Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Doug Willhite <drwillhite@earthlink.net>]

Hey Tommy,

I cannot speak for your community, or anyone else here's situation or  
community.  I can only speak for my own immediate family, community,  
surroundings, and circumstances.

I agree with Paul that consumers in the U.S. eat way too much meat  
(and way too much of everything, except fruit and veggies, for that  
matter! :)

But if my neighbors and I all had to become vegans / vegetarians and  
grow most of our own food on the rugged mountain-desert terrain  
around here -- (especially in a post-collapse world without having  
cheap, abundant, reliable fossil fuels for shipping veggies an  
average of 1500 miles from soil to plate any longer) --  our  
collective starvation would be a near certainty.

If you made slaves out of everyone around here and built enough cold  
frames and greenhouses you might be able to avert mass starvation.   
Otherwise the local, small-scale raising of livestock for meat is by  
far your best bet!

I don't give a rip what the U.N. or Richard Heinberg might have to  
say about it... really, I don't. I've known Richard since the 1970's.  
He's a brilliant and talented man. But there's a vast difference  
between being "book smart" and being "street smart."

Veganism and vegetarianism are NOT realistic or doable options for  
folks who are serious about taking responsibility for their own food  
supply.  Not around here. Not where I live. Your kind of talk --  
"vegan lifestyles are a survival device" -- is just plain la-la land!

The myth of vegetarianism needs to be dispelled pronto.  Vegetarian  
ideology is currently one of the biggest obstacles to reaching local,  
community food self-sufficiency.

doug

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Message: 12
Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:49:05 -0500
From: Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] The Truth About Vegetarianism

..... There is no way the US model of meat-eating can continue, and  
the dairy industry
isn't a lot cleaner, so vegan lifestyles are a survival device, rather
than a choice, until we get our species out of population overshoot
(Earth without cheap oil supports perhaps two billion humans, Richard
Heinberg says) and recalibrate from there.

Smiles.
Tommy

On 6/3/10 4:29 PM, Ken Hargesheimer wrote:

>     The vegetarian myth is disproved. It is often stated that meat
>     produces one-fourth to one-tenth the food that using that same
>     land for a vegetarian diet would produce. That is not the whole
>     picture. Animals who transform one-fourth of their food into meat
>     transform three-quarters of their food into manures (high value
>     fertilizer if properly managed and used) which is transformed into
>     humus which is transformed into crops for both livestock and
>     people. Organic agriculture recycles everything and transforms
>     inert minerals, air, water and sunshine into increased biota
>     through feeding the microherd a full diet including animal wastes.
>     There is more life created into existence out of the dead
>     planetary chemistry than vegetarians are able to account for with
>     their tired false myth. [Lion Kuntz]
>
>     Much of the land in many countries is suitable only for pasture
>     which can be used only to produce m

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