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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

>  But they have 
> unbelievable discussion boards where individual contributors discuss the 
> projects they're working on.

The "negativism" is actually just a form of the $239 tomato, says I.

My gardens are primitive, scarcely neolithic.  More than 3/4ths of the plants 
are from saved seed and all the "fertilizer" is from decaying organic matter. 
 The shovels and hoes cost little in either money or energy to produce and 
bid fair to last 100 years.  This spring I restored my grandfather's old 
Vulcan 
#13 plow and turned one 1/6th acre plot that had been allowed to fallow the 
previous year and had begun to grow in sod.  The restoration cost about $16.

This is turning out to be a very good gardening year.  Already here just past 
the Ides of June my 'produce/cash outlay' is very high.  My 'produce/energy' 
ratio is even higher, 'energy' here being liquid fuel or electricity.

The cash cost of a tomato (once they ripen) is likely to be so negligible 
that it is hardly worth tallying.

Yet the gardens of some acquaintances are insanely cash intensive, and energy 
intensive.  There is the Kubota tractor parked by the 20'x30' garden, the 
purchased platic trellises, the polycarbonate green house (heated, of 
course), 
etc. etc.   When the year's garden expenses are divided by the produce, it 
isn't 
unusual for the result to be a $239 tomato.

And why are they gardening?  Why, to save money, of course.  That, and to 
save the Earth by not contributing to the energy and soil erosion that 
agribusiness causes.  They never stop to realize that manufaturing that 
tractor and all 
the purchased garden dodads cost more in energy than the produce from that 
garden would save in 500 years.

I look at all the alternative energy posits I can find, including the one 
Bill posted.  I have yet to find one that in the end is not a $239 tomato.  
As I 
have unpopularly opined before, if you take the actual amount of electricity 
available at the outlets for an alternative energy system and compare that 
amount of electicity to the cost (in energy used and pollution caused to make 
it 
as well as cash to purchase it) and compare that to the cost (ditto) of 
purchasing that amount of electicity, in every case so far that I've 
investigated, 
the alternate energy system in the end is causing MORE energy use and 
pollution 
than buying the power, and the cash payback is in hundreds of years.

There's another aspect of this I find fascinating.  Now of days one hears 
endless blather of how we can come up with alternate motor fuels or alterante 
vehicles so we can continue to dash about madly.  The suggestion that moving 
about great distances at 70mph every day might itself be the problem which is 
easily solved by working out a lifestyle that doesn't NEED personal motor 
transport of that type in in that quantity.

Blank stares follow the suggestion.

>From Bill's site this:

"Hand Pumps--Better than not having water, if you have no resources 
available.  Or if you can get your kids to do it."

Like the unassailable mindset that will consider no alternatives but the 
status quo of unlimited amount of personal vehicular transportation, the 
pervasive 
theme on all the "what to do about depletion and pollution caused by the 
electric system" sites is that whatever task is to be done, the ONLY thing to 
be 
considered, even remotely considered, is to stand back with one's hands 
folded 
and watch some gismo do the work.

Do it by hand?  You have got to be f-ing kidding!!  Why, I know someone 93 
years old with only one arm and in a wheelchair and on an oxygen collector.  
You 
can't expect HER to do that work by hand so you can't expect ANYONE to do it 
by hand.  What an evil, sick suggestion.

And yet on the proffered website, the feature for water pumps is the solar 
powered pump that lifts the water 35 feet at a rate of 75 gallons an hour on 
sunny days.  I am just finishing up a system on my place using an old cast 
iron 
transfer pump that lifts the water from the collection basin in  a stream 24 
feet to the pump and then delivers it under a bit of pressure 16 more feet to 
the cistern (which has a low flow in very dry weather).   With a reasonable 
effort the system delivers 5 gallons a minute.  That's 300 gallons an hour 
although one is unlikely to crank the thing for a full hour at that rate.  
Yet it 
costs only fifteen minutes of work to duplicate the fellow's solar system and 
it 
can be done any time day or night, sun or clouds.

Yet the prospects are dismissed.  You'd only employ a hand method of doing a 
task if no other method existed and then you'd try to shanghai someone else 
into doing the work at that.

No, it isn't negativism, it's realism.  It's the insight and courage to look 
the matter clear through to the end and see that many (most) of the proffered 
low tech solutions use more energy, cause more pollution, and require more 
cash (the obtaining of which itself uses energy and causes pollution) than 
just 
limiting oneself to that lower amount of energy and obtaining it from 
conventional sources.  The real low tech solutions are shunned as some sort 
of hellish 
curse.    </HTML>