally designed for specific areas.

The short stunning video demonstrates that mycelium is an excellent base for starting the commodity ecology on a groundwork of living soil because literally mycelium was the later basis for all land base life that depended and grew up from that living soil. Mycelium was the first land dweller that prepared everything chemically for soil formation that other creatures utilized later.

Paul Stamets: 6 ways mushrooms can save the world (17 minutes)
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/258

In the above video, the permaculturist notes that nearby degradative and self-destructive farms burn away the secret that could save their soil. The degradative farms burned off so called 'waste from agriculture' and turned it into easily erodible and easily-lost ash because they were ignorant of what to do with it. For the permaculturist, these so-labeled wastes were a key feature of creating their oasis of desalinated soil in the desert, without adding any water artificially and just working with what they had to create solutions for everything.

This is a longer film about Tasmanian/Australian Bill Mollison, who invented the permaculture term with his 1970s book Permaculture One.

From the following film, Mollison noted by 1989--nearly twenty years ago--there were already over 1,000 working examples of permaculture in the world.

Permaculture (1989 film) [The Life of Bill Mollison]
52 min 33 sec

Details the rise and rise of the "Permaculture Concept" as espoused by Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawton. (Another version of the same here.)

The term 'permaculture' was meant to reflect 'permanent culture' and permanent agriculture,' after noting that all historical societies predictably destroyed themselves with soil destruction and desertification. Societies have been desert creating entities--though is it required? Hardly so. Permaculture is a word originally coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the mid 1970's to describe an "integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man", as a consciously designed landscape which mimics the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an (over!)abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs. People, their buildings and the ways in which they organize themselves and plant species spatially are central to permaculture. Thus the permaculture vision of permanent or sustainable agriculture has always been one of permanent or sustainable culture, or sustainable society.

Bill Mollison as an inventor of the concept of permaculture (with David Holmgren) and Geoff Lawton as founder of the Permaculture Research Institute are names associated with international 'permaculture activism'. All help spread working test plots of permaculture examples around the world.

This is a lecture about permaculture:

Introduction to Permaculture - segment 1
19 min 47 sec
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8298358562571067395

A lecture given by Mary Shalhub-Davis at Sacred Grounds Coffeehouse in Tampa, Florida, on the subject of Permaculture.

The definition she likes is "permaculture is an holistic approach to landscape design and human culture. It is an attempt to integrate several disciplines: biology, ecology, geography, agriculture, architecture, appropriate technology, and community building." Importantly she notes that permaculture can be urban or rural, small or large in land scale. The secret is creating the low-labor cycles where the plants, the animals, and the (potentially modified) landscape, interact in such a way as to provide an overabundance of food without much 'farmer' labor input, if any at all. In the Bill Morrison video he talks of 'abandoned' permaculture plots where its owner had moved away. However, the permaculture kept on producing, creating a veritable garden of Eden without any farmer to watch over it.

Permaculture is: without any synthetic pesticides or herbicides (species interactions achieve this effect for free), has a radical reduction of farmer labor required, has zero tilling, is without additional water requirements, as well as is a form of perennial agriculture (instead of annual plantings), is without a clear planting cycle, and can be integrated (typically) into pre-existing forest ecologies.

(If forests don't exist groups like the Colombian llanos-residing dwellers at Gaviotas (see the book Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World (1999)) solved that difficulty as well by creating a forest-creation cycle from nothing that provided a foreign species fast-growing tree as a trellis for later 'local domestic' forest growth that would take over from the foreign species. They were able to start a process of forest generation in an area that had been desert and eroded soil for thousands of years in the frontier of Colombia. They expanded their community built on an economy of forest creation and profit--leading to expansion of forest lands with expanding human settlement and agriculture from virtual desert conditions.)

This is another example from Australia. People began to be interested in this man, Peter Andrews, and his ideas during a decade-long drought in Australia (that ended slightly in 2008) that revealed ONLY his farm had maintained its greenery. Everyone else around him was desert. He created a soil-creating framework, an oasis of permaculture techniques. He had just as much water or raw materials issues as the rest of neighboring farmers and ranchers. However, only his organization of them was sustainable while others were creating deserts from their forms of organization.

Australian Story - "Land Regeneration"
29 min
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8960194180325234816

Details the use of basic permaculture concepts to change a piece of salted and degraded land into a productive oasis.

Effectively 'learning from Ladakh,' Australian Peter Andrews is applying and reinventing the EXACT water harvesting and soil infiltration techniques as Northern India (15 minutes into it).

Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh
1 hr 0 min 11 sec
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5314168278683386338

Are we facing the prospect of going 'back' to the future? Will the future be more like the past? These kinds of questions need to be raised, and they are with great insight and understanding in this film about the development of Ladakh, in Northern India. A poignant and timely look into the dark face of globalisation, this documentary contrasts the once utopian essentialisms and sustainable practices of the Ladhaki's, with the disastrously destructive modern encroachment and infiltration.... In this gripping and authentic film, both local markets and local identity are undermined and soon everything is exploited.

Here is a forest garden based permaculture started with experiments by Mr. Robert Hart.

Forest Gardening with Robert Hart ... a film by Malcolm Baldwin (1 of 2)
7 min 25 sec
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weGAe9NM0kg

"[A] haven of tranquility and abundance....His vision was to plant a major edible forest which could fulfill a healthy diet in beautiful surroundings. Some thirty years later, this....provides a model of what can be achieved in any backyard...grown in a secession of layers that imitate nature. The natural forest is regarded as having seven stories...the top story as being tall, light-demanding trees, the second story being short shade trees, the third story is the shrub level, the fourth the herbaceous, the fifth plants that spread horizontally, the sixth the rhizome or root layer, and the seventh the vertical level [of] climbers and creepers." He is indebted he says to Toyohiko Kagawa (1888-1960), a Japanese inventor of "3-D" methods of linking soil and conservation with food production (fodder trees to conserve soil, supply food and feed animals).

(2 of 2)

Here is a 'permaculture trio' of three short films in one. Another one about Robert Hart, edible forest gardens, as well as urban permaculture.

PERMACULTURE TRIO: Forest Gardening, Edible Landscaping, Urban Permaculture
48 min 5 sec

[T]hree short (about 15 minutes) documentaries.... 1) Robert Hart's Forest Garden Find out loads about what forest gardening is, and how to make your own.... 2)Edible Landscapes Second is an amazing case study about Rural Permaculture in Britain, showcasing loads of amazing edible plants and aquaculture and flowers, as well as fantastic medicinal plants. Look out for a cure for female infertility that's dropped in here.... 3) Urban Permaculture This is a brilliant and inspiring documentary of permaculture techniques used effectively in an urban back garden. With little more than 2 hours of work a week, this couple produce about a fifth of their food intake....

Another example of a working permaculture in a temperate and high altitude climate. The coldest places in Austria are growing lemons at 3,000 ft and much more: the Kramaterhof alpine farm of Sepp Holzer is an alpine garden of Eden with strategic uses of large rocks for passive heat in the winter in the farm's water system.

Farming With Nature: A Case Study Of Successful Temperate Permaculture;
A visit to the farm of Sepp and Veronika Holzer; The Krameterhof in Lungau, Austria
37 min 10 sec
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=727825431796194016

Permaculture is a design-based approach to practical sustainability, using systems thinking and approaches that combine regenerative ethics with ecological principles to create sustainable environments. Permaculture was developed in the sub-tropics (Australia) and thus there was some debate about how well it could adapt to practiced in Temperate climates. [Like Robert Hart's temperate forest-based permaculture,]...[t]his film dispenses with any such worries. In this documentary, we take a look at a case study of permaculture in the Austrian Alps, which is snowed over for much of the year. Despite this, by using permaculture design and a lifetime's experience, the farm here produces abundant and diverse yields, while attracting interest from people and restaurants far and wide.

Here is greater detail about permaculture in practice.

Permaculture in practice
49 min 42 sec
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7629806485951726891

Permaculture in Britain, interspersed with case studies from all over the country. Packed with inspirational design features and beautiful Permaculture systems.

Here is an permaculture 'eco-subdivision'. It was conceived as an integrated landscape of human and ecological relations with multi-species (plants and animal raising mixed with agriculture/orchard and housing for a full community.

Murrnong - a permaculture subdivision
8 min
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOW-RdCFax0
A permaculture community subdivision based on tree crop agriculture, on the edge of an Australian country town....

If this can be done in arid Australia, it be done virtually anywhere.

As if it's not obvious, I don't care for totalitarian unsustainable police states whether they are Cuban or based in the United States. However, for a LARGER working model of organic, soil-creating agriculture--and political mechanisms that support it instead of destroy it--take a page from the "accidental agricultural revolution" in Cuba after they lost access to subsidized Soviet Block inputs and petrochemicals from 1989:

Cuba: The Accidental Revolution PT-1 and PT-2 (1989 to present in agriculture)
Canadian Broadcasting Company
90 min
(split into in ten minute segments at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdnlcYx6AIE )

Other Secrets of Sustainable Soil Creation

However, another secret of sustainable soil has been recovered from Amazonian archeology. See the below BBC video about this.

The lost urbanized societies in the Brazilian Amazon and the western half of Bolivia are yielding other secrets of soil sustainability, how to create renewable soil with large agricultural techniques, instead of creating a social process that destroys the soil. One key to this process of sustainable soil involves 'char-and-burn' remineralization of the soil instead of 'slash and burn' (meaning remineralization by burning items to white ash).

For remineralization, in a lower-temperature, lower-oxygen char-and-burn of any 'agricultural waste' you create charcoal instead of white ash. Then you mix that charcoal in the soil. Since charcoal is hard to erode and only partially turned to free chemicals, this remineralization by charcoal-in-the-soil facilitates a slow and stable release of minerals into the soil--over centuries. This places minerals durably in the soil instead of with white ash turning these minerals into something erodible and easily-lost.

In the below video, see a working example of this ideal anthropogenic (human-created) 'char-and-burn' form of agriculture that makes a soil-creating agriculture instead of a soil-destroying agriculture. Even after these urban Amazonians are long gone, their anthropogenic soil is still incredibly rich. Learn one of the 'secrets of the 'terra preta'' below: this sustainable char-and-burn mineralization of the soil to move away from the unsustainable slash and burn styles of mineralization. (Some of these videos have been removed though I leave the titles to see so you can find them, as well as because I assume someone will repost these elsewhere. Then I will update the links).

Unravelling Human Creation of Amazonian 'Terra Preta'/Dark Soil (Or, How to Make Permanent, Anthropogenic, Self-Renewing Soil); 7 min.:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kUvgOPAPnA

"This is a short excerpt from a BBC Horizon documentary entitled "The Secret of El Dorado". It recounts how a previously unknown highly populated area of Eastern Bolivian Amazonia extending into the Amazon River Basin gave the area a major urban/agricultural society. It completely disappeared as Europeans arrived. However, it left its 'terra preta'--the dark earth of the Amazon--that is still mined and carried off because it is so beneficial a soil. And it still self-replicates--long after the original human/indigenous creators have died off and their secret lost. We are slowly unraveling how to recreate this perpetual self-renewing soil. Some secrets of it are featured in this short video clip. One secret is slash-and-char instead of slash-and-burn. The charcoal mixed later into the soil creates a slow release of minerals instead of burned ash that is eroded away very quickly. Very smart. See the amazing differences of scale of yields by only varying the addition of charcoal! Watch the longer video below for more detailed information about other aspects of the terra preta."

BBC - Horizon - The Secret of El Dorado
49 min
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2809044795781727003

"New evidence that advanced societies flourished in the Amazon Basin before the arrival of Europeans. It was the most notorious wild-goose chase in history: the Conquistadors' search for El Dorado, a fabulous kingdom of gold that Indians said lay hidden in the jungles of the Amazon Basin. But now, at last, archaeologists have uncovered the truth behind that myth. They have found evidence of a huge society, as advanced as the Egyptians or the Incas, right in the heart of the rainforest. And this is more than the story of a lost world rediscovered. For it seems that the people of the real El Dorado possessed a secret with the power to transform our world and their secret in the soil could be the solution to solving famine in the Third World and other nations [by making local independent and autonomous agricultural sound for poor soil areas--because you can invent the soil out of nothing in a low-tech way!] once and for all."

So, one of the main points is that a long durable human agriculture (permanent culture) would be soil creating instead of soil destroying. Actually at the herbicides/pesticides I go into this as well, so see that link.

Below is something I wrote for the Encyclopedia of Social Problems (2008, pending) on "Erosion." Perhaps I'll add some more of the details that were clipped out of the accepted draft. It helps you understand the generalizable biochemical processes involved in good soils.

Erosion

Erosion can refer confusingly to effects of human and natural processes, and human-natural interactive processes, the latter serving here as the focus in discussing soil erosion and biodiversity loss, particularly as a result of surface water runoffs in both urban and rural environments.

When humans disrupt soil creation processes habitat fragmentation, habitat destruction, and general ecological unraveling begins in that soil gradient's plant and animal life specific to it. Worldwide, the majority of biologists blame anthropogenic soil erosion and biodiversity loss for the current sixth major mass extinction event in the history of planet Earth. This is the first anthropogenic mass extinction event, and it is far more rapid than any of the “Big Five” in past geologic times.

Natural Erosion and Soil Creation

In different soil gradients, a specific slow, organic and inorganic physical process of natural soil creation occurs that involves beneficial erosion. This process jockeys increasingly with a faster, human soil erosion and sheet runoff that kills plant and animal life within a soil gradient—carrying the slowly formed soil away. Thus, anthropogenic soil erosion and associated biodiversity loss start in the alteration of this balance in the creation or destruction of soil and in how humans affect water dynamics.

Understanding soil creation chemically and physically is necessary if one wishes to understand and arrest the process of soil destruction. Soil creation results from a mixture of decayed organic and inorganic matter relationships which create an all important macro-molecular chelate arrangement of humic acids. Humic acids are a major component required for making humic substances, created via microbial degradation of once living matter. A large amount of humic molecules are hydrophobic, meaning they innately allow in the presence of water, clumping into `water avoiding' supramolecular nodes.

Only the acidic component of humic substances, mainly carboxylic acid, gives soil a capacity for chelation, a capacity to ‘store’ inorganic minerals as ions without them having a strong chemical bond with anything else. Chelated inorganic ions are both more readily bioavailable for plants or are sequestered away from them if they are poisons. Thus one of the most important properties of humic acid is this chelation ability to solubilize many ions into hydrophobic cations (water avoiding, chemically positive ions). For bioavailability chelation, ions like magnesium, calcium, and iron are made available for plant absorption. For sequestering chelation, humic acid holds apart as ions many elements that otherwise would form toxic molecular salts to poison the soil without positive biological effect (like cadmium and lead). For instance, sodium and chlorine ions naturally want to combine to form a salt. Instead, in good fertile soil they are attached as separate ions to humic acids and clay—rendered harmless by chelation. Thus, many good soils contain large quantities of safely chelated “salt,'' held apart in ionic form from precipitating out in this way. Plant growth thrives in such “theoretically saline'' soils, in many cases. In short, humic acid chelation capacities have an important dual role for living systems: making biological uptake of nutrients possible as well as sequestration of poisons. Chemistry of varied humic acids has a profound influence on chelation capacities as well.

On the contrary, human soil erosion processes chemically have in common destruction of the humic acid creation process. This causes [1] loss of chelation capacity and [2] loss of water permeability and loss of soil infiltration capacities as a consequence. For agriculture, the latter can lead to [3] forced excessive watering, and in turn, a raised pH. Water as slightly alkaline (chemically positive) as well as dilutive would demote the slightly acidic (chemically negative) environment that encourages humic acid creation and would thus demote chelation action further. Such watering as a consequence can lead to [4] artificially raised water tables that can bring in external salts to precipitate from below, creating a hardpan and encouraging soil erosion of the drier soil above it. These four interactive soil destruction factors cause increased salt precipitation in chelated soil. This encourages a chemical and physical change toward poorer soil and less water-absorbent soil in both urban and rural areas. This primes the conditions that cause soil erosion whether by sheet water runoff or wind.

Erosion: Just Add Water or Wind

Poor land/soil uses like deforestation, overgrazing, styles of chemical and physical agriculture (tilling), unmanaged construction activity, and urban impermeable surfaces demote humic acid formation. This leads to erosion because less humic acid means less hydroscopic soils, resulting in an innately dry soil—regardless of climate. Human-created poor soils facilitate ongoing natural water erosion and wind erosion above rates of natural soil formation. In heavily eroding water conditions, it is not water alone that erodes, but also suspended loads of abrasive particles of poor loose soil, pebbles, and boulders which expand the power of erosion as they traverse and scrape soil surfaces. Waterborne soil erosion in these conditions is additionally a function of water speed and suspended particle dynamics.

Wind erosion occurs in areas with little or no vegetation, often in areas without sufficient rainfall. However, the common factor of a less humic acidic hydroscopic soil facilitates wind erosion regardless of climate. One example is the long-term shifting dunes in beaches or deserts, which advance to bury any plant life even when underground sources of water may be sufficient. Huge areas of western China are experiencing expanding desertification and wind based erosion, whipped into incredible dust storms caused by mostly anthropogenic climate change. Both water and wind erosion cause further biodiversity loss from receiving water sedimentation and ecosystem damage (including fish kills).

Anthropogenic soil erosion and biodiversity loss expand from edge effects, the ecological juxtaposition between contrasting environments. The term identifies boundaries of natural habitats and disturbances by poor land use choices. When an edge is created to a natural ecosystem and the area outside is a disturbed system, even the natural ecosystem fragment is affected for great distances inward from the edge. This edge effect area is called the external habitat and has a different microclimate than the residual interior habitat. This partially compromised external habitat starts a feedback loop process, leading to further soil erosion and microclimate change unraveling and exposing more interior habitat to further habitat destruction. For example, Amazonian areas altered by edge effects exceed the area actually cleared, and fires are more prevalent in the external habitat area as humidity drops and temperature and wind levels rise. Increased natural fire frequency from the 1990s in the Amazon, Indonesia, and the Philippines is an edge effect.
In such contexts, an ecosystem unravels toward a simpler ‘emergy’ state (embedded or sequestered biomass energy). Intrusive exotic species are part of this, further causing biodiversity loss to levels of lower complexity. Exotics are hardly to blame. The blame is human soil erosive processes that create edge effects and biodiversity loss which exotics opportunistically utilize.

