Ecological Armageddon....

[yarrowfarm]

I feel the same as most sentiment here. However, like Vegetarianism or Veganism, concern for the planet falls to the more affluent and privileged.
A large part of the global population can't afford to think much beyond basic living standards.

I am sad to say that I think, due to human nature, this is a lost battle. I'd like to be wrong, but think the planet (not us) will heal itself of what we currently think of as humanity and life on earth will be very different in the future.
That doesn't mean I don't care or do my bit.....

 

[Leshy]

I feel the same as most sentiment here. However, like Vegetarianism or Veganism, concern for the planet falls to the more affluent and privileged.
A large part of the global population can't afford to think much beyond basic living standards.

I am sad to say that I think, due to human nature, this is a lost battle. I'd like to be wrong, but think the planet (not us) will heal itself of what we currently think of as humanity and life on earth will be very different in the future.
That doesn't mean I don't care or do my bit.....

Respectfully disagree...

It doesn't matter how rich or how poor .
Grassroots movements all over the world , like the south American campesinos and poor farmer communities all over the world are doing their bit to turn things around.
Ignoring the Monsanto threats and deals and going at it the traditional way .


Additionally there is hope , it is not a lost battle .
The apathy and defeatism is unfirtunately contagious and like you , there are many people that have accepted defeat before even attempting to change the world around them .
It's easier that way.
Conformity and apathy are all known tools of the Corporate cleptocrats and they rely on those to carry on.

Change yourself and watch the world change around you.
Your perception is not the reality.

Here are just a few examples of what's already happening.

https://solutions.thischangeseverything.org/


Additionally I strongly recommend Naomi Klein's books .
"This changes everything " especially is a huge eye opener.

Peace

 

[yarrowfarm]

@Leshy - I do like what you are saying and appreciate that I sound like I've given up.
I am not suggesting we give up trying, I'm just not optimistic that humankind will properly turn things around until forced to - sadly.

I worry that A LOT of people like things the way they are, and/or aren't prepared to make any sacrifice for tomorrow.

I will keep doing my bit...... I should do more.........

 

[Leshy]

I will keep doing my bit...... I should do more.........

Same here.


And I know what what you mean , but positive action makes it happen.
Keep it up bud 👍

 

[Janne]

Most Indians are poor. Most of the poor are Hindus. Most Hindus are Vegetarian.

It is cheap to be Vegetarian. You do not have to buy expensive processed stuff like Quorn, Tofu, imported exotic fruit and veg...

Unfortunately, Vegetarians and Vegans are better for Mother Earth than omnivores.
I say unfortunately because I eat meat and fish, so contribute to the demise if Earth as we know it.

 

[yarrowfarm]

Most Indians are poor. Most of the poor are Hindus. Most Hindus are Vegetarian.

It is cheap to be Vegetarian. You do not have to buy expensive processed stuff like Quorn, Tofu, imported exotic fruit and veg...

Unfortunately, Vegetarians and Vegans are better for Mother Earth than omnivores.
I say unfortunately because I eat meat and fish, so contribute to the demise if Earth as we know it.

This is true, the whole Indian culture/way of living is tuned to it. Their meat free curries are the best.
In the UK it's easier to be a vegetarian now than a few decades ago, but it can be hard work as everything is still mostly geared towards meat eating.
I nearly overdosed on cheese .

 

[Janne]

You know, you can be a meat eater, but be ´Earth friendly’. How?
Each much, much less meat. In the past, people only ate meat maybe once a week. There are soooooo many meat free, European tasty dishes....

You are right, a good Vegetarian curry is the best. I suspect the ’Indian sub continent’ cooking was developed for vegetarian dishes. Moslem countries (Pakistan and Bangladesh) were Hindu brfore the takeover by the Moslem religion. They kept the cooking style and just added whatever Animalia they liked.

Take a curry with chicken or prawns. Do you really taste the chicken or prawns? Not really!

 

[snappingturtle]

I think of myself as a modern primitive, it is nice to have some aspects of the tools and living we have, but I counter that with a primitive philosophy, are tools are awesome but so is the garden about us, just got to get that balance right, I don't hold much hope for are race, but just keep doing what your doing and keep that fire burning for others to see, then maybe there is a change, all life comes from tiny seeds.

