[Terrapreta] Fwd: Global Carbon Cycle

[lou gold]

Hi Code,

We have vastly greater technology than the original inventors of TP, it is
> likely that we can determine (eventually) why it works so well and how we
> can produce something similar, tailored for whatever environment is
> necessary, without necessarily using only one sort of feedstock.
>

Well, yup, we have vastly greater INDUSTRIAL technologies than the original
inventors of TP who might have had vastly greater ECOSYSTEM technologies,
enough greater to figure out some stuff that remains as mystery to us today.
I think we need to be more humble in our assessment of past civilizations
and acknowledge that  the word humble comes from the Greek root humus or
close to the soil, which those folks certainly were. The great challenge is
to somehow, in a modern fashion, move from an arrogant technology toward a
more humble one.

I can't help making a plug for a TED podcast by the great ethnobotanist Wade
Davis. It has much relevance for our attempt to understand how to come back
into a balance with our niche. Check it out:
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/69

As an example, you can't go from a nice, non-polluting pre-industiral
> society directly to a nice, non-polluting high-tech society. You have to
> have a dirty, abusive, polluting industrial revolution first, because it is
> this that lets people realize that they have the power to destroy the world
> and spurs them to invent the stuff that can eventually lead to a clean,
> sustainable high-tech civilization. This sustainable civilization can then
> clean up the damage done getting to that point. While in principle, or
> retrospect, it might be possible to skip the nasty middle parts, it is in
> practice prohibitively difficult.
>
> I recently read an article about China that suggests that someone in power
> there understands this idea. Rather than attempting to stifle blazing
> economic growth, something that is difficult to create on demand, and the
> associated environmental damage that goes along with, they accept that
> damage must be done, but that once the painful growth phase has finished,
> the resources of the resulting more mature economy and civilization can be
> directed to cleaning up the damage and to producing wonders of
> sustainability that would not have otherwise been possible.


Yes, there is a developmental process. You can't go from childhood to
adulthood without  the utterly reckless and wondrously experimental phase of
adolescence. But wisely, adults do attempt to set some limits. China is
realizing this. They now have the most ambitious new housing program ever
seen on earth -- 120 million new homes/apartments to be built in 10 years.
The scale is so vast that they have had to outlaw building with bricks
because that amount of construction from bricks would use all their topsoil
and coal resources.

I think that we might well ponder the possibility that the Industrial Age
bears a marked similarity to adolescence  and that limits  are both
necessary and life supporting.

Thanks for hearing a different view.

lou



-- 
Lou Gold

My blogs:
(English) http://lougold.blogspot.com/
(Portuguese) http://visionshare-pt.blogspot.com/
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