Shifting Blame and Shifting Cultivation

The blame for much of the world’s soil and biodiversity erosion usually focuses on the poor—the slash and burn cultivators of mostly the Developing World. However, transnational corporate Developed World logging around the world with Developed World directed mining, export-driven grazing of cattle and plantation agriculture linked to a war economy demoting political expression of local ecological self-interest. This combines as the major blame for soil and biodiversity loss, as well as the major factor keeping such degradation in place. In short, current faulty and unsustainable Developed World models and associated warfare are the larger origin of soil erosion, defoliation, and biodiversity destruction. Another example of misplaced priorities of exclusive blame (though proper concern) on peasant slash and burn for erosion is its false magnification by politicized Developed World research institutions. Despite the largest blame for soil erosion and biodiversity loss coming from Developed World developmental models, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) assessed shifting cultivation of the last independent natives to be the main cause of deforestation—ignoring more invasive and destructive unsustainable Developed World logging. The apparent discrimination and policy focus against independent shifting cultivators (whom the FAO recommend be forced to work on export economy rubber plantations) caused a confrontation between FAO and environmental groups who saw FAO supporting unsustainable commercial logging and plantation interests against local rights of indigenous people to be independent economically.

The lesson here is that the infrastructural and cultural adherence of more than 3-4 billion people (at least ambivalently) supportive of Developed World political economic models and commodity choices are far more dangerous to soil erosion and biological diversity than the estimated mere 250 million people subsisting on slash and burn. Instead of nomadic slash and burn sustenance-minded shifting cultivation villages, it is the expansion of permanent agricultural monocropping techniques particularly in export frameworks of high herbicide/pesticide commodities, mining pollution, transnational corporate logging, and tree plantations that has led to more soil erosion and biodiversity loss. Massive export-oriented sheep and cattle herding, for instance, led to soil erosion and biodiversity loss in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the Amazon. In less than 150 years in Australia, export-oriented monocrop agriculture in New South Wales led to clearing 90 percent of native vegetation. The same chosen agricultural strategy and chosen commodities removed 99 percent of Tallgrass prairie in North America in the same period, leading to extreme habitat fragmentation and massive suspended loads (sediment) flowing down the Mississippi River. In the past fifty years, erosion is affecting even oceans, with over sixty massive ‘dead zones’ of deoxygenated ocean water appearing off the littorals of the Developed world.

In short, organizing developmental paradigms of more locally attenuated human-environmental commodity relationships to maintain local natural soil gradient formation processes and to maintain soil infiltration are two generalized goals common to addressing soil erosion and biodiversity loss. There are already many land use techniques developed in urban and rural areas to allow for quick sedimentation and slowing water speed. Wider goals are to demote contexts that allow suspended loads or soil destruction in the first place—by altering agricultural and construction practices to mitigate against loosened soil or heavy watering. There are frameworks of urban water handling and agricultural water and soil handling already developed to allow for more water infiltration, less (sometimes zero) soil tilling, and elimination of chemical pesticides and herbicides.

Integrating ecological relationships into urban infrastructural relations and making rural extraction sustainable by encouraging soil-creating human activities instead of soil destruction are both crucial. This seems to be the only route to demote massive soil erosion and biodiversity loss that follow soil gradients. Comparatively historically, soil and biodiversity survive with human societies, or all will fall together.

Mark D. Whitaker
See also

Environment: Runoff and Eutrophication, Sewage Disposal; Environmental, Degradation, Movement; Water: Organization, Quality, Supply.

Further Readings and References

Ascher, William. 1999. Why Governments Waste Natural Resources: Policy Failures in Developing Countries. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins Press.

Diamond, Jared. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Viking.

Hillel, Daniel. 1991. Out of the Earth: Civilization and the Life of the Soil. New York: The Free Press.

Ponting, Clive. 1992. A Green History of the World the Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Potter, Christopher S., and Joel I. Cohen. 1993. Perspectives on Biodiversity: Case Studies of Genetic Resource Conservation and Development. Washington, D.C.: AAAS Press.

Pye-Smith, Charlie. 2002. The Subsidy Scandal: How Your Government Wastes Your Money to Wreck Your Environment. London Sterling, VA: Earthscan.

Quammen, David. 1997. The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. Scribner.

Steensberg, Axel. 1993. Fire-Clearance Husbandry: Traditional Techniques Throughout the World. The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters’ Commission for Research on the History of Agricultural Implements and Field Structures. Herning: Poul Kristensen.

Books on Permaculture:

Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements by Mollison and Holmgren (Paperback - 1990)

Permaculture Two by Mollison (Paperback - Jun 1979)

PERMACULTURE: A Designers' Manual by Bill Mollison and Reny Mia Slay (Hardcover - Oct 1, 1997)

The Permaculture Way: Practical Steps To Create A Self-Sustaining World (Practical Steps) by Graham Bell, Bill Mollison, David Bellamy, and Brick (Paperback - Mar 30, 2005)

Permaculture Magazine by Permanent Publications - Magazine Subscription - 4 issues / 12 months

Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability by David Holmgren (Paperback - Dec 2002)

How to Make a Forest Garden by Patrick Whitefield (Paperback - Jun 22, 2002)

Or contact the Permaculture Research Institute, founded by Geoff Lawton.

In comments below are strategies of zeolite, soil remineralization from mining tailings, and other material inputs utilized to make soil sustainability.

5. Garbage/Garbage disposal

(compost, wastewater treatment (graywater, other kinds of waste water), ruminant foraging, etc.)

Get rid of garbage the old fashioned way. Very old. About 3 billion years old. Turn it to mycelium and then watch everything grow sustainable from the novel pristine base. Like the runners of mycelium, the use of mycelium for garbage removal has many 'organic factory' aspects for other connects to the commodity ecology of a local area.

Ideally, this entire category of garbage would disappear when commodity ecology was working properly in smooth pass-offs from one area to another--without wastes or iteratively mounting ecological damages in the locations where humans live, grow things, mine, or whatever.

The below video however is a brilliant cross-over example mixing several consumptive use categories at once: waste remediation, energy generation, and water purification all in one! The application is mentioned near the close of the video though the whole video is interesting. Imagine a 'wastewater treatment plant' that was the local energy plant as well. This does it.

Given that human waste streams like fecal coliform pollution will always exist, some form of remediation will likely always be there. This one is modular, localizable to a watershed, and thus an ingenious application of sustainable technology. It makes use of an energy technology's by-product effects (clean water and energy) to conduct waste water treatment. Talk about solving many issues at once!

Oxy Hydrogen Process (Water Fuel Cell)
8:25 min

Another major idea that has localization capacities for garbage 'REmoval' (stress on 're' and moving) is mycelium. Mycelium is an excellent base for starting the commodity ecology, because literally it was the basis for all land base life: the first land dwellers that prepared everything chemically for soil formation that other creatures that was utilized as the base of life. See this short stunning video, below. Just put in some local mycelium at a garbage dump, and you have a novel factory floor for later commodity ecology. Then take the water and purify it with the oxyhydration process, creating energy as a byproduct.

Paul Stamets: 6 ways mushrooms can save the world (17 minutes)
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/258

7. Drugs/Medicines

(different forms of medicine; are you given options or are you forced to consume certain medicines by those who have limited your choices and even hidden and outlawed cheap and effective remedies?)

I recommend this film for those interested in health freedom choice and the ongoing repressive politics against free nutritional therapies in the United States and in many cases, worldwide.

G. Edward Griffin - A World Without Cancer - The Story Of Vitamin B17
55 min - Apr 7, 2006

"G. Edward Griffin marshals the evidence that cancer is a deficiency disease--like scurvy or pellagra--aggravated by the lack of an essential food compound in modern man's diet. That substance is vitamin B17. In its purified form developed for cancer therapy, it is known as Laetrile. This story is not approved by orthodox medicine. The FDA, the AMA, and The American Cancer Society have labeled it fraud and quackery. Yet the evidence is clear that here, at last, is the final answer to the cancer riddle. Why has orthodox medicine waged war against this non-drug approach? The author contends that the answer is to be found, not in science, but in politics--and is based upon the hidden economic and power agenda of those who dominate the medical establishment.

With billions of dollars spent each year on research, with other billions taken in on the sale of cancer-related drugs, and with fund-raising at an all-time high, there are now more people making a living from cancer than dying from it. If the solution should be found in a simple vitamin, this gigantic industry could be wiped out over night. The result is that the politics of cancer therapy is more complicated than the science."

I additionally recommend investigative journalist Phillip Day's book on nutritional health research. Most of this information has been hidden by self-interested medical establishments because cheap treatments of many things are well known, though they have been hidden from the public. See the book Health Wars.

And mycelium is a far more efficient and effective form of (free, unpatentable) form of medicine. It has several billion years of field testing, so it works on mycelium as well as us--because both humans and mycelium have an uncanny similarity biologically for what keeps us alive and healthy. Therefore, free, unpatentable mycelium abstracts can make a true revolution against the synthetic, deadly, hyper-expensive treatments. Note Paul Stamets research showing that mycelium is hundreds of times more effective than any synthetic drug on the market.

Mycelium is an excellent base for starting the commodity ecology, because literally it was the basis for all land base life: the first land dwellers that prepared everything chemically for soil formation and self-medicine against bacteria and other viral pests. See this short stunning video, below.

Paul Stamets: 6 ways mushrooms can save the world (17 minutes)
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/258

Other examples of electromedicine/frequency medicine are Dr. Peter Guy Manners' Cymatic Instrument (based on audio frequencies instead of electrical frequencies), or a Chinese Qigong infrasound machine utilized in China, based on infrasound 'taped' from Qigong masters and played back 'at' hospital patients for healing. This enters an area that is quite interdiciplinary and based on knowing about the bioelectric and bio-audial frameworks of DNA activation and biofrequency conditions of health in the human body and reachiving it through sympathetically inducing in the body enough of a frequency effect to allow the body to heal itself naturally.

However, when other 'natural' additions or techniques are irreversible or inequitably available as commodities we are off into a 'brave new world' of ethical dangers. For instance, if bodily regeneration is only available for the rich in the future, it would create a class-based hive society. The future is here and it requires an equitably available preventative medicine based regime.

Alan Russell on regenerating our bodies
19:37 min.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/142

Aubrey de Grey says we can avoid aging
23:31 min.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/39

Such are the promise and perils of this category of human commodities of medicines: will medicine maintain equality among humans or only become another form of inequality being reified biologically, with different life chances based on access to these regenerative medical ideas? Will we be repressively limited access to free nutritional therapies by international corporations that don't like the competition with their expensive products? This is how the Codex Alimentarius from the WTO is attemping to outlaw nutrituional therapies by 2009. You should watch this: see a nutritionist's videotaped talk concerning GLOBAL threats to our health and medical freedom due to the WTO's repressive Codex Alimentarius that would outlaw many free nutritional therapies to benefit the international pharmaceutial manufacturer sales, at this link.

Only if medicine is [1] entirely opt-in/opt-out, [2] reversible without harm, and [3] equally available would seem to be three critical caveats that avoid any unknown feedback effects associated with the famous phrase "you know, it was a great idea, er, at the time, until..."

8. Infant food

10. Vegetable based food

[1] Check out the films at BioregionalStateTV for other agricultural solutions for sustainability. Click on 'more from user' for the rest.

[2] Additionally see the category "6. Soils/Dirt/Hydroponics" for how to remove the urban and rural metabolic breaks in nutrient flows with city-to-farm composting and other ingenious ways to stop such separation of human consumption from production.

[3] In the name of maintaining biodiversity, the Slow Food Movement of institutionalizing biodiversity and varietals is a far more long term and far more sound model for health, ecology, and economy--than industrial pesticide/herbicide laden agriculture.

"The Slow Food movement was created to combat fast food and claims to preserve the cultural cuisine and the associated food plants and seeds, domestic animals, and farming within an ecoregion. It was the first established part of the broader Slow movement. The Slow Food movement was founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy as a resistance movement to fast food. It has since expanded globally to 100 countries and now has 83,000 members."

As if it's not obvious, I don't care for totalitarian unsustainable police states whether they are Cuban or based in the United States. However, for a working model of organic, slow-food, pro-biodiversity agriculture and political mechanisms that support it instead of destroy it, take a page from the "accidental agricultural revolution" in Cuba after they lost access to subsidized Soviet Block inputs from 1989:

Cuba: The Accidental Revolution PT-1 (1989 to present in agriculture)
Canadian Broadcasting Company
46 min
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=5350731284170267256

"Cuba: The Accidental Revolution are two one-hour documentaries celebrating the country’s success in providing for itself in the face of a massive economic crisis, and how it’s latest revolutions, an agricultural revolution and a revolution in science and medicine are having repercussions around the world. Cuba: The Accidental Revolution (Part 1), airing Sunday, July 30 at 7 P.M. on CBC Television, examines Cuba's response to the food crisis created by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989. At one time Cuba's agrarian culture was as conventional [and unsustainable and polluting] as the rest of the world. It experienced its first "Green [Industrial Agricultural and Toxic] Revolution" when Russia was supplying Cuba with chemical and mechanical "inputs." However, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 ended all of that, and almost overnight threw Cuba's whole economic system into crisis. Factories closed, food supplies plummeted. Within a year the country had lost over 80% of its foreign trade. With the loss of their export markets and the foreign exchange to pay for imports, Cuba was unable to feed its population and the country was thrown into a crisis. The average daily caloric intake of Cubans dropped by a third. Without fertilizer and pesticides, Cubans turned to organic methods. Without fuel and machinery parts, Cubans turned to oxen. Without fuel to transport food, Cubans started to grow food in the cities where it is consumed. Urban gardens were established in vacant lots, school playgrounds, patios and back yards [and the state allowed these to be private profit-driven cooperatives, as well as allowed urban farmers to use unused public land in usufruct]. As a result Cuba created the largest program in sustainable agriculture ever undertaken. By 1999 Cuba’s agricultural production had recovered and in some cases reached historic levels [thus in other words it was more productive as organic than as industrial/pesticide/herbicide based]."

Cuba: The Accidental Revolution PT-2 (1989 to present in agriculture)
Canadian Broadasting Company
46 min.
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-3045843288423571289

"In Cuba: The Accidental Revolution (Part 2), airing Sunday, August 6 at 7 P.M. on CBC Television, we learn that the country has been blockaded since 1961, but today Cuba has the highest quality of life in the region, the highest life expectancy, and one of the highest literacy rates in all of Latin America. With the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, Cuba lost the foreign exchange needed to pay for expensive drugs and medicines. As a result, much of Cuba’s medicine today is based on medicinal plants. These are grown on farms, processed in small labs and made available to patients through an extensive network of medical clinics. Today Cuba’s advances in alternative medicine could have important consequences for other countries around the world. Cuba boasts other firsts as well: The Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana is regarded as the flagship biosciences lab in the developing world. Cuban scientists are working on an HIV vaccine, a meningitis vaccine, a Hepatitis C vaccine, and other pharmaceuticals. Cuba has also embarked on a program of medical internationalism. There are 25,000 Cuba doctors serving in 68 poor countries around the world. The Latin American School of Medical Science has 10,000 students from developing countries primarily in Latin America and the Caribbean. They are educated for free with the understanding they will return to their home countries to practice. Fidel Castro has survived many perils and at 78, he is rumoured to suffer from a number of afflictions. As his health declines the world wonders: what will become of Cuba's Green [Biodiversity] Revolution after he is gone? Even now Castro presides over a political system, which although socialist, has an economy where bartering and quasi-entrepreneurial practice seemingly influence many trades and professions, including the "green" sector...."

Totalitarianism has nothing to do with sustainability. It only perpetuates the forms of power and developmental inequalities that lead to environmental degradation. Lots of very ingenious agricultural/foddering relationships and medical regimes based on choice (shock!) of treatments have sprung up in Cuba because its totalitarianism was weakened in some sectors of the economy. It's worth knowing a different model of organizing agricultural and medial reality is not only possible, it is better. The political sector is still totalitarian in Cuba though the economic issues since 1989 have gone through some interesting forms of ecological rationality and ecological localization that go against state management and previous state encouragement of environmental degradation toward state encouragement to maintain biodiversity and locality instead.

Since in the bioregional state local jurisdictional autonomy on economic developmental path decisions is the primary jurisdiction, decisions like this along the model of 'does it fit where we live?' will be instrumental for setting commodity ecology policy in a watershed. This is seen in the many county level governments and states that have institutionalized higher local levels of human health and ecological health protection concerning commodities than federal baselines of the U.S. It is additionally seen in the 'accidental biodiversity localization revolution' in Cuba since 1989.

Thus, decisions on all commodities will be up to particular local watersheds, a model of state more akin to modeling biodiversity and ecological variegation as the purpose of the state to protect and maintain, instead of destroy. However, this fails to mean that large scale baseline standards laws (or laws to outlaw) certain commodity uses and merely supply-side uses will disappear from larger jurisdictions. These will only be baselines of human health, ecological, and economic sustainability local protection though, in all cases, instead of attempts to make multiple local areas suffer under larger federal 'glass ceilings laws' attempting to stop local health, ecological, and economic protection from going higher, when the public in that area wants it.

In this movement toward material sustainability, I can think of nothing more appropriate than [1] to demote supply-side biased agricultural monocropping and its recent budded-off twin, [2] to demote supply-side biased cloned animal strategies. Both have always been short term evil twins against local long term ecological, health, and economic durability. They are evil twins organizationally speaking because they are interwoven in massive pollution/externality streams connected via monocropping feedstocks for such 'animal monocropping.'

In this category of 'vegetable based food, the Slow Food Movement encouraging local varietal use and maintenance is far more important to institute with commodity ecology interactions.

Seven Arguments Against Industrialized Agriculture

Arguments against agricultural monocropping are very numerous and interrelated to health, biodiversity/ecological, and economic sustainability issues:

[1] Organic actually has equal or higher output than industrialized agriculture.

[2] The industrialized agricultural food is incredibly denutrified and denatured--leading to wider ill health.

