Thoughts and Speculations

Yes We Canned.

Michael Byron — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:35:00 GMT

RAMONA’S RECIPE FOR HOME-MADE DIRT: THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL

[Note: my original article can be read online at: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Making-Terra-Preta-Soil-R-by-Ramona-Byron-080821-153.html or at: http://myblog.michaelpbyron.com/2008/08/21/making-terra-preta-soil-ramonas-recipe-for-homemade-dirt.aspx .]

Mike has been nagging me for weeks about doing a sequel to “Ramona’s Recipe for Home-Made Dirt.” He keeps saying, “The world is waiting.” Obviously, as one who was raised Roman Catholic, Mike has forgotten my own imperviousness to guilt-trips.

But finally today, Mike forbade me from doing anything else until I write this sequel. No reupholstering the living room chairs. No finishing the drapes for the reading room. No relaxing with a good book in the shade on the patio, and learning at last who may have done the dastardly deed of murdering King Tut (“Who Killed King Tut” by Michael R. King and Gregory M. Cooper). Not even weeding our terra preta garden.

Mike can be a real bully sometimes. So here I am, writing the sequel. And because he’s going to be reading this first, and as one who was raised Catholic and who will no doubt find himself on a well-deserved guilt trip, I will add here that we are in a heat wave and there is no air conditioning in our house. And he’s sitting out in the shade on the patio, reading science fiction and drinking iced tea as I write.

OK, enough of my self-pity. Here is the much-awaited sequel. I hope that the World finds it worth the wait.

SOAK THE CHARCOAL TO MAKE IT EASIER TO BREAK

I wrote “Ramona’s Recipe for Home-Made Dirt” to be amusing as well as informative. I think now, though, that the emphasis on the hellishly difficult work of breaking up the dry charcoal may have had the unintended effect of discouraging people from trying to make terra preta soil.

We have learned since then that if you soak the charcoal for awhile, that it gets soft and easier to break. It’s one of those “duh” moments when you wonder why you didn’t think of that in the first place. I’m actually embarrassed to admit it.

To soak the charcoal, you can leave it out in opened bags under the sprinklers for as long as you want, or you can pre-soak it in some kind of fertilizer-laden liquid to pre-prime it with nutrients so that it will feed the plants sooner. One idea would be put the charcoal in a wheel barrow or large tub, cover it with compost, pour water all over it, mix, and let it sit for some days. The water that comes off of soaked compost is called “compost tea” and it is highly recommended as a nutrient for young plants, so having compost tea absorbed into your charcoal to prime it up with nutrients has to be a good thing. BE SURE THAT YOU USE CHARCOAL THAT DOES NOT HAVE ANY CHEMICALS.

We have been buying non-chemical charcoal and soaking it in the flushed-out water from our turtle aquarium before putting it into the garden, so that the biochar is pre-primed with nutrients from the turtles as well as being soft and easy to break (in case you're wondering, we had to move the turtles to an indoor aquarium because of repeated attacks by raccoons in the outdoor pond that we used to have).

THREE NEW INGREDIENTS FOR OUR TERRA PRETA

Three new ingredients that we are now using for our terra preta and that I did not mention in my first article are: compost, to soften the soil if needed; clay hydroponics balls to hold moisture; and rock powder. But there are other good things that you can add. Use your imagination and do some research. Add ingredients that you have easily and cheaply available.

COMPOST

I suppose there’s no need to explain compost or why it is needed. You will know if you need it, because that will be when you can’t break the ground with a hoe even though you just watered it that morning. Also, the microlife needs the compost. And remember, we are feeding the microlife and not the plants. If the microlife is healthy and plentiful, it will take care of the plants.

But you knew that.

CLAY POTTERY

The clay hydroponics balls are a substitute for the clay pottery sherds that the Amazonians put into their terra preta. The clay absorbs water and releases it slowly, helping to keep the ground moist between waterings.

Maybe those Amazonians had a public health program back then, unlike here in the United States nowadays, and so they did not worry about infections from cuts made by sharp pottery sherds in the soil while they were tending their gardens.

As for us, we’ll make the investment in the nice round-edged hydroponics clay balls. And it is an investment. Those things are expensive. But still cheaper than a trip to the Emergency Room.

ROCK POWDER FOR ESSENTIAL MINERALS FOR YOUR PLANTS, AND FOR YOU

The other new ingredient that needs some explaining is the rock powder. We learned about the power of rock powder from a small book called “Soil and Immunity,” by Dr. Bernard Jensen. This is a deeply philosophical book that often digresses into other issues, but the main idea is that much of human disease is related to mineral deficiency, and that mineral deficiency is because our food lacks minerals. He also says that much about our food system is dysfunctional and does not promote human health; in fact, that system promotes disease.

Dr. Jenson says that plants need far more than the three nutrients that are provided in the usual commercial fertilizers (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium); and he says that plants need almost all minerals in trace amounts. Dr. Jensen says that microbes in the plants’ roots break down the rock powder and make the minerals available to the plants, in particles that are tiny enough to pass into the root system. He says that when the plants have a full spectrum of minerals, that they are more nutritious and also tastier, and that eating them makes us healthier. I can vouch for the tastier, because our vegetables (especially the corn, cucumbers and tomatoes) were among the very best that I have ever tasted. My mouth is watering right now, just thinking about them.

