Tokyo Babylon

Whenever I hear about global warming my first reaction is to shake my head and smile a little. It may be that the temperature of our atmosphere is rising but it remains difficult to prove because of the complexity of what it is that we are trying to model. There are those, generally in the majority that say it is indisputable and there are those who dispute that, perhaps out of principle and perhaps for reasons connected to secret swiss bank accounts. However, this argument is a good one since it increases public awareness of what is happening. However, it’s also wrong for several reasons.

My first problem with this is that it’s symptom reduction. It’s rather like a doctor looking at a patient with smallpox and saying “Ok, we have a skin problem, let’s see about getting rid of these sores shall we?” It’s taking pictures of shrinking glaciers, of skiers standing looking puzzled on grass, of predominantly poor black people sitting inside a sport’s stadium in New Orleans. It generates a lot of press and this in itself is better than nothing, but it’s a whole lot less than ideal.

You see global warming is merely one symptom of many, all of which point to a larger illness which is being ignored for the most part. You see global warming, if it exists, is about human beings changing atmospheric chemistry, in other words atmospheric pollution, but doesn’t it seems myopic to only look at chimneys and ignore sewer pipes, algal blooms, brown sites, heavy metal contamination etc?

Climate change also seems to me to be overly focussed on the discussion about effects and then speculating on the causes. Now since the effects are disputed, and the numbers vary, it’s rather difficult to determine and then rank the causes in order of priority. Once again I think the whole debate about this is a good thing, but it’s only the beginning. Any discussion about global warming generally starts talking about carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases like methane. And once you start down that road you’re picking and choosing your pollutants rather than trying to solve the problem of pollution in general. What you get then is the band aid solution of catalytic convertors and sulphur reduction technology in power station chimneys, sure it’s better than nothing but it remains nothing more than a stopgap because its not dealing with the core problem.

The heart of the problem is pollution you might say, but to that I would say pollution is only the symptom not the problem. I would then say you would need to think about pollution and ask why. That thinking would probably take you to thinking about how we manage resources, at which point I would say ‘now we’re getting somewhere’. You see resources are intimately connected to the provision of services – we dig stuff up, we process it inefficiently, we often put it on ships and steam it around the world, we use it once (the service) and we then we burn it or bury it, and hope that it goes away, after which we express dismay should someone have the effrontery to describe how it doesn’t. Following that logic we could say that the problem is the manner by which business provide services. Further still and we start to focus on our buying habits; yours and mine.

But the thing is that even should we consider all pollution we would still only be considering a symptom, not the actual disease. We have to think a little harder and dig a little deeper. For really we need to look at why the manner in which we are provided with services could lead us to this. So we ask why do businesses provide us services in a manner which causes so much damage? Which is why we start to focus on our buying habits; yours and mine.

What I think is that the reasons for global warming boil down to a few things.

It’s not seeing the big picture; basically not thinking about the consequences of our actions, not saying to ourselves ‘If everyone on the planet did it this way, what would would happen?” We see things in relation to ourselves but we don’t multiply it by billions. Which leads me to repetition.

Repetition turns a discrete action into a habit, it takes a one off action and turns it into a machine, working endlessly over and over. Do something once and it’s probably inconsequential, do something as a habit and we’re looking at something akin to compound interest, what Einstein referred to as ‘the most powerful force in the universe’.

Then there is the concepts of services as ownership and fashion which are implicitly designed to promote what every business is chasing – the repeat customer, which connects back directly to the most powerful force in the universe. You see repeat business is all about trying to get the customer to come back again and again to pay for the same product, not the service, but the product. There is a problem here though that if the customer has to come back too often they might start thinking they’re not getting value for money, but sadly most consumers don’t think this far. I’ll give you an example.

I have a can of Nivea for men shaving foam. As a dispenser it truly sucks. If I’m half asleep and bleary eyed I press on the trigger without considering the carefully thought out design flaw and get enough foam to shave a viking longboat crew. Tell me how difficult would it be to redesign the trigger so that it pushes out enough foam for a single shave? Not difficult at all think I. That’s been around for decades, but it’s not being used for this. Now take that reality and overlay it over every service you need and every product you buy.

Now stop and think about the implications of that. It’s horrifying isn’t it?

