Launched to provide a parallel information service connected with _Toward a Bioregional State, the book; this parallel blog is the commentary, your questions and my answers, on technological and material science news from around the world related to the issues of sustainability and unsustainability and how to institutionalize it in particular watersheds anywhere in the world, in a running muse on various issues of concern or inspiration.
[Go to the main front page for updated introduction. In December 2009, I formalized additional commodity ecology categories in an update. With 90 commodity use categories, it is a more complete list, with all 90 visible in the column on the right, now.]
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
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."
"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.
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. Perhaps graphene--see below: 200x stronger than diamond and cheaper than most building materials
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. ...
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 one solution to change material choices:
Eben Bayer: Are mushrooms the new plastic? 9:05 min
"Product designer Eben Bayer reveals his recipe for a new, fungus-based packaging material that protects fragile stuff like furniture, plasma screens -- and the environment. Eben Bayer is co-inventor of MycoBond, an organic (really -- it's based on mycelium, a living, growing organism) adhesive that turns agriwaste into a foam-like material for packaging and insulation."
For another alternative on the same theme, find out what more durable wastes are (unlike plastics that are very fragile and unstable materially) and ingenious solutions can be found for using the more stable wastes as future materials as a natural part of the product cycle to have many social uses. For instance, tires as having multiple uses socially instead of only one categorical use of transportation: note the particular way the recycled products structurally are in sync with building materials in many different stages of use and conservation of this 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 grow your own home. Takes a few years though permanently renewable and integrated into the environment. However, depends upon a water source for environmental conditions as well as stable climates I presume year-round?
Mitchell Joachim: Don't build your home, grow it! 2:57 min
"TED Fellow and urban designer Mitchell Joachim presents his vision for sustainable, organic architecture: eco-friendly abodes grown from plants and -- wait for it -- meat. Soft cars, jet packs and houses made of meat ['printed' with cells from inkjet printers--printed into the 3D shaped desired without harming or killing anything sentient like an animal; all this is]...all in a day's work for urban designer, architect and TED Fellow Mitchell Joachim."
Or more durably, 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.
"Hempcrete": Hemp Waste Makes a Better Concrete 1:24 min
Hemp Waste + Lime = far stronger 'Hempcrete' than very pollutive industrial production of concrete: "How would like like a building material that is stronger than cement and SIX TIMES lighter?
Better yet, one of its main ingredients in the waste product of a plant that literally grows like a weed.
Here's the reality about [mineral based] cement [monopolies]:
1. The manufacture of traditional cement is incredibly energy intensive, so much so that many cement companies seek and receive legal variances to not only burn coal, but also medical waste and used automobile tires as fuel for their kilns.
2. After oil refineries and chemical plants, cement factories are the most polluting factories in the world, spewing tons of microparticles containing toxins like arsenic and mercury into the air."
The film relates that people in France can build up to 300 cheap houses a year for people using hemp wastes, because hemp is legal in the far freer country of France.
Here's use of hemp to make a private house, by what looks like volunteer labor:
Here's an Irish architectural firm that have published a book about their method, using the same method see above on a larger scale. They mention that the insulation properties of hempcrete is very good: they say "zero" additional energy required to heating such a house made of the hempcrete because of its high thermal mass (keeping heat in itself) and other insulating properties as well as the tiny air pockets in the material itself.
Or is graphene the next environmentally sound plastic?
We have so many options for sustainability, being held back by degradative politics preserving old raw material regimes in the commodity ecology categories that are unintegrated in each other. There's nothing to stop full sustainability except a handful of psychopaths in their previous infrastructural investments gatekeeping against it and with violence and repression of our sustainable options as well.
