[Terrapreta] Terrapreta Digest, Vol 15, Issue 14

[lou gold]

Right on, Nikolaus.

VIVA!




On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 10:33 PM, Nikolaus Foidl <nfoidl at desa.com.bo> wrote:

>
> Dear All¨
>
> I live in Bolivia on a farm and next to our farm are several small
> indigenous villages or house gatherings where the original people still
> live
> as they did hundreds of years ago. They have, as we have a certain need to
> clean the houses from trash and the main place and the surroundings of the
> houses. Everything starting with rests of fruits and gardening as well
> rests
> of food and cooking is thrown into a pit in the backyard. Nowadays some
> have
> chicken and pigs so part of those thrown away organic materials are still
> taken as food from those animals what did not happen before the Spanish
> arrived because they had no chicken and pigs before. The fires which burn
> all day and long into the night to spook the mosquitoes away produce huge
> amounts of badly burned rests and ashes. The simple pottery they use are a
> short life pottery, they fall down, the dogs or pigs or children brake it,
> the pottery is not very heat resistant so brake easily when put into fire
> with something cooking in it etc. so there is a good amount of broken
> pottery a day in the village which as well is thrown into the trash pit in
> the backyard. The defecation as well is done next to the pit and thrown
> into
> it, to clean their ass, leaves and corncobs are the most used items which
> as
> well end up in the pit. So if you have a closer look at the content of the
> pit then you see that's an accumulation of a lot of minerals like
> potassium,
> phosphorus, nitrogen, magnesium ,calcium etc. If you do a mass balance
> over
> 100 years or more its a simple mineral dump because with all that rain the
> organics after 3 to 6 weeks are all eaten up by bacteria and fungi and
> what
> is left is slower degrading bones from animals, lignin and some cellulose.
> After 500 years in such high water and high temperature environments even
> the bones and lignin etc . Are irecognizeable mineralized .
> So there is no meaningful wise man or ethnic which studied how to rise the
> fertility of the soils , no complicated thinking about cationic exchange
> capacity or nitrogen influence in crop production etc. it is as simple as
> it
> can get it is a series of dumpsters with over time interconnected. Those
> people had and still have several village like compounds which they visit
> regularly what means when the population of eat able animals is down due
> to
> over hunting they simply move on some kilometers and stay in the next
> place
> one or two seasons and after several years they come back to always the
> same
> places and erect again some very primitive housings and the cycle starts
> over again.
> You have to have in mind that under these conditions where you spend 95%
> of
> your time for surviving and where everybody has the same workload just to
> survive there is not much room for experiments and development. That's the
> reason why they are still 5000 years back in there social and human
> developement.Untill they develope a social network with different
> functions
> for different social groups in the village they wont have people freed
> from
> the dally workload of surviving so they can dedicate time for development
> of
> the same group.
> If somebody will have a look at our dumpsters in some 2000 years from now
> the same esoteric discussion about the deeper meaning of accumulating
> things
> in the dumpster will happen. What do you think why did the accumulate flat
> glass peaces and half round glass peaces so evenly distributed in the
> surrounding soil? Is it possible that they had a growing system where they
> avoided humidity loss from the soil covering the soil around the plants
> with
> different types of glasses, did they filter out different damaging light
> waves with different colors? And reality is : its a dumpster where we
> throw
> our waste in without thinking very much about the consequences.
>
> That's it , don't interpret things in terra preta which never where there,
> its a dumpster.
>
> Best regards Nikolaus
>
>
>
>
>
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