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  • From: "E. E. Mitchamore Jr" <emitch@att.net>
  • To: <activism98201@verizon.net>, "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] We have a lot farther to fall than Cuba
  • Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 17:51:23 -0600

So we should just sit down on the land and wait for it to save us?  I doubt that's what you meant.
 
I believe that understanding what Nature demands or will allow will require all that our innovative minds can deliver.  Study and work will be required, and it's foolish to leave anything out.  Application of appropriate technology is one of the trickiest areas, and it's inappropriate to label ALL technology as evil.
 
From Wikipedia: "In economics, the Jevons Paradox is an observation made by William Stanley Jevons who stated that as technological improvements increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, total consumption of that resource may increase, rather than decrease. It is historically called the Jevons Paradox since it ran counter to Jevons's own intuition, but it is not a paradox at all and is well understood by modern economic theory which shows that improved resource efficiency may trigger a change in the overall consumption of that resource, but the direction of that change depends on other economic variables."
 
Note that it doesn't say "..always means faster depletion of a given resource."  For the end user, improved efficiency does not increase consumption.
 
I agree that the answers are in the land, but our innovative minds are the key to finding those answers.
 
E. E. "Mitch" Mitchamore
www.hillcountrynatives.biz
----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Nagel
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2006 2:38 PM
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] We have a lot farther to fall than Cuba

"It means large amounts of money must be spent to do it."

And though money is a but an abstract, it nonetheless does have some sense of connection to work.  And work means energy; therefore, money equals energy.  What I'm wanting to point out here is that it's an energy problem; and, as noted, innovation doesn't create energy (it can only improve efficiency; the problem here is that, as noted by Jevons Paradox, efficiency always means faster depletion of a given resource).

We must lay down the burden of expecting technology to save us.  It won't.  The answers are in the land, not in our minds...


-Mark Nagel
Everett, WA


=====================
From: Gloria Baikauskas <gcb49@flash.net>
Date: 2006/11/29 Wed AM 04:53:06 CST
To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] We have a lot farther to fall than Cuba

The US dollar is at an all time low today.  Maybe we should all be scared to death about that.  Orders for manufactured goods are way down, and housing starts aren't exactly multiplying.   It is the same in Japan.       Time will tell if this will be a global thing....or merely a repositioning of wealth and power which does occur from time to time.  Greed is a huge part of the problem I think.  We in the US have sold off property and goods left and right to the point that foreign companies and individuals own more of the US than most Americans realize.  Even Monsanto is not American owned.       Tis all a mess.       Somewhere there is a research project being funded that would ordinarily not be because some clear thinking individual realizes that now is the time for that alternate energy.  Remember our streets used to be lit by gas lamps....not electric ones with halogen bulbs and such.  Necessity is the mother of all invention.       In much of the world the high speed magl
 ev <magnetic levitation> trains are used to move people from place to place using far less fossil fuel than an ordinary one in the US.  For the life of me I cannot figure out why they have not put down new rails and tried this new technology here when it has worked so well in Asia and in Europe.  I know why.  It means large amounts of money must be spent to do it.  Those folks with all the money who are in our Congress, or cousin to those who are, could make it happen...but they don't.  In the end huge amounts of money would be saved, though.

Sometimes it is not ignorance, but contempt that is the problem.
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