[3] The social practices of creating industrialized food is self-defeating. It is connected to soil erosion and humus demotion.

DENUTRIFIED FOOD AND INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE

Recently, it has been noted that Americans are shrinking--as junk food and denutrified food takes its toll.

"Poverty and poor diet mean the average US man is getting smaller, while Europeans keep growing taller
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1185457,00.html

Researchers have made a startling discovery: Americans are shrinking. A nation once famed for its strapping, well-nourished youth is gradually diminishing in physical stature."

Of course, it's only Americans as the rest of the world continues to grow & grow.

As early as the 1920s and 1930s, damage to the soil was noticed, and its effects on vitamin content in the food were noticed. From Ausubel's book Seeds of Change:

"During the period of the 1920s and 1920s, several U.S. scientists noted that food quality, along with animal and human health, declined when the synthetic NPK trinity of nitrogen/phosphorus/potassium was substituted for organic manures and compost. So striking were these findings that the scientists and over four hundred medical doctors in England published a statement by the esteemed British medical journal The Lancet calling for a revolution within medicine. They argued for a greater emphasis on preventive medicine with a balanced fertile soil as the foundation of a healthy diet.

It was further noted that organic seeds actually did much better than chemically treated seeds, despite the propaganda otherwise:

"In the 1920s, the nutritionist Sir Robert McCarrison experimented with cultivating seeds organically and chemically [for a comparison of outcome effects on each]. His tests showed that the seed from a manure-grown crop was superior in its germination rate to other seeds [chemically grown]. The longer the manure had been composted, the more impressive was this biological effect....This experiment is one of the only ones ever conducted on organic seeds. This oversight is more surprising considering the primary importance of the superiority of organically grown foods...[p. 130-1]"

And there were even Congressional testimonies given.

The below is a verbatim unabridged extract from the 74th Congress 2nd Session: Senate Document 264, in 1936, showing they were aware that "modern" agricultural positional choices of herbicides/pesticides are really regressive politically since it is increasingly destroying the consumer instead of serving them. Minerals were being leached out of the food. However, still nothing is being done, belying that suppliers are really looking out for us at all--including looking out for themselves:

"Our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon minerals we take into our systems than upon calories or vitamins, or upon precise proportions of starch, protein or carbohydrates we consume."

"Do you know that most of us today are suffering from certain dangerous diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until depleted soils from which our food comes are brought into proper mineral balance?"

"The alarming fact is that foods (fruits, vegetables and grains) now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals are starving us - no matter how much of them we eat. No man of today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his system with the minerals he requires for perfect health because his stomach isn't big enough to hold them."

"The truth is that our foods vary enormously in value, and some of them aren't worth eating as food...Our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon the minerals we take into our systems than upon calories or vitamins or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein or carbohydrates we consume."

"This talk about minerals is novel and quite startling. In fact, a realization of the importance of minerals in food is so new that the text books on nutritional dietetics contain very little about it. Nevertheless, it is something that concerns all of us, and the further we delve into it the more startling it becomes."

"You'd think, wouldn't you, that a carrot is a carrot - that one is about as good as another as far as nourishment is concerned? But it isn't; one carrot may look and taste like another and yet be lacking in the particular mineral element which our system requires and which carrots are supposed to contain."

"Laboratory test prove that the fruits, the vegetables, the grains, the eggs, and even the milk and the meats of today are not what they were a few generations ago (which doubtless explains why our forefathers thrived on a selection of foods that would starve us!)"

"No man today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his stomach with the mineral salts he requires for perfect health, because his stomach isn't big enough to hold them! And we are turning into big stomachs."

"No longer does a balanced and fully nourishing diet consist merely of so many calories or certain vitamins or fixed proportion of starches, proteins and carbohydrates. We know that our diets must contain in addition something like a score of minerals salts."

"It is bad news to learn from our leading authorities that 99% of the American people are deficient in these minerals, and that a marked deficiency in any one of the more important minerals actually results in disease. Any upset of the balance, any considerable lack or one or another element, however microscopic the body requirement may be, and we sicken, suffer, shorten our lives."

"We know that vitamins are complex chemical substances which are indispensable to nutrition, and that each of them is of importance for normal function of some special structure in the body. Disorder and disease result from any vitamin deficiency. It is not commonly realized, however, that vitamins control the body's appropriation of minerals, and in the absence of minerals they have no function to perform. Lacking vitamins, the system can make some use of minerals, but lacking minerals, vitamins are useless."

"Certainly our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon the minerals we take into our systems than upon calories of vitamins or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein of carbohydrates we consume."

"This discovery is one of the latest and most important contributions of science to the problem of human health."

Senate Document No. 264, 1936. [[http://www.mich.com/~vit/gvt.html]]

[4] The power relations in agricultural food becomes a form of risk enforcement and forced 'foddering' of humans without their say in the matter if it is industrialized--along with the demotion of other options for health as

[5] Industrialized agriculture demotes biodiversity.

[6] It encourages by #5, more systemic ecological situations where pesticides/herbicides are unable to handle pests that only grow because of the ecological monocrop scale. If scale was smaller, pests would go down as a consequence as well.

While food becomes more denutrified with industrialized agriculture and all its externalities, the medical lobby wants to seriously demote vitamins even though it is known that many people are 'fed though malnourished' from their food. Vitamins and nutritious food are cheap solutions to health of a people and the ecology involved. However, such healthful practices interferes with profit margins of people who only get paid when you are in ill health, so the medical industry has a concern to maintain ill health instead of actively promote health. What else can be said except to note their desire--supposedly by 2009--to force the Codex Alimentarius (a U.N./WTO amalgam) to attempt to outlaw certain vitamin supplements? It's already recently implemented in Europe as of two years ago.

This following 2003 article excerpt, from the UK Alliance for Natural Health, an organization mounting a legal challenge to the Food Supplements Directive, was before Britain was roped into the same framework. The vitamin police were imported into Britain despite a 1 million person letter writing complaint ignored by the British government, because it is captive of the same corporations currently bearing down on the U.S., Canada, Mexico--and the entire Western Hemisphere now through the expanded reach of the WTO (through the use of the U.N.'s) Codex that makes the EU frameworks internationalized by 2009:

"ON 3rd JULY 2003, the European Food Supplements Directive was passed into English Law, which will, over the next few years, effectively ban around 5000 discrete products currently legal to sell in health food shops and pharmacies. This Directive has been devised and pushed forward by the unelected EU bureaucrats in order to "harmonize" the selling of health supplements throughout the EU, and was railroaded through the British Parliament by the Blair Government despite being rejected by the House of Lords. The way that the Government passed it was outrageous: just before the vote by the Standing Committee in the House of Commons, five Labour MPs who were going to vote against it were replaced by more obedient MPs. Even then, this directive was only passed by 8 votes to 6!

"So it seems that the European Parliament and the present UK Government are determined to pass the Food Supplements Directive despite the will of the people and even of MPs themselves. Why? Because it is the will of the EU Parliament which is very strongly influenced by the massive pharmaceutical companies in Europe. They are the only ones that will financially gain from the destruction of the health supplement industry. After all, people who take responsibility for their own health by taking supplements need less drugs because they are healthier.

"It is ironic that the Malnutrition Advisory Group has recently released a report showing that about 2 million people in the UK(!), including 60% of hospital patients, are not getting adequate nutrition and they admit that this is severally affecting their health and ability to heal. Of course, they don't mention supplements because they are still under the false and dangerous impression that this fictitious thing called a "well-balanced diet" exists that can adequately supply all the nutrients that the body needs. Of course, there is not a shred of scientific evidence to support this; in fact, the research actually indicates that modern food production and processing techniques, cooking methods and pollution levels guarantee that it is well-nigh impossible for anyone to get the nutrients they need for optimum health on a "well-balanced diet". (And if you can't get optimum nutrition using ingredients from the supermarket, how on earth are you going to find it in a disgusting NHS hospital slop canteen!) Given this terrible state of modern nutrition, it is astonishing that our governments are trying to move legislation towards a vastly reduced availability of nutritional supplements. What is going on?

"Many of us have been protesting about these proposals for the past five years, writing letters to our MPs and MEPs, signing million signature petitions and even marching on Parliament here in London. Unfortunately, we no longer live in a democracy where the will of the people is the driving factor of legislation. The EU Parliament is not interested in personal freedom, or even personal health… only control and more control. And they have tried to justify this assault on our rights to take supplements on the grounds of our safety, even though health supplements have a safety record second to none — see LaLeva's Safety of Dietary Supplements and Comparative Safety Graph. And given their incredible safety, it is rather odd that the tabloid newspapers have been running sensational headlines over the past few years on the dangers of nutritional supplements. (I wonder who is behind those media campaigns?)

"Already, the supplement market in Germany and Norway are severely controlled, and it is illegal, for example, to buy Vitamin C over 200mg in strength because it is considered by Brussels to be unnecessary, although of course, it is very necessary for the population to continue to buy cigarettes and alcohol as they are very healthy for governments' bank accounts. I have just heard (10/3/04) from a very reliable source that a woman has been arrested in France for selling 500mg tablets of Vitamin C because in that country doses of that strength are now considered medicinal! (There is absolutely no safety issue with Vitamin C and you can freely buy 1000mg tablets here in the UK and US at the moment… I take 3 a day.) Soon, these sorts of controls will be pan-European, and you will only be able to buy from a small and bland list of ineffective, inorganic supplements and in doses that the EU diktat considers appropriate. Many innovative products and companies will simply disappear, and it will become much harder for each of us to take responsibility for our health."

More on this issue at a previous post.

So the WTO's Codex would 'harmonize' disharmoniously with current U.S., Canadian, and many other countries in the Western Hemisphere's more locally representative laws that benefit the consumer health freedom access to vitamins and minerals--forcing all countries internationally involved in the WTO to remove their pro-consumer and health freedom access legislation, like the EU. [[http://energygrid.com/health/2003/07ap-supban2.html]]

All of this consumptive consolidation and externalities are integrated into enforcement of industrial agriculture.

[7] Consolidated industrial models of agriculture impoverish farmers and make small scale land tenures less durable which are required for sustainability and institutionalizing biodiversity.

For instance, the huge opposition to "Terminator taxes" on simple seeds amongst the global farming population is another sign that industrialized agriculture is coming up against serious opposition for its extension.

Terminator Seed Rejected In UN Meeting In Brazil!

From Multiple Sources
3-25-2006

Just an hour ago here in Brazil, the Chair of the UN meeting announced that governments have agreed to reject language that would have undermined the moratorium on Terminator.

Groups, communities and individuals across the world have joined together in this fight to ban Terminator and your action has been effective in this important first step.

The Ban Terminator Campaign will continued to monitor the meetings today and next week.

Terminator rejection - a victory for the people

A broad coalition of peasant farmers, indigenous peoples and civil society today celebrate the firm rejection of efforts to undermine the global moratorium on Terminator technologies - genetically engineered sterile seeds - at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Curitiba, Brazil.

"This is a momentous day for the 1.4 billion poor people world wide, who depend on farmer saved seeds," said Francisca Rodriguez of Via Campesina a world wide movement of peasant farmers, "Terminator seeds are a weapon of mass destruction and an assault on our food sovereignty. Terminator directly threatens our life, our culture and our identity as indigenous peoples", said Viviana Figueroa of the Ocumazo indigenous community in Argentina on behalf of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity.

"Todays' decision is a huge step forward for the Brazilian Campaign against GMOs," said Maria Rita Reis from the Brazilian Forum of Social movements and NGOs, "This reaffirms Brazils' existing ban on Terminator. It sends a clear message to the national government and congress that the world supports a ban on Terminator."

"Common sense has prevailed--lifting the Moratorium on the Terminator seeds would have been suicidal literally," said Greenpeace International's Benedikt Haerlin from the Convention meeting. "This is a genuine victory for civil society around the world - it will go a long way to ensuring that biodiversity, food security and the livelihoods of millions of farmers around the world are protected."

Terminators, or GURTS (Genetic Use Restriction Technologies), are a class of genetic engineering technologies which allow companies to introduce seeds whose sterile offspring cannot reproduce, preventing farmers from re-planting seeds from their harvest. The seeds could also be used to introduce specific traits which would only be triggered by the application of proprietary chemicals by the same companies.

At the CBD, Australia, Canada and New Zealand along with the US government (not a party to the CBD) and a number of biotech companies were leading attempts to open the door to field testing of Terminator seeds by insisting on 'case by case' assessment of such technologies.

This [Anglo-American corporate] text was unanimously rejected today in the CBD's working group dealing with the issue.

It still needs to be formally adopted by the plenary of the CBD.

Despite today's victory, there is no doubt that the multinational biotech industry will continue to push sterile seed technology.

'Terminator' will rear its ugly head at the next UN CBD meeting in 2008.

The only solution a total ban on the technology once and for all," concluded Pat Mooney of the Ban Terminator Campaign. Now all national governments must enact national bans on Terminator as Brazil and India have done.

---
http://www.rense.com/general70/term.htm

And more from the author of Seeds of Deception, an hour-long talk by the author about his book on GM-crops:

The REAL Reasons You Want to
Avoid Genetically Modified Foods
(Jeffrey Smith, on his book Seeds of Deception)
59 min 57 sec

Conclusion

In general, the added risks and lack of similarity in industrial food versus more sustainably produced and nutritious food is anti-consumer, anti-farmer, anti-soil, and anti-sustainability on every level. There are many other forms of agriculture that have been developed, for instance perennial polyculture, or 'no till' agriculture, or forest multi-story polyculture.

As mentioned in the Commodity Ecology title page, institutions on the watershed level (CDIs and commodity ecology) help facilitate this changeover, equitably and sustainably, for the iterative long term.

[Slow Food Snail with Green Phrygian Cap]

The bioregional state in many ways, from the point of view of animal/vegetable varitals, the state formation implications or component of the Slow Food Movement:

The Slow Food movement incorporates a series of objectives within its mission, including:

* forming and sustaining seed banks to preserve heirloom varieties in cooperation with local food systems

* developing an "ark of taste" for each ecoregion, where local culinary traditions and foods are celebrated

* the preservation and promotion of local and traditional food products, along with their lore and preparation

* the organization of small-scale processing (including facilities for slaughtering and short run products)

* the organization of celebrations of local cuisine within regions (e.g. the Feast of Fields held in some cities in Canada)

* Taste Education

* educating consumers about the risks of fast food

* educating citizens about the drawbacks of commercial agribusiness and factory farms

* educating citizens about the risks of monoculture and reliance on too few genomes or varieties

* Various political programs to preserve family farms

* Lobbying for the inclusion of organic farming concerns within agricultural policy

* Lobbying against government funding of genetic engineering

* Lobbying against the use of pesticides

* Teaching gardening skills to students and prisoners

* Encouraging ethical buying in local marketplaces

Building those two institutions of commodity ecology and the CDI in all watersheds will aid in making commodity uses streamlined and optimized in particular watersheds as well as encourage local democratization--instead of merely watching corrupt governments institutionalize more biased commodity uses against local health, the ecology, and against the sustainability of the economy itself.

9. Animal based food

In the name of maintaining biodiversity, the Slow Food Movement of institutionalizing biodiversity and varietals is a far more long term and far more sound model for health, ecology, and economy--than cloned cattle.

"The Slow Food movement was created to combat fast food and claims to preserve the cultural cuisine and the associated food plants and seeds, domestic animals, and farming within an ecoregion. It was the first established part of the broader Slow movement. The Slow Food movement was founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy as a resistance movement to fast food. It has since expanded globally to 100 countries and now has 83,000 members."

Since in the bioregional state the local jurisdictional autonomy on economic developmental path decisions is the primary jurisdiction, decisions like this along the model of 'does it fit where we live?' will be far more instrumental for setting commodity policy in a watershed. This is already seen in the many county level governments and states that have institutionalized much higher local levels of human health-ecological health protection concerning commodities, than federal baselines.

Thus, decisions on all commodities will be up to particular local watersheds, a model of state more akin to modeling biodiversity and ecological variegation as the purpose of the state to protect and maintain, instead of destroy. However, this fails to mean that large scale baseline standards laws (or laws to outlaw) certain commodity uses and merely supply-side uses will disappear from larger jurisdictions. These will only be baselines of human health, ecological, and economic sustainability local protection though, in all cases, instead of attempts to make multiple local areas suffer under larger federal 'glass ceilings laws' attempting to stop local health, ecological, and economic protection from going higher, when the public in that area wants it.

In this movement toward material sustainability, I can think of nothing more appropriate than [1] to demote supply-side biased agricultural monocropping and its recent budded-off twin, [2] to demote supply-side biased cloned animal strategies. Both have always been short term evil twins against local long term ecological, health, and economic durability. They are evil twins organizationally speaking because they are interwoven in massive pollution/externality streams connected via monocropping feedstocks for such 'animal monocropping.'

In this category of 'animal based food,' the Slow Food Movement encouraging local varietal use and maintenance is far more important to institute with commodity ecology interactions.

Seven Arguments Against Cloned Animals

Arguments against cloned animal monocropping are very numerous and interrelated to health, biodiversity/ecological, and economic sustainability issues:

[1] Clones cannot be perfect copies.

"...clones are far from perfect copies. All clones are defective, in one way or another, with multiple flaws embedded in their genomes. Rudolf Jaenisch, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, estimates that something like 4-5% of the genes in a cloned animal's genome are expressed incorrectly.

[2] Clone and human health difficulties arising from clones get transferred into the food chain: you.

"These often subtle genetic defects can have tangible consequences. Cloning produces an extraordinarily high number of deaths and deformed animals. Some clones have been born with incomplete body walls or with abnormalities in their hearts, kidneys or brain function, or have suffered problems like "adult clone sudden death syndrome" and premature ageing."

[3] Without the data on its safety at all, it is only another open air experiment on your health, thanks to the corrupt FDA--just like their corrupt open air experiment without notification concerning GMOs.

"...who knows how this is transferred to YOU. Nothing has been done in research on these issues of long term exposure.

[4] Cloned animals demote biodiversity.

[5] Cloned animals encourage agricultural 'shakeout' or agricultural/stock consolidation land tenures, which become more prone to externalities (like factory farming large scale arrangements).