So Mike found a source for rock powder, and he applied two 50-pound bags of it to the garden. You can get rock powder in various grades and coarseness. Mike started with a very fine powder so that the plants would receive the mineral boost faster. We plan to also add some coarser rock powder that will break down more slowly and last a long time. Mike says that the rock powder is expected to last over 70 years, so I figure that once we add the coarser grain, that should be sufficient for the rest of the time that we expect to live here.

If you don’t have a source for rock powder, I believe that adding lava rock would accomplish the same thing, just more slowly. We placed lava rock around a lot of plants in the yard because we have some major snail and slug issues here in the eternal springtime of Southern California, and those will not cross lava rock. I have noticed that lava rock breaks down rather quickly, and I think that lava would contain practically all the minerals that a plant or microbe could ever want.

OTHER SOURCES OF ENRICHMENT FOR THE TERRA PRETA

ANIMAL BEDDING

NOTE: Only use bedding from vegan animals. Animals that eat meat, especially if it is raw, can spread a lot of diseases and parasites.

ANOTHER NOTE: If you are going to use animal bedding as compost for your terra preta, do not use cedar. Cedar has a natural pesticide in it and is poisonous.

We have been adding the aspen-chip bedding from our large tortoises’ sleeping area, which is very rich in, well, you know, tortoise fertilizer. This is some seriously good stuff for a garden, especially since our tortoises dine mostly on clover.

Speaking of recycling, tortoise-style, we also are able to use any vegetables that were spoiled by insects by feeding them to our large Sulcata tortoises. Those guys will eat and recycle almost any plant matter, except for beans. And they’re cuter than a worm farm.

If you have rabbits, then that bedding and the dung would be a fantastic addition to your terra preta.

If you live near any horses or cattle, maybe you can talk the rancher out of some of the used hay in the stables, in return for removing it. You would need to let that cure for awhile before putting it into the garden, because large animal manure is very rich and will burn the plants if it is used too soon. Also, don’t use any stable material from race horses — according to the newspapers, a lot of those critters are doped up with who-knows-what kind of drugs.

KITCHEN WASTE

We also add raw vegetable and fruit waste from the kitchen, eggshells, and coffee grounds as well as the coffee filters. We don’t have a compost pile – the terra preta garden itself is the compost pile.

LEAVES

We planted a couple of deciduous fruit trees on the edge of the terra preta garden. When the leaves drop off of the trees, we will only have to move them a few feet to get them into the terra preta garden. We will just leave the leaves on the top of the ground to rot, the way that Nature does it.

HAY

I have learned that alfalfa roots can go as deep as 250 feet, so it would make an excellent addition if you want to return minerals to the surface. You don’t have to dig up those 250-foot deep roots to get the benefit. When you cut the alfalfa down, return it to the terra preta as hay mulch, and the minerals will be added to the soil as the hay decomposes.

FISH

One of our correspondents says that his group buys rotten fish very cheaply and chops them up, while holding their noses, of course; and then they bury this stinking mess into their terra preta garden. It’s a rich source of all kinds of stuff for the microlife in the soil.

Just be thankful that you’re not one of their neighbors.

SEAWEED

We haven’t actually added this yet, we just bought the bottle recently. But I’m sure that it will add a lot of other minerals to the terra preta. It was recommended by Dr. Jensen, and so that’s good enough for me.

If it smells like fish, then try to use it on non-windy days in order to spare your neighbors.

HYDROGEN PEROXIDE

We recently learned that food-grade hydrogen peroxide, when properly diluted and watered into the ground, will add oxygen to the plants’ root systems and send them into an ecstasy of growth. We haven’t tried it yet, but will be doing so soon. I have no doubt that it will work.

NOTE: Use ONLY the food-grade hydrogen peroxide, and handle it with gloves because it will burn you if you spill it.

CLOVER AND BEANS

Clover and beans fix nitrogen and enrich the soil.

HOW WE’RE DOING WITH OUR TERRA PRETA

Our terra preta soil conversion is coming along quite well. We have some biochar throughout the whole garden, but will probably be adding more as time goes on and the spirit moves us. We think that there is no theoretical limit to how much biochar you can use, so we will just keep adding it.

Our terra preta garden is extremely productive and there is a lot of vigorous growth. We have had corn, several kinds of squash, several kinds of tomatoes, several kinds of beans, a lot of different kinds of peppers, eggplants, herbs, some onions, strawberries, and even some flowers. The flowers are primarily for attracting pollinators into the garden, but it is a side-benefit that they make the garden pretty and more fun to look at.

And best of all, these vegetables and the strawberries are among the tastiest that I have ever known. Yum.

AZTEC PLANTING STRATEGY

In planting our vegetables, we did not put them in tidy rows. Instead, we used an ancient Aztec method of grouping plants that like to be together. The Aztecs placed the corn, beans, and squash (called “the three sisters”) together so that the corn supported the beans, and the squash protected the roots of the corn and kept them cool. Also, the squash covered the ground and helped to prevent evaporation of the water from the soil. It all worked for us for awhile.

However, as the summer waxed on, I found that I did not like this arrangement. The beans grew taller than the corn, and so I had to stake them anyway. The beans wrapped around the ears of corn and made it difficult to harvest the corn without damaging the bean vines. Because the squash plant was prolific and prickly, it made it difficult to harvest the corn and beans that were in the middle of it. And the squash got its inevitable fungus and had to be pulled out anyway.

CAN COPPER COILS KEEP FUNGUS AT BAY?

