permaculture

["Bart Anderson" <bart@cwo.com>]

>>LL wrote: Is Rick Valley still around?

The last I heard, about a year ago, he had joined the Lost Valley
intentional community in Dexter, Oregon.

>> LL wrote: I would think there needs to be a re-think about waste
management and make it part of the energy equation, i.e. stop the waste of
waste. CNN has a video newsclip on recycling cow manure as vehicle fuel. If
the public could be pursuaded to stop dumping things they shouldn't into the
waste stream (npi) then municipal sewage could be processed in natural
systems within which vast biofuel and ethanol crops could be grown.

Great ideas, especially the intelligent use of waste. From what I can see,
though, they are only workable on a small scale.

The underlying problem, the "Type 1 Error" is having an infrastructure that
requies so much energy. When oil was cheap and abundant, we didn't have to
pay much attention to efficiency. Now we do.

Even with all the permaculture ingenuity in the world, biofuels cannot match
the ease and concentration of fossil fuels.

1) Sunlight, ultimate source of the energy, is diffuse, so a lot of area is
required to gather it.

2) The organisms which gather and store the energy are not "efficient"; they
require most of the solar energy for their biological processes.

3) The human process of growing & gathering the materials, processing them
and tranporting the resulting fuel all take energy.

4) Unless one is paying attention, the continual harvesting of crops grown
for fuel will deplete the soil.

It's MUCH MUCH easier to avoid wasting energy in the first place.

I'm coming to believe that the prime example of a Type 1 Error is a
high-mobility lifestyle - especially cars.