With more knowledge assembled about how possible complete sustainability is, it is more likely unavoidable. For instance: graphene:
The wonder stuff that could change the world: Graphene is so strong a sheet of it as thin as clingfilm could support an elephant
By David Derbyshire Last updated at 7:39 AM on 7th October 2011
Revolutionary: Graphene, which is formed of honeycomb pattern of carbon atoms, could be the most important new material [transparent, electric, and strong building material as well] material for a century [it's a completely unique mixture of consumptive categories in this material: a thin, transparent, super-strong (harder than diamond) structural building material that has electrical conduction properties better than copper (copper is hardly a structural material), though graphene's lack of semiconductor principles may make it difficult for some fantasy computer operations that currently are based on mostly silicon's physical capacities of 'on/off' switching in the material itself (there are other options for this switching though than polluting silicon industries: see the category on communication materials for more options); thus with graphene always 'on' in other words, and very efficiently so, it makes it difficult to do any anticipated Boolean/operations in the material itself in base 2--the insight of all computers from Shannon onward.]
Revolutionary: Graphene, which is formed of honeycomb pattern of carbon atoms, could be the most important new material for a century
It is tougher than diamond, but stretches like rubber. It is virtually invisible, conducts electricity and heat better than any copper wire and weighs next to nothing. Meet graphene — an astonishing new material which could revolutionise almost every part of our lives.
Some researchers claim it’s the most important substance to be created since the first synthetic plastic more than 100 years ago.
If it lives up to its promise, it could lead to mobile phones that you roll up and put behind your ear, high definition televisions as thin as wallpaper, and bendy electronic newspapers that readers could fold away into a tiny square.
It could transform medicine, and replace silicon as the raw material used to make computer chips [perhaps everything except this however, see note above.]
The ‘miracle material’ was discovered in Britain just seven years ago, and the buzz around it is extraordinary.
Last year, it won two Manchester University scientists the Nobel Prize for physics, and this week Chancellor George Osborne pledged £50 million towards developing technologies based on the super-strong substance.
In terms of its economics, one of the most exciting parts of the graphene story is its cost. Normally when scientists develop a new wonder material, the price is eye-wateringly high.
But graphene is made by chemically processing graphite — the cheap material in the ‘lead’ of pencils.Every few months researchers come up with new, cheaper ways of mass producing graphene, so that some experts believe it could eventually cost less than £4 per pound.
But is graphene really the wonder stuff of the 21st century?
For a material with so much promise, it has an incredibly simple chemical structure. A sheet of graphene is just a single layer of carbon atoms, locked together in a strongly-bonded honeycomb pattern.
Pledge: George Osborne, pictured visiting the University of Manchester lab where graphene is being researched, has said £50m will be set aside to help with development of technologies based on the substance
That makes it the thinnest material ever made. You would need to stack three million graphene sheets on top of each other to get a pile one milimetre high. It is also the strongest substance known to mankind — 200 times stronger than steel and several times tougher than diamond.
A sheet of graphene as thin as clingfilm could hold the weight of an elephant. In fact, according to one calculation, an elephant would need to balance precariously on the end of a pencil to break through that same sheet.
Despite its strength, it is extremely flexible and can be stretched by 20 per cent without any damage.
It is also a superb conductor of electricity — far better than copper, traditionally used for wiring — and is the best conductor of heat on the planet.
But perhaps the most remarkable feature of graphene is where it comes from. Graphene is made from graphite, a plentiful grey mineral mostly mined in Chile, India and Canada.
A pencil lead is made up of many millions of layers of graphene. These layers are held together only weakly — which is why they slide off each other when a pencil is moved across the page.
Graphene was first isolated by Professors Konstantin Novoselov and Andrew Geim at Manchester University in 2004. The pair used sticky tape to strip away thin flakes of graphite, then attached it to a silicon plate which allowed the researchers to identify the tiny layers through a microscope.
Discovery: Professors Andre Geim, left, and Dr Konstantin Novoselov first isolated graphene in 2004. They later won the Nobel Prize for Physics last year
Russian-born Prof Novoselov, 37, believes graphene could change everything from electronics to computers.
‘I don’t think it has been over-hyped,’ he said. ‘It has attracted a lot of attention because it is so simple — it is the thinnest possible matter — and yet it has so many unique properties.
‘There are hundreds of properties which are unique or superior to other materials. Because it is only one atom thick it is quite transparent — not many materials that can conduct electricity which are transparent.’
Its discovery has triggered a boom for material science. Last year, there were 3,000 research papers on its properties, and 400 patent applications.
The electronics industry is convinced graphene will lead to gadgets that make the iPhone and Kindle seem like toys from the age of steam trains.
