greenstorm (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
greenstorm) wrote2008-04-28 09:26 am
greenstorm) wrote2008-04-28 09:26 am
Entry tags:
Worst Thing
So I don't normally pay a ton of attention to "the news". One might even say I keep my head deliberately in the sand sometimes.
Sometimes, though, ya just can't keep your chin down far enough. WHAT THE FUCK is with the world lately? Is this just environmentalism going big-time and trendy? I understand that things get dumbed down when they hit mass consumption stage, but things seem to be getting so dumbed down they're actually moving backwards. It's creating this bizarre anti-environmentalism, where people are if you will excuse my caps SO FUCKING SURE THEY ARE HELPING and instead they are ACTIVELY HELPING TO FUCK THINGS UP MORE THAN IF THEY HAD JUST DONE NOTHING.
I mean, what the fuck? How does this even exist in the world? Who ARE these corn-as-biofuel, cutting-down-standing-wood-and-burning-it-will-make-our-forests-carbon-sinks-again, jet-organic-food-from-Chile fucknuts? Is it just the labyrinthine twistings of science-bureaucrazy-media-indifference-rinse-repeat that create this? Because this SO DAMN STUPID that I don't know how it could be created by accident, and SO DAMN IGNORANT that maybe ten minutes of research and common sense applied to the issues should explode them into little bits. Instead the media 'science/random factoid' soundbites get repeated, the issue gets popularised, the policy gets implemented, and no one stops to think: Hey! Corn is food and inefficient as a convertor of sunlight to biofuel, let's use an efficient convertor like sugarcane or grow something on land unfit for agriculture if we want to simply convert rather than reduce! Not only will logging the pine beetle forests and burning the wood for biofuel result in the same amount of carbon in th eair, but it will fuck with the regenerating ecosystem and release all the carbon sequestered in the rest of the vegetation and destabilise slopes and reduce their ability to uptake moisture resulting in floods, washouts, and dead streams! Maybe Chile's organic standards are even weirder and less useful than our own and jetting food that distance is somewhat counterproductive to helping the environment which buying organic is supposed to accomplish anyhow!
And I mean, SUV use is still going up instead of down. There are hundreds of acres of unused arable land in our cities, even if we don't go into balconies and rooftops as per Havana's model. People still drive if they're going four blocks or if it's a sunny day when being out on a bike is sheer joy, and then drive to the gym to work out on machines that require electricity after work. It's not like there aren't things that are self-evident like that lying around by the bucketful. And it's not like there are't useful things happening, like http://sharingbackyards.com/ or community supported agriculture or the hundred-mile-diet thing which is driving the formation of local expertise.
I'm reduced to foaming at the mouth and breathing really hard nowadays. Time to use this energy for packing. Gotta be done by tonight. But guys, please... I don't know. Put an hour a month into researching environmental issues? Anyone who reads this is likely to be doing some practical useful things already, but the more real, true info in people's heads out there the better this will go. And plant a planterbox of lettuce seeds and do the three-week magic of growing your own Earthbound Organics box and you'll have done a LOT.
Ne well, guys.
Sometimes, though, ya just can't keep your chin down far enough. WHAT THE FUCK is with the world lately? Is this just environmentalism going big-time and trendy? I understand that things get dumbed down when they hit mass consumption stage, but things seem to be getting so dumbed down they're actually moving backwards. It's creating this bizarre anti-environmentalism, where people are if you will excuse my caps SO FUCKING SURE THEY ARE HELPING and instead they are ACTIVELY HELPING TO FUCK THINGS UP MORE THAN IF THEY HAD JUST DONE NOTHING.
I mean, what the fuck? How does this even exist in the world? Who ARE these corn-as-biofuel, cutting-down-standing-wood-and-burning-it-will-make-our-forests-carbon-sinks-again, jet-organic-food-from-Chile fucknuts? Is it just the labyrinthine twistings of science-bureaucrazy-media-indifference-rinse-repeat that create this? Because this SO DAMN STUPID that I don't know how it could be created by accident, and SO DAMN IGNORANT that maybe ten minutes of research and common sense applied to the issues should explode them into little bits. Instead the media 'science/random factoid' soundbites get repeated, the issue gets popularised, the policy gets implemented, and no one stops to think: Hey! Corn is food and inefficient as a convertor of sunlight to biofuel, let's use an efficient convertor like sugarcane or grow something on land unfit for agriculture if we want to simply convert rather than reduce! Not only will logging the pine beetle forests and burning the wood for biofuel result in the same amount of carbon in th eair, but it will fuck with the regenerating ecosystem and release all the carbon sequestered in the rest of the vegetation and destabilise slopes and reduce their ability to uptake moisture resulting in floods, washouts, and dead streams! Maybe Chile's organic standards are even weirder and less useful than our own and jetting food that distance is somewhat counterproductive to helping the environment which buying organic is supposed to accomplish anyhow!
And I mean, SUV use is still going up instead of down. There are hundreds of acres of unused arable land in our cities, even if we don't go into balconies and rooftops as per Havana's model. People still drive if they're going four blocks or if it's a sunny day when being out on a bike is sheer joy, and then drive to the gym to work out on machines that require electricity after work. It's not like there aren't things that are self-evident like that lying around by the bucketful. And it's not like there are't useful things happening, like http://sharingbackyards.com/ or community supported agriculture or the hundred-mile-diet thing which is driving the formation of local expertise.
I'm reduced to foaming at the mouth and breathing really hard nowadays. Time to use this energy for packing. Gotta be done by tonight. But guys, please... I don't know. Put an hour a month into researching environmental issues? Anyone who reads this is likely to be doing some practical useful things already, but the more real, true info in people's heads out there the better this will go. And plant a planterbox of lettuce seeds and do the three-week magic of growing your own Earthbound Organics box and you'll have done a LOT.
Ne well, guys.
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Now, my father-and-law and I had a friendly argument about the corn-as-biofuel thing when Lis and I were visiting her parents for Passover. I claimed that the corn-as-biofuel thing was pushed by agrobusiness as a way to get the government to give more subsidies to them; he claimed that it was pushed by oil companies to keep ethanol expensive and therefore noncompetitive with oil.
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Burning the stuff is just a way to spike the demand and increase the value of every corn crop, and to hell with people who could use that land to eat-to-survive.
(Aside from the theory, I know someone with a dairy farm. Their costs are ballooning because their feed costs—mostly corn-derived—have doubled in the past few years.)
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Oh, and it has a fig tree. I don't like to eat figs and someone will need to.
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Just you wait-- the fire risk will be up there as another reason the lmber companies need in there.
First nations seem to have had a burning schedule right across the continent which varied by... well, you see to know this, so I won't lecture more. :)
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uh. yeah. Sorry, it was just a huge realization for me. I'm still going to look at it and see you not the unicorn though.