Speaking of fungus, we had an interesting experience with one of our cucumber plants. I bought some copper refrigerator coil to use as a support for some cucumber plants, figuring that it was reusable and therefore more economical than wooden stakes that would rot after a short use.

I plunged one end of the copper coil into the ground, and then twisted it around in a direction that I thought the plant may enjoy growing. Then I cut the coil and plunged the other end into the ground. I crossed this with another piece of copper coil to make something like a tent. I tied some twine from the crossing point and down the sides to support and lead the cucumber plant upward.

To our amazement, the cucumber plant that had the greatest amount of copper coil in contact with its leaves has lasted about 10 times longer than any of the others. It is still putting out new growth and bearing cucumbers after all the other cucumbers and squash plants have died, and even though the fungus is eating it up too.

This makes some sense, in that the only control that I know of for the fungus is a copper fungicide spray (I did not buy the spray because it is not an organic product, it is hideously expensive, and it only works for a very short time anyway). So I hope some of you will try this too and let me know if this has worked for you, or if maybe what happened with that one plant was just an anomaly. This bears some more research.

Also, as I recall, Jerry Baker (“America’s Gardener”) of PBS used to recommend putting pieces of metal rod (cut-up clothes hangers, actually) vertically into the ground in the garden. He said that it channels static electricity, which helps to fix nitrogen in the ground, just like lightening does on a much larger scale. So the copper coil in our terra preta is probably also helping to fertilize it too.

FISH FARMING

You may want to consider another project in conjunction with your terra preta garden. It is possible to use flushed-out fish pond water to irrigate and fertilize a garden, or to cycle that pond water through hydroponics vegetable trays. If it is used with hydroponics, the water can be returned to the fish pond because the plant roots will have cleaned it, and there is no need for an additional filter. However, I think that it is better to use the water for ground irrigation instead of hydroponics, because I believe that the trace minerals in the terra preta soil make the food more nutritious than what you can get from even the best hydroponics arrangements.

And of course, the fish should be the kind that you can eat rather than the decorative, expensive and utterly useless koi. If your land is subject to a lot of flooding, then you should only raise native fish so that non-native fish do not inadvertently get released into the wild.

I have learned that tilapia are easy to raise and they are native to just about everywhere in the world and so they may be a good choice for you; however, they are difficult to breed because they require a huge amount of space for breeding.

We are limited in space for a pond, but we may someday have a small catfish pond near the patio in the grassy people part of the yard. That is, if they turn out to be easy to breed; I haven't started the research on that as yet since we have many other projects to complete before putting in a fish pond. If any of you have advice about this, I would be very happy for you to write to me.

And of course, some of the garden vegetables and leaves can be used to feed the fish, and any parts of the fish that are not eaten can be buried in the garden for fertilizer. This results in a nice closed system where each part supports another and you get double and triple use out of each part.

You could also consider keeping chickens to roam through your garden to eat the insects and also to provide eggs, as well as being mobile sources of fertilizer for the garden. Also, the eggshells are high in calcium and can be recycled into the soil. And here's a weird but effective-sounding strategy that someone once told me: hang a chicken feeding cage over the fish pond; and as the chickens eat the grain, their fecal matter drops into the pond and is eaten by the fish, so that you actually get **two** feedings out of the same amount of grain!

YES, WE CANNED

If your terra preta is as productive as ours has been, you will be overwhelmed with delicious produce and the pleasant dilemma of what to do with it all.

You could give it away to those patient neighbors of yours that did not call the noise police when you were loudly drumming outside while breaking up the charcoal, and who did not complain when you buried the smelly dead fish upwind of them. That would be a nice thing to do, and it may gain you some neighborly good-will that you will need for your future terra preta garden capers (the possibilities are endless).

Or, you can preserve your harvest and be able to keep most of it for yourself. Mike and I opted mostly for the latter, although we have shared some with the neighbors.

We are canning tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and herb mixes for spaghetti sauce almost every weekend. We are aiming for 100 quart jars, because we figure that is about how much spaghetti sauce that Mike makes in a year.

Our vegetables are far better than anything that can be bought in the stores – even the organic places — because our vegetables have the benefit of the mineral boost from rock powder. And so it feels like a significant accomplishment when we preserve that incredibly tasty and nutritious produce for our later use.

And there’s nothing quite like that cold beer after a hot day in the kitchen, canning vegetables. You’ll see.

FINAL ADVICE, UNTIL THE NEXT SEQUEL

DO research traditional ways of agriculture for your area and use those plants and strategies, as they will likely be the best and most productive, hardiest in your climate, and also require the least amount of work for maintenance.

DO record where the plants were grown in each year so that you don't put the same ones in the same places in successive growing seasons; this rotation is done to prevent diseases and pests from taking hold.

DO leave a few weeds or native plants here and there. They are beneficial to the soil, especially if they are deep-rooted. When the leaves drop off of the plant, they will return minerals to the surface that might otherwise have been lost. Also, the native plants support the native pollinators, and that is always important.

DO put in drip irrigation as soon as you can.

DON’T buy flimsy tomato cages. They are a waste of money. Believe me, you are going to grow some monster tomato plants in your terra preta garden, and they will bend and break the flimsy kind of tomato cages or just pull them right out of the ground. Get the strong ones that you can use again next year — it’s worth the extra initial investment.