Modern touch-sensitive screens use indium tin oxide — a substance that is transparent but which carries electrical currents. But indium tin oxide is expensive, and gadgets made from it shatter or crack easily when dropped. Replacing indium tin oxide with graphene-based compounds could allow for flexible, paper-thin computer and television screens. South Korean researchers have created a 25in flexible touch-screen using graphene.
Ancient history: If the development of graphene is successful it will make the iPad and Kindle seem like toys from the age of the steam train
Imagine reading your Daily Mail on a sheet of electric paper. Tapping a button on the corner could instantly update the contents or move to the next page. Once you’ve finished reading the paper, it could be folded up and used afresh tomorrow.
Other researchers are looking at many ways of using graphene in medicine. It is also being touted as an alternative to the carbon-fibre bodywork of boats and bikes [and car tires?] Graphene in tyres could make them stronger.
Some even claim it will replace the silicon in computer chips. In the future, a graphene credit card could store as much information as today’s computers.
‘We are talking of a number of unique properties combined in one material which probably hasn’t happened before,’ said Prof Novoselov. ‘You might want to compare it to plastic. But graphene is as versatile as all the plastics put together.
‘It’s a big claim, but it’s not bold. That’s exactly why there are so many researchers working on it.’
Dr Sue Mossman, curator of materials at the Science Museum in London, says graphene has parallels with Bakelite — the first man-made plastic, invented in 1907.
Resistant to heat and chemicals, and an excellent electrical insulator, Bakelite easily made electric plugs, radios, cameras and telephones.
‘Bakelite was the material of its time. Is this the material of our times?’ she says. ‘Historically we have been really good at invention in this country, but we’ve been really bad at capitalising on it.’
If graphene isn’t to go the same way as other great British inventions which were never properly exploited commercially at home — such as polythene and carbon fibre — it will need massive investment in research and development.
Core material: Graphene comes from a base material of graphite and is so thin that three millions sheets of the substance would be needed to make a layer 1mm thick
That’s why the Government’s move to support its development in the UK got a warm round of applause at the Conservative Party conference.
But compared to the investment in graphene in America and Asia, the £50 million promised by the Chancellor is negligible. South Korea is investing £195million into the technology. The European Commission is expected to invest one billion euros into graphene in the next ten years.
Yet despite the flurry of excitement, many researchers doubt graphene can live up to such high expectations.
It wouldn’t be the first wonder material that failed to deliver. In 1985 another form of carbon, called fullerenes or buckyballs, was hailed as the revolutionary new material of the era. Despite the hype, there has yet to be a major practical application.
And there are already some problems with using graphene. It is so good at conducting electricity that turning it into devices like transistors — which control the flow of electrical currents, so need to be able to stop electricity flowing through them — has so far proved problematic.
Earlier this year computer company IBM admitted that it was ‘difficult to imagine’ graphene replacing silicon in computer chips.
And sceptics point out that most new materials — such as carbon-fibre — take 20 years from invention before they can be used commercial use.
You might think from all the hype, that the road to a great graphene revolution has already been mapped out.
But its future is far from certain. In fact it’s barely been penciled out in rough.
(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
(compost, wastewater treatment (graywater, other kinds of waste water), ruminant foraging, etc.)
Eben Bayer: Are mushrooms the new plastic?
9:05 min
"Product designer Eben Bayer reveals his recipe for a new, fungus-based packaging material that protects fragile stuff like furniture, plasma screens -- and the environment. Eben Bayer is co-inventor of MycoBond, an organic (really -- it's based on mycelium, a living, growing organism) adhesive that turns agriwaste into a foam-like material for packaging and insulation."
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.
"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:
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.
Note: in practice, remediation of the garbage in human bodies is different materially than this type of garbage remediation. Information on that location of remediation is under drugs/medicines.
Learning about mycelium is the excellent basis of a commodity ecology. And Paul Stamets is an excellent introduction.
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.
"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."