[6] In practice, cloned animals would yield more health dangers to you from wider 'monocropped animals' in factory farm conditions, with more loads of crowd diseases risk, stress, and antibiotics given to them all the while, which gets transferred to you as well, as well as leads to pathogens becoming immune to antibiotic treatment.

[7] It's against the animals themselves.

In general, the added risks and lack of similarity in cloned meat is anti-consumer and anti-animal on every level.

As mentioned in the Commodity Ecology title page, institutions on the watershed level (CDIs and commodity ecology) help facilitate this changeover, equitably and sustainably, for the iterative long term. It is very similar to the goals of the Slow Food Movement.

[Slow Food Snail with Green Phrygian Cap]

The bioregional state in many ways, from the point of view of animal/vegetable varitals, the state formation implications or component of the Slow Food Movement:

The Slow Food movement incorporates a series of objectives within its mission, including:

* forming and sustaining seed banks to preserve heirloom varieties in cooperation with local food systems

* developing an "ark of taste" for each ecoregion, where local culinary traditions and foods are celebrated

* the preservation and promotion of local and traditional food products, along with their lore and preparation

* the organization of small-scale processing (including facilities for slaughtering and short run products)

* the organization of celebrations of local cuisine within regions (e.g. the Feast of Fields held in some cities in Canada)

* Taste Education

* educating consumers about the risks of fast food

* educating citizens about the drawbacks of commercial agribusiness and factory farms

* educating citizens about the risks of monoculture and reliance on too few genomes or varieties

* Various political programs to preserve family farms

* Lobbying for the inclusion of organic farming concerns within agricultural policy

* Lobbying against government funding of genetic engineering

* Lobbying against the use of pesticides

* Teaching gardening skills to students and prisoners

* Encouraging ethical buying in local marketplaces

Building those two institutions of commodity ecology and CDI in all watersheds will aid in making commodity uses streamlined and optimized in particular watershed areas as well as encourage local democratization--instead of merely watching corrupt governments institutionalize biased commodity uses against local health, the ecology, and against the sustainability of the economy itself.

11. Mycelium based food

[MMM. I will always remember my first morel.]

(mushrooms, other fungi; some delicious and nutritious, some deadly poison)
Mycelium is an excellent base for starting the commodity ecology, because literally it was the basis for all land base life: the first land dwellers that prepared everything chemically for soil formation that other creatures utilized later. See this short stunning video, below, about the history and importance of mycelium introductions as the base of everything.

Paul Stamets: 6 ways mushrooms can save the world (17 minutes)
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/258

"Entrepreneurial mycologist Paul Stamets seeks to rescue the study of mushrooms from forest gourmets and psychedelic warlords. The focus of Stamets' research is the Northwest's native fungal genome, mycelium, but along the way he has filed 22 patents for mushroom-related technologies, including pesticidal fungi that trick insects into eating them, and mushrooms that can break down the neurotoxins used in nerve gas. There are cosmic implications as well. Stamets believes we could terraform other worlds in our galaxy by sowing a mix of fungal spores and other seeds to create an ecological footprint on a new planet."

Re-basing commodity ecology, the ecologizing of human commodification, on mycelium seems the sounded basis to start. Moreover, it is probably to be expected because mycelium was the first arriving "'life organ' of ecology" that these species would be an integral start for life--and for other commodity ecology paths. It has THE MOST cross-connects or overlaps SO FAR with leads into other categories. It connects very well with:

58. Remediation
16. Herbicides/Pesticides
6. Soils/Dirt/Hydroponics
5. Garbage/Garbage disposal
7. Drugs/Medicines
11. Mycelium based food
72. Packing Materials (for seeding forests, mycelium and seeds embedded)

THAT means mycelium's many local multiple consumptive positional uses makes it a good place to start upon the commodity ecology for branching in multiple directions from this locus. He says 6 ideas. I count seven. Really, all the difficulties with sustainability are already solved. It merely means putting all the pieces together combined with challenging the corrupt developmentalism with the bioregional state institutional arrangements, challenging the arrangements that keep sustainability, sustainable politics, and territorial states from happening.

Fungi as Food Sources

Traditionally, mushrooms were identified and picked for food. The mushrooms you see at the markets are now commercially cultivated. These mushrooms are grown in highly controlled environments at specific temperature and humidity levels.

Mushrooms that made their way to our dinning tables

Shiitake Mushroom (Lentinus edodes)

Also known as Japanese mushroom, Chinese mushroom and mushroom of the forest.

It is a saprophytic fungus which colonises dead wood of various species. In Japan, it occurs naturally in a type of tree called Shii. Therefore the name Shiitake in Japanese.

It is of medium size, with a cap diameter of approximately 2-4" and a stalk that is 4-5" long. The cap is round, brown and "scaly" while the stipe is yellowish-white with a prominent, persistent annulus.

Economic Importance of Shiitake Mushrooms

Shiitake Mushroom is the second most cultivated mushroom in the world, only after Agaricus, the Paris mushroom. Besides China and Japan, Shiitake is also widely cultivated in Taiwan, Thailand, Korea, Singapore as well as Holland, the United States and Canada.

Shiitake's protein has a full complement of essential amino acids so it can be used extensively in a vegetarian diet. Its active ingredient, Lentinan (a polysaccharide), has been shown to reduce cancer and cholesterol.

The Shiitake Mushroom is as common in Asian countries as Agaricus bisporus is in the West. Its cultivation method is similar to that of P. ostreatus.

Agaricus Mushrooms

This genus includes the commercially cultivated Agaricus brunnescens (bisporus). This is not a tropical species and those sold in supermarkets are imported [from Europe/North America.]

The basidiocarp consists of a stipe bearing a ring and pileus. the pileus is cup-shaped and when fully opened, the gills rapidly turn dark brown.

The young button stage is marketed as 'Button Mushrooms'.

Oyster Mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus)

This species is a saprobic fungus that can commonly be found, growing on dead trees, in nature. This large white, gray-brown or ivory-colored mushroom is named for its oyster shell-like shape. Its cap can grow to around 5-15 cm in its longest dimension. It has white gills running down a very short, off-center short and white stalk.

Paddy Straw Mushroom (Volvariella volvacea)

The Paddy Straw mushroom is large. Its cap, if allowed to mature, often exceeding 5" in diameter, and is light to dark gray.

When young, the mushroom is entirely enclosed in a white, egg-like structure called the volva. As the mushroom develops, the stalk will elongate and push the cap upward, thereby rupturing the volva, leaving only a cup-like structure at the base of the stalk.

Many Chinese recipes require this mushroom. It is commercially cultivated on a mixture of raw cotton waste and rice bran and harvested in the button or egg stage before the pileus emerges. In the wild, the fungus tends to grow on decaying vegetation and wood.

Wood Ear (Auricularia polytricha)

The earliest record of this species dated back to about 200-300 BC. It is now cultivated throughout the South Pacific and Asia. It has a common name that refers to the ear-shaped structure of the fruiting body: Mu-Er (wood ear) in China, and Pepiao (ear) in Hawaii.

The fruiting bodies are usually brownish to reddish brown and has a consistency of jelly. In nature, the two species are saprobes that grow on tree logs.

The cultivation of these species is the same as that of the Shiitake Mushroom. It is cultivated on logs and also on a mixture of saw dust and cotton waste.

Silver Ear (Tremella fuciformis)

Commonly known as 'Jelly Fungi' because of the gelatinous, jelly-like nature of the basidiocarps which are wrinkled or consist of leaf-like folds.

It is a saprophyte growing on decaying branches. This species produces a white, lobed, irregularly shaped fruiting body.

It is has been long utilized as a "herb" to cure many ailments. Tremella fuciformis is also known as 'silver ear' or 'snow ear' fungus, is widely eaten in the east. Chinese believe that it could cure tuberculosis, high blood pressure and common cold. It is also a Chinese delicacy.

The method of cultivation of this species is identical to that of the Shiitake and Auricularia since it is a wood inhabiting species.

Enoki (Flammulina velutipes)

The Enoki is a very small, delicate mushroom. The species is whitish-yellow, with a cap not more than ¼- ½ " in diameter. The stalk is approximately 3-4" long and about ¼" thick.

It is cultivated on sawdust medium in a large container. It would seem to be an unlikely candidate for cultivation because of its small size, but seems to be commonly sold in supermarkets. The origin of cultivation of this species is believed to be in Japan.

These mushrooms are believed to contain medicinal properties...

Lingzhi or Reishi (Ganoderma lucidum)

Ganoderma is not a palatable mushroom. It can be used to make tea or soup.

It is a large, hard and leathery fungus with sessile or stalked basidiocarps. the undersurface of the basidiocarp is characterised by the presence of many tiny pores.

It is one of the most respected ingredients in traditional oriental medicine. It is cultivated for its medicinal and tonic values.

Cordyceps (Cordyceps sinensis)

This fungus is a parasite growing on insects. It produces a long club-shaped structure or stroma on the dead body of the host.

Cordyceps sinensis that grew on caterpillars.

When the caterpillars died, the fungus is dried and used in traditional Chinese medicine as a tonic and for various ailments.

Isn't it a joy to see these mushrooming in front of your eyes?

Cultivation of common edible mushrooms

We will discuss some of the better known species from both Western and Eastern cultures.

In these species, three methods of cultivation are used:

1. Composted substrates: usually horse manure and straw or just straw alone
2. Woody substrates: logs or sterilized sawdust
3. Inoculation onto the roots of living trees: this is done only for those mushroom species that form mycorrhizae with the roots of certain species of trees.

[4.] Compared to far more complicated 26-step artificial morel growth processes.

Agaricus bisporus is the most cultivated mushroom in the world.

The substrate on which it is cultivated includes horse manure, wheat straw, corncobs and several plant or animal wastes.

The composting process is a mixed fermentation involving a range of microorganisms, bacteria and other fungi, which will degrade some of the complex compounds such as lignin and cellulose. The biological activities of the microorganisms make the compost warm. When the compost cools, it will have a consistency similar to that of thick oatmeal and will provide an environment well suited for mycelial growth of A. bisporus. The mycelium that is inoculated into the compost is referred to as the spawn.

Following growth of mycelium throughout the substrate, a casing layer, is placed over the substrate. The casing layer is critical in the fruiting body formation of A. bisporus. The biological activity of bacteria, various soluble salts, together with the lowering of the temperature between 14-18o C, will optimize fruiting body production in A. bisporus.

Oyster Mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus)

It was first cultivated on tree logs. In late 1950's, an important innovation developed in which sawdust was used as the substrate material. This method would become important, not only in cultivation of Pleurotus, but all cultivated mushrooms cultivated on wood.

This process involves placing sawdust in a polypropylene bag that is then sterilized, cooled and inoculated with Pleurotus. [The more complicated morel process involves this at one stage.] The inoculated substrate is now placed in the dark, and after the mycelium has grown throughout the substrate, openings are cut through the bag where fruiting bodies will develop. This process is more ecologically sound because it utilizes waste material as the substrate for cultivation of the mushroom. It also shortens the period of fruitbody formation to approximately two months.

Although P. ostreatus appears to be a popular cultivated mushroom, it is soft, fragile and has the shortest shelf life of any cultivated mushroom. It often has bacterial or fungal contamination within a day or two of arriving at the market place.

Paddy Straw Mushroom (Volvariella volvacea)

Paddy straw is practically the only material used to prepare the substrate for cultivation of the Paddy Straw Mushroom even though other substrates (eg. rice straw, cotton waste, dried banana leaves and oil palm bunch waste) had been successfully used but with lower yield. The cultivation method of this mushroom is similar to that of Agaricus bisporus. In Indonesia and Malaysia, mushroom growers just leave thoroughly moistened paddy straw under trees and wait for harvest.

[Pig trained to look for (and eat unless you watch it) truffles]

Truffles (Tuber melanosporum and other related species)

Unlike the other fungi that have been discussed, truffles are actually members of the division Ascomycota rather than Basidiomycota. They grow underground and form mycorrhizae with certain species of European Oaks.

Fungi that form mycorrhizae have never been cultivated, at least not with the two methods previously described, because of their obligate relationship with the roots of trees. Thus, a different strategy was required to "grow" truffles. The environmental and nutritional requirements for formation of fruitbodies of truffles are not known.

In cultivation of truffles, it is important to have a background in ecology as well as mycology in order to grow truffles successfully. T. melanosporum will only grow where its host tree can grow. Within its host range, one method of "cultivating" truffles requires a lot of land where the host trees can be planted. To ensure truffle formation, the mycelium of the truffle is inoculated into the roots of these trees.

Because truffles grow underground, they must be dug out. The best way to find truffles is to let pigs, and sometimes dogs, "sniff" them out.

Mushrooms Cultivated in Singapore

Shiitake Mushroom (Lentinus edodes)

The Shiitake mushroom has the distinctive advantage of a much longer shelf-like because they are more commonly sold dried while most other mushrooms are sold fresh. A great deal of research has been carried out, in Japan, on the nutritional and medicinal value of the Shiitake. It is said to be rich in vitamin D2, has anti-tumor and antiviral properties and removes serum cholesterol from your system.

Growing morels on your own? Check this out this web site.
(Source: http://www.gaia.org/farm/mushroom/morel.html)

In the local scene...

To bridge the gap between academic R&D activities and business, a few of our Singaporean entrepreneurs took the opportunity to enter business ventures to cultivate mushrooms using agricultural waste.

The cultivation of mushrooms is a blooming business now. At least 15 tonnes of mushrooms are cultivated locally monthly for export and for local markets. Most of the locally-cultivated mushrooms are the Shiitake mushrooms. Those fresh mushrooms you see at your supermarkets could have been harvested from their farms.

Not only have these enterprising entrepreneurs found a way to shorten the production time of certain mushrooms, they can now produce these mushrooms are year round using the latest biotechnological methods!

Truffles

What is a truffle ?

Truffle, a fungus belonging to the order Tuberales, is a subterranean European fungi. The fruiting body, which is often referred to as the truffle, is usually round and pitted, and 1-7 cm (0.5-3 inches) in diameter.

Truffles have been collected for at least 3600 years. They have a tantalizing taste and aroma. The flesh of all truffles is nearly white when young; as the truffle matures, the flesh becomes darker with a marbling of lighter tissue.

Economic Importance of Truffles

Truffles are undoubtedly the most sought-after delicacy among the fungi with great economic value. The taste and aroma of commercially collected truffles is so intense that they are used as a flavoring instead of a separate dish.

How does truffle grows?

Growing underground, they are difficult to find and very expensive as a result. It is perhaps the most highly prized of all edible fungi.

Truffle-producing fungi have also formed symbioses with trees (mycorrhizae) because fungi cannot make their own food. The hyphae coat the roots of the tree and help their host absorb soil minerals. In return, the tree host provides the fungus with carbohydrates and other nutrients, the product of the tree’s photosynthesis. Truffles contain spores for reproduction. Many truffles have a strong smell and attract animals such as chipmunks, rabbits and squirrels to help disperse their spores by digging them up.

How are truffles recovered from the soil?

In North America, truffle collectors use clues to find truffles.

First, it must be warm and the soil moist. Truffles are often found 10 to 14 days after a heavy rain. The umbrella-shaped mushrooms which pop up after a good rain can be used as a kind of clock. Look for truffles after these mushrooms have started to collapse.

Second, the right trees present must be present. Truffles are formed by fungi that are partners (ectomycorrhizal) with certain trees such as pines, firs, oaks, hazel nuts, hickories, birches, beeches, and eucalyptus.

Due to truffles' distinctive odour, their underground location may be determined by animals trained for this purpose. Every Spring, truffle hunters in Europe take to the woods, hoping that the sensitive noses of their trained pigs and dogs will lead them to buried treasure.Several species are highly esteemed delicacies, particularly the Perigord truffle, Tuber melanosporum, and are usually found under oak or beech trees.

Pigs and dogs are the usual truffle hunters.

Attempts are being made to farm truffles due to the difficulty in finding them in the wild. The harvest has steadily decreased for the last 90 years, due to forest destruction and the killing of trees by air pollution. France produced 1,000 metric tonnes of truffles in 1892; now, only 50-90 tonnes are harvested each year.

More visuals of truffles and 'truffleculture' in the Languedoc (southern France), via the village website of Uzès featuring their annual truffle festival.

More on Morels

Morels are found on the ground in a variety of habitats, including moist woodlands and in river bottoms. They are delicious and thus are cultivated for economic reasons.

The surface of a morel is covered with definite pits and ridges. It is about 2" to 12" tall. There are three common species of morels:

* The common morel (Morchella esculenta): When young, this species has white ridges and dark brown pits and is known as the "white morel." As it ages, both the ridges and the pits turn yellowish brown, and it becomes a "yellow morel".

* The black morel (Morchella elata): The ridges are gray or tan when young, but darken with age until nearly black. The pits are brown and elongated. These morels are best when picked young; discard any that are shrunken or have completely black heads.

* The half-free morel (Morchella semilibera): This is the exception to the rule that morels have the bottom of the cap attached directly to the stem. The cap of the half-free morel is attached at about the middle. These morels have small caps and long bulbous stems.

Although morels are quite distinctive, it is still possible to confuse them with false morels. Some of these false morels are actually poisonous!

Morel Life Cycle

A technique of artificially growing morels (with their complicated life cycle) was developed by mycologist Gary Mills after much trial and error, and observations of morels growing in nature. What is linked here is a sequence which Gary demonstrated for the PBS series, Scientific American Frontiers. The temperature, humidity, substrate and other detailed parameters were placed in the public domain by George Robert Trager.

12. Insect based food

[Insects in a Beijing (China) market in 2004.]

"There are millions of insect species known worldwide. Only 1500 or so are reported edible."

Edible Insects

Insects have played an important part in the history of human nutrition in Africa, Australia, Asia and the Americas. Hundreds of species have been used as human food. Some of the more important groups include grasshoppers, caterpillars, beetle grubs and (sometimes) adults, winged termites (some of which are very large in the tropics), bee, wasp and ant brood (larvae and pupae) as well as winged ants, cicadas, and a variety of aquatic insects.