DON’T use municipal mulch. It’s free or cheap, but you have no idea what is in it. There is probably no end of herbicides and pesticides from people’s yards in that mulch; after all, very few people are as enlightened as you are about the dangers of the many chemicals that are commonly slathered onto lawns and flower beds. If you absolutely must use municipal mulch, then pile it up in a corner and leave it to leach out its poisons for at least a year before adding it to your terra preta. Two years would be better.

DON’T plant your vegetables right next to a treated-wood fence. Those pesticides in the treated wood leach out and get into your vegetables. Keep at least two feet of distance between treated wood and your vegetables. Also, don’t use treated wood or cedar (which has a natural pesticide in it) for any raised planters or boxes that will contain food plants.

DON’T let your garden go fallow because the weeds will become very happy and prolific in that rich terra preta soil, and it will be a lot of extremely hard work to remove them (as we learned the hard way). As some vegetable plants begin to die out, put in new vegetable plants that will grow in the seasonal weather where you live, so that the garden is as productive as possible all year round.

UNTIL NEXT YEAR’S SEQUEL, HAPPY GARDENING!

OK, I’m done for now. So I’m off to the patio to sit in the shade and read that book while Mike takes his turn in the house, proof-reading this.

We would love to hear from you about how your terra preta is doing.

Happy gardening!

Clash of Realities

Michael Byron — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:15:00 GMT

America, more than any other nation, was founded on an ideal of exceptionalism. Limits were for the “Old World.” Here in the New World, as the saying went, “the sky is the limit.” For nearly 300 years—from Jamestown in 1607, until the disappearance of the frontier at the end of the 19^th century—the country expanded physically.

The Civil War of the 1860’s made the nation an industrial power. The expansion of railroads across all of North American, in conjunction with the defeat of the South’s agrarian economy, gave the nation a continental scale economy. By the 1880’s the US had become the largest industrial power on the planet.

For the next hundred years its industrial economy continued to expand. By the middle of the 20^th century the “American Dream” of mass middle class prosperity, centered upon suburban home and car ownership, an endless supply of consumer goods, along with plentiful, cheap food, had arrived.

However by late in the century—the 1970’s and ‘80’s—the American economic engine began to falter. This was due to foreign competition from the skilled and disciplined workforces of nations such as Germany and Japan, producing quality goods from ultra modern new factories built upon the bombed out rubble of WWII. It was also due to the ever accelerating outsourcing of American industry and jobs overseas where through labor arbitrage, goods could be produced more profitably. And so America’s once vast manufacturing economy hollowed out into a “McJobs” service economy.

Energy prices soared in the 1970’s before declining, temporarily, again in the 1980’s and ‘90’s. Mounting environmental damage became ever more apparent during these late century decades. However, people’s economic angst became incendiary during this period. Energy and environmental concerns were perceived to be of secondary importance.

Government was increasingly captured by globalized corporations, whose sole interest was wealth maximization for their elite owners and controllers. With the rise to power of Bill Clinton and his corporatist “New Democrats” in 1992, the capture of the American government by multinational corporations and financial interests was effectively complete.

Throughout this period, from Reagan’s “Morning in America” theme onwards, as threats to the American Dream mounted, the American people—most of them anyway—made it clear that they wanted their American Dream maintained at any cost. And politicians of both corporatist parties promised to do this. Speaking at the Earth Summit in 1992, then President GHW Bush rejected environmental constraints on the US economy bluntly asserting “The American way of life is not negotiable.” This became the mantra for both political parties.

A skilled magician does not, of course; actually perform “magic” causing, say, a rabbit to suddenly materialize inside of a hat. Rather he or she relies on misdirecting the attention of the audience, so that they fail to see what is actually being done surreptitiously by the magician. This leads to the perception that “magic” has occurred.

Similarly, over recent decades, corporatist spin meisters and their bipartisan politicial whores continually reinforced the idea that maintenance of the American Dream required the progressive evisceration of government regulation of the economy in conjunction with reduction of taxation on corporations and the very wealthy.

Essentially, the people were convinced that preserving their standard of living required ever greater corporate control over government in tandem with ever lessening government regulation and taxation of corporations. The more that the avaricious profit-seeking of the elites undermined the American economy, the more that the victims, the American people, were conditioned to cry out for their victimizers to be given still greater power, with ever fewer constraints, upon its self-interested exercise. Predictably, as the rich got richer, everyone else become poorer, had to work longer, were ever more financially insecure. Which occurrence, in its turn, generated more pressure to further empower corporations at the people’s expense—both literally and also figuratively.

So here we are in 2009. “Change you can believe in” has been shown to mean limited change, if and only if, it benefits corporate interests. The hijacking of the health care legislative process in Congress is exhibit A. The apparent demise of even a watered down cap and trade environmental and energy bill is exhibit B. Elected politicians do not control our political and economic system, they are controlled by it.

Absent a revolution, of, for, and by the people, the corporatists will continue to control our political system. As most Americans fervently seek to maintain the American Dream status quo, logically they will only revolt when that status quo has been undermined.

Given their corporatist media brainwashing such a revolt would represent a conservative attempt to restore the vanishing status quo. In other words, the aim of the revolt would be to fully empower a corporatist system. In plainer words still, fascism would finally “flower” in America.

If military conquests of oil lands allowed for a few crumbs to be distributed to the population, fascism American style would actually be popular initially. After all the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved that Americans care nothing for the deaths of vast numbers of foreigners so long as wealth, comfort and security are preserved here in the “homeland.”