Other frameworks of creating living soil like hot composting, worm farming (vermiculture), or mulching potentially are separated from the long term embedding of humans in the larger ecological relationships that can be institutionalized at the same moment. These other techniques can be done, though with re-basing commodity ecology, the ecologizing of human commodification, on mycelium seems the added sounded basis to start maintaining and constructing novel ethnobotany relationships in particular ecoregions.
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:
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.
Intimately related to this section are the categories on herbicides/pesticides and fertilizers. That is, if you have to use them. In many cases, you can get soil that is healthy, live, and productive without them. For instance, a quote from the short film below:
"You can fix all the world's problems, in a garden. You can solve them all, in a garden....And most people today don't actually know that,...and that makes most people very insecure [to see salty dead desert soil bloom and desalinize before their eyes because they are more attached to their worries and mental constructions than solving the issue]."
A short film on turning around worst case scenarios of soil in the world, turning them into a (mycelium-rich) garden. The heavily salty desert around the even more heavily salty Dead Sea in Israel becomes a garden without pumping in extra water or artificial fertilizer/herbicides. "We could green the entire Middle East in this way," Geoff Lawton says in the film.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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 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.
Here's a smaller home version, 'square foot gardening' might be called 'square foot permaculture' due to the employment of many permaculture principles at a very tiny scale, though still based on seeding and harvesting processes (unlike permaculture that just grows an "Eden" of food endlessly without tending). There is a very tiny amount of tending in this model:
Square Foot Gardening
36 min
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."
"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.
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: 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.
Coconut Oil, Very High in Lauric Fatty Acid Which Has Many Health Uses
"Black Seed:" Nigella Sativa; cancer treatment
Tumeric
(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?)
For two hundred years, there has been an economic competition from the empirics/homeopaths that caused the allopathics to found the American Medical Association. This organization has been found guilty of conspiracy before to repress alternatives. For more details see below the film Hoxsey: How Healing Becomes a Crime. I quote from this film's narration:
"The war of money between Hoxsey and the doctors is another old story in medicine. In the 1800s, doctors tried to stop the popular empirics from collecting their fees by denouncing them as quacks. Economic competition from the empirics caused the doctors to found the AMA. But the AMA was a small trade association without political clout, and the balance of power remained equal until the turn of the century. Then, new medical treatments emerged that were potentially very profitable. Then the AMA joined with strong financial forces to transform medicine into an industry. The fortunes of Carnegie, Morgan, and Rockefeller financed surgery, radiation, and synthetic drugs. They were to become the economic foundations of the new medical economy. Ironically, John D. Rockefeller himself used only an empirical homeopath while investing in allopathic medicine. Surgery became viable [for the first time without potential secondary infection deaths] with anesthesia and infection control, and doctors advocated expensive radical operations. These in turn produced the need for a large, and lucrative hospital system. The allopaths also discovered a new toxic mineral, radium..." etc. 1:03:35 into the film.
Furthermore, it narrates:
"The AMA targeted Harry Hoxsey as public quack #1. But by the 1940s, its quack files had swelled to include 300,000 names. Hoxsey had long charged a conspiracy. His solitary voice was now echoed by many others. In the 1950s, a Congressional committee came to the same conclusion. The Fitzgerald Report to Congress named at least a dozen other promising cancer treatments seemingly blocked by organized medicine. Their proponents were mostly doctors of high reputation. The treatments were immunological or nutritional. Dismissing them as quackery, were panels of surgeons or radiation therapists. The congressional report emphasized two outstanding cases of alleged suppression: Harry Hoxsey and Dr. Andrew C. Ivy. If Hoxsey fit the [stereotypical] image of a quack [without being one], Dr. Ivy certainly did not. [He was the organizer of the Bethesda Navel Medical Research Institute, former national director of the National Cancer Advisory Council, Vice President of the University of Illinois, and a former board member of the American Cancer Society; he was associating himself with the drug Krebiozen (more information available from the book Krebiozen: 13 Years of Confict (1963)).
The Hoxsey film documents a disturbing pattern at least three times: where the AMA doctors attempted to buy a workable cancer treatment, though were refused by the inventors. Then the AMA sets out to destroy through its political institutional allies the alternative it was unable to profit from, though attempted to. There were Congressional investigations into AMA fraud in 1953, 1963, and 1981 the film documents as well.
