[Terrapreta] Terrapreta Digest, Vol 4, Issue 183

[Rhisiart Gwilym]

Siwmae pawb!

I want to get behind this post of Sean's (key snip quoted below) and 
push. It strikes me as piercing good sense from first to last, 
especially the snip quoted. Terra preta nova is an idea whose time 
has come. Right now, urgently, in spades, on steroids!

On some of the other forums (ok, fora if you want to be a picky Latin 
scholar) that I frequent, there are sophisticated, insightful and 
thoroughly holistic conversations going on about the current global 
mess, how we got here, and what's the most likely escape route back 
to safety for foolish humans, and for the planetwide lifeweb which is 
our ONLY known life-support system. (What the great British poet Ted 
Hughes called ".......Earth's beauty-dress / Her life-robe.....")

This ain't just about making things bearable for oh-so-important 
humankind, all 6-7-8-whatever billion of us (or maybe less, if it 
ends in a dieoff). As Bill Mollison and other profound visionaries 
point out, we learn to fit back respectfully and harmoniously into 
the Gaian lifeweb, or we're finished, probably; and with us a whole 
lot of the fecund beauty of the web, which has rebuilt itself so 
effulgently since the Chicxulub meteorite strike.

And I reckon Sean is right. If I were a gambling man, I'd give the 
path from here to recovery that he outlines shorter odds than any of 
the hitech contenders that I've seen so far. It's been well said by 
plenty of commentators that it was too much hitech, high-energy 
meddling, recklessly applied, which got us into this mess, so it's 
not likely that more of the same will get us out. "When in hole, stop 
digging!"

  And, too, there are the gangster-capitalists (I mean that phrase 
literally: ruthless, pathologically-irresponsible world-league 
criminals) who will have to be recognised for what they are, faced 
down, and have their disproportionate power and gross excesses of 
private wealth removed, using whatever it takes to do that.

As to how to achieve these urgent crash-priorities, let me give an 
already-developed example which will be familiar to some listees here 
already:

For decades now, Larry Winiarski, Ianto Evans, and a stalwart network 
of other deeply respect-worthy pioneers have been pushing the 
boundaries of ultra-cheap, simple, low-tech, ultra-efficient cooking 
techniques for very poor, displaced and destitute people within the 
deprived and abused eighty percent of humankind. The story of the 
development and spread of this appropriate technology is very 
enlightening. The principled pioneers from the over-rich countries - 
the Pampered Twenty Percent - went to their intended beneficiaries, 
asked them what they needed, listened carefully, experimented with 
the simplest, cheapest technologies they could devise, tested 
repeatedly, listened again and again to the verdicts of the end-users 
- mostly poor wives-and-mothers amongst the Eighty Percent - and 
refined again on the strength of the women's sovereign advice.

The result is a set of biomass and solar cooking devices which can be 
knocked up in hours from scavenged cardboard boxes, tin cans and 
such, which have been built in their hundreds of thousands by the 
poor end-users themselves once they saw the practical effectiveness 
of the devices, and which are now spreading widely amongst the Eighty 
Percent, largely unheralded and unnoticed amongst the Twenty Percent. 
Much of this spread is being created by enterprising individuals, 
working locally, in the poor world, without any input to speak of 
from the over-rich world. THEY'RE DOING IT BECAUSE THEY CAN, AND 
BECAUSE THEY NEED TO, URGENTLY, FOR THEIR IMMEDIATE LIFE SUPPORT, AND 
BECAUSE THEY'VE SEEN SOLID DEMONSTRATIONS THAT IT WORKS. Sustained 
motivation doesn't get any more rock-solid than that.

Now -- doesn't that sound like peasant farmers and gardeners 
everywhere, when they hear about terra preta nova, and see for 
themselves, with the deeply-intelligent pragmatism of the poor, that 
it works, and there seem to be no drawbacks; and all inputs are local 
and cheap or free, and they don't need to go with their 
desperately-needed little scrape-ups of cash to the transnational 
gangsters for ruinously expensive patented inputs; and -- so the 
scientists say -- millions, no billions of them doing this thing on 
their own patches, to satisfy their own immediate, urgent needs, will 
also coincidentally strike a massive blow, possibly a rapid 
coup-de-grace, at the great climate chaos dragon?

On my own, working only with a little home-made stove, and just 
gathering what dead wood I can carry home myself when I'm out with 
the dogs, I've already sequestered probably about a hundred kilograms 
of char just in my own permaculture garden, in a matter of a month or 
two. I reckon that I'm already significantly on my way to making my 
entire life, since birth, net carbon-negative. With a little help 
from friends, and a second-generation retort-oven that I can weld up 
myself, I can push that figure up to several tonnes a year. There's 
no practical limit to the woodlands and mountain pastures hereabouts 
where I can scatter that, to bury itself under the forest litter: 
tonnes per year per person just for simple, backyard peasant-level 
activities.