Now instead of paying to own a product that provides a service how about just paying for the service and getting rid of the ownership. If Nivea provided skin care services instead of skin care products wouldn’t they then be more concerned about the efficiency by which that service is provided? You see what concerns me most is that I’m clean shaven rather than how much foam I’m buying. If Nivea told me they were charging me the same price but reducing the amount of foam I used by making it better and more efficient for environmental protection then I would probably think “My what a great company!” But we’re still stuck with owning products which provide us with services instead of missing out that one step and going straight to services. There’s no interest in making things go further. The name of the game is accelerated disposability.

When you put those three together this is what you get….

[Every person in the world x population] x repetition x [accelerated disposability]= Pollution = Added costs to everything we do individually, as business, as nations….

That’s my model and I think you’ll agree it’s simpler than the one for climate change. Doing this you get one seriously screwed up planet and not just the climate. It affects every aspect of our lives.

Isn’t it about time we took off our blinkers and saw the big picture?

However turning this all around and heading in the other direction would mean GDP goes down. When you consider the kind of effort it would take to wrest us away from the golden calf of GDP growth you could be mistaken for thinking that it might be easy to air filter the entire planet. A project of that size would certainly increase GDP. On the other hand if you can get Consumers to demand services rather than products and Businesses to see how they could wipe out their product focussed competitors by switching to services then governments will have no choice but to follow.

The great hope lies with change from the bottom, you and me. The greatest journey starts with a single step. Saving the planet starts with a single purchasing decision.

That’s why global warming is the diversion.

There has to be a better word for going back to an older way of doing things but doing it from a position of increased knowledge and understanding. The question then is what would you call that way of doing things. Mostly what I am thinking about here is agriculture, how we get our food and raw materials and the tiny sliver of genetic goodness that we get our food from.

You see mostly we get our food from annual crops which means we’ve got to sow, weed, tend and harvest. But there other plants out there called perennials, which produce year after year after year without the need to sow, weed or tend very much.

It occurs to me that a plant that builds it’s infrastructure, roots, leaves etc in the first year and then reuses it over and over again is probably going to be more efficient than a plant that dies at the end of the year, leaving only seeds to rebuild everything all over again from scratch. Now because it has to do everything from scratch and do it quickly that seed has a lot of energy in it, and its that energy that we use to make our bread and pasta. That’s how it’s been explained to me in books and it makes sense to me, even though I wouldn’t know millet from sorghum. It also makes sense to me that the way we grow food isn’t filling all the biological niches. You see different plants have roots at different levels, they take different nutrients from the soil, they like exposure to light at different levels, they grow and flower at different times of the year, some of them put nutrients into the soil and some take them out, some work in harmony with the fungi that makes glomalin, some attract pests and some repel pests. A field of wheat takes all that growth potential, all that space and uses only a very small percentage of it. So the next time you look at a field of wheat imagine it as a factory building with all the production machinery stuffed into one corner with the rest of the floor space empty.

There’s also the notion that an annual only has so much time to build its infrastructure. If you were a builder and were told you only had six months to build something, well you’re not going to try and build the Empire State Building, are you? So what you get is the natural equivalent of urban sprawl, miles after mile of simple low plant density. That’s the Green Revolution for you.

Now imagine a paddy field filled with rice. Before the Green Revolution that paddy field would have had more than just bowl of rice in it, it would have had fish suppers and frogs legs. Then along came the green revolution. You have to spray green revolution rice, but then there’s no more fish suppers and frog legs. But farm planners don’t tally up the fish suppers and frogs legs they’re only concerned with counting the rice. So in a field you have space for plants, that I’ve already talked about but you also have space for animals, each of which had it’s own niche before it pesticides and herbicides wiped them out.

Right now farming in this way is a bit like American afternoon TV, it’s dumb as hell and you don’t get much from it.

What’s the alternative you might ask?

The alternative is as different from conventional farming as a Pentium 4 is to a 286; anyone remember those?

You see when you design a landscape to meet mans needs by filling every available ecological niche then you get something wondrous; you get a forest. Now ask most people what you get from a forest and some will say the fire that burned my house down, others will say furniture and paper. But an open forest that lets light in all the way down to the ground is farming in 3 dimensions, instead of 2. Under those conditions it’s possible to take the width and breadth of your growing area and multiply it by adding depth. It’s called a forest garden.

