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.
