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  • From: Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] More on Low Dairy and Meat Diets
  • Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2010 23:46:31 -0500

John,
You say a lot that I agree with. I do Transition when my mental health will stand it, since we've not yet got to the point where we recognize the grief process as we each do that and, being a shamanic practitioner, I feel the pain of the land as it suffers, so I'm nearly always grieving. Sometimes it's more than I can handle, but I'm surrounded by people who need to "stay in the solution" while the myth of separation steals more of the human future by exploiting the land, turning soil into dirt, and then desert.

Transition started in Kinsale and their City Council analogue has adopted an Energy Descent Action Plan to get them off fossil fuels and organized into community working at restoring full resilience to the nature around there. Nature wasn't hurt there nearly as bad as US culture has hurt it here.

If we'd been doing Transition instead of the SUV binge since President Carter told us we needed to get off oil, I'd have some confidence that our species might make it, but we did the SUV binge, instead. That's only one of the giant errors we made with the Gipper. I tend to think we're screwed, and I've pretty much thought that since I graduated New College, where Richard Heinberg was one of my teachers.

I don't know for sure about how the species ought to eat. I'm pretty much a vegetarian, transitioning to raw veganism, but I live in Austin, in town - in a riparian corridor where we have no business being, where it's too shady to grow food much and has no southern exposure that the HOA will let us grow in, so we sold it and when we find the right place, we'll move. Until then, we rent the place back from the buyers and I'm trying to let the "back yard" return to what it wants to be.

All I really know for sure is that when I'm in a place where nature is happy the weight lifts off my soul. I'm Cherokee (and Scotch Irish, German, and English), and I'm living wrong for my soul. I'm hanging around hoping for Transition community to start happening so we have the power to act in the world as if we have time to save ourselves from self-administered extinction. Texas is as conservative a place as one's likely to find, but it's home. My family's been here since the Civil War, which hasn't got over yet in some parts of the country.

I lived on a Permaculture on the Santa Rosa Plain, an ancient lake bed, where anything we stuck in the ground grew like crazy, and planting fruit and nut trees on berms so they could get their roots dry part of the year caused them to thrive, so, after a couple of years, we would graze through the food forest, picking stuff and eating it right then, while it was still alive, with a gratitude that has been rare since I returned to Texas in 2006 and haven't managed yet to rejoin the land for more than a few moments at a time. We had a lot of help and the only livestock were pets, so we were settling in pretty good the second year we didn't pinch all the buds off the trees. There was still a ton of work to do, but it was good work, the sort of work that I think people are here to do, stacking in all the biodiversity we could manage. My work is creating just, sustainable culture, working the land by working its people. It's good to do this work among people with enough substance to throw off the smiley face demanded by domination culture.

Thanks for sharing your way of life with me. It feels to me like you're solidly engaged with working the land. Since Plato's students left Athens to raise horses in the country, we've known that's how we humans are supposed to live. Relations is where meaning is found in human existence, a favorite teacher used to say.

Smiles.
Tommy

On 6/21/10 5:12 PM, John D'hondt wrote:
Tommy,
I really don't think the difference in carbon foot print between vegetables,
grains, soy bean or dairy and meat is of the slightest importance. When
TSHTF large scale agriculture is going to stop, shops will go empty and
transport will slow down to a snail's crawl.
This means that most people will start to starve at that stage and that
anything that is edible will be eaten. Maybe there are a few of us capable
of producing food for more people than ourselves but none of us can feed
even the nearest small town for very long.

We have a few things happening at the moment that could very well, each on
their own, mean the end of our species and every single day of the week I
get several mails to that effect. Taken all together I think mankind has no
chance at all. Maybe a good thing too because we are not a good species to
have around in fragile space ship Earth.

The hopeful detail though is that when our numbers go very low we might just
pull of to come out as a better, improved species.

And why should "we" not have access to meat and dairy. Without going into
details, I fully expect my family will have plentiful access to just that.
We milk two cows and five goats by hand, produce our own rennet. Make 3 two
kilo hard rounds of cheese per week, butter, kefir and soft cheese as much
as we want. What is most important is the knowledge of how to do things and
we do have that.
Unfortunately it is clear to us that if people wanted to start doing the
same thing that it would be very difficult to do in troubled times. We
reccon it takes about two years run in time to do everything needed and at
the moment it may already be too late to start and solve all problems before
TSHTF. It took us 5-6 years to solve the rennet problem for instance. The
amount of nonsense written about this subject is enormous and it simply does
not work.
john

Does this study remain valid when/if Peak Oil, climate change, and
economic collapse are factored into its assumptions? Meat and dairy
have a lot more of a carbon footprint than vegetables, especially from
established beds, unless we're talking about homestead chickens/rabbits,
etc.

What the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is teaching us, too late, is
that there is not a way to safely produce deepwater oil with current
technology. BP spends $1 billion/month cleaning up and trying to plug
the well they let get away from them. Ocean-going ships are no longer
able to access Mississippi River grain export facilities. After this
thing ripples through Gulf state economies, the tens of millions of
refugees will make the Katrina diaspora look insignificant. Richard
Heinberg today on Energy Bulletin.net says BP's mess may take down the
US (and harm the British) economy
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/53168. Over time, Richard has been
near 100% correct in his predictions.

The only reason BP's drilling in mile (or more) deep water is because
the easily gotten commercially viable shallow water and land deposits
are gone, meaning cheap oil is gone, which is what Peak Oil always
meant. When oil goes over $80/barrel, the US economy staggers, and
Michael Ruppert says we'll have $200/barrel by the end of this summer
because BP is deepwater drilling's Three Mile Island. Ruppert says he's
right 80% of the time.

What this seems to indicate, to me, is that we will be eating whatever
the immediate twenty miles or so produces, and a significant portion of
that will be what we can produce ourselves. Keeping our diets healthy
may become a challenge.

It seems certain, however, that we will not have the access to meat and
dairy that this study assumes.

Smiles.
Tommy

On 6/20/10 1:47 PM, pbunch@cox.net wrote:
This Cornell study indicates that largely vegetarian diets with small
amounts of meat and dairy products may provide more effective land use
than vegan diets.

http://tinyurl.com/332pxro
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