As for the other problem: the brutal, ruthless, blood-soaked, 
thieving gangsters with the winning smiles and the ten grand suits 
(no kidding, I mean all of those adjectives literally): how to bring 
them back under control, and make sure that that shadow side of human 
psychology never gets to be so unchained and rampant in the world 
ever again....

Well, as David Blume points out in the short outline of his 
hugely-effective permaculture farmlet in California, which I 
recommended in my post yesterday --

  http://www.permaculture.com/permaculture/About_Permaculture/food.shtm

-- the reason that hitech, high-energy, hyperbroadscale, 
super-INefficient, toxic, soil-destroying, unsustainable, big, 
globalised agribiz is so popular with the gangsters is because it 
almost manages to dispense with labour altogether, substituting 
mindless, obedient machinery (which never organises into unions and 
communities and starts making demands), and toxic but very profitable 
chemicals. And the few human workers who are still needed in that 
insane and hopeless system are scattered, few, atomised, disinformed, 
distracted and cowed. Ideal labour-relations, from the gangsters' 
viewpoint.

But give the poor majority access to terra preta nova knowledge, and 
to David Blume et al's hyper-productive and entirely benign 
permaculture techniques, and watch them walk away from the siren song 
of the gangsters and their greaser politicians, and the 
perception-management 'journalists' of the corporate media, and into 
the big global tidal wave of action to save the planet -- which also 
liberates them from the terror of food-insecurity at the same time. 
Which is why they'll embrace it in their millions as soon as they see 
that it works.

As the American empire -- the transnational gangsters' number one 
control project in the world, bigger even than their schemings in the 
Russian and Chinese empires -- totters towards its imminent collapse, 
following the Soviet Union only about quarter of a century later, 
many millions of poor people in Central and South America and many 
other oppressed regions around the world are liberating themselves 
from its malign control. Judging by the ferment and flood of creative 
ideas amongst dissident US citizens -- see, for example, ex-Special 
Forces Master-Sergeant Stan Goff's 'Insurgent American' website -- it 
may not be long before lots of the ordinary citizens of the US fight 
clear of the toxic nightmare of the media-blinded, hyper-consumerist 
hell that they inhabit now, and rise up and re-claim their Republic 
and their democracy, and start doing the sort of benign, small-scale 
community-serving agriculture that Sean outlines, and which some of 
this list's members are already doing. I dream of living to see that 
time. For some absolutely dazzling accounts of the prospect of that 
great American liberation, see the great American writer Joe Bageant, 
at his website of the same name: www.joebageant.com. Joe, let me tell 
ya, is a GAS! A radically-awakened good ol' boy who writes like a 
permanently-tipsy angel. For a yelling-laugh-out-loud mind-blow, try 
his latest: 'Ghosts of Tim Leary and Hunter Thompson'. And the 
energetic, vivid, ordinary Americans who send comments to him are 
marvellous to read as well -- a wonderful cure for any temptation to 
be anti-American. Loathe the empire and the gangsters by all means, 
but never confuse them with the salt-of-the-earth common citizens of 
the US.

Don't know if I'm loosing the cat amongst the pigeons here. No malign 
intention whatever. But terra preta work can't exist in a vacuum. It 
has to take account of the global picture, to be really successful 
and useful.

Cofion gorau,      Rhisiart G

>
>Message: 4
>Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 22:17:42 -0500
>From: "Sean K. Barry" <sean.barry at juno.com>
>Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Charcoal agriculture: not ready for prime
>	time

(snip)

>Hi Allan, Michael,
>
>I agree with Allan.  Neo Terra Preta (renewed charcoal agriculture) 
>not ready for prime time?!  Balderdash.  Now is the absolute best 
>time to develop charcoal in agriculture.  The simplest way to 
>harvest CO2 from the atmosphere, reduce NO2 emissions from the 
>industrially fertilized soil and reduce CH4 emissions from animal 
>manure is to harvest energy from biomass and animal waste, and use 
>agricultural land as a sink for carbon in the form of charcoal.  It 
>is our absolute best chance to mitigate the effects that humans have 
>made on global climate.

(snip)

>
>Regards,
>
>Sean K. Barry
>Principal Engineer/Owner
>Troposphere Energy, LLC
>11170 142nd St. N.
>Stillwater, MN 55082
>(651) 351-0711 (Home/Fax)
>(651) 285-0904 (Cell)
>sean.barry at juno.com<mailto:sean.barry at juno.com>