Ordinarily, insects are not used as emergency food to ward off starvation, but are included as a normal part of the diet throughout the year or when seasonally available.

In Europe the use of insects of foods has always been very limited. Although frequently mentioned in ancient Greek and Roman literature, there are only very few reports on the use of insects as food in later centuries. Only in times of starvation, insects were eaten. The main reason for the difference between Europe and the other continents is that insects are not so abundant and generally much smaller compared to tropical regions.

Recently the use of insects as food has declined in many tropical regions, partly to increased availability of ‘better' foods. This often includes meat and more Western styles of dishes [which is causing huge changes in health in populations unused to eating this European food in Asia; see this book for examples of why:

Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity by Gary Paul Nabhan (2006)

].

As insects are a very good source of nutrients, the question remains whether insects are not actually the better food.

In Africa insects are traded on a large scale and several industries produce canned insects and insect dishes.

On the other hand, in the US and to a lesser extend in Europe, eating insects has increased. However, not as a regular food, but more as a curiosity.

Insects are for example covered in chocolate or offered as sugared candies.

Tequila flavoured candy with worm (source)

Chocolate covered ant candies (source)

Most religions accept insects as normal food and place no restrictions or taboos on consumption of insects. Jewish traditions consider only a few types of insects as kosher. However, in practice, Jews avoid eating insects deliberately, as only trained entomologists may be able to distinguish between kosher and non-kosher insects.

In Muslim regions the use of insects is very restricted. Only grasshoppers are considered halal (allowed to eat), when died a naturally death or killed lawfully. Practically all other insects are considered haram. However, in countries such as India, Indonesia and Malaysia, many different insects are eaten traditionally, even in nominal Islamic regions. In Arab countries only grasshoppers can be found on markets.

As over 1500 different species of insects have been reported as being consumed or edible, this is a too long list to describe in detail. The following pages give some more information on the use of insects as food:

* Classes of edible insects
* Regions and countries
* List of reported species
* Some nutritional data

Classes of edible insects

There are millions of insect species known worldwide. Only 1500 or so are reported edible.

Insects are subdivided in many different orders, groups, genera and species. Below some groups of insects and their use as food are described.

Butterflies and moths (Order Lepidoptera).

The larvae (caterpillars) of many species of moths (and a few species of butterflies) are used as food. They are a particularly important source of nutrition (protein, fat, vitamins and minerals) in Africa. In one country alone, Congo (formerly Zaire), more than 30 species are harvested. Some caterpillars are sold not only in the local village markets, but are shipped on a large scale from one country to another. Caterpillars are canned in Botswana and South Africa. In the rural countryside, they are usually dried in the sun before being sold in the market.

Adult moths and butterflies are not eaten – their wings and bodies are clothed with the small flat scales and hairs that make them so colourful.

A colony of Imbrasia ertli on the base of a Funtumia tree (Congo). The caterpillar descend from the foliage of the tree each time they moult. It is at this stage they are collected for eating. Normally the whole colony is taken and can either be eaten after roasting or boiling or else can be sun dried for later use. (Source)

True bugs (Order Hemiptera).

Most of the insects in this order that are used as food live in water. The famous “Mexican caviar,” or ahuahutle, is composed of the eggs of several species of aquatic Hemiptera; these have formed the basis for aquatic “farming” in Mexico for centuries. One species in Asia, the “giant water bug,” is now exported from Thailand to Asian food shops all over the world.

Thai Giant Water Bug (Lethocerus indicus ), eaten steamed, also ground into a paste with chilli and eaten with sticky rice (Source)

Cicadas (Order Homoptera).

This order includes many insects, such as aphids and leafhoppers, which are important agricultural pests, but only the cicadas are used widely as human food. The nymphs of some species, known as “periodical cicadas,” spend up to 17 years underground where they feed on roots. After 17 years they emerge from the soil, climb up a tree trunk or fence post and molt to the adult stage. Periodical cicadas occur as “broods” which appear above ground only once every several years in any one locality. When they do appear, however, it is often in vast numbers. That is when they are collected as food, sometimes even by school children in the United States. They can be fried. Many cicadas have shorter life cycles, and some of them were collected as food by Indian tribes in what is now the western United States. They are eaten regularly in many other countries, especially in Asia, and some are very large. A cicada from Malaysia even has a wing span of nearly 18 cm!

Brood X, one of the North American periodical cicadas (Magicicada sp.). (Source)

Termites (Order Isoptera).

Termites are most widely used as food in Africa. They are social insects with colonies divided into “castes” that include workers, soldiers, winged adults and a queen. The queen becomes very large and she lays thousands of eggs. Colonies of some species build huge earthen mounds, called termitaria, which may be up to 20 feet high. Periodically, the winged adults emerge in huge swarms, mate while in flight, and then start new colonies. They are highly attracted to lights, even candlelight, and that is one way they are captured for use as food. The wings are broken off, and, fried, termites are delicious. The queens are considered a special treat and are often reserved for children or grandparents.

Termites. (Source)

Bees, ants and wasps (Order Hymenoptera).

With bees and wasps, it is usually the bee or wasp “brood” (larvae/pupae) that is eaten. Most adult bees and wasps don't taste good, but there are exceptions. Canned wasps, wings and all, are sold in Japan, and rice cooked with these wasps was a favourite dish of the late Emperor Hirohito. With ants, it is also the larvae and/or pupae that are usually eaten, but not always. Roasted leafcutter ant abdomens are sold, instead of popcorn, in movie theaters in some places In South America. In some cultures, bee nests are collected as much for their bee grubs as for the honey. In Mexico, certain kinds of ant pupae, known as escamoles, are found on the menu in the finest restaurants. They are served fried with butter, or fried with onions and garlic.

Beetles (Order Coleoptera).

Beetles have complete metamorphosis. Larvae, pupae and/or adults of many species are used as food. Obviously, people do not eat adult beetles whole; the hard parts (wings, legs and head) are removed during preparation for cooking. The larvae (sometimes called “grubs”) are soft-bodied.

Australian tyape arlkerlatye grubs (Source)

Grasshoppers, crickets, etc. (Order Orthoptera).

Grasshoppers and crickets and their relatives have played an important role in the history of human nutrition. Roasting and sautéing are frequently used methods of cooking, after first removing the wings and legs. Seasonings such as onion, garlic, cayenne, chili peppers or soy sauce may be added. Candied grasshoppers, known as inago, are a favourite cocktail snack in Japan .

The inago grashopper (Oxya japonica) (Source)

Spiders and scorpions (Class Arachnida)

Spiders and scorpions are two different orders within the class Arachnida (spider-like organisms), the Aranae (spiders) and the Scorpiones (scorpions). Only a few of the over 40.000 species in this class are eaten.

Scorpions are eaten in the south of China and neighbouring countries. They are reared in ‘ranches', mostly in people's homes, then sold in the markets. Scorpions have a woody taste and should be eaten whole, except for the tip of the tail.

Spiders are also mainly eaten in South-East Asia. In Cambodia large, tarantula like, spiders are still commonly eaten in the North of the country.

Scorpion soup. (Source)

Walking sticks and leaf insects (Order Phasmatodea).

These grotesquely shaped insects are used as food in a few places in Asia and in Papua New Guinea.

The edible Extatosoma tiaratum from Papua New Guinea. (Source)

http://www.food-info.net/uk/products/insects/classes.htm

Adopted from : www.food-insects.com

2.

New, the online book:

"The Human Use of Insects as a Food Resource: A Bibliographic Account in Progress"

Table of Contents and Preface

Chapters 2-28 now online. Please read the Preface to find out how all of this is supposed to unfold.

About the book, and Table of Contents

The Human Use of Insects as a Food Resource: A Bibliographic Account in Progress

Gene R. De Foliart
Professor Emeritus
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Table of Contents*

Preface

Part I. Introduction, The Western Hemisphere and Europe

Chapter 1. Introduction (not yet written)
Chapter 2. Insect Foods of North American Indigenous Populations North of Mexico (pp. 1-95)
Chapter 3. The Use of Insects as Food in Mexico (pp. 1-49)
Chapter 4. Central America and Caribbean Islands (pp. 1-11)
Chapter 5. South America: Overview (pp. 1-10)
Chapter 6. South America: Brazil (pp. 1-20)
Chapter 7. South America: Colombia (pp. 1-15)
Chapter 8. Other Countries in South America (pp. 1-23)
Chapter 9. Western Attitudes Toward Insects as Food: Europe, The United States, Canada (pp. 1-40)
Chapter 10. Western Research on Insects as Food and Animal Feedstuffs (pp. 1-30)

Part II. Africa

Chapter 11. Southern Africa: Overview (pp. 1-10)
Chapter 12. Republic of South Africa (pp. 1-22)
Chapter 13. Southern Africa: Zimbabwe (pp. 1-17)
Chapter 14. Other Countries in Southern Africa (pp. 1-16)
Chapter 15. Central and Eastern Africa: Overview (pp. 1-14)
Chapter 16. Central and Eastern Africa: Congo (Kinshasa) (Formerly Zaire) (pp. 1-35)
Chapter 17. Central and Eastern Africa: Zambia (pp. 1-19)
Chapter 18. Central and Eastern Africa: Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda (pp. 1-17)
Chapter 19. Central and Eastern Africa: Angola, Congo (Brazzaville), Others (pp. 1-22)
Chapter 20. Northern and Western Africa (pp. 1-30)

Part III. Asia, Oceania

Chapter 21. Southwestern Asia (pp. 1-23)
Chapter 22. South-Central Asia (pp. 1-23)
Chapter 23. Southeastern Asia: Overview [incomplete]
Chapter 24. Southeastern Asia: Thailand (pp. 1-35)
Chapter 25. Other Countries in Southeastern Asia (pp. 1-28)
Chapter 26. Eastern Asia (pp. 1-36)
Chapter 27. Oceania: Overview, Papua New Guinea, Others (pp. 1-20)
Chapter 28. Oceania: Australia (pp. 1-51)

Appendix Chapter 1. General Bionomics: Insect Orders and Families With Complete Metamorphosis

Appendix Chapter 2. General Bionomics: Orders and Families With Incomplete Metamorphosis

Appendix Chapter 3. Potential Hazards with Ingestion of Insects

* Chapters for which page numbers are shown are those so far posted.

Preface

Compilation of the papers found here began in 1975 when the author started preparation of a technical paper on a subject he knew nothing about.

It was to be delivered on the University of Wisconsin campus as part of what organizers were calling "A Workshop on Unconventional Sources of Protein." More details about the workshop will be available later in a book I am preparing, titled, "Insects as a Global Food Resource: The History of Talking About it at the University of Wisconsin."

During the ensuing 27 years (approximately) pertinent references were gathered in fitful spurts, some in connection with research projects but others simply because they pertained to the broader subject of insects as food. From early on, it seemed that the subject warranted a book-length updating of F.S. Bodenheimer's classic Insects as Human Food published in 1951.

Although the goal continued to be eventual publication of a book, the growing assemblage of papers had many immediate uses. It was a resource file not only for research but for a growing outreach effort that included founding The Food Insects Newsletter, introduction of a 1-credit course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, creation of a traveling exhibit for elementary and middle school students, and responding to increasingly frequent invitations to write review articles or to speak on the subject locally or at meetings of professional organizations in this country and abroad.

Mentioning all this activity, you may have guessed, is an attempt, a weak attempt, perhaps, to explain how easily one can let year after year slip away without completing a particular major goal – like finishing this book.

In 1997 though, my wife, Louise, or "Lou," who was adept on computers, helped me launch an intensive electronic literature search through the University of Wisconsin libraries aimed at pulling in copies of many articles that I had not seen previously. Lou's sudden death, from cardiac arrhythmia, in February 1998 brought this particular stretch of productivity on the book to an abrupt end. After dealing with a variety of new distractions, like learning how to survive on my own cooking (which became possible, actually, by handouts from friends), I again turned attention to what had by now become THE BOOK, a monstrous piece of unfinished business. Getting it out suddenly seemed a matter of greatest urgency, and I resumed work on it early in 2002. One main concern was that all the effort made to obtain and translate numerous French and Spanish language works on the subject not be wasted by continued delay.

By this time I had decided to publish the book on the Internet, for two reasons. One, I was thoroughly disgusted with the high price of science books; two, rather than waiting until all the final details were cleared up (which always takes longer than one expects), I could start posting a few chapters at a time, as they become ready. This more informal approach seemed the best way to ensure that the book might actually become useful to somebody, some time, somewhere. For example, I haven't written Chapter 1, the Introduction, yet. Have you ever seen a book with no Chapter 1? Of course not. Until now. But, with our informal Internet approach, we don't have to hold up 27 other chapters simply because we lack a Chapter 1. It's one of the nice things about the electronic age; we can add an Introduction later, when we get around to it.

In deciding to go with what we have, warts and all, I have tried to provide for future expansion. The title hints at that, ". . . in Progress." Chapters are numbered independently, each chapter beginning with page 1. Tables are listed for most chapters, but, for now, readers will need to consult the original sources if they wish to see the tabular data (table numbers in the original sources are given). Eventually I hope to find time to seek permission from publishers to include the tabular data here. At the end of the References Cited in most chapters, there are additional references under the heading, "Added References." These are references pertinent to the chapter but not cited; it is my hope that soon after we get all existing text online we can start adding abstracts below these titles, and also start adding additional titles. Also, it is my intention, at that time, to invite readers to submit pertinent references of which they are aware but that are not yet listed, and, if possible, to furnish copies (the hills are getting steeper on the UW campus and I no longer have a stable full of young people eager to do legwork to the libraries). We may also be soliciting volunteers willing to translate papers from languages other than English. By then, we might even be soliciting for pertinent photographs, as long as accompanied by adequate data. When the time comes, potential donors should inquire first, before sending material of any kind, in order to avoid duplications. Such inputs from others will be acknowledged, of course, somewhere in the book within a reasonable time.

There are important papers in the "Added References" sections, and readers should consult them where possible in order to be sure of having completely updated information on a country or region. The 1997 work by F. Malaisse, with chapters on the caterpillars, termites and other edible insects of Congo (Kinshaza) (formerly Zaire) is one good example. The three chapters (pp. 198-242) are also a good example of pages needing translation before this author can proceed with abstracting and future incorporation. Another good example is The Edible Insects of China, by Chen Xiaoming, 181 pp. published in 1999, in Chinese, and fortunately for some of us, with an English abstract. Chen lists 177 edible species, far more than will be found in our text on China. Another important recent source under "Added References" is the 1997 special issue of Ecology of Food and Nutrition, titled Minilivestock, edited by M.G. Paoletti and Sandra G.F. Bukkens, with chapters by various authors on a number of countries. In a chapter on Ecuador, a country for which little information was available previously, G. Onore lists 83 edible insect species.

Following the section on "Added References" in some chapters is an additional short section titled, "Items Needing Attention." These are mostly missing bits of information or other problems with the references already included under "References Cited." Here again, after all of the chapters are online, we will turn our attention to these "items needing attention." These are the sorts of dangling details I mentioned above that always take longer to clear up than one expects. Once again, I will probably seek help from readers who have ready access to a particular paper that poses a problem.

Finally, we welcome input from taxonomists who spot errors in our use of names or who can supply the names of species authors where these are missing. Prof. Robert Jeanne and Steven Krauth, Curator of the Entomology Department Insectarium have supplied names already of authors of some species of Hymenoptera.

Our first task now is to finish getting the existing chapter texts up on the website. After that is done we can think about how best to handle additional references and other alterations. Maybe, with help from users we can eventually make this a quite complete collection of papers on this important subject.

Acknowledgments

Although the main business of my laboratory was medical entomology, many individuals in the lab made a contribution to this project at one time or another, in one way or another. This was especially true of the people holding Specialist or lab assistant positions down through the years, assisting in research, doing library searches, formatting the Newsletter, etc., etc.; chronologically, three of the most involved were Marsha Lisitza, Joyce Keesey, and Catherine Howley. Postdoc Christine Merritt was also of great help, especially in rounding up literature. Howley and Merritt both put in many volunteer hours after my retirement and the termination of my medical entomology program with its associated funding. Graduate student research, of course, yielded pertinent literature. Mark Finke and Barbara Nakagaki earned PhDs, while Stephen Landry and Megha Parajulee took Masters' degrees on this subject, before continuing on to PhDs in other entomological specialties. Wives of two graduate students made an immense contribution by furnishing translations, Dianne Landry, who is fluent in French, and Heloisa Scholl, fluent in Spanish.

Moving up to the present time, thanks are due to my son-in-law, David Jansen of Portland, Maine who installed and has maintained this website up to now, with some help on maintenance from his daughter, my granddaughter, Cortney Jansen. I am greatly indebted to two of my Madison neighbors, Laura Herman and Jennifer Stevens, who come to the rescue when I am in trouble on the computer (which is most of the time when I am on the computer). Thanks go to Janet Deutsch, webmaster for the UW Department of Entomology who is helping put this book on the website, and will sometime in the future help shift it to the Entomology Department website or to the General Library System digital collections. I thank Lee Konrad of the Digital Content Group, General Library System and two members of his group, Jean Gilbertson and Jean Ruenger-Hanson, for valuable discussions on handling this as an on-line work. I am indebted to my Entomology Department colleague, Prof. Robert Jeanne, for establishing the contact with the Digital Content Group.

Gene De Foliart
Madison, Wisconsin
June, 2002

Page last update 9/29/02.

http://www.food-insects.com/book7_31/The%20Human%20Use%20of%20Insects%20as%20a%20Food%20Resource.htm

http://www.food-insects.com/

13. Transport

This is an important category. The first large scale territorial states depended upon external transportation infrastructures to expand. We can always walk, though states failed to develop until we could ride, i.e., until we elaborated other commodity choices of transportation. They were different in different areas of the world. Three examples historically are given--the horse, the camel, and the llama. Then we can discuss the current environmental difficulties with an oil-based transportation and how we do already have solutions for it. However, lots of corruption keeps oil in place against its more consumer friendly challengers for this category.