 

[Janne]

I wonder if all countries would force a change if a really nasty catastrophy happened? Like a huge drop in crops for a couple of years and mass starvation.
My wild guess is not.

I read a few days ago that there is an idea out there to change a gene in rice so the “whatever” in the rice changes and crops will double. Something 3 will turn to sonething 4.
(Robson Valley will know what uneducated me mean)

But when I read that I thought that the crop will put a double drain on the soil, so more fertilisation (= more runoff of it too) will be needed. Sure, more food, but at the cost of buggered up waters.

 

[Robson Valley]

I'm quite certain that rice is 3C. Adding 4C might be as useful as putting fish gills in a giraffe.
So many other critical things need to be changed as well.

Plants take in carbon dioxide and a major result of photosynthesis and metabolism is biomass = more plant. Apples, whatever.

OK. Answer this question: when a plant takes in a carbon dioxide, where do you first find that carbon atom from that carbon dioxide?

Answer: The carbon atom is combined with a 5-carbon molecule and immediately split in half = one of the 3-carbon bits has the new carbon in it.
That is the "opening step" in the Calvin Benson cycle in chloroplasts.

However.
There were a couple of guys working for Dole Pineapple in Hawaii who notices that pineapple plants didn't perform as expected.
They got paranoid about losing their jobs so they passed their results to some other guys at an Australian university (Brisbane?)

Hatch and Slack soon discovered that elsewhere in the leaves of many plants, the carbon dioxide was being almost vacuumed out of the air.
The detail is that the new carbon shows up as a part of a 4-carbon molecule in very specialized chloroplasts in very specialized plant cells.

It's a really efficient uptake, far more than the CB cycle alone. This is why it's so important. Called the Hatch-Slack Pathway.
Next,
These plants split the 4C, and recycle the 3C part while the new carbon gets handed off to the CB cycle, as usual.

These days, many different plants have been found which exhibit 4C.
Most of the time, the plant anatomy, the arrangement of the living plant cells in the leaves, is enough to give it away.

Ecologically this does not mean that these plants require an equivalent uptake of everything else. More, yes. Equal, no.

Humans have a really bad habit of removing the most nutritiously valuable plant parts
and rarely if ever do people put any of those nutrients back where they came from.
Yeah, I'm talking human waste. Western social stigmas prevent that. Fix it.
In asia, they know better. Called "night soil."

 

[Janne]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4996858/A-step-creating-rice-50-productive.html

Found it. As it is Daily Mail, the chance is they got it wrong.
Daily Mail is a British paper with questionable news, staff that have writing difficulties but still fun to read!

I prefer brown rice and the Canuck Wild Rice. Picked by hand I guess.


The Night Soil has to undergo a maturing/fermentation process, to remove pathogens and other crap (sic).
Years ago we banned importation of Chinese cans (vegetables) as it was discovered that the cans contained traces sterilized Human Night Soil.
They sprayed liquified human $hit on the fields in short speaking French.

I wee around my Mango trees if rain is expected.

 

[Robson Valley]

Well, blow the dust off your copy of Lehninger and read all about 3C and 4C.
Dole Pineapple would have looked like aces if their management was less than stone-dense.

Wild rice is some other grass, not Orza sp at all. Was originally introduced into western Canada as muskrat food.
In the sandy bays of the Churchill river, across Saskatchewan, it's still harvested from a canoe, by hand.
I buy only from the First Nations Co-Op in La Ronge, SK. I can buy cheaper from south of the 49th but I refuse.

All the same, its a perfect example of a crop that thrives on neglect, a bit labor intensive to harvest but decent nutritional values.
As well, it doesn't seem to have had any detrimental impact on ecologies where it's been introduced.
Those sandy river back bays always had some tall (6' - 8') Scirpus reeds and now they're covered with rice.
Excellent habitat for very young fish and bugs to eat.

Work-mate of mine bought a section (square mile) of crap forest land and cleared some. Trout ponds = profit.
Road along one edge with a near new ditch, so he planted wild rice = profit.

We have gone over the edge to an ecological mess. You like garlic? Huh?
It has been cultivated for so long that it's no longer able to reproduce naturally.
Scatter garden seed in sunny openings in your forests. Wait a few months.
Go take a look at who the successful competitor plants really are.

