Tokyo Babylon

Doug Alder, from left_comment@thealders.net, after reading my one future vision post had this to say..

“Don’t forget to capture the methane from the composting manure and use it to create power or cook with.”

I couldn’t agree more. As a rule I tend to avoid the eternal bickering over global warming since to my mind the root of all our problems whether it is global warming (believe it or not), our seas dying, increased cancer incidence, heavy metals with your fish oils and food scares all boil down to pollution. But if you think about pollution in another way then it’s basically just a resource that’s gone un-utilised, or waste. Waste is something that could make your life easier, by reducing your costs or providing you with income. I’m not saying that while puffing a cigar or anything, but saying that in a society that operates on money and seems so abusive of people and their potential; there’s just something so right about the win-win scenario that comes out of this.

Doug Alder also writes…

“When global warming and end-of-oil, along with one of those pesky epidemics that ma nature like to toss at us once in awhile causes the collapse of civilization or at least the total collapse of major economies, the surviors will have to revert to this type of composting in order to produce the food they need - they won’t be squeamish then.”

I’d have to partly disagree with the whole civilizational collapse thing due to global warming and the end of oil. Sure we’ll lose a bunch of cars (but we’ll move to battery power), we wont fly as often (at least not by jet) though airships would make a comeback. I doubt thought that things will be that bad where people have the education and the imagination, as well as the breathing space to develop strategies. I have hope that we’ll be able to live better, more fulfilling, lives. We’re wasting so so much that we could lose access to 90% of the resources that we have, except for agriculture, and still support everyone, if we modified our belief structures and what we want from life just a little.

We can all continue to live in the lap of luxury, but it will be luxury derived from working in harmony with nature instead of fighting her every step of the way.

The Cuban Experiment went a long way to proving that it’s possible, despite the fact that they don’t get too many XBoxes. I don’t think of composting as reversion either, it makes it sound like like we’re going backwards, when in fact doing a lot of this stuff is undoubtedly moving forwards.

On the other hand where you have countries with population levels so high that their breathing space is minimal you could witness something out of our worst nightmares occurring. Rwanda was basically a massacre brought about by resource scarcity. Now imagine that in India or China. If that’s dark to your mind you should read some Lester Brown. He’s saying India and China will soon be out of water.

Our civilization needs to slip on a banana skin so that we can pick ourselves up and see where we went wrong. The epidemic though is truly frightening. Makes you want to go and live in the Australian Bush as soon as people start dying.

Ok, so you’ve got your Terra Preta. It’s basically Champion the Wonder Soil. People are talking about it as a form of carbon sequestration, where sequestration means taking the carbon out of the endless cycle of solid carbon to gaseous carbon and back again. The other methods of sequestration include pumping it down into the oil and gas bearing rocks which have recently been emptied by drilling. That method however doesn’t have the advantage of building soils. It’s taking a resource that is the basis of organic life and injecting into rocks where no organic life exists. That’s a bit of a waste to my mind.

But other thoughts..

Ten years ago if you had asked scientists what it was that held soil together they would have have said humus. Now this is not the delicious Turkish dip made from chickpeas, but rather a substance derived from humic acid. It’s fairly complex stuff that can eventually turn into peat etc. Up until recently scientists thought that humus was what held soil together, which seemed to have encouraged them to think of soil as a chemical soup. Soil chemistry is huge, so much so that soil biology is starved of sunlight. Now however it’s possible that a forest giant has tumbled to the ground leaving a space in the canopy. There’s been a bit of a storm and that storm was not Katrina but rather Glomalin.

Glomalin is the soil’s glue, without it you would just have a beach or the Oklahoma dust bowl (that sounds a bit like A Martha Stewart reality program) . Given that it’s so important you would think they would have discovered it before. Well there’s a good reason why they didn’t. This stuff is strong. Scientists had to drown it in acid and subject it to heat just to isolate it enough to get a good look at it. The fact that its so incredibly strong is just one amazing thing about it. The other is where it comes from. It comes from fungus. Soil chemistry just took one in the head.

Here’s what the wikipedia says about it. It’s short and to the point.

Glomalin is a glycoprotein produced abundantly on hyphae and spores of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in soil and in roots.