Horses, and Camels, and Llamas, Oh My: Honoring more Ecologically Suited Transportation

Brother of early sociologist Max Weber, Alfred Weber, described a 'horse state' (not his term though his idea) as an important innovation in human/environmental capacities that allowed humans to develop larger territorial jurisdictions. It was a merging of nomadic riders who could with agricultural populations who were unable to. This lead to the first large scale states and empire in world history from the Shang in proto-China, to the Assyrians in the current Middle East. Regional variations of the horse state were the 'camel state' (how could you have Islamic expansion without in in these areas, or the Caliphates?); or the llama state (how could you have the Incan Empire in South America without this multi-purpose transport, textile, and food supply--which was a nationalized infrastructure? The politics of this empire would look very different without riding in on the back of the local's dependencies for transport controlled by the state).

So think of the horse, the camel or the llama in the same category as the automobile. Sometimes, as this video shows, the camel wins easily over the car given what suits the area involved well.

Keith Bellows: Celebrating the camel
16:06 min

Keith Bellows gleefully outlines the engineering marvels of the camel, a vital creature he calls "the SUV of the desert." Though he couldn't bring a live camel to TED, he gets his camera crew as close as humanly possible to a one-ton beast in full rut.

And in the Arctic areas, only sleds of frozen fish work for creating any large scale transportation. In conclusion, the point is that transportation is a major consumptive category of human existence. Much human scale and range depends upon its reliability and sustainability suited to a particular ecoregion.

However, we still pretend that the unadaptable automobile is a good idea despite it breaking down whenever we forget to build its roads or provide its oil supply.

As for removing one difficulty of oil toward more localized solutions--here we go. A water based car has finally made it to mass production? Genepax, of Japan, is looking to connect with a larger auto manufacturer. The water-based cars have been in existence for at least 20 years. None have politically made it this far however--without being bought up and shut down, or without their main inventor being killed (like Stan Meyer for instance).

Water based car in Japan
1 min 22 sec

What if you are in the desert without water? Perhaps this will make it to mass production soon.

Solar powered electric car
14:10 min

If it fails to make it to mass production, you can make one on demand. Build it yourself. The plans are here: http://www.sunnev.com.

What about if its dark, cold as ice, and we are without water? Well, we have air--in the compressed air car. This mass manufactured car engine runs on pure air: without thermodynamics, without pollution.

The Air Car
8:52 min

The MDI air car is being mass manufactured. The first location was by Tata Motors in India from March 2007. It got some American media attention when it appeared at a New York City Auto show in 2008. Next will be an American production model. That is scheduled presumably for production starting in 2009--in the New England area in the last news that I saw about it.

So we already have solar/electric, water, and air cars. Why do we have gasoline monopolies on transportation, tell me once more? I will tell you: corporate and government interlocking corruption is why we consume gasoline. It's the raw material regime phenomenon I talked about before. Read Edwin Black's Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives to get up to speed on this history.

What about smarter roads as well?

A few interesting ideas to creating a self-funded 'road ecology' for transportation infrastructure maintenance--that minimizes empty cars and creates a way to fund the infrastructure away from reliance on a cycle of institutionalizing gasoline (through gasoline taxes) to maintain roads, into different sources of road infrastructure funding based on traffic itself. Which makes far more economic sense--though it could be biased against equality of access for the poorer in society to fund roads solely this way. Just expand it as a choice.

Robin Chase: Getting cars off the road and data into the skies (13 minutes)
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/212

"Robin Chase founded Zipcar, the world’s biggest car-sharing business. That was one of her smaller ideas. Here she travels much farther, contemplating road-pricing schemes that will shake up our driving habits and a mesh network vast as the Interstate. With Zipcar, Robin Chase turned the concept of car-sharing -- and carbon-saving while you're at it -- into a reality and even a full-blown trend. If she weren't a proven start-up entrepreneur, you might imagine Robin Chase as a transportation geek, some dedicated civil servant, endlessly refining computer models of freeway traffic. Or if she weren't such a green-conscious problem-solver, you might take her for a businesswoman only. Ultimately, the best way to understand Chase is simply as a remarkable innovator. Case in point: In 2000, Chase focused her MIT business training on founding Zipcar, now the largest car-sharing business in the world. Using a wireless key system and Internet billing, members pick up [and access a choice of different 'status' and use-dependent] Zipcars [instead of access to only one type of car] at myriad locations anytime they want one. The idea is at once ordinary and highly sophisticated, with powerful technologies applied to tasks as prosaic as grocery shopping. But the result couldn't be more straightforward: fewer cars, less carbon. Since its founding, Zipcar has doubled in size every year, making Chase's biggest ideas and her latest company, GoLoco [grouped trip sharing index of others so you can travel together if desired], look mighty promising. "Robin Chase has already changed the way we drive, but she's not satisfied. Now she wants to change the way we live as well."--Harvard Gazette"

Her WiFi-microwave radiation intensive 'solutions' however are harmful to the very biological life she wants to help: us and other species. I suppose that comes from the MIT specialized training that has left her clueless about the ecological bioelectric damages caused by her solutions. However, remove the WiFi and it's a better assortment of ideas. WiFi extensions would have terrible second order effects on health as well as civic freedom since it would yield a police state. And a police state is the key to unsustainability and corruption. It is a mistake to concentrate only on the materials, because the issue of unsustainability an unrepresentative, tyrannous, political framework that encourage repression and more corruption. A surveillance grid, discriminatingly utilized by those in the pilot seat, can only be utilized for corrupt and unsustainable goals instead of open representative ones like she imagines.

14. Pollinators

(introduced honeybees where none exist; or in some cases required hand pollination, in vanilla for instance; ultrasound; bombiculture)

15. Fertilizers

(organic, inorganic, even sonics are being utilized to expand growth of plants)

Read this discussion over at herbicides/pesticides.

Physically, however it is done, phosphorous and nitrogen are required for the growth of plants optimally. We currently utilize many unsustainable, toxic, and soil-destroying mechanisms to push into plants these two elements.

The following short video discusses how to escape the dependency on increasingly toxic low quality phosphate rock with a recycling program that yields methane bio-gas--and the bio-gas 'waste products' are phosphorous-rich materials that can be applied to plants. It is being done in Europe in combined bio-gas/phosphorous fertilizer plants already:

City To Farm Composting Project
7:15 min

Betsy Kettle explains the City to Farm Composting Project. This is a different method of collection and processing urban food scraps that could potentially supply the farmlands around major cities with an odourless, leachate free compost. The security of the urban food supply may be dependent on growing locally without dependence on petrochemical-based fertilizers and minimal transport. Organic agriculture based on compost may be our future food security and also create a more sustainable agricultural system.

What about nitrogen? Well, do some selective planting of fast growing nitrogen-fixing trees, like tree lucerne, that provide nitrogen rich soils for other plants in the area. Cut these trees regularly and use those products for something else. The following arrangement is shown raising milk goats with tree lucerne cuttings because they are high in protein. In two parts, this is a short 20 minute documentary about the co-inventor of permaculture concepts, David Holmgren. The first few minutes solve the nitrogen issue:

Permaculture co-originator 'Holmgren', Pt1
9:09 min

'Eco-Centric', a story by reporter Tim Lee from the 2004 ABC program 'Landline' about permaculture co-originator David Holmgren, whose "pivotal role in developing permaculture has scarcely been recognised" http://www.holmgren.com.au.

Permaculture co-originator 'Holmgren' doco Pt2
9:06 min

Another way to create durable soils full of required minerals and other materials is to draw upon rediscovered Amazonian soil fertility strategies:

Unravelling Human Creation of Amazonian 'Terra Preta'/Dark Soil (Or, How to Make Permanent, Self-Renewing Soil); 7 min.:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kUvgOPAPnA

This is a short excerpt from a BBC Horizon documentary entitled "The Secret of El Dorado". It recounts how a previously unknown highly populated area of Eastern Bolivian Amazonia extending into the Amazon River Basin gave the area a major urban/agricutural society. It completely disappeared as Europeans arrived. However, it left its 'terra preta'--the dark earth of the Amazon--that is still mined and carried off because it is so beneficial a soil. And it still self-replicates--long after the original human/indigenous creators have died off and their secret lost. We are slowly unravelling how to recreate this perpetual self-renewing soil. Some secrets of it are featured in this short video clip. One secret is slash-and-char instead of slash-and-burn. The charcoal mixed later into the soil creates a slow release of minerals instead of burned ash that is eroded away very quickly. Very smart. See the amazing differences of scale of yields by only varying the addition of charcoal! Watch the longer video below for more detailed information about other aspects of the terra preta.

BBC - Horizon - The Secret of El Dorado
49 min
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2809044795781727003

New evidence that advanced societies flourished in the Amazon Basin before the arrival of Europeans. It was the most notorious wild-goose chase in history: the Conquistadors' search for El Dorado, a fabulous kingdom of gold that Indians said lay hidden in the jungles of the Amazon Basin. But now, at last, archaeologists have uncovered the truth behind that myth. They have found evidence of a huge society, as advanced as the Egyptians or the Incas, right in the heart of the rainforest. And this is more than the story of a lost world rediscovered. For it seems that the people of the real El Dorado possessed a secret with the power to transform our world and their secret in the soil could be the solution to solving famine in the Third World and other nations [by making local independent and autonomous agricultural sound for poor soil areas--because you can invent the soil out of nothing in a low-tech way!] once and for all.

16. Herbicides/Pesticides

Herbicides/Pesticides (and fertilizers which are thrown into this category) are actually a larger issue of agricultural organization--which involves erosion.

The images above show what has happened in only 50 years of poor agricultural practices: there are holes in the ocean--deoxygenating destroying malestorms, killing everything in its path, and leaving hundreds of square miles of oceanic rotting death.

Note the rate of increase.

Note the single corporation that is hugely responsible and its history.

The World According to Monsanto (2008)
109 min.

"On March 11, 2008, a new documentary was aired on French television (ARTE – French-German cultural TV channel) by French journalist and film maker Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto - A documentary that Americans won't ever see. The gigantic biotech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years."

For alternatives to this, see the soil-creating forms of agriculture and permaculture without chemical herbicides and pesticides.

Besides the herbicide and pesticide monopolies, we can just utilize "despored mycelium" that Stamets talks about in this short video. Get rid of the synthetics entirely, the old fashioned way. Very old. About 3 billion years old.

Utilize mycelium's properties as a pesticide as well as soil creator.

Then watch everything grow sustainable from the novel pristine base. Like the runners of mycelium, the use of mycelium for pesticides has many 'organic factory' aspects for other connects to the commodity ecology of a local area without the synthetic monopolies like Monsanto.

Mycelium is an excellent base for starting the commodity ecology, because literally it was the basis for all land base life: the first land dwellers that prepared everything chemically for soil formation that other creatures that was utilized as the base of life. See this short stunning video, below. Just put in some local mycelium in as a pesticide, and you have a clean basis of organic agriculture.

Paul Stamets: 6 ways mushrooms can save the world (17 minutes)
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/258

A Canadian filmmaker travels to the north Pacific Ocean to discover a world of unknown plastic pollution.

An uncle of mine who is retired from DuPont NEVER HEARD OF EITHER OF THESE ISSUES of dead zones or oceanic gyre garbage...which shows the extent of scientific specialization and hubristic ignorance institutionalizing nearsighted crops of humans, generation after generation, in the current unconnected monocultures of the universities.

More interscientific curricula are required likely as solving these agricultural issues because the difficulty is with human ignorance certified falsely as knowledge, instead of it being something only to do with the commodity change per se.

The origins of dead zones origins and how a chemical cocktail of nitrates and phosphates and other pollution leads to their creation can be found at this link on the bioregional state and the oceans over at Toward A Bioregional State.

Completely removing forms of chemical agriculture (which will increasingly save the humic soil as well) means an entire reformation of agriculture. This will likely entail particular localized solutions that are more conservative of biodiversity. Certain forms are already in existence in some locations and their commonalities are they move away from monocropping toward other forms of permiculture, forest gardening (multi-level agriculture), perinneals agriculture (instead of based on breeding for fast growing annuals), 'no-till' forms of agriculture (for soil conservation, incresingly no-till additionally means no-pesticide as well in some versions), and using interactive species (sometimes even other plants cross planted with others that kill pests instead of just alternative insects) to remove agricultural pests. It's all about knowing of the lateral relationships instead of focusing on the commodity at hand. And the bees. Use native bees associated with what particular crops they most efficiently utilize. Carting around bees should be phased out.

Stop Phosphating and Nitrating the Oceans

A short treatment of the origin of such pesticide laden phosphate frameworks from the chemical industry is found Karen Steingraber's _Living Downstream. It came mostly from decommissioned warmaking factories making chemicals--that then kept up production and simply turned the phosphates and nitrates and other things useful in explosives. Then there was the ecological and social terrorism of the so called "Green Revolution" of agrochemical pesticides sales worldwide, which massively impoverished local forms of agriculturalists and send then hurtling toward the slum cities.

For the historical origin of artificial nitrates see the book _The Great Guano Rush, and The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben (on the Haber process). Both started the whole downhill ecological destruction of agriculture. We can turn that aruond with mycelium applications for pesticides.

Of course there are the wallflowers who sigh romantically and say it started with agriculture itself, though that is silly because it is a categorical argument when it is exactly what kinds of agriculture is the issue: actually many forms of agriculture have survived over millennia in China in the same areas (though with versions of economic shakeout and regional specializations that launched millions into endless poverty and instability of course by the Yuan into the Ming).

Second, the Aztecs had some good ideas for durable organic fertilizer based agriculture in their milpas.

Third, the difficulties with poor soil agriculture in Amazonia has been solved toward stable forms of tenure that demotes the endless ecocline erosion frameworks destroying the forests there in some populations. There was an interesting article in the British magazine The Ecologist about this. This was before what I can only surmise was a recent 'editorial coup/lobotomy' that in my opinion dumbed down the magazine from discussions of political economy toward shallow editorial lines of thinking that change comes only from the consumer instead of from blaming the organizational frameworks themselves. Most consumers are held hostage to this clientelistic framework hardly of their own design or blame.

Anyway, before the lobotomy at The Ecologist, this article was printed concerning a man working over 20 years in and out of academia in experiments in Latin America. He solved ‘solved’ the jungle/poor soil frameworks of agriculture, fuel provisioning, and salable commodities through a form of ecological modernization. The magazine The Ecologist wrote a short article about it several years ago, aiming for wider coverage of it’s combined features of local consumptive durability, poverty alleviation, and ecological security--all addressed simultaneously. [cite: “Rainforest Saver: After 20 years work a British tropical ecologist thinks this can save the world’s rainforests” [and generate income for local people without destroying it],” The Ecologist, Volume 35, No. 1, p. 56]

Fourth, on biodiversity as agriculture instead of against it, read Kenney Ausubel's Seeds of Change, and Gary Nabhan's Enduring Seeds. Both argue some forms of agriculture are more conducive to maintaining biodiversity that destroying it.

Additionally, The Slow Food Movement should have a chapter in every watershed worldwide.

In short, ideally, to institutionalize biodiversity it is paramount to integrate it into agriculture. I've got lots of notes about other forms of agriculture organization that can additionally remove the requirements of the category of pesticides. See some of the comments about that. Perhaps I'll post a summary article below about this as well.

For the moment, here is a draft of an encyclopedia article I wrote for the Encyclopedia of Social Problems, on "Erosion." Read it at the commodity category on soils/dirt/hydroponics.

17. Mineral food

(typically only one: salt, sometimes earth/clays/dirt, nutritional trace elements)

18. Preservatives

(salt, smoke, sun-dry/dehydrate, chemical, sugared, vacuum sealed, pickled, dry freeze, cryogenic, etc.)

19. Communication/Transmission technology

(voice/sound, paper, mud brick cuneiform, silk rolls, papyrus, digital computers, pony express, telephone/telegraph, smoke signals from fires, semaphore, electrified metals/conductors, electromagnets, etc.)

We are biologically endangered by the poor choice of utilizing electropollution as a mechanism of communication. I mean EMF as a mechanism of communiation.

The science of these dangers is not "still out". The information is available in droves about the dangers of: Wi-Fi, EMF, cell phones, RFID tags, Verichip implants, cell phone towers, police communication frequency bands, supermarket two way radios, etc. Most of this misses the major corporate owned media rounds, so it's definitely important to the consumer and citizen.

The infrastructure of your digital communication life definitely is giving you cancer, leading to numerous other health complications, leading to mental imbalances and other mental conditions in children and adults, and causing you to go blind with cataracts, and much more below.

"Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a controversial technology that uses tiny microchips to track items from a distance. These RFID microchips have earned the nickname "spychips" because each contains a unique identification number, like a Social Security number for things, that can be read silently and invisibly by radio waves. Over 40 of the world's leading privacy and civil liberties organizations have called for a moratorium on chipping individual consumer items because the technology can be used to track people without their knowledge or consent." Bennetton's RFID was nipped in the bud in 2003 with a huge consumer backlash. Now, companies like Levis Strauss keep mum about the U.S. test location in order to prevent such a consumer backlash, effectively lying to their consumers about adulteration of their clothing with RFID. Clothing retailer Benetton was hit hard by a consumer boycott led by Albrecht in 2003 when the company announced plans to embed RFID tags in its Sisley line of women's clothing. The resulting consumer outcry forced the company to retreat from its plans and disclaim its intentions. The same can happen to Levi Strauss doubly so because it is attempting to do this against the wide consumer opposition to being tracked much less by having it secretly introduced by Levi Strauss in the process.

A control grid, a prison without bars, is being introduced like the above on many levels.

This has health implications as well: RFID gives you cancer and a host of other problems. So if you are lax about your concerns of governmental tyranny, perhaps you will be concerned by the cancer increases in your young children from the RFID panopticon?

The "Intelligence Reform Act" of 2004 and the Real ID Act of 2005 in the USA established an ominous national ID system, ***forcing all states to standardize*** biometric-laden birth certificates, drivers licenses and other (RF)ID cards.