So let’s say you have tree like Moringa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moringa_oleifera

It’s basically a vegetable field that grows vertically. Its leaves are edible, as is its fruit. It also produces oil and medicines. So that’s one plant in your new style field, but because it grows upwards and not outwards you’ve still got space and light for other plants. You’ve also got multiple products there as well. Now that you’ve got your trees spaced out in your field, you’ll want something to grow on them, like a liana. Cat’s Claw is a useful climbing plant, it’s medicinal in a big way. Kudzu , the ‘the plant that ate the south’ is another perennial that’s edible and has medicinal properties though I am sure there are many more. So now you’ve got your trees holding the soil together and gently, not densely shading it. The Moringa can grow as high as 10 metres, so either you keep them short or you build an elevated walkway. Keep in mind you’ve basically still got the tall bush level, the short bush level and then ground level, after that you’ve got your sub ground level, like mushroom patches. Some plants you’d put in to provide nitrogen to the soil, some plants you put in to repel insects. You could do worse than to have a Neem Tree in there as well.

Because everything’s maturing at different times you have work all year round. You also don’t have weeds because weeds fill empty spaces and in this designed space there are none. You don’t need to sow, because you’ve already built it. It’s basically just collecting; a hunter gatherer existence in the 21st century but different from the hunter gatherer experience in a supermarket. . On the other hand you’re getting vegetables, fruit, timber, oil, medicines, building materials, mushrooms all from the one field. Additionally you could have bees, muskovy ducks, chickens and off field livestock to eat that which you can’t.

I really want to try and create this self sustaining environmental factory and have it next to my self sustaining self powered house and my electric car. I’d probably only be a part time hunter gatherer, but I’d have a cushion against almost anything you could throw at me by this point. Now link this to Terra Preta..

Why am I talking about this? Because I want to do something once and get continuing returns. I also want to increase biodiversity at the same time. If I could get it up and running I’d have the ability to buy marginal land and rehabilitate it. The trick is to make it so that nature does most of the work and I think this is one way to do it.

So what would we call this kind of existence? Hunter Gather?

Perhaps idyllic would be a better description.

When I was studying at Yonsei Graduate School another student, from just below the Mason Dixie line would try and mock me with these words, “He’s looking out for the little man.”, whenever I made my opinion known. My opinions which I deliver to you in my own stream of consciousness plain speaking style, hopefully void of condescension, haven’t changed much in the intervening years, so perhaps you, more than I, know what he was objecting to. He seemed to believe he was scoring points off me every time he brayed it out.

His attitude puzzled me then, as it puzzles me now, since he wasn’t a rich kid, nor was he from a rich family. I wonder now, as I wondered then, why he thought big capitalist interests needed defending. It seemed to me somewhat like a man defending vampires while his shirt collar turns crimson.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for business and unlike many environmentalists you might come across while out hugging trees, I think the solutions to our problems lies in altering the way we make things, the way we make money from things, and how we manage energy and material flows in our economies. So, any way you look at it there’s really only two groups; consumers and producers, which means that at least half of this equation is business.

My preference for small community based business, run by the ‘little man’, comes from my belief that since they are part of the community they have a stake in its well being, whereas a supermarket chain has concerns only to it’s shareholders who are very much like absentee landlords eternally looking for higher rents as far as senior management is concerned. There is also the sense that a ‘little man’ running his own business has a greater say in how to live his life and the form of the legacy he will leave behind. I’d rather be a citizen than a subject any day of the week. Citizens choose their own destiny to a certain extent, subjects can get neutron jacked out of their jobs. Jack Welch hates that nickname. The joke is that neutron bombs don’t destroy buildings they only kill people, much like Jack himself.

Others will say that there has been increasing interest in ‘corporate responsibility’ and that this will soften the sharp edges of large companies headlong pursuit of monopoly and the market power to squeeze small suppliers until they expire.It’s well known that a great many of Walmarts past suppliers declare bankruptcy while it recorded ever greater profits. It’s abuse of power pure and simple. In politics it would be called a dictatorship, in business it’s called the logic of the market. When did it become ok to elevate something so transparently immoral as this upon the high pedestal it currently rests upon.

However returning to corporate responsibility. That’s rather like saying “military intelligence” and “deafening silence”, it is an oxymoron (why does that sound like zit cream in a non-child proof container?) which gluing two opposing ideas into the one phrase is generally used as vehicle for irony. It is certainly ironic that so many people are using it in a serious, non humorous way. You see corporations are by definition organizations that hide behind their status as limited responsibility entities. So what we have here is an organization which shields itself from responsibility whilst at the same time pursuing it. That’s kind of like a man with claustrophobia trying to stuff himself in a small box. So, if you ask me, any corporation that claims to behave with corporate responsibility is schizophrenic, a danger to society and should be medicated.