Moreover, the American medical association was found guilty of ‘conspiracy’ to destroy the chiropractic profession in August, 1987.
Other medicines condemned without investigation include:
HERBAL
Chapparal tea, University of Utah
Essiac
Renee Caisse, RN
Gerson Therapy
Max Gerson, MD
Vitamin C
Linus Pauling, MD; Nobel Laureate
Macrobiotics
Kichio Kushi
IMMUNOLOGY
Bacteriophage
Robert F. Lincoln
Coley’s Toxins
William Coley, MD
Coffey-Humber Extract
Walter Coffey and John Humber MD's
Glover’s Serum
Thomas J. Glover, MD
Glyoxylide
William F. Koch, MD
Hydrazine Sulfate
Joseph Gold, M.D.
Immuno-Augumentive Therapy
Lawrence Burton Ph.D.
Krebiozen
Andrew C. Ivy, M.D.
Laetrile (featured in the film linked below)
Earnst T. Krebs, MD
Livingston Vaccine
Virginia Livingston
Ozias Treatment
Charles Ozias, MD
Revici Method
Emmanuel Revici, PhD
Rife Microscope
Royal Raymond Rife
I recommend the Hoxsey film and the following one for those interested in health freedom choice and in researching ongoing repressive politics against free nutritional therapies --whether in the United States and in many cases, worldwide.
This documentary concerns Harry M. Hoxsey, the former coal miner whose family's herbal recipe has brought about claims of a cancer cure. Starting in 1924 with his first clinic, he expanded to 17 states by the mid 1950s, along the way constantly battling [the poor track record of] organized medicine that [attempted to] label him a charlatan. Hoxsey's supporters point out he was the victim of arrests, or "quackdowns" spearheaded by the proponents of established medical practices. Interviews of patients satisfied with the results of the controversial treatment are balanced with physicians from the FDA and the AMA. A clinic in Tijuana, Mexico claims an 80% success rate....What is apparent is that cancer continues to be one of humankind's more dreaded diseases, and that political and economic forces dominate research and development.
"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.
"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:
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.
Politics is always over developmental directions--some more representative (like the bioregional state) than others.
In the definition of the bioregional state:
Bioregional democracy (or the Bioregional State) is a set of electoral reforms and commodity reforms designed to force the political process in a democracy to better represent concerns about the economy, the body, and environmental concerns (e.g. water quality), toward developmental paths that are locally prioritized and tailored to different areas for their own specific interests of sustainability and durability. This movement is variously called bioregional democracy, watershed cooperation, or bioregional representation, or one of various other similar names--all of which denote democratic control of a natural commons and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path decisions—while not removing more generalized civil rights protections of a larger national state.
Other temporary enhancements to encourage human self-healing seem ethically sound, like much of electromedicine:
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.
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..."
Just to keep in mind what is known for free therapy, though systemic interests want to keep from everyone:
Pot Shrinks Tumors; Government Knew in '74
In 1974 researchers learned that THC, the active chemical in marijuana, shrank or destroyed brain tumors in test mice. But the DEA quickly shut down the study and destroyed its results, which were never replicated -- until now.
May 31, 2000
The term medical marijuana took on dramatic new meaning in February, 2000 when researchers in Madrid announced they had destroyed incurable brain tumors in rats by injecting them with THC, the active ingredient in cannabis.
The Madrid study marks only the second time that THC has been administered to tumor-bearing animals; the first was a Virginia investigation 26 years ago. In both studies, the THC shrank or destroyed tumors in a majority of the test subjects.
Most Americans don't know anything about the Madrid discovery. Virtually no major U.S. newspapers carried the story, which ran only once on the AP and UPI news wires, on Feb. 29, 2000.
The ominous part is that this isn't the first time scientists have discovered that THC shrinks tumors. In 1974 researchers at the Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National Institute of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system, found instead that THC slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice -- lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia.
The DEA quickly shut down the Virginia study and all further cannabis/tumor research, according to Jack Herer, who reports on the events in his book, "The Emperor Wears No Clothes." In 1976 President Gerald Ford put an end to all public cannabis research and granted exclusive research rights to major pharmaceutical companies, who set out -- unsuccessfully -- to develop synthetic forms of THC that would deliver all the medical benefits without the "high."