Both Democrats and Republicans are heir to a 400 year old belief system which includes absolute faith in “free” markets to deliver prosperity. Both subscribe to the belief that the economy can expand endlessly. They believe that this expansion can be accomplished without significant damage to the planetary biosphere. They accept without question the axiom that “America is the greatest country in the world.”

What though accounts for this presumed greatness? Is it our lack of a universal health care system—something all other wealthy countries—and many poorer ones such as Costa Rica, have? Is it our skewed, uneven distribution of wealth in favor of the rich over everyone else? Perhaps it’s our possessing the largest number of prisoners of any nation on the planet? In any event this belief is an axiomatic embodiment of the idea of American exceptionalism which began 400 years ago. We need to realize that ideals are one thing. Actually living up to those ideals is something very different.

There are some differences between the two corporatist parties.

The Democrats possess a fading belief, residual from F.D.R. and L.B.J, that government ought to work in the interests of ordinary citizens—so long as corporate interests are not jeopardized. Many rank and file Democrats have a sense that we have lost our way, have become disconnected from reality, and seem to be rushing to disaster. They want something to be done—though they do not want to do anything that might cause them any discomfort.

However, elected representatives of the people do not control our system, so only the most tepid change can ever be implemented—and then only if sufficient bribes to the true masters of our political universe are incorporated into the final legislation. What most Democrats do not want to know, and willfully refuse to accept, is that Obama is powerless to implement true, fundamental change—as are the Congressional Democrats.

As to the Republicans, their base is increasingly rural and suburban, southern, white, fervently religious Protestant. What they perceive around themselves is a society which is increasingly less white, less rural, and less religious—at least in a dogmatic, intolerant, fundamentalist way. Their thinking is manipulated to cause them to group together the social changes occurring around themselves as “liberalism.”Further, they are conditioned to see this liberalism as the CAUSE of their financial problems. In particular, liberalism is said to support “big government” which destroys jobs. Their proposed “solution” is to scale back government control over corporations while eliminating the provision of public goods, such as education, health care, free roads, and medical and retirement security, to the maximum degree possible.

In reality this means that these ignorant millions become a political force for the corporations as nothing can restrain these avaracious entities except laws and regulations enforced by the police power of the state. So this cohort works to destroy itself. More recently, increasingly extreme, violent elements of this cohort have become politically organized for the purpose of disrupting Congressional town hall meetings—which is to say they have become the brown shirts of the corporate state.

Corporatism is parasitical not only upon the great mass of humanity, but on the wealth of nature itself. As it requires unending growth—else it would face financial collapse as today’s loans could only be paid off with tomorrow’s new material wealth, it is inconsistent with natural reality. It is inevitably doomed to collapse, taking most of humanity, and indeed most of the complex life of the planet, down into oblivion with itself. But, it exists to extract short term profit, and it has subverted government to its will. Given this reality, the globally powerful US military is now an enforcement arm of these unelected thugs.

Within the USA, Democrats hope for “change” from within the political system which will be both effective and will not interrupt their American Dream lives. By acting within the established system, and by never challenging its core assumptions, they strengthen the iron grip of the corporatocracy. In reality their party is a simply a vessel to channel public discontent in harmless (to the corporate state) ways. Ultimately though, this group is delusional, as no real change ever occurs.

Republicans, seeking desperately to maintain their backward facing white American Dream represent delusion on steroids. In their fearful desperation to preserve the status quo they actively attack those forces which could benefit their standard of living—unions, progressive legislators etc., while serving as the attack agents of the corporate forces which are actively subverting themselves and their families. This faction has often been referred to as being “batshit crazy.” There’s a lot of truth in that, though I feel that they are so astronomically far out there as to perhaps require an apology to batshit for demeaning it by association!

America in the early 21^st century is being forced to shed its 400 year old delusions and come to grips with actual reality. Seemingly endless growth and expansion—in terms of territory, resources and economics, was a historical anomaly. All available territory is now not only fully occupied, but actually overpopulated. Energy and material resources are in decline, or are approaching decline. Declining resources cannot provide for an ever-expanding economy. In any event our compounding destruction of the planet’s biosphere is unsustainable.

The post World War II “American Dream” corresponds to the climax of a brief and now vanishing period of energy and resource abundance on a mostly non-industrialized, much less crowded (population 3 billion in about 1960 versus almost 7 billion now) planet. We need a new dream for our future. One that allows us to live healthy, happy, fulfilling lives, in the context of a complex society, which is sustainable and coexists harmoniously with our biosphere.

However, most Americans appear to be willing to die rather than accept a reality inconsistent with their 1950’s era “American Dream.” They may well get their wish as our house of cards, delusional political and economic system collapses in the near future.

The rest of us need to escape this doomed, consensus trance, corporate manufactured “McReality” and deal squarely with actual reality, our own survival, the survival of complex society, and of the biosphere. We are compelled to accomplish this agenda outside of the formal political system except at the local, and perhaps, state (or provincial in Canada) level. It’s time for a new dream, a Planetary Dream!

Crisis and Opportunity

Michael Byron — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 18:29:00 GMT

To be or not to be that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the stings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing them, end them. [William Shakespeare, Hamlet]

Early 21^st century humanity is beset by a “sea of troubles”, or as we would call them today “crises.” These crises are economic, political, environmental, and climatological. They concern energy, ecology, sociology, government, and ultimately spirit.