By 2008, personal data from USA citizens will be flowing into a biometric database full of DNA profiles that the Fuhrer's would be proud of. While coming to power over all law enforcement agencies with its directives and funding, DHS is regimenting U.S. medical establishment to collect and forward all health data....Medical history will be part of your 'file' and your DNA will be governmental property, suitable for culling? Remember, the Third Reich was unable to organize the eugenic Shoah/Holocaust without the technology of communication and monitoring in place. The USA has currently an even more improved form of eugenic monitoring than was utilized in Germany in the 1930s through silent, scannable RFID information and DNA databases. You are unable to organize a eugenic bioweapon driven Holocaust like PNAC is on record wanting without detailed individual genetic-biological lists, courtesy of, in the U.S. from 2008, a microwave based RFID file system with individual required bio-information-genetic markers carried at all times as an internal passport, mandated by the State. The next Holocaust is being organized right now via microwave RFID. All 'genetic minorities' should be concerned by the USA's activities. LET'S RECALL P.N.A.C.'s quote, signed off by dozens of appointee in Bush Administration: "...advanced forms of biological warfare that can target specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool."

Ban all uses of these frequencies now. They are bad for your health and a bad communications medium because they could be different frequencies.

Can I mention that the same frequencies for cell phones institutionalized right now are known to be 'useful' psychotronic mind/mood control and/or altering frequencies as long ago as the 1950s? Anyone out there getting cataracts from their cell phones?

CATARACTS AND CELL PHONES
www.isracast.com
July 29, 2005 .

ISRAELI RESEARCH:
CELL PHONE RADIATION MAY CAUSE VISUAL DAMAGE
In a recent scientific study conducted by a team of researchers from the Technion, a possible link between microwave radiation, similar to the type found in cellular phones, and different kinds of damage to the visual system was found. At least one kind of damage seems to accumulate over time and not heal, challenging the common view and leading the researchers to the assertion that the duration of exposure is not less important than the intensity of the irradiation.

With RFID tags, Verichip implants, and cell phones (all microwave band frequencies) capable of giving people cancer and a host of other diseases from reduced bodily soundness, a complete switch away from these harmful spectrum bands is required.

More data on these claims below, and one film about cell phone electropollution and cancer.

First, the Verichip:

AP: FDA approved microchip implants linked to animal cancer
( Published on Monday, September 10, 2007 )
A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had "induced" malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats

AP: FDA approved microchip implants linked to animal cancer
Published on Monday, September 10, 2007.
Source: Associated Press - Todd Lewan AP Writer

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients' medical records almost instantly. The FDA found "reasonable assurance" the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005's top "innovative technologies."

But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had "induced" malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats.

"The transponders were the cause of the tumors," said Keith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining in a phone interview the findings of a 1996 study he led at the Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich.

Leading cancer specialists reviewed the research for The Associated Press and, while cautioning that animal test results do not necessarily apply to humans, said the findings troubled them. Some said they would not allow family members to receive implants, and all urged further research before the glass-encased transponders are widely implanted in people.

To date, about 2,000 of the so-called radio frequency identification, or RFID, devices have been implanted in humans worldwide, according to VeriChip Corp. The company, which sees a target market of 45 million Americans for its medical monitoring chips, insists the devices are safe, as does its parent company, Applied Digital Solutions, of Delray Beach, Fla.

"We stand by our implantable products which have been approved by the FDA and/or other U.S. regulatory authorities," Scott Silverman, VeriChip Corp. chairman and chief executive officer, said in a written response to AP questions.

The company was "not aware of any studies that have resulted in malignant tumors in laboratory rats, mice and certainly not dogs or cats," but he added that millions of domestic pets have been implanted with microchips, without reports of significant problems.

"In fact, for more than 15 years we have used our encapsulated glass transponders with FDA approved anti-migration caps and received no complaints regarding malignant tumors caused by our product."

The FDA also stands by its approval of the technology.

Did the agency know of the tumor findings before approving the chip implants? The FDA declined repeated AP requests to specify what studies it reviewed.

The FDA is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, which, at the time of VeriChip's approval, was headed by Tommy Thompson. Two weeks after the device's approval took effect on Jan. 10, 2005, Thompson left his Cabinet post, and within five months was a board member of VeriChip Corp. and Applied Digital Solutions. He was compensated in cash and stock options.

Thompson, until recently a candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, says he had no personal relationship with the company as the VeriChip was being evaluated, nor did he play any role in FDA's approval process of the RFID tag.

"I didn't even know VeriChip before I stepped down from the Department of Health and Human Services," he said in a telephone interview.

Also making no mention of the findings on animal tumors was a June report by the ethics committee of the American Medical Association, which touted the benefits of implantable RFID devices.

Had committee members reviewed the literature on cancer in chipped animals?

No, said Dr. Steven Stack, an AMA board member with knowledge of the committee's review.

Was the AMA aware of the studies?

No, he said.

---

Published in veterinary and toxicology journals between 1996 and 2006, the studies found that lab mice and rats injected with microchips sometimes developed subcutaneous "sarcomas" - malignant tumors, most of them encasing the implants.

- A 1998 study in Ridgefield, Conn., of 177 mice reported cancer incidence to be slightly higher than 10 percent - a result the researchers described as "surprising."

- A 2006 study in France detected tumors in 4.1 percent of 1,260 microchipped mice. This was one of six studies in which the scientists did not set out to find microchip-induced cancer but noticed the growths incidentally. They were testing compounds on behalf of chemical and pharmaceutical companies; but they ruled out the compounds as the tumors' cause. Because researchers only noted the most obvious tumors, the French study said, "These incidences may therefore slightly underestimate the true occurrence" of cancer.

- In 1997, a study in Germany found cancers in 1 percent of 4,279 chipped mice. The tumors "are clearly due to the implanted microchips," the authors wrote.

Caveats accompanied the findings. "Blind leaps from the detection of tumors to the prediction of human health risk should be avoided," one study cautioned. Also, because none of the studies had a control group of animals that did not get chips, the normal rate of tumors cannot be determined and compared to the rate with chips implanted.

Still, after reviewing the research, specialists at some pre-eminent cancer institutions said the findings raised red flags.

"There's no way in the world, having read this information, that I would have one of those chips implanted in my skin, or in one of my family members," said Dr. Robert Benezra, head of the Cancer Biology Genetics Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Before microchips are implanted on a large scale in humans, he said, testing should be done on larger animals, such as dogs or monkeys. "I mean, these are bad diseases. They are life-threatening. And given the preliminary animal data, it looks to me that there's definitely cause for concern."

Dr. George Demetri, director of the Center for Sarcoma and Bone Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, agreed. Even though the tumor incidences were "reasonably small," in his view, the research underscored "certainly real risks" in RFID implants.

In humans, sarcomas, which strike connective tissues, can range from the highly curable to "tumors that are incredibly aggressive and can kill people in three to six months," he said.

At the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, a leader in mouse genetics research and the initiation of cancer, Dr. Oded Foreman, a forensic pathologist, also reviewed the studies at the AP's request.

At first he was skeptical, suggesting that chemicals administered in some of the studies could have caused the cancers and skewed the results. But he took a different view after seeing that control mice, which received no chemicals, also developed the cancers. "That might be a little hint that something real is happening here," he said. He, too, recommended further study, using mice, dogs or non-human primates.

Dr. Cheryl London, a veterinarian oncologist at Ohio State University, noted: "It's much easier to cause cancer in mice than it is in people. So it may be that what you're seeing in mice represents an exaggerated phenomenon of what may occur in people."

Tens of thousands of dogs have been chipped, she said, and veterinary pathologists haven't reported outbreaks of related sarcomas in the area of the neck, where canine implants are often done. (Published reports detailing malignant tumors in two chipped dogs turned up in AP's four-month examination of research on chips and health. In one dog, the researchers said cancer appeared linked to the presence of the embedded chip; in the other, the cancer's cause was uncertain.)

Nonetheless, London saw a need for a 20-year study of chipped canines "to see if you have a biological effect." Dr. Chand Khanna, a veterinary oncologist at the National Cancer Institute, also backed such a study, saying current evidence "does suggest some reason to be concerned about tumor formations."

Meanwhile, the animal study findings should be disclosed to anyone considering a chip implant, the cancer specialists agreed.

To date, however, that hasn't happened.

---

The product that VeriChip Corp. won approval for use in humans is an electronic capsule the size of two grains of rice. Generally, it is implanted with a syringe into an anesthetized portion of the upper arm.

When prompted by an electromagnetic scanner, the chip transmits a unique code. With the code, hospital staff can go on the Internet and access a patient's medical profile that is maintained in a database by VeriChip Corp. for an annual fee.

VeriChip Corp., whose parent company has been marketing radio tags for animals for more than a decade, sees an initial market of diabetics and people with heart conditions or Alzheimer's disease, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The company is spending millions to assemble a national network of hospitals equipped to scan chipped patients.

But in its SEC filings, product labels and press releases, VeriChip Corp. has not mentioned the existence of research linking embedded transponders to tumors in test animals.

When the FDA approved the device, it noted some Verichip risks: The capsules could migrate around the body, making them difficult to extract; they might interfere with defibrillators, or be incompatible with MRI scans, causing burns. While also warning that the chips could cause "adverse tissue reaction," FDA made no reference to malignant growths in animal studies.

Did the agency review literature on microchip implants and animal cancer?

Dr. Katherine Albrecht, a privacy advocate and RFID expert, asked shortly after VeriChip's approval what evidence the agency had reviewed. When FDA declined to provide information, she filed a Freedom of Information Act request. More than a year later, she received a letter stating there were no documents matching her request.

"The public relies on the FDA to evaluate all the data and make sure the devices it approves are safe," she says, "but if they're not doing that, who's covering our backs?"

Late last year, Albrecht unearthed at the Harvard medical library three studies noting cancerous tumors in some chipped mice and rats, plus a reference in another study to a chipped dog with a tumor. She forwarded them to the AP, which subsequently found three additional mice studies with similar findings, plus another report of a chipped dog with a tumor.

Asked if it had taken these studies into account, the FDA said VeriChip documents were being kept confidential to protect trade secrets. After AP filed a FOIA request, the FDA made available for a phone interview Anthony Watson, who was in charge of the VeriChip approval process.

"At the time we reviewed this, I don't remember seeing anything like that," he said of animal studies linking microchips to cancer. A literature search "didn't turn up anything that would be of concern."

In general, Watson said, companies are expected to provide safety-and-effectiveness data during the approval process, "even if it's adverse information."

Watson added: "The few articles from the literature that did discuss adverse tissue reactions similar to those in the articles you provided, describe the responses as foreign body reactions that are typical of other implantable devices. The balance of the data provided in the submission supported approval of the device."

Another implantable device could be a pacemaker, and indeed, tumors have in some cases attached to foreign bodies inside humans. But Dr. Neil Lipman, director of the Research Animal Resource Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, said it's not the same. The microchip isn't like a pacemaker that's vital to keeping someone alive, he added, "so at this stage, the payoff doesn't justify the risks."

Silverman, VeriChip Corp.'s chief executive, disagreed. "Each month pet microchips reunite over 8,000 dogs and cats with their owners," he said. "We believe the VeriMed Patient Identification System will provide similar positive benefits for at-risk patients who are unable to communicate for themselves in an emergency."

---

And what of former HHS secretary Thompson?

When asked what role, if any, he played in VeriChip's approval, Thompson replied: "I had nothing to do with it. And if you look back at my record, you will find that there has never been any improprieties whatsoever."

FDA's Watson said: "I have no recollection of him being involved in it at all." VeriChip Corp. declined comment.

Thompson vigorously campaigned for electronic medical records and healthcare technology both as governor of Wisconsin and at HHS. While in President Bush's Cabinet, he formed a "medical innovation" task force that worked to partner FDA with companies developing medical information technologies.

At a "Medical Innovation Summit" on Oct. 20, 2004, Lester Crawford, the FDA's acting commissioner, thanked the secretary for getting the agency "deeply involved in the use of new information technology to help prevent medication error." One notable example he cited: "the implantable chips and scanners of the VeriChip system our agency approved last week."

After leaving the Cabinet and joining the company board, Thompson received options on 166,667 shares of VeriChip Corp. stock, and options on an additional 100,000 shares of stock from its parent company, Applied Digital Solutions, according to SEC records. He also received $40,000 in cash in 2005 and again in 2006, the filings show.

The Project on Government Oversight called Thompson's actions "unacceptable" even though they did not violate what the independent watchdog group calls weak conflict-of-interest laws.

"A decade ago, people would be embarrassed to cash in on their government connections. But now it's like the Wild West," said the group's executive director, Danielle Brian.

Thompson is a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, a Washington law firm that was paid $1.2 million for legal services it provided the chip maker in 2005 and 2006, according to SEC filings.

He stepped down as a VeriChip Corp. director in March to seek the GOP presidential nomination, and records show that the company gave his campaign $7,400 before he bowed out of the race in August.

In a TV interview while still on the board, Thompson was explaining the benefits - and the ease - of being chipped when an interviewer interrupted:

"I'm sorry, sir. Did you just say you would get one implanted in your arm?"

"Absolutely," Thompson replied. "Without a doubt."

"No concerns at all?"

"No."

But to date, Thompson has yet to be chipped himself.

Microchip implants cause fast-growing, malignant tumors in lab animals
( Published on Saturday, September 08, 2007 )
Damning research findings could spell the end of VeriChip

Source: Intel Daily - Dr. Katherine Albrecht

The Associated Press will issue a breaking story this weekend revealing that microchip implants have induced cancer in laboratory animals and dogs, says privacy expert and long-time VeriChip opponent Dr. Katherine Albrecht.

As the AP will report, a series of research articles spanning more than a decade found that mice and rats injected with glass-encapsulated RFID transponders developed malignant, fast-growing, lethal cancers in up to 1% to 10% of cases. The tumors originated in the tissue surrounding the microchips and often grew to completely surround the devices, the researchers said.

Albrecht first became aware of the microchip-cancer link when she and her "Spychips" co-author, Liz McIntyre, were contacted by a pet owner whose dog had died from a chip-induced tumor. Albrecht then found medical studies showing a causal link between microchip implants and cancer in other animals. Before she brought the research to the AP's attention, the studies had somehow escaped public notice.

A four-month AP investigation turned up additional documents, several of which had been published before VeriChip's parent company, Applied Digital Solutions, sought FDA approval to market the implant for humans. The VeriChip received FDA approval in 2004 under the watch of then Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson who later joined the company's board.

Under FDA policy, it would have been VeriChip's responsibility to bring the adverse studies to the FDA's attention, but VeriChip CEO Scott Silverman claims the company was unaware of the research.

Albrecht expressed skepticism that a company like VeriChip, whose primary business is microchip implants, would be unaware of relevant studies in the published literature.

"For Mr. Silverman not to know about this research would be negligent. If he did know about these studies, he certainly had an incentive to keep them quiet," said Albrecht. "Had the FDA known about the cancer link, they might never have approved his company's product."

Since gaining FDA approval, VeriChip has aggressively targeted diabetic and dementia patients, and recently announced that it had chipped 90 Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers in Florida. Employees in the Mexican Attorney General's Office, workers in a U.S. security firm, and club-goers in Europe have also been implanted.

Albrecht expressed concern for those who have received a chip implant, urging them to get the devices removed as soon as possible.

"These new revelations change everything," she said. "Why would anyone take the risk of having a cancer chip in their arm?"

==========================================

ABOUT CASPIAN

CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) is a grass-roots consumer group fighting retail surveillance schemes since 1999 and irresponsible RFID use since 2002. With thousands of members in all 50 U.S. states and over 30 countries worldwide, CASPIAN seeks to educate consumers about marketing strategies that invade their privacy and encourage privacy-conscious shopping habits across the retail spectrum.

==========================================

FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO ARRANGE AN INTERVIEW, PLEASE CONTACT:

Dr. Katherine Albrecht
Founder and Director, CASPIAN Consumer Privacy
(877) 287-5854, kma[at]spychips.com

Host of "Uncovering the Truth"
We the People Radio Network, M-F 10AM-12PM EST
http://www.wtprn.com

Co-author of "SPYCHIPS: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID"

http://www.spychips.com/book/booksales.html

WEBSITES:

Human Chipping: http://www.AntiChips.com

RFID: http://www.SpyChips.com

Shopper Cards: http://www.NoCards.org

Bio online at: http://www.spychips.com/media/katherine-albrecht.html

More on the cell phone frequencies:

Dangers of the Wireless Cell Phone, Wi-Fi and EMF (Electromagnetic Frequency) Age, Part 1 (9 min) (four parts)

World-renowned Epidemiologist Dr. George Carlo provided a high impact presentation that exposed the dangers of living in the wireless age in a way that everyone could understand. As the chief scientist of the world's largest research effort into wireless safety, the Safe Wireless Initiative (SWI), he discussed the effects of electromagnetic radiation, specifically Information Carrying Radio Waves (IRCWs) and how they negatively affect the body's ability to function and repair damage affecting our cells. This is great information about how emf effects our health.

Recent Swedish epidemiological studies confirm that, after 2,000 hours of cellular phone exposure, or a latency period of about 10 years, brain cancer risk rises by 240 percent. Brain cancer has leaped forward as the #1 cancer killer of people in the world. There are about 2.5 billion users of cell phones in 2007.

20. Condiments/Flavorings

21. Scents/Incenses/Fragrances

22. Purifiers/Cleansers/Concentrators

(soap, water, membrane sieves, clays, diatomaceous earth, ultrasound, gas diffusion/heat, etc.)

The below video however is a brilliant cross-over example mixing several consumptive use categories at once: waste remediation, energy generation, and water purification all in one! The application is mentioned near the close of the video though the whole video is interesting.

Given that human waste streams like fecal coliform pollution will always exist, some form of remediation will likely always be there. This one is modular, localizable to a watershed, and thus an ingenious application of sustainable technology. It makes use of an energy technology's by-product effects (clean water and energy) to conduct waste water purification. Talk about solving many issues at once! This really is the special category of 'remediation' though I post it here as well because it is a general example of purifiers/cleansers/concentrators as well.

Oxy Hydrogen Process (Water Fuel Cell)
8:25 min

23. Protectants

(paint, plastic, electroplate, glass, bulletproof glass, etc.)

24. Retardants

(asbestos, inflammable materials, deoxygenators, glass, etc.)

25. Insulators

(wool, ice, straw, fiberglass, rags, vacuums, brick, solid glass, plastic, stones/marble, etc.)

26. Abrasives

(diamond dust, carborundum, sandpaper, etc.)

