permaculture

[Judith Hanna <jehanna@gn.apc.org>]

Dear Toby

So your rock dust supply is a local resource, harnessing an output of an
existing operation that would otherwise go to waste -- seems to me to meet
the permacultural criteria.

Your final para -- on short-term start-up inputs which fall short of
sustainability criteria in order to get a site up to long-term sustainable
balance -- is indeed a fundamental issue we all have to negotiate, in a
multitude of ways. 

Carry on rocking...
Judith


At 22:41 21/05/00 -0700, you wrote:
>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
>
>
>
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Judith Hanna
jehanna@gn.apc.org
15 Jansons Rd, Tottenham, London N15 4JU