The root of our crises lies in most members of our species having adopted an impossible worldview. We believe that our global economy can consume all of nature’s capital without limit. We believe that this will facilitate endless growth in material wealth. We believe that our supply of natural capital (nature) is not only limitless, but that it will not be significantly affected by the pollution caused by our wealth extraction. We believe that we exist independently from the natural world around us. We believe that we can have our cake and eat it too.

Unfortunately, we live in a physical universe governed by natural laws which do not accommodate themselves to our delusions. This means that endless material growth in a finite environment is impossible. It means that our pollution and our degradation of our biosphere are having significant and accelerating effects on its ability to sustain us. It means that we have overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity for humans by billions of people.

Only hydrocarbon energy—particularly oil—sustains the planet’s nearly seven billion humans. Oil’s production is about to enter irreversible decline. Burning ever more coal might keep things going a bit longer, but only at the cost of accelerating climate change. Climate change—particularly drought and erratic weather makes agriculture less productive. Look at India right now where the monsoon rains have failed to materialize.

Modern “scientific” agriculture consists of inefficiently using about ten calories of hydrocarbon energy to produce one calorie of “food.” Additionally, water tables across the planet are receding as they are drawn down much faster than they can be naturally replenished. Increasing temperatures mean diminishing snowpack’s in mountains. This reduces the flow of melt water into most of the world’s great rivers. This impacts humans directly as reduced availability of drinking water as well as reduced water for agriculture.

Planet-wide our political systems and our informational systems have been captured by the profit uber alles corporations which are accelerating our plunge towards utter catastrophe. People are fed an unending diet of carcinogenic McFood, cheap junk from Wall Mart, along with a media diet of scandal, misinformation, and happy talk. Meantime, the uber rich who control it all simply get even uber richer. Wealth is now concentrated in their hands beyond the most avaricious dreams of Croesus. And this process of wealth concentration is accelerating.

Humanity has arrived at the most profound existential crisis of its 200,000, or so, year existence.

I use crisis to mean the occurrence of a set of circumstances which cannot be dealt with using existing behaviors and strategies, but which must be dealt with quickly in order to avert serious harm or death from occurring. Crisis, understood in this sense, causes behavioral adaption—or death for individuals and collapse for complex societies which fail to rise successfully to its challenges.

This presents us with the hopeful side of this dire situation: We MUST change fundamentally if we wish to survive. The societal complexity we call civilization MUST be fundamentally altered if human complexity above the tribal band is to be preserved. There is NO alternative.

Wake up from the consensus trance and get busy making this deep and fundamental transformation a reality. Don’t look around for someone else to lead you. You lead yourself.

Last year I wrote an essay entitled Peak Oil and The Fermi Paradox. In it I addressed the question of why we have not detected extra terrestrial intelligent life. I concluded that one very real possibility was because all intelligent species upon developing a technological society quickly use up all of their hydrocarbon energy supply and collapse. Hence they never get here. This appears to be humanity’s fate as well. Still, there may just be time for deep and fundamental change.

Think of this as an almost impossibly difficult graduation exam. If we fail, we establish ourselves as an unsuccessful larger-brained ape species. Sooner or later—perhaps sooner—we go unlamented into the extinction to which we selfishly drove so many other species who shared this Earth with us.

If we pass this exam, we transcend our selfish ape natures and become fully human. Endless ages of spiritual and intellectual—though not necessarily material—growth lay ahead of us. Perhaps then we will get to meet other species out there somewhere who also passed this excruciatingly difficult test!

A time of unparalleled existential crisis such as we live in today is also an unprecedented opportunity for profound transformation. Let’s seize the moment! There is a world—a universe—a future—to be won!

Of Microbes and Men

Michael Byron — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:02:00 GMT

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour…[William Blake, Auguries of Innocence]

Memory works similarly at the very largest and the very smallest scales of life. For both the microcosm and the macrocosm structure is memory.

Viruses are able to attach to and gain entry into living cells because they are encapsulated in a protein coat possessing a predetermined structure and shape which can latch onto particular proteins found on the outside of a cell much as a key fits into a lock. The virus’s genetic material can then be injected into the cell hijacking its replication process creating ever more of the virus.

In multi-cellular animals body cells are defended by an immune system which learns to recognize the outer protein structure of invasive viruses and other microorganisms. Once identified, its structure is physically recorded for future use as needed. Subsequently the immune system can produce endless attack cells which possess this pre-recorded structure in the form of an adaptive layered defense against the invading pathogen. This is how vaccinations create immunity to diseases for example.

The key insight is that pathogens learn how to gain entry into cells by “learning” the optimal protein structure to do so. Once this learning occurs it is passed down to all descendents—all possess the same successful structure.

An infected organism’s immune system subsequently “learns” to recognize these invasive pathogens by memorizing the shape of their outer protein coat. The organism then stores this learning in the form of template cells, which when needed can be replicated in vast numbers to overwhelm an invading pathogen. “Learning” in life’s microcosm involves developing and recognizing particular structural configurations.

For the largest structures created by human societies, nation-states and the overall international system, learning also involves structural adaptation. A society’s learning and memory are encoded, in part, for long-term storage and usage in the form of institutions and laws which encode the adaptive learned responses of individual level decision-makers into the structure of the political economic system.

