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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Riot for Austerity! 90% Reduction Emissions Project
  • Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2007 09:02:07 EDT


> 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>




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