27. Lubricants

28. Elastics

(rubber, synthetic rubber)

29. Coolants

(ice, caves, chemicals, oils)

Sometimes, well chosen form in architecture or materials can serve as an efficient overlapping form of coolant and ambient heat, i.e., you can address one category (coolants) more efficiently by addressing another (building materials) more efficiently.

Note the particularly keen use of tires and dirt as a form of natural refrigeration/air conditioning for this house in the summer as well as heat release in the winter.

Dennis Weaver's Earthship
27 min 5 sec

"Dennis Weaver, the US retired actor, here builds himself a mansion made almost entirely from....old tyres and dirt. This is eco-modernisation, proving once and for all that eco-friendly design and construction/building does not have to smell or look funny. In fact, it is cheaper, quicker, easier and safer to construct such an 'earthship' than any conventional construction technique! This is eco-rationality in action. Prepare to be amazed."

30. Ambient heat

(chemicals, caves, oil, hot springs/geothermal, tallow, wood fires, anti-freeze)

32. Potable liquids

(water, wine, sake, beer, cider, milk, tea, coffee, koumiss, etc.)

The Fluoride Deception (Interview With Investigative Author Christopher Bryson)
28 min 31 sec

"In this video, Christopher Bryson, an award-winning journalist and former producer at the BBC, discusses the findings of his new book The Fluoride Deception that is the product of 10 years of research and censorship by major U.S. journalistic publications (like the Christian Science Monitor that he had attempted to publish this within earlier (that article at this link).

EARLY REVIEWS of The Fluoride Deception: "Bryson marshals an impressive amount of research to demonstrate fluoride's harmfulness, the ties between leading fluoride researchers and the corporations who funded and benefited from their research, and what he says is the duplicity with which fluoridation was sold to the people. The result is a compelling challenge to the reigning dental orthodoxy, which should provoke renewed scientific scrutiny and public debate."

Most countries of the world reject fluoridation on health and ethical grounds. Why does the USA recommend fluoridating its population particularly after WWII, and exhibit itself as the lone nut of the world's countries in this practice? This video and the book help explain why: fluoride streams have a lot to do with aluminum refining wastes and the U.S. Manhattan Project--the U.S. nuclear bomb program. Both generated massive toxic levels of fluorides. They were subsequently dumped into the U.S. water supply as well as sold to the public with lies that it was safe, lies crafted by master corporate public relations consultant Edward Bernays to keep the U.S. government and U.S. industries that utilized fluoride insulated by a snowjob that fluoride was safe. It was Bernay's public relations for the U.S. government and U.S. industry that sold fluoride through intentionally convincing (and funding) doctors and dentists to legitimate it even though the government knew it was harmful all the time! However, fluoride was not safe, and never was. Fluoride is the "protected pollutant" in the USA (and in other countries that utilize it), making fluoride a very politically powerful pollutant known to cause bone cancers, I.Q. reduction (as a neurotoxin), skeletal fluorosis, emphysema, and even deaths. Fluoride can additionally cause infertility and suppress thyroid function.

Quotes about fluoridation from other countries at this short article from The Ecologist (July/August 2003):

France: 'Fluoride chemicals are not included in the list [of chemicals for drinking water treatment]. This is due to ethical as well as medical considerations.' --Louis Sanchez, head of environmental standards for the city of Paris, August 2000

Belgium: 'This water treatment has never been of use in Belgium and will never be (we hope) in the future.' --Christian Legros, director, Belgaqua, Brussels, February 2000

Norway: 'In Norway we had a rather intense discussion on this subject some 20 years ago, and the conclusion was that drinking water should not be fluoridated.' --The National Institute of Public Health, Oslo, March 2000

Austria: 'Toxic fluorides have never been added to public water supplies in Austria.' --Manfred Eisenhut, head of water at Gass Wasser, Vienna, February 2000

Czech Republic: 'Since 1993 drinking water has not been treated with fluoride in public water supplies throughout the Czech Republic. Although fluoridation of drinking water has not actually been proscribed it is not under consideration because this form of supplementation is considered:

- uneconomical -- only 0.54 per cent of water suitable for drinking is used as such; furthermore; an increasing amount of consumers (particularly children) are using bottled water for drinking;

- unecological

- unethical [because of lack of consumer choice]; and

- toxicologically and physiologically debatable; fluoridation represents an untargeted form of supplementation that disregards actual individual intake and requirements and may lead to excessive health-threatening intake in certain population groups.' -- Dr. B. Havlik, Minister of Health, the Czech Republic, October 1999

98% of countries in Western Europe have rejected fluoridation.

7:1 is the ratio of the incidence of bone cancer in fluoridated countries to non-fluoridated countries.

No one requires linking to the chemical toxic industry to make potable liquids anyway.

This entry by Xogen Technologies (an outfit whose technology is slightly connected with the late water-car inventor Stan Meyer), provides a form of energy generation that is modular, localizable to a watershed, and thus an ingenious application of sustainable technology. It can additionally make use of an energy technology's by-product effects (clean water and energy) to conduct waste water treatment or space heating. Talk about solving many issues at once! It works so well that a lot of "hate webpages" about this technology have sprung up recently--creating a disinformation campaign about it. I take that later development as a sign it works "too well"--too well for those elite groups that stand to lose big when we switch to sustainable technologies.

Xogen Technology's Oxy Hydrogen Process (Water Fuel Cell)
8:25 min

Although originally designed with energy production as the focus, subsequent testing of the Xogen technology on wastewater samples from a conventional sewage treatment plant identified potential application as a wastewater treatment process. Under specific operating conditions in a bench scale reactor, the technology has achieved high levels of organic degradation and pathogen destruction at very low retention times and temperatures. Benefits of this are:

* "Complete elimination of most of the infrastructure components of a conventional plant including the primary clarifier, aeration basin and air blowers, disinfection processes, sludge stabilization processes such as anaerobic digestion and final disposal or utilization of the stabilized [and still toxic] sludge.

* Huge reduction in the waste footprint of the industrial plant or urban area

* Complete elimination or significant reduction in sludge (biosolids) processing costs

* More stable process allowing for rapid start-up and insensitive to toxic shocks. Biological plants typically have a long start-up time because the microbes must be acclimatized to the feed (sewage) and increase in concentration to the point where acceptable treatment is achieved. In addition, since a biological system relies on microbes, any components in the incoming sewage can result in either killing the entire biomass or shocking it to the point where it takes a significant period of time, sometimes days, to recover its efficiency.

* The production of a significant energy source in the form of hydrogen which can be used to generate electrical energy for internal use or export. Xogen has powered various combustion devices with the hydrogen-oxygen gas liberated by the technology; such as a 1-kw Honda generator, under 90% load conditions."

31. Light/Artificial light

(sunlight, chemicals, oil (whale or abiotic), tallow, electricity/blubs, fire, phosphorescence)

33. War materiels

34. Energy

(thermodynamics [oil, solar, wood, nuclear, hydro/waterpower, charcoal, horse power, human labor], non-thermodynamics [AC electricity, DC electricity, tides, zero-point technology, water based electrolysis engines, cold fusion, electromagnetic dynamos, compressed air engines, magnetic motors, etc.)

Mylow's copy of Howard Johnson's Magnetic Motor

[Magnetic Motor, Working Copy of Howard Johnson's 1980's device (see comments below)]

To introduce this section, energy is perhaps the most politically contentious raw material arrangement for two rationales. First, it is because there is so much money and dependency to be created in energy. Second, it is because none of that centralization or dependency is required. Only massive amounts of political corruption hold it in place as raw material regimes that hold off consumer choices in the interest of achieving consumer clientelism and power in that way in a forced (non)-choice. It's like having a (non) 'choice' of 20 different brands of gasoline without having a choice in what engines run on, in your car.

Below is a short video for you. It is from Greenpeace-UK, and talks exclusively about the UK except for a short trip to Finland. However, it addresses an issue that resonates worldwide: degradative subsidizations in risky, overpriced, energy production technology while easy economies of abundant energies are all around us. Thus the video's title: "The Convenient Solution." However it a good introduction to raw material regimes and how the principle is applicable in many other environmentally degradative relationships in other raw material categories, instead of only this thread of energy.

The video focuses on how subsidies toward institutionalizing massive pollution and nonrenewables are quite silly when you look at their economic and environmental costs.

It is doubly silly when solutions are so cheap and so quickly possible to bring online to replace these environmentally degradative sources of power.

In many of the links below in this category, it shows how we are hardly 'running out of energy'. To paraphrase something Buckminister Fuller noted years ago, instead of a scarcity of energy, there is only a scarcity of intelligence, invention, and inspiration.

There is more energy being made all around you (as below links show) that most ever imagine. Therefore, ideas of "energy running out and making itself costly" is just a corporate advertising--a softening up campaign to bilk consumers of millions and billions of dollars in wasteful investments that are unrequired. Far more "convenient solutions" are around us all the while. The other propoganda campaign so closely connected to the one about "energy running out" is that "energy production is innately polluting"--which is untrue as well.

And technology keeps getting better. The "so 2006"-looking wind turbines in the video below--or the image above just about to take flight--may have just been replaced entirely. Far more quiet, far more efficient, far more bird-and-bat-friendly 'stormblade' turbine ideas have just been invented. Search for that below. In other words, concentrate on thinking about the energy source, instead of fixating on a particular technology used to tap it--since the technology is endlessly improvable.

The Convenient Solution (The Economics of Abundant Renewables vs. Non-Required Unrenewables)
Greenpeace UK
9 min 27 sec

A related presentation is "Decentralised Energy" in the UK Magazine The Ecologist's first podcast for 2008. In that podcast, "Phil England talks about decentralised energy and in particular the inefficiency of current production methods where 60% power generated is lost, and the benefits of Combined Heat and Power (CHP) [mentioned in the video as well above] where heat from generation is used to warm the houses that surround the plant. Click here to download (MP3; 22.5 MB; 24:34 min)

An interesting four short videos below reveal a brilliant cross-over example mixing several consumptive use categories: waste remediation, energy generation, and water purification all in one! Any applications from implosive, water based energy is a very green technology on many levels. This is additionally known as Brown's Gas generation for energy though it is not mentioned in the first video in that name.

This entry by Xogen Technologies (an outfit whose technology is slightly connected with the late water-car inventor Stan Meyer), provides a form of energy generation that is modular, localizable to a watershed, and thus an ingenious application of sustainable technology. It can additionally make use of an energy technology's by-product effects (clean water and energy) to conduct waste water treatment or space heating. Talk about solving many issues at once! It works so well that a lot of "hate webpages" about this technology have sprung up recently--creating a disinformation campaign about it. I take that later development as a sign it works "too well"--too well for those elite groups that stand to lose big when we switch to sustainable technologies.

Xogen Technology's Oxy Hydrogen Process (Water Fuel Cell)
8:25 min

This special stoichiometric mix of oxygen and hydrogen yields an implosive, hotter flame-- from mere tap water. It is better known as Brown's Gas. It is the same mixture generated in the video above as the one below--just with a different technology to generate the same special mixture:

Brown's Gas Generators
8:40 min

A poorly recorded video quickly explains the physics of this strange oxygen/hydrogen implosive combustion that only occurs at a particular ratio known as Brown's Gas:

Brown's Gas - Implosion of Water
9:23 min

Another company from Taiwan is manufacturing these oxy-hydrogen generators (i.e., Brown's Gas mixtures for massive energy on demand from tap water). I particularly like the "EP-200"--the homey-looking domestic stove with flames running from burning water instead of natural gas! (That is about five minutes into it for that.)

Epoch Energy Technology Corporation (Oxy-Hydrogen Generators from Water Fuel)
8:29 min

Since much political corruption flows from consumptive clientelism across ostensible political borders, it turns into the 'real' political borders through these tendrils of material dependence.

Therefore, all material and technological changes toward sustainability in the bioregional state should be judged on how well then can be decentralized as much as materially sustainable--optimized to a particular watershed or bioregional area's own sustainability.

In other words, this decentralized material sustainability is its own political sustainability. This means judging novel technologies and materials on more than simply soft sustainability (material sustainability), it means hard sustainability that integrates a degree of judgment on whether the technology or material can be implemented locally and in a decentralized fashion to avoid future cross-border political economic dependences that become the source of corruption in the watershed, and soon a source of a political developmentalism that encourages more unsustainability through more political corruption, etc., in a feedback loop of corruption that is political and material. Many of the examples below or in the videos above fulfill this hard sustainability.

Another example that fulfills modular, localized technologies of cheap, inexhaustible energy generation would be the tabletop chemistry effects that generate non-radioactive nuclear level heat effects: otherwise dubbed 'cold fusion.'

Heavy Watergate: The War Against Cold Fusion [part 1 of 5]
10:54 min

And cold fusion seems to be some sort of similar zero point energy effect. I think that the Brown's Gas process can help us understand the mere-chemical nuclear effects interactions seen in 'cold fusion'.

The creation of a instant vacuum is the constant that seems to touch on the zero point energy and allow it to burst through whether in cold fusion (done with high frequency in the liquids and special sized pellets to create the cavitation sometimes--that vacuum/cavitation is a common theme in all the various places that the massive energy has been reported from Brown's Gas to cold fusion.)

The high temperature vacuum state when the hydrogen and oxygen burn/implode in Brown's Gas seems to generate the same physics/cold fusion noted effects. Just an observation. Watch the cold fusion video if you haven't seen it, and think about the chemical/nuclear energy scales of Brown's Gas's implosion or even its nuclear modulation effects itself (Brown's Gas heat causing chemistry-only reduction in nuclear radiation wastes for instance, within minutes)...

The chemists don't talk to the physicists, and the physicists don't talk to the chemists, though there is a world of interactive chemical/nuclear interactions out there that the academic separations are keeping us in the dark about. The general point is that pollution is unrequired for energy generation in any of the examples mentioned here.

FREE ENERGY: THE RACE TO ZERO POINT (1 of 11)
9:57 min

"I trust you are aware that we are being controlled in every area of our lives"--says speaker/author Lindsey Williams. I post his talk less because I agree with his sentiment of 'go get that classified oil', though to show that he is right when he says oil is a political weapon. However, it is only a political weapon if our technologies require it. Once we institutionalize many of the working technologies in this thread, the politics supporting a heavily polluting oil and coal era will be at a close.

Lindsay Williams on The Energy Non-Crisis
75 min

Though oil fails to be required to be a political weapon. It can be green--made in biodiesel. One of the difficulties with biodiesel is that it is unethically linked to making cars compete for food with people. However, that fails to have to happen.

The following ideas from Valcent Products is for biodiesel (however much biodiesel in the long run is unrequired). The following short video demonstrates a workable model. As an introduction to that video:

"The Vertigro process, a joint venture between Global Green Solutions Inc. and Valcent Products Inc., is now mass producing rapidly-growing algae to be used as biofuel feedstock and ingredients in food, pharmaceutical and health and beauty products. Requiring minimal water and land usage, Vertigro algae is the ultimate renewable energy."

It is an interesting 'green bridge technology' to allow green conversion of current pollutive rock oil technological complex arrangement for petroleum that the physical plant of cars and other oil based frameworks utilize. It still keeps their economic value so switching can be quick. Their idea is to let algae lipids could go into it. This algae-based biodiesel is far more efficient and less politically suspect because it avoids having cars compete with starving people for food. Corn or sugar biodiesel is a terrible idea, immoral and inefficient.

Why algae? First, it's an efficient choice. He claims algae is the fastest growing plant, so it's almost destined to be biodiesel standard. Several "oil" (petroleum) companies are rapidly becoming lipid companies, like Royal Dutch Shell and Galp oil companies pilot plants for algae biodiesel, both announced in the past year. (More about that is in the comments below).

Second, algae is ideal for biodiesel because it produces a lot of lipids--we can make oil directly from it, and from the waste could make ethnanol as well! Almost 50% of algae is a high grade lipid that can be used for a variety of purposes.

Third, because of this algae immediately outclasses wasteful corn or sugar ethanol for biodiesel. He claims that an acre of corn can only grow 18 gallons of oil per acre per year. He describes the next highest, most currently prevalent, is palm oil: it's only 700 gallons of oil per acre per year. With algae, 20,000 gallons of oil per acre per year is possible--and that's just "natural algae production" in an open pond system. This featured technique would be hugely higher in production for the rationales that he describes.

Fourth, with this technology, we can be selective for what carbon chains enter production: if you want bio-jet fuel just put in a different species of algae that makes that type of lipids/carbon chain; want a different carbon chain, put in another algae for making lipids for gasoline. So lipid/algae production can be tailored to the final application. Genetically engineered algae should be avoided: we should institutionalize ourselves into current ecologies and find ways of living together in mutual dependencies instead of manufacturing an artificial lifeworld that destroys the current ecological fabric.

Fifth, it would make sulfur free diesel--cutting down on S02 smog.

The commodity ecology rationale for this is that it is a biological loop that has benefits even from its wastes. One of its effects is that it sequesters carbon (CO2) from the atmosphere in the production cycle. The second good point is that wastes are products: after the lipids are extracted, the wastes can go into [1] animal feedstocks, [2] soil remediation for fertilizer, [3] and then you could even make ethanol from the waste as well. He claims that currently unproductive desert areas could be utilized for this: 1/10 of the area of New Mexico desert could meet the energy requirements for oil for the entire United States.

Vertical Algae biofuel Growing (see description and invest) [I have no financial connections to this company]
3:17 min

Two more comments. The first is that the best thing is that it is a useful bridge technology to existing structures. Critiques about the high maintenance of its facilities I think would be solved by its huge profitability and efficiency. Another concluding point I like about it is that it exemplifies an ideal: it institutionalizes choice in supply lines with scaled technological production--something that is very rare to have technology encourage ongoing material choices and adjustment instead of enslaving us to a particular choice of the past. Typically most technological arrangements are designed around exclusively one particular crop or extraction at scale. It is so wonderfully rare it is worth showing this other ideal: a tech arrangement that allows ongoing choice to be institutionalized in the arrangement instead of dependency. It's a flexible technological scaled production, a multi-choice arrangement. And it's green. And it's now.

Commodity Ecology

Sunday, June 3, 2007

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