For example, at the nation-state level, in the USA, adaptive learning deriving from the experience of the Great Depression was encoded into our political system in the form of newly created institutions such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which was created by Congress in 1934 to regulate the stock market and to prevent trading abuses. Regulatory laws such as the Glass-Stegall Act of 1933. This act regulated the permissible activities of savings and investment banks.

At the global level adaptive learning deriving from the experience of WWII was incorporated into the structure of the international political economy in the form of the creation of the United Nations. All members of this institution are required to sign its charter which then becomes legally binding upon the signatory nation.

This process allows for the transfer of hard learned knowledge from the minds of the learners into the very structure of society. As those who possessed this knowledge directly pass away, their learning remains viable, potentially forever to benefit futurity.

Thus at both life’s microcosm and at it macrocosm learning is encoded structurally. This is for identical reasons: initial learning occurs at the individual level. However, for learning to be passed down through successive generations it must be encoded in some manner. Encoding learning in structure is a robust technique for long-term informational storage. So both microbes and men (people) have learned to exploit this technique.

Storing information in this manner has both positive and negative implication for large-scale organized human complexities. A clear positive implication is that past learning can be maintained to the benefit of all long after the individual learners have passed from the scene. A negative implication is that the learning may decay over time.

Decay could occur in at least two ways:

1) Forgetfulness. Over time structurally encoded past learning may simply be forgotten. This might happen because the circumstances which it is adaptive to seldom or never recur for a sufficiently long period of time. If eventually the circumstance did recur, the appropriate adaptive response would have been “forgotten” through prolonged disuse.

2) Subversion. Unlike forgetfulness, this is intentional. Powerful societal actors which stand to benefit from removal of constraints on their freedom of action imposed by structural learning may gain sufficient control over societal decision-making as to eliminate or render ineffective the institutions and or laws which constrain them. Private gain seeking entities such as corporations, for example, may act to eliminate public good constraints to maximize short-term profit.

For example, with respect to #2 above, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 effectively repealed the Glass-Stegall Act of 1933. The result was predictable. In less than a decade the greed-driven mistakes which precipitated the Great Depression of the 1930’s caused the near collapse of not only the American economy, but indeed of the planetary economy. This collapse was facilitated by the functional neutering of the FEC under its W. Bush appointed Chair Chris Cox. Needless to say the large financial institutions, most particularly, Goldman Sachs, which willfully created this situation, made fortunes.

Also with respect to # 2 above, consider how the W. Bush administration, itself a tool of large global corporations, insidiously subverted the United Nation’s Charter in forcing that institution to acquiesce in its clearly illegal and unprovoked act of aggressive warfare against Iraq in 2003. Again, corporate fortunes were made consequential to this subversion.

This leads to my final comparison between microbes and men (humans). Human organized complexities such as nations and the world political economy, not to mention nature itself—our Earth’s biosphere, are complex systems which are basically “bodies”. Corporations are specialized, invasive pathogens which attack these bodies seeking, like all pathogens, to replicate themselves (“enrich” themselves) endlessly. In other words, both microbial and corporate pathogens seek to create private gain for themselves at the expense of the overall good of the invaded body. However, given that a body’s resources are finite, unless the infection is terminated, the body dies.

Where is our global immune system to fight off the invasion of this newly evolved class of inimically destructive pathogen? It’s time for rapid evolution—or death!

Consider the Ant…

Michael Byron — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:48:00 GMT

How can an individual, possessing limited information and abilities, make a difference globally?

Strange as it may seem, one place to begin in answering this question is by looking to the behavior of ants. Science Daily reports on a study of utility maximization—basically making the most advantageous possible choice—among ants. This study finds that: “…researchers at Arizona State University and Princeton University show that ants can accomplish a task more rationally than our – multimodal, egg-headed, tool-using, bipedal, opposing-thumbed – selves. “ The study’s authors continue: "This paradoxical outcome is based on apparent constraint: most individual ants know of only a single option, and the colony's collective choice self-organizes from interactions among many poorly-informed ants…”

In an ant colony all individuals are members of an organized, integrated, highly interactive society. As such they continuously engage in collective decision making. A single ant is nearly mindless, and possesses little knowledge or information. However, rational decision-making emerges out of the constant interactions between many ants, sometimes at or above the human level.

I have already written extensively on the scientific miracle of emergence, so I will not go into detail here, other than to note that emergent properties are collective properties—they emerge out of the interactions of their constituent elements or members. Emergent properties cannot be reduced to the sum of their constituent parts. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We see this principle of emergence vividly illustrated by the powerful, rational, utility maximizing emergent group-mind of an ant colony.

Similarly, human individuals are members of an interlocking, nested set of groups ranging from family, and friend networks, through ever larger political and economic systems, until ultimately the nested aggregate of all of these smaller constituent systems produces our overall global political economy. One clear difference between human and ant systems lies in their degree of organization.

Ants, like humans do specialize to maximize emergence—some ants even engage in agriculture and raising livestock—for example, to say nothing of enslaving rival ants, and fighting wars for territory and resources. Ants possess a social order for each colony in which each individual member is constantly participating in collective decision-making. Each individual ant’s input is considered in making group decisions. Each ant is wholly bound by the colony’s ultimate collective decision. There is no individualism. Each ant effectively functions as an integral part of a collective organism.

