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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] More on Low Dairy and Meat Diets

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] More on Low Dairy and Meat Diets
  • Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:02:49 +0100


But there I differ on TSHTF. It's my hope that the gradualists (like Dimitri Orlov) are right, that we won't just wake up some fine morning to find our world is out of fuel and the store shelves are empty. That there will be time for many to relearn and redisccover what's been lost. Otherwise I'm wasting my time maintaining this list. Yet it's totally encouraging to see so many different people taking part, posting things of concern, staying on topic and discussing intelligently (and yes, even disagreeing with yours truly). That's what it takes to learn. We can't figure it all out by ourselves, can we.

<<<< Figuring it all out for ourselves takes too long in a time of crisis Paul. Reason to start asap. While we are at it I can give my own version of a cheese press (patent pending :))
When we were very poor we made cheese in a small bucket with holes punched in the sides but it was not easy to press the cheese in this. A commercial cheese press was very expensive and took up too much space in our already cluttered kitchen. I solved this by screwing a short piece of galvanised angle iron to the wall just above the height of the cheese bucket and we have a heavy oak plank standing at the ready but out of the way that fits under the angle iron and that comes on top of the lid of the bucket. Want more pressure? just push the cheese closer to the wall.

I never figured Orlov for a gradualist. Last time I heard him he advised to give up the job, buy a container and fill this with tools and food supply to survive the first shock.

And I sincerely don't know what to wish for. When I was a young biology student in the early 70's we had a professor for ecology who loved mathematical models. We had to calculate all kinds of weird things. For instance what position to take in for maximum solar tanning. Take a human body as a cilinder and find out in what position most rays strike the surface. Standing upright on the beach until about 11 a.m. was ideal and only at noon is a lying down position ideal.
But we also were set to calculate how many people this planet could carry. The answer we came up with was then half a billion give or take a few million. The only reason we were able to rise far above this limit is that we are destroying the resources as we go. Half a billion people means that we can all live from the interest (annual solar influx) on the planet's capital (the global ecosystem). We found ways to eat the capital direct and that is the only reason we are now at around 6.8 billion.
A few years ago I redit those calculations and came to the conclusion that the carrying capacity now has been reduced to below 200 million people. That number is dropping at an ever increasing speed.

So is it good to have a gradual conversion of 7 billion people to more primitive living? I can not see this being enough.
It is well known that populations of other animals at times climb steeply/ exponentially above their normal carrying capacity towards an asymptote and then the numbers crash typically to near zero way below the normal carrying capacity.

I have been thinking about this for a long time and I can not see how our own fate could posibly be different. The longer we keep going the deeper we will fall and the less resources there will be left to allow any one of us to live on afterwards. So really the faster we crash the better? It scares the shit out of me but yes that is what I logically have to come up with. And I am afraid J.H. Kunstler is an optimist here below. I think that the one job with the best growth potential is that of robber and plunderer. Much easier than to actually get into food production.

I do half hope you are right though.
john



paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------------------------------

Many types of jobs will cease to exist: public relations executive, marketing directors, et cetera. I think work will be very hands-on, and a lot of it will revolve around food production.
-- James Howard Kunstler, 2003

How do you move from a system which has built in destruction of the planet and built in devastation for local communities and local economies and transition back to systems which formerly worked and new environmentally sustainable systems? That's the project of our time.
- Jerry Mander

When I speak of these two phases of systemic collapse, what I mean is that we concern ourselves over whether the waitress will bring the food promptly enough, but we omit to ask if there is any food to be brought.
-- Jan Lundberg









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