Sure, a garden is fairly intensive. But, keeping a personal but diverse seed bank as a hedge against disaster is a good thing. Can't survive on parsley.

 

[mousey]

I've been watching a chap called Jordan Peterson a fair bit recently. In one video he looks hopeful with the view that we've really only been interested in 'saving' the planet from the 60's or so, and the steps taken within the last 50 or 60 years have been quite progressive. Before this the view that we mere humans could impact the ecology of something so vast as the earth seemed the prevailing thought so nobody worried - we now know better.

I am hopeful - electric cars are available [how that electricity is made is another issue - but it's a step] more energy is available from green sources. The company I work for has solar panels which produce all the power we use and feed more back to the system. The energy I use at home has come from [purportedly] green sources - [Ecotricity, Bulb, Good Energy, Co-Operative, Green Star, OVO - some of these I have used some not and is not an exhaustive list.]

Things connected to my work is going down the route of being as efficient as possible, maybe not for the purpose of being eco friendly per se, maybe just more efficient running = cheaper to run with the eco thing being a byproduct, but you've got to start somewhere.

 

[Janne]

You are so right. We in the First World countries have changed hugely since the late 60's and early 70's, and the countries in the former Soviet Block since the early 90's.

Huge progresses has been done.
The only aspect I personally hate is that the items we buy today do not last as they did.
Any item manufactured in the past was designed to last for decades. This by itself was and is very environment friendly. Today things break, can not be repaired so get thrown away. Hopefully recycled, but as the recycling in most countries is still not sufficiently developed, end up in land fills.

So even with environment friendly manufacturing and materials, they end up as polluting the Earth.

Electric cars? They need a huge amount of energy to make. The batteries are made using Rare Earth metals, mostly mined in countries where the environment is less important.

 

[Robson Valley]

Planned obsolescence is an industrial standard.
You pay a serious premium to expect anything more.

Henry Ford demonstrated the effectiveness of assembly-line production.
Next, he asked for a complete inventory of all the spare parts that all the Ford dealerships used in repairs.
The story goes on to say that he learned of one or more parts which never wore out.
He demanded that those parts be redesigned to fail like all the others.

We can't win for trying.

 

[crosslandkelly]

The only aspect I personally hate is that the items we buy today do not last as they did.
Any item manufactured in the past was designed to last for decades. This by itself was and is very environment friendly. Today things break, can not be repaired so get thrown away. Hopefully recycled, but as the recycling in most countries is still not sufficiently developed, end up in land fills.

And as ever those terrible socialists the Swedes, are leading the way. https://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/respo...wants-reward-citizens-who-repair-instead-toss

 

[Janne]

Cool move. Sounds like an idea from the Greens.

Most things can not be repaired, or the part plus repair is more expensive than buying a new part.
I do not think you know the hourly rate in Sweden for even the cheapest 'person'. Hence the large 'off the record' economy in Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia..

I see this rebate of VAT to be an attempt to lower the Black Economy.

The recycling rate in Sweden is 98 or 99%. You have a bit to go.
Do it, Earth will thank you.

 

[santaman2000]

......You like garlic? Huh?
It has been cultivated for so long that it's no longer able to reproduce naturally.....

Just like corn (maize)

 

[santaman2000]

.......Unfortunately, Vegetarians and Vegans are better for Mother Earth than omnivores.
I say unfortunately because I eat meat and fish, so contribute to the demise if Earth as we know it.

Are you sure about that? Conventional (mono crop) farming destroys all other life forms on the farmed area whereas livestock farming supports dozens of other plant and animal species.

 

[daveO]

I'd rather see government run repair centres where they provide parts at a reduced rate and train and pay pensioners or layabouts, sorry jobseekers, to fix stuff. I've seen charities doing similar things but I guess insurances etc are the problem with electrical goods. Saying that I'm pretty handy when it comes to fixing things so if they want to pay me to fix my own stuff then great.

What I hate is walking around Aldi or Lidl and seeing the isles full of cheap goods that you know will be in landfill within a year. People can't get enough of it though. Holidays like Christmas and Halloween have just become so wasteful, millions of tons of plastic waste generated for brief gratification. If the government want to fix anything I'd start with that.