This manifestation of organized complexity is clearly environmentally sustainable, since ants have existed for perhaps 160 million years. Unlike us, ants coexisted with dinosaurs for nearly a hundred million years. And they are still here, which demonstrates that the high emergence arising from organized complexity provides immense survival value. Like humans, ants exist all around the world, and their long period of evolutionary success demonstrates the robustness of their emergent complexity as an organizational principle.

Ants work for the collective good of the entire group. They live within the energy and resource constraints imposed upon them by nature. Still, they demonstrate that high degrees of organized complexity, including large “urban” centers (ant nests), agriculture, specialization of labor, etc., are not inherently unsustainable.

Complex groupings succeed because they take full advantage of a fundamental property of nature: emergence. This is the source of their success. However, not all forms of complex society are necessarily viable. Those that prioritize short-term gain of the few at the expense of the many, in the long-term are non-viable—human society, for example.

Unlike ants, among human societies, most people are effectively shut out from meaningful participation in group decision-making. Human societies that maximize individual input into group decision-making—democracies—possess an edge over those which minimize it. However, due to factors such as capture of their political systems by non-democratic economic actors (corporations), meaningful input to group decision-making is limited to a very few individuals. Additionally, corporate control over the mass media means that most members of even democratic societies have little idea of what is actually going on. And of course humans are fragmented into numerous, often antagonistic, societies. These factors constrain our potential for true emergence, thereby stunting our potential mental growth, and limiting our options for effective action when crises arise.

Because humans, unlike ants, are individualistic, the loyalty of most humans usually lies with maximizing their own self-benefit. This is particularly true for corporations—which exist solely to create private gain. In theory, this is mitigated by government, which exercises a counterbalancing effect by providing public goods. However, around the world, as I’ve noted, governments have effectively been captured by global corporations.

Thus, human society from the global level down to the local one is predicated upon utility maximization for the few, and without much regard for the interests of the many. The planetary web of life within which this exploitative society is nested is taken for granted by subjective, corporate-generated reality consensus. If this essential planetary web of life is thought about at all, it is considered as an endless source of raw materials, and an infinite sink for manufactured waste products.

As we pollute our “nest” and use up our resources, human-organized complexity, unlike that of ants, is unquestionably unsustainable as it is presently organized.

Obviously humans are not ants. Ants’ selflessness arises from their near mindlessness—there’s little there to generate a sense of self. Conversely, human selfishness arises from our far more powerful minds which are quite effective at producing a vivid sense of self. It follows that an organized complexity composed of humans cannot be integrated together in the same way as that of the ants. What does not follow is that an organized complexity of humans cannot exist sustainably.

Sustainable human complexity requires several things:

1) That we expand our consciousness to embrace all other humans and to see ourselves as existing within the Earth’s ecology, upon which we are dependent. We must change ourselves fundamentally in this regard. Infant humans assume that they are the center of the universe, but growing up entails learning that this is not so. What we must do is to grow up a bit more as a species. We must not only realize that there are others, but that we must act cooperatively with these others, and with nature. Further developing our powers of observation and abstraction can help considerably to facilitate this growth as I’ve recently written about in my essay “Consciousness and Complexity.”

2) Ant colonies are interlinked by a web of pheromones which link all of its members together in an information sharing network. Global organization of humanity requires that we do the equivalent by linking humanity together in a truly worldwide web—a global internet. This web must allow for not only information sharing, but collective decision-making. Ultimate human decision-making must occur at the global level, though each individual’s input will necessarily be based upon local information available to that individual. Optimal decisions will emerge from the collective decision-making process.

3) The energy base of global society must be sustainable. I believe that a fundamentally critical component of an energy system is that it must allow for the global distribution of renewably produced power. This will make the welfare of all humans dependent upon sharing with all other humans, in addition to allowing for the most efficient usage possible of energy. I believe that the most expedient method for setting up a planetary power-sharing grid is to place wire mesh microwave reflectors into geosynchronous orbit and relay power around the world via beamed microwaves. I’ve recently addressed this topic in my essay entitled “Pi in the Sky.”

How to make all of this happen? First, realize that today’s existing worldwide system of organized complexity (the global political economy) is self-doomed. Like Rome, it will fall, and it will cease to exist. No outside force need be brought to bear to cause this result—it is the now inevitable result of human selfishness and avariciousness becoming the fundamental and unsustainable organizing principle for humanity.

What we must do is to consciously change ourselves, while networking as densely and interactively as possible with others, to create linked, interactive nodes of organized complexity around the world, and arising from our local level organization.

As the old unsustainable order collapses of its own weight of built-in self-contradictions, all those who are aware enough to seek an alternative will be drawn into our counter-complexity. The collapse of the old society, terrible and destructive as it will be, will “inflate” the new one—but only if this alternative social complexity already exists.

That is where each of us comes in—each of us must create a local level node of alternative organization. This node should be interlinked with many others.

If we do nothing, tomorrow will be a nightmare that may forever end civilization as we know it. Even if we act, and act effectively, tomorrow may still be a nightmare—though perhaps less so than would otherwise have been the case. However, the day after tomorrow, might see the full emergence of a truly humane planetary organized complexity which is humane, personally fulfilling, and above all, environmentally sustainable, for ages to come.

One organizational advantage humans could potentially possess over ants is to become a conscious planetary species. All humans everywhere would be integral members of this globally organized human complexity.

As we were admonished by Proverbs 6:6, consider the ant: it has flourished for 160,000,000 years! Let us take that as a challenge to see whether we humans, with our large brains, can do as well or even better in the eons to come.