Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dan Conine <dconine@dotnet.com>]

Hello, my name is Dan, and I'm a conspiracy nut....
My years of work with technology, research into physics, and general 
feel for the technical environment has yielded several ways of looking 
at the needs/wants of humanity when it comes to sustainability. The 
first is that there really is a vast black conspiracy with men in suits 
and everything who take promising technology and squirrel it away from 
prying eyes in order to protect us from our own abilities. There are 
holes in the quantum/relativity paradigm and "here there be 
monsters"-leaving this thread to other lists...
The ethanol vs. petroleum debate is simply one of shoveling a lot of 
manure around without taking real action. The amount of energy to be had 
from ethanol can easily be saved through simple conservation methods and 
a few regulation changes. Development of ethanol production should be 
focused on small scale production for local use, whether for on-farm or 
in-town utilization, not on supporting the status quo of transportation. 
Transportation should be focused on hybrid drives and electric chassis 
systems (fuel cell or battery) because that is the future of technology, 
regardless of the fuel.
Living on the Land (the list and the act) is important because at least 
some people have to live outside the shielded box of television 
propaganda and commercial profit addictions. When the next economic 
collapse comes, there won't be a cow in the shed to milk and feed all 
the hobos: only an empty gas tank on an ATV. Most of the current farm 
economy is based on the high volume, processed stuff and the meat 
industry. These are both highly dependent on centralization, cheap fuel, 
and ignorant consumers.
Another key point to frugality and land-based culture is that we have to 
determine not the university-optimized amount of food which can be grown 
on an acre, but the amount that will be grown by less than optimal 
conditions, with less than optimal training and less than optimal 
equipment. In other words, what kind of native living can be 
reestablished without current infrastructures? From there, we have to 
decide on what population levels we can sustain as a species, rather 
than starting with any assumptions about 'servicing' the behemoth we 
have wrought.
I applaud all of you, all of your arguments, and mostly, all of your 
hard work.

Dan Conine
Belgium,WI