permaculture

["Dylan Ford" <dford@suffolk.lib.ny.us>]

Richard,  I don't know what goes on elsewhere but around here we have
municipal pickup for residences and contacted private pick-up for
businesses. I don't see this process stopping, we must do something with all
the garbage our society generates, and we are using the fuel to get it
anyway even as we squander the resources mixed into it. Making alcohol is
not rocket science, there is no reason to haul organic garbage any further
than we do now, once the local mechanisms are in place. And I agree, our
society ought to generate less garbage and should be encouraged and
compelled to do so, but we mustn't allow the sad facts of societal
piggishness to undermine attempts on the ground to locally chip away at our
petroleum use

I don't know if you've ever looked at my website essay, but I suggest in
there that if we saved every bit of used fryolator oil and discarded fats to
make bio-diesel, and every bit of organic matter to make alcohol, the fleet
of trucks that pick up garbage could be tooled to run on these substances.
And I believe that an alternative service to the military for young people
could make use of their physical energy and enthusiasm to inexpensively have
a work-force to do much of the work during the transition. Service to
country need not be limited to military affairs.

I don't know if this has a place on this discussion list, but has anyone
noticed that there is something terribly wrong going on with many of the
young people in this country? Many of these young folks have never spent a
night outdoors, have never had a proper nourishing fresh home-cooked organic
meal, have never had the experience of planting or nurturing anything at
all, or spending any time experiencing the natural world or doing any
altruistic work as a cooperative group. I think we could make a change for
the better in this country if young people are given all of these
experiences before they begin the adult phase of their lives. Little wonder
we as a people so little value the natural world - most people have had no
experience of it beyond a film on PBS, and whose experience of dining is
limited to denatured fast-food rubbish.

Someone may argue that making alcohol to fuel trucks to pick up organic
matter to make alcohol to fuel trucks is a pointless loop of activity, but
we pick the garbage up anyway, we are just about out of landfills, we buy
oil to run these trucks now and we desperately need to get this organic
material back
into our soils. Remember the garbage barge, travelling the world from New
York City looking for a place willing to take the garbage? I don't know if
it still applies but a few years ago New York City sewage was travelling by
train to the southwest to be dumped on "deserts". That is madness and that
is increasingly the future we face.

We must take advantage of every scrap of transition fuel we can get our
hands on, and we must find a way to safely reclaim the organic material in
human body waste. The knowledge exists to transform this material from
dangerous pollution into safe forms for environmental re-energizing, if
never for human food. Saying that making these changes is pointless until we
change our behavior may be ultimately true and right, but here on the ground
it keeps us locked into this political oil madness and breeds nothing but
pessimism and paralysis.

One doesn't need pristine raw materials to make industrial alcohol. Can you
imagine if you collected separately the table scraps from every eatery, the
culled fruits and vegetables and expired breads and broken packages from
every supermarket, the spoiled foods and grassclippings and leaves from
residences and tons of cardboard all of which now ends up in landfills to
make alcohol? And even if you argue that removing the carbohydrates gives
one a degraded raw material for composting or vermicomposting, it is still
more material than we are salvaging now, it still has value for increasing
the tilth and sponge of soils. Like in any learning curve, until we set
aside our theoretical perfectionism and take the first baby steps and make
the mistakes, all this opportunity will never get further than the
spit-balling stage, just more high-minded and fatalistic blather.

Journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.  dylan


Dylan Ford is the author of the proposal at www.ideaforpresident.com , a
website devoted to an idea that could provide an avenue to address pollution
issues, food safety, social justice, prison reform and healthcare.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "richard wade" <wade@coac.es>
To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Friday, February 03, 2006 6:40 AM
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Ethanol proposals


> Dear Dylan,
> It seems to be a reasonable argument that where large quantities of
> organic waste are produced, such as wineries, brewries and canning
> plants, then ethanol could be economically produced especially if used
> in the plant that produced  it. That is presently done in spain with
> wine waste. But what makes large scale municipal composting schemes
> "wastefull" is the hugh energy cost of collecting and transport to
> composting sites, not to mention the presumed cost of transport back to
> consumer. Have you tried to do the  energy accounting on a scheme of
> this sort?
> With 75% of greenhouse effect co2 comming from transport, moving
> *anything *could be considered anti ecologic unless absolutly necessary.
> Also I see no advantage of speeding up the decomposition of  cellulose
> into avalible nutrients. That goes against simple principles of
> fertility managment.
> Regards
> Richard
> Dylan Ford wrote:
>
> >Dear Robert,
> >
> >Why does everyone think that making alcohol from something necessarily
> >excludes it from then being used for compost? Anyone who ever made wine
> >knows that the source material is not in the least consumed or exhausted
by
> >the fermentation process. In fact I would not be surprised if what is
lost
> >as sugar is not made up for by the dead remains of the yeast that do the
> >work. Also, enzymes that break down cellulose will speed the transition
of
> >many of these things back into available fertility.
> >The worms that turn organic material into high-value plant food must wait
> >until bacteria, molds, fungi, yeasts, etc perform the initial
decomposition
> >anyway before they can consume it. This is win-win as far as I can see,
and
> >adds impetus to the argument that these items should be salvaged from the
> >dead-end waste stream and taken full advantage of.   dylan