The Madrid researchers reported in the March issue of "Nature Medicine" that they injected the brains of 45 rats with cancer cells, producing tumors whose presence they confirmed through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). On the 12th day they injected 15 of the rats with THC and 15 with Win-55,212-2 a synthetic compound similar to THC. "All the rats left untreated uniformly died 12-18 days after glioma (brain cancer) cell inoculation ... Cannabinoid (THC)-treated rats survived significantly longer than control rats. THC administration was ineffective in three rats, which died by days 16-18. Nine of the THC-treated rats surpassed the time of death of untreated rats, and survived up to 19-35 days. Moreover, the tumor was completely eradicated in three of the treated rats." The rats treated with Win-55,212-2 showed similar results.
The Spanish researchers, led by Dr. Manuel Guzman of Complutense University, also irrigated healthy rats' brains with large doses of THC for seven days, to test for harmful biochemical or neurological effects. They found none.
"Careful MRI analysis of all those tumor-free rats showed no sign of damage related to necrosis, edema, infection or trauma ... We also examined other potential side effects of cannabinoid administration. In both tumor-free and tumor-bearing rats, cannabinoid administration induced no substantial change in behavioral parameters such as motor coordination or physical activity. Food and water intake as well as body weight gain were unaffected during and after cannabinoid delivery. Likewise, the general hematological profiles of cannabinoid-treated rats were normal. Thus, neither biochemical parameters nor markers of tissue damage changed substantially during the 7-day delivery period or for at least 2 months after cannabinoid treatment ended."
Guzman's investigation is the only time since the 1974 Virginia study that THC has been administered to live tumor-bearing animals. (The Spanish researchers cite a 1998 study in which cannabinoids inhibited breast cancer cell proliferation, but that was a "petri dish" experiment that didn't involve live subjects.)
In an email interview for this story, the Madrid researcher said he had heard of the Virginia study, but had never been able to locate literature on it. Hence, the Nature Medicine article characterizes the new study as the first on tumor-laden animals and doesn't cite the 1974 Virginia investigation.
"I am aware of the existence of that research. In fact I have attempted many times to obtain the journal article on the original investigation by these people, but it has proven impossible." Guzman said.
In 1983 the Reagan/Bush Administration tried to persuade American universities and researchers to destroy all 1966-76 cannabis research work, including compendiums in libraries, reports Jack Herer, who states, "We know that large amounts of information have since disappeared."
Guzman provided the title of the work -- "Antineoplastic activity of cannabinoids," an article in a 1975 Journal of the National Cancer Institute -- and this writer obtained a copy at the University of California medical school library in Davis and faxed it to Madrid.
The summary of the Virginia study begins, "Lewis lung adenocarcinoma growth was retarded by the oral administration of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabinol (CBN)" -- two types of cannabinoids, a family of active components in marijuana. "Mice treated for 20 consecutive days with THC and CBN had reduced primary tumor size."
The 1975 journal article doesn't mention breast cancer tumors, which featured in the only newspaper story ever to appear about the 1974 study -- in the Local section of the Washington Post on August 18, 1974. Under the headline, "Cancer Curb Is Studied," it read in part:
"The active chemical agent in marijuana curbs the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice and may also suppress the immunity reaction that causes rejection of organ transplants, a Medical College of Virginia team has discovered." The researchers "found that THC slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much as 36 percent."
Guzman, writing from Madrid, was eloquent in his response after this writer faxed him the clipping from the Washington Post of a quarter century ago. In translation, he wrote:
"It is extremely interesting to me, the hope that the project seemed to awaken at that moment, and the sad evolution of events during the years following the discovery, until now we once again Œdraw back the veil‚ over the anti-tumoral power of THC, twenty-five years later. Unfortunately, the world bumps along between such moments of hope and long periods of intellectual castration."
News coverage of the Madrid discovery has been virtually nonexistent in this country. The news broke quietly on Feb. 29, 2000 with a story that ran once on the UPI wire about the Nature Medicine article. This writer stumbled on it through a link that appeared briefly on the Drudge Report web page. The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times all ignored the story, even though its newsworthiness is indisputable: a benign substance occurring in nature destroys deadly brain tumors.