As a glycoprotein, glomalin stores carbon in both its protein and carbohydrate (glucose or sugar) subunits. It permeates organic matter, binding it to silt, sand, and clay particles. Not only does glomalin contain 30 to 40 percent carbon, but it also forms clumps of soil granules called aggregates. These add structure to soil, and keep other stored soil carbon from escaping.

Glomalin is causing a complete reexamination of what makes up soil organic matter. It is increasingly being included in studies of carbon storage and soil quality.

Now what I wrote about terra preta tells us that it’s basically an organic carbon matrix inhabited by fungi. Now we see that the glue which holds soil together is produced by fungi in cooperation with plants. Now this stuff is produced on the microscopic thread like tendrils that fungi weaves through the soil so by definition it’s got to be connected to the fungal matrix.

Is it just me or does this seem like the soil version of Lucas’ Force? Keep in mind when I say that I’m taking the popular culture slant on what is basically Taoism.

What interests me about all of this is the potential of the kind of biological matrix to reclaim nutrients that would otherwise wash right off fields and out of barn stalls straight into our rivers. Would it be possible to grow soil this way instead of river algae? If it is then there may be a way to take carbon out of our atmosphere, build soil, clean up agriculture and restore oxygen to our bodies of water by using nothing more than some charred wood and some fungus spores. Seen in this way the terra preta glomalin idea could be seen as a a kind of Roald Dahl magical sponge taking the crap out of our world and converting it into gold. Now that would be alchemy.

After sharing my thoughts on Andrew O Hagan I feel purged to an extent. I looked him up, read what he’s been doing. Some of it is admirable. It appears that he still wouldn’t know a witticism if he walked into one like the patio door you could have sworn was open. But not everyone has quick fire wit. I wouldn’t recognise organized writing if fell asleep on it, slobbering. That’s people for you and that’s what makes it interesting.

He wrote a book about the plight of British farmers, which is something I can appreciate, since I’m writing a thesis on how Korean farmers are getting screwed. Andrew writes about victims it seems, whether farmers or the disappeared people, which probably means he’s more compassionate than I took him to be. Sitting back I wonder whether if I met him today he would be like those films you first saw as a kid and which take you in a completely different way now. I’ve changed. He’s changed. Hopefully we’re both better people than we were otherwise what’s the point of lumbago and a dodgy knee. That’s people for you and that’s what makes it interesting.

It’s got to be about people in the end. You can talk about economics till you’re blue in the face, but if it’s not used in the service of people it won’t engage me. You can talk about markets in a similar vein, but if its a case of people serving the market rather than vice versa it won’t engage me. You can talk about technology in the same way, technology has to serve people and not the other way around. Too many people talk or write about these things in a context light fashion. They say wow isn’t this neat. To which I would say how does it improve the lot of people, or indeed, does it? Put it in context.

Just the other day I was thinking about the people I’ve known and lost touch with. That’s a lot of people because I’ve moved around a lot and I’ve never been good at keeping relationships close when distance becomes a factor. Could this be why I’m blathering on about community action now, I wonder.

Crapper used to be a family name in the tradition of Hoover in that the maker’s name became synonymous with the item he popularised, by bringing one into the houses of Victorian Britain. I doubt you’ll find a Crapper anywhere these days. I’m sure they changed their name ages ago, so if you’re looking for one, well you’re shit out of luck. However while the family has been consigned to the dung hill of history the popularity of this porcelain throne, this great white telephone will I am sure be something that causes our descendants to call us decadent idiots. It used to be that people used to crap next to where they prepared food; go into a McDonalds and you might swear they’ve taken one step closer. The reason they did this was they believed the smell would keep away foul humors, and I don’t mean Lenny Bruce,  and so prevent illness.

We’ve come a long way since those days. Today in our enlightened society we drop our bowels into bowls of drinking quality water, mix it by pulling a lever so that it becomes toxic waste, then send it out to gag a fish and give kids who swim in the river a nice rash to show mother. It’s fire and forget monstrosity. It’s like crapping into a rocket cone, firing the missile into the sky and not caring where it comes down again.