Now the only reason they’re getting away with this crap is that you and I are not voting with our dollars as we should. Supermarkets are not cheaper, they just market themselves that way based on an optimal basket of products that no-one ever buys. But the costs are huge – destitute farmers whose slice of the pie gets thinner every year, destitute small vendors whose dwindling earnings remain in the community, providing additional value to customers in the form of government revenues and social services. Most people don’t think about the big picture of how their actions affect their community as a whole. Not only should we be responsible for our actions, we should think about what the consequences are, otherwise we are unconscious citizens at the mercy of the unscrupulous.

So yes, I’m looking out for the little man because he’s me, he’s you, he’s most of us.

In the book “Natural Capitalism” there’s a chapter which talks about ‘tunneling through the cost barrier’, which basically looks at all the things that can be improved by taking a systems approach and by doing things in the right order. One of the things they talk about in this respect is how to build structures better.

The prevailing wisdom of our urban landscape is build it fast, build it cheap, throw in lots of machines to make it habitable. They’re efficient in terms of man hours devoted to designing them and building them but after that they require lots of energy to keep them running. Over the lifespan of the building the cost of that energy will more than likely be a multiple of it’s building cost. This amounts to a small down payment to buy your ‘money pit’.

The prevailing wisdom is that if you try to reduce the energy requirements needed to keep the building habitable is that it will cost you big time. However there are some big assumptions at play here. The first is that in order to do this you have to add features to the money pit and this will cost money. They don’t assume taking anything out.

Ok, so let’s say you have a thermal mass that takes sunlight and radiates heat into the building. Let’s also say you have natural ventilation. Let’s also say you have a roof garden for insulation. It makes sense that working in harmony with sunshine and drafts, if properly harnessed by good design, will reduce or obviate completely the need for a furnace and an air conditioning system. A thermal mass is pretty much a concrete wall facing south so that the sun heats it. Putting glass in front of it can prevent it being aircooled. Depending on how you build it it can be used to heat the building, or heat air that draws cool air through the building in a gentle noise free breeze, or both.

So now let’s start taking things out of your building such as the big AC units, the heating equipment, the electrical systems to power both, the large back up generators. Now take that money and use it to purchase additional wall insulation, some solar panels to power it, a terrarium with rubber plants to clean and cool the air; lightshelves, skylights and light pipes to bring in natural sunlight, sensors controlling lights and water plus a roof garden to insulate the roof, protect the surface from UV light and moderate water run off from your building. Chances are it won’t cost much more to build than the first building but running costs will be a fraction of the first. Additionally, there are probably some government grants in there as well, and don’t forget if you have a network of such buildings you can sell your carbon credits on the rapidly expanding global market.

Take things a few steps further and your building could in theory produce more energy than it needs selling the rest or pumping it into your electric vehicles (people are already converting the Prius to fully electric) . You could sell any excess heat into supplying nearby buildings (in Tokyo where buildings almost merge anyway there’s a lot of scope for this) . This is really expanding into the field of industrial ecology though.

We already have the technology to ensure that our homes make money for us and are not just a continual drain on our resources. What would I do with the extra money? Well I’d probably invest in other ways to make my home or business premises pay for themselves and more. Then I’d start thinking about helping others do the same.

A company in Texas called EEstor is talking about a battery ultracapacitor hybrid that if their claims are to be believed make lithium ion batteries resemble something akin to a flint spearhead in that it’s safer, charges faster, delivers more charge, you name it. A battery stores its electricity chemically whereas a capacitor stores its electricity as an electric field. Much more than that I don’t know but the potential of it to store renewable energy holds my interest.

Then there’s ongoing research into using titanium alloys to create films that will liberate hydrogen from water using nothing but sunlight. I first heard about that about 3 years ago and I’ve been hearing it again recently.

Both are interesting to me because they holds out the promise of cheaper localised energy; where the people who own the energy use the energy. I’ll explain why I think that’s important in a bit, but first…

The Economist recently had an article on the possible future creation of a European wide windpower electricity grid that will take advantage of the fact that it’s always blowing a gale somewhere in Europe. As an aside Gale is a girl’s name isn’t it? I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere. Actually, I’d laugh if I wasn’t so appalled. The Economist is a free trade magazine so they want blurred borders and as much international trade as we can swallow without gagging, but has anyone asked them about transmission losses? It doesn’t matter if you’re using AC or DC to push it, the further the juice goes the more you lose, at least until we get superconductors which operate at ambient temperatures.

