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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] future of fuels

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: Dan Conine <dconine@dotnet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] future of fuels
  • Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 13:33:50 -0500

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




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