It’s seems un-natural to me, since I believe everyone when they stand up trousers around ankles turns around and takes a good look. Holy crap, that came out of me! I had no idea I had it in me. Mmm.. well I don’t anymore. And like ships that pass in the night, or in this case a ship and a submarine, you wish it a fond farewell, and send it on it’s way. However you have no reason to feel flush with success. You’re hynie has just done something heinous.

In many parts of the world what happens is your crap finds its way into a river, creek or ocean. Even in the developed world there are many places where unloved and definitely unprocessed it races into larger bodies of water in it’s pure form. We then take our bucket and spade down to the beach, go surfing, do the breast stroke, swallow a little water. In many places it just goes into the river, then downstream into someone else’s drinking water, but worry not there’s probably someone upstream from you doing exactly the same to you.

Now you might say.. Hey wait a minute, we have sewage plants to clean this stuff up. Well true, but many of them are old, many only clean the water to an acceptable level to flush on, and even the good ones don’t kill a lot of the stuff that live in us. You know what I’m talking about; little scaley friends that you see in glass jars, like the stuff of nightmares. How many feet long? And you say it was the reason I was losing so much weight?

Don’t rest easy with the assumption that someone else will clear up your mess. There’s just too many of us, as the dead sea zones around our big cities will attest to. What he have here by way of analogy is lots of people walking up to the village well and taking a dump in it. Now the thing is once you know this, do you give a shit?

I was concerned about this. Every time you see movies about slums in Africa, or favelas in South America, you see something liquid and multicoloured running down the hill, with any luck. If you’re not that lucky it just stays where it is and bubbles away. I lived in Indonesia for over a year and my apartment looked down over the river. It was a multifunctional place. It was the bath, it was the toilet, it was the place where you could brush your teeth. In many of the countries that we are from we do pretty much the same thing. We just do it in private and feed it into the water with a long pipe courtesy of the flush and forget ejection system.

Yeah, so what do you want us to do about it, I hear you say. Well with city ordnances the way they are these days if you live in the middle of the city there isn’t much you can do, except wait for enlightenment. Martin Luther, who suffered from constipation something awful, experienced enlightenment whilst sitting down and straining his intellect. Or maybe there is, you just have to check and see if it’s possible or not..

The word shit in English means something less than worthless. A direct translation into Chinese does not exist because shit in Chinese is not worthless, it’s the basis of their farming system so much so that a farmer could almost literally say ‘your shit is our bread and butter’. That’s not original by the way it’s from the book humanure, which incidentally is a book that every responsible adult should sit down (you choose the place) and read.

Nature long ago decided that it would have no waste. Men turned that on its head and strangely enough we’re the clever ones. What happens in nature is that everything that is waste for us is food for something else, whether it’s plant, fungus, bacteria or lichen. Bacteria long ago discovered that when the shit and plant material are combined that they could extract a whole lot from it and in doing so convert it into plant food. Shit is nitrogen heavy and plant material is carbon heavy, each one alone will sit and moulder away. But put them together and you get nature’s equivalent of critical mass.

People have known about this for centuries. In English it’s called a compost heap. Compost heaps steam on the coldest nights. Crap and vegetation is the idea behind the mounds that alligators build to keep their eggs warm. It’s all because of thermophilic bacteria. They heat the mound up. Sometimes they catch fire it gets so hot. Now that bacteria kills the bacteria that causes a whole host of human diseases. It also sterilizes the eggs of intestinal parasites. Give it a year and you’ve got soil for your garden. Now before anyone gets squeamish this is no different from any other soil, and the plants you get from it no different from the ones you get off the farm. In fact if you grow organically they’d probably be a whole lot better.

Basically all you need to get started with this is a big bucket and lots of chopped up plant material. You must cover it up once you’ve dropped it. When your bucket is full take it to your compost heap and dig a hole into the middle where the bacterial fungus is raging, drop it in and cover it up. It’s that simple. It’s cost free. It’s environmentally friendly. You get dirtier wiping your ass. You end up with soil after bacteria, fungus and earthworms have finished with it.

Interestingly in the Korean war, the Korean farmers would paint their outhouses pretty colours and compete with each other to tempt soldiers to their conveniences. Oh how things have deteriorated since then….