Which is why it makes so much sense to use electricity as close to where you make it as possible.

But a pan European grid and pan-European control? It sounds expensive doesn’t it? It would probably need a lot of capital investment. But who would invest in something so risky? Well, we all know what happens when a big company says to the government “we won’t invest in this unless you can guarantee our return on investment”. The government turns around and hands them a monopoly, or a guaranteed price that leaves you and I out of pocket. But don’t forget where that money goes. I’ll come back to that as well. Anyway, I remember a story about a man in Scotland who generated electricity using a waterwheel in the stream at the bottom of his garden. He was told he had to pay the utility company for the power his wheel created.

You see, all over the world big companies are trying to see how many of the things we depend on for our very survival they can bring under private ownership. Bechtel, a right nasty bunch from California, sees a future in water; yours, mine. I mean what are you going to do? Not pay?

The supermarket chains see a future in food, while screwing over farmers and rural communities. Pretty soon your choice is buy from that big store or this big store; Walmart being only the most egregious example.

Enron, and companies like it see a future in electricity, and we all know how that turned out for California.

These big business concerns are wiping out small communities all over the world. They look at the way the world is going, with free access everywhere right up to your back door and start singing ‘Tiiime is on my side”.

We should make the chorus “No, it’s not.”

I’m fed up hearing about small farmers getting squeezed by the big food concerns, about family stores closing down because a massive store opened up just outside town. I’m fed up hearing about big multinationals buying the water system or the electricity grid and then raising prices overnight.

People will tell you that private enterprise is more efficient and sometimes it is the case, but then again there’s many types of private enterprise, but the only one you hear about is the corporation. When was the last time you heard cooperative? Yet there are thousands of successful co-ops the world over. Even in the US, that bastion of shameless profiteering, there are thousands of co-ops, including electricity utilities – they supply power more cheaply as well.

Small communities work best when the money generated in them circulates within them. That’s what makes companies like Walmart so reprehensible. There’s nothing wrong with trade but why import something when its local production keeps your neighbor in a job, providing of course he’s not totally woeful.

This technology, and others like it; clever, efficient and with little or no infrastructure development cost, offers up the promise of free democratic sustainable communities, the kind of places that used to be good places to live, but are being abandoned the world over. The alternative, which is the path we’re on now, is seeing the money that should stay in your community being vacuum pumped off to a tax haven in the Cayman Islands.

So hydrogen? Batteries? I don’t care so long as it’s within the reach of small communities to buy, maintain and operate.

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….

I wish I could take credit for a lot of the things written here, but I can’t. Almost every view I hold is the result of asking a question and then doing some research. The funny thing about a lot of it is how as soon as I turned to look I stubbed my toe on the answer and had to hop around for a while swearing under my breath.

When I was thinking about the analogy of growth as a hamster wheel spinning us around in an eternity of unthinking drudgery I came across Clive Hamilton’s Growth Fetish in a bookshop in Australia. The book basically threw itself off the shelf as I walked past. A very thoughtful book it asks questions like what does the left do now in the midst of affluence? It questions Blair’s Third Way. It asks questions about societies goals and objectives.

When I was thinking about realigning our methods of production I came across Natural Capitalism, The Natural Advantage of Nations and The Toyota Production System, all of which are about doing things better and harnessing the vitality of business to get it done. Lately I’ve added The Natural Step from Sweden. I also read The End of Poverty but was less impressed. The ideals are creditworthy, but their basis in economics rather than in methods which are tailor made for poor countries left me doubting whether it was sustainable.

Books on Society at large included the Death of Responsibility and the Unconscious Civilization, both of which made me think and hone my own ideas. Both are questioning books and the questions they ask are the questions we all need to think on, even if our answers are different.

That being said the thing that interests me most is bouncing ideas around. Brainstorming is apparently improved if everyone has a piece of paper, writes their idea on it and then pushes it into the middle of the table. Like a baton exchange in a relay race, someone picks up on your idea and maybe takes it in an unexpected direction, to the benefit of all.

We are all of us seeking answers to the important questions of destiny, function and purpose, something which I like to call our own personal legacy. It is very difficult to find these things while walking alone. So, please if there’s anything you like, don’t like, needs whittled, then please add a comment. I will respond.