permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

Judith Hanna wrote:

>What information do you have on where and how your mineral supplements are
>mined? What is the environmental and social justice impact at that end?
>I've not seen any information on this, so am still unsure how 'sustainable'
>rock dust is as a fertiliser.

An interesting question. Rock dust is nearly always a by-product of gravel
quarrying. The basalt quarry near me generates several hundred thousand
cubic yards per year (!) of gravel for road construction; the owner says he
gives away a couple of yards a year of rock dust (most of that to me,
lately) in the form of fines that come off the crusher. Hundreds of yards
of fines blow away. So rock-dust production is a tiny drop in an ocean of
gravel; "sustainable" as long as gravel is being produced, I guess. Gravel
production is an ugly and eventually unsustainable process (there's an
awful lot of rock on the planet, but it takes a lot of energy to grind it
up, and the despoliation of land is unconscionable). But . . . is it
unethical to use an otherwise wasted by-product of an unsustainable yet
common practice? To my mind, no, not if your use of the product in no way
encourages the unsustainable practice. I suppose some would say using rock
dust condones the gravel quarrying. But for me, the benefits--of creating
fertile soil and using a waste product--outweigh the downside. Sure, if the
rock dust is trucked in from 1000 miles away then I'd avoid it, just as
it's best to avoid rock phosphate since it's strip-mined  (most in the US
comes from hideous open pits in Utah) or bone and blood meal from
inhumanely kept cattle. So where do we get our fertilizer from?

All imports to a system raise ethical questions, yet restoring a degraded
system to the point where it requires few inputs often takes lots of
imports at the beginning. One of those ugly questions that permaculture
raises, isn't it? If others have mused on the ethics of jump-starting a
sustainable system via unsustainable means, beyond these few late-night
thoughts, I'd be curious to hear them.

Toby