Raymond Cushing is a journalist, musician and filmmaker. This article was named by Project Censored as a "Top Censored Story of 2000."
"They let the genie out of the bottle with this one, and the big money can't put it back in." A Film By Christian Laurette - After a serious head injury in 1997, Rick Simpson sought relief from his medical condition through the use of medicinal hemp oil. When Rick discovered that the hemp oil (with its high concentration of T.H.C.) cured cancers and other illnesses, he tried to share it with as many people as he could free of charge - curing and controlling literally hundreds of people's illnesses... but when the story went public, the long arm of the law snatched the medicine - leaving potentially thousands of people without their cancer treatments - and leaving Rick with unconsitutional charges of possessing and trafficking marijuana! [The corrupt Canadian government attacks everyone in sight related to this, even its own military curing soldiers of various ailments far better than the expensive "required" allopathic medicines that make drug companies richer and people sicker with side effects, with little cure in sight, and most cures withdrawn by a money-model base of medicine, instead of cures put in sight by a healing-model base of medicine.]
Canada is in the middle of a cancer epidemic. Meet the people who were not allowed to testify on Rick's behalf at the Supreme Court of Canada's Infamous Rick Simpson Trial on September 10, 2007...INCLUDING A MAN WHO WAS CURED OF TERMINAL CANCER USING HEMP OIL! IF YOU SEE ONLY ONE DOCUMENTARY THIS YEAR...MAKE IT THIS ONE! Download the whole movie for free and share it at http://www.phoenixtearsmovie.com VIEW ALL 7 FILES AT http://www.youtube.com/chrychek - Please make a donation in any amount using the donate button on phoenixtears.ca and together we can CRUSH CANCER without government support. The world deserves a cure for cancer. Please support this world-changing cause. http://www.phoenixtears.ca ; http://www.phoenixtearsmovie.com ."
"Black Seed"
"Black Seed:" Nigella Sativa
Black seed is also known as Nigella sativa, black cumin, kalonji, haba al barakah and gizhah.
It has been used for over 2000 years as a relief for all disease and recently it has been studied extensively for cancer, skin disease and inflammation disorders.
Originally black seeds were used for migraines, allergies and acne disorders, but as scientists begin to realize its potential for curing cancer, the research began:
Pancreatic Cancer Research
"In 2008 Jefferson Kimmel Cancer Center studied the effect of Nigella sativa on pancreatic cancer tumor cells and discovered that they were able to kill 62% of the cells. Future research by Jefferson showed that with the use of Nigella sativa, they were able to annihilate or cause cell death on 82% of tumor cells. In addition to the positive results on pancreatic cancer, they found more results worth noting. According to Hwyda Arafat, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of Surgery at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, "Nigella sativa helps treat a broad array of diseases, including some immune and inflammatory disorders. Previous studies also have shown anticancer activity in prostate and colon cancers, as well as antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects."
Turmeric is one the most thoroughly researched plants in existence today. Its medicinal properties and components (primarily curcumin) have been the subject of over 5600 peer-reviewed and published biomedical studies. In fact, our five-year long research project on this sacred plant has
revealed over 600 potential preventive and therapeutic applications, as
well as 175 distinct beneficial physiological effects. This entire
database of 1,585 ncbi-hyperlinked turmeric abstracts can be downloaded
as a PDF at our Downloadable Turmeric Document page, and acquired either as a retail item or with 200 GMI-tokens, for those of you who are already are members and receive them automatically each month.
Given the sheer density of research
performed on this remarkable spice, it is no wonder that a growing
number of studies have concluded that it compares favorably to a variety
of conventional medications, including:
Lipitor/Atorvastatin (cholesterol medication): A 2008 study published in the journal Drugs in R & D found
that a standardized preparation of curcuminoids from Turmeric compared
favorably to the drug atorvastatin (trade name Lipitor) on endothelial
dysfunction, the underlying pathology of the blood vessels that drives
atherosclerosis, in association with reductions in inflammation and
oxidative stress in type 2 diabetic patients. [i] [For addition curcumin and 'high cholesterol' research – 8 abstracts] [Other studies now disagree that cholesterol has anything to do with heart disease: find any work by Mary Enig, or watch a summary of her biochemistry work by Sally Fallon of the Weston Price Foundation, a presentation entitled "The Oiling of America".]
Corticosteroids (steroid medications): A 1999 study published in the journal Phytotherapy Research found
that the primary polyphenol in turmeric, the saffron colored pigment
known as curcumin, compared favorably to steroids in the management of
chronic anterior uveitis, an inflammatory eye disease.[ii] A 2008 study
published in Critical Care Medicine found that curcumin
compared favorably to the corticosteroid drug dexamethasone in the
animal model as an alternative therapy for protecting lung
transplantation-associated injury by down-regulating inflammatory
genes.[iii] An earlier 2003 study published in Cancer Letters found
the same drug also compared favorably to dexamethasone in a lung
ischaemia-repurfusion injury model.[iv] [for additional curcumin and inflammation research – 52 abstracts]
Prozac/Fluoxetine & Imipramine (antidepressants): A 2011 study published in the journalActa Poloniae Pharmaceutica found that curcumin compared favorably to both drugs in reducing depressive behavior in an animal model.[v] [for additional curcumin and depression research – 5 abstracts]
Aspirin (blood thinner): A 1986 in vitro and ex vivo study published in the journalArzneimittelforschung found
that curcumin has anti-platelet and prostacyclin modulating effects
compared to aspirin, indicating it may have value in patients prone to
vascular thrombosis and requiring anti-arthritis therapy.[vi] [for
additional curcumin and anti-platelet research]
Anti-inflammatory Drugs: A 2004 study published in the journal Oncogene found that curcumin (as well as resveratrol) were effective alternatives to the drugs aspirin, ibuprofen, sulindac, phenylbutazone, naproxen, indomethacin, diclofenac, dexamethasone, celecoxib, and tamoxifen in exerting anti-inflammatory and anti-proliferative activity against tumor cells.[vii] [for additional curcumin and anti-proliferative research – 15 abstracts]
Oxaliplatin (chemotherapy drug): A 2007 study published in the International Journal of Cancer found
that curcumin compares favorably with oxaliplatin as an
antiproliferative agenet in colorectal cell lines.[viii] [for
additional curcumin and colorectal cancer research – 52 abstracts]
Metformin (diabetes drug): A 2009 study published in the journal Biochemitry and Biophysical Research Community explored
how curcumin might be valuable in treating diabetes, finding that it
activates AMPK (which increases glucose uptake) and suppresses
gluconeogenic gene expression (which suppresses glucose production in
the liver) in hepatoma cells. Interestingly, they found curcumin to be
500 times to 100,000 times (in the form known as
tetrahydrocurcuminoids(THC)) more potent than metformin in activating
AMPK and its downstream target acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC). [ix]
Another way in which turmeric and its
components reveal their remarkable therapeutic properties is in research
on drug resistant- and multi-drug resistant cancers. We have two
sections on our site dedicated to researching natural and integrative therapies on
these topics, and while there are dozens of substances with
demonstrable efficacy against these chemotherapy- and
radiation-resistant cancers, curcumin tops both lists:
We have found no less than 54 studies
indicating that curcumin can induce cell death or sensitize
drug-resistant cancer cell lines to conventional treatment.[x]
We have identified 27 studies on
curcumin’s ability to either induce cell death or sensitize multi-drug
resistant cancer cell lines to conventional treatment.[xi]
Considering how strong a track record
turmeric (curcumin) has, having been used as both food and medicine in a
wide range of cultures, for thousands of years, a strong argument can
be made for using curcumin as a drug alternative or adjuvant in cancer
treatment.
Or, better yet, use certified organic
(non-irradiated) turmeric in lower culinary doses on a daily basis so
that heroic doses won’t be necessary later in life after a serious
disease sets in.
Nourishing yourself, rather than self-medicating with ‘nutraceuticals,’ should be the goal of a healthy diet.
[learn more at
Sayer Ji's new